Arthur Gillman created newspaper 'town halls' and polled for Democrats

By Doug MacKay

Arthur Sidney Gillman: Pollster, mathematician, independent man. Born on Jan. 28, 1934, in Winnipeg; died on May 30, 2019, in Winnipeg; of difficulties following arterial work on his leg; aged 85.

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Arthur Gillman walked into the newsroom of the Winnipeg Free Press late in 1979 with a proposal. He looked respectable enough in a dark suit, and he had a good backstory: a senior civil servant let go a year or so earlier when Manitoba's new Progressive Conservative premier, Sterling Lyon, was ridding himself of his NDP predecessor Ed Schreyer's inventions and appointees.

Gillman was received by two editors. The Free Press was then locked in a circulation war with the Winnipeg Tribune, few holds barred. Classified ads were free in one paper and almost free in the other. Both papers had been expensively redesigned (when redesigns were a new tool). And there was keen competition for talent.

His scheme was to use the Free Press as a platform for gathering public opinion. It would publish a survey with hundreds of questions for people to answer about their day-to-day lives, current issues, the works. And the paper would publish complete results a few weeks later.

He had a unique polling methodology. As he got deeper into describing it — he had taught econometrics at the University of Manitoba before joining the government — the editors' eyes widened and then glazed over. He spoke fluent mathematics. They didn't.

He said he could use regression analysis on any collective opinion held by the respondents to see what other opinions of theirs were driving the one in question. So we could learn surreptitiously, mathematically, what was causing, say, dislike of a government or a tendency to favour one newspaper over another. It would be possible to push buttons, if it were ethical, and potentially move public opinion.

Wait. How did that go again?

But what about it not being a representative sample?

Critic of polling

"Well," he said, "imagine if you held a public meeting, a town hall, and hundreds of people came. And everyone got to have their say. Would it be worth covering? Would you report it?"

He had us there. Never mind if thousands came, which they did to those "town halls" in Winnipeg, Halifax, and across North America for years afterward. And so was born "1980 & You," a newspaper town hall — and with it friendships that lasted 40 years until Arthur's death at 85 on May 30, 2019.

Wizard-like, he treated everyone with kindness and respect. That said, he was an unrelenting critic of conventional polling and pollsters ("even a broken clock is right twice a day"), and he regarded their results as hopelessly misguided at best.

At his funeral, his wife Louise described some of Arthur Gillman's qualifications as a renaissance man. A childhood polio survivor and diabetic, he went out of his way to play hockey in the hard streets of North Winnipeg where he grew up. He studied the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course and took up weightlifting.

He was a competitive chess player and a violinist who could have turned professional. As a teenager, he had a magic act and at 22 took to the stage as a hypnotist (a newspaper clipping from 1955 shows him wearing a bow tie and leaning rakishly into the camera).

He became a championship debater at the University of Manitoba, a chartered accountant, and an expert at the actuarial mysteries of insurance (he was among the designers of Manitoba's public auto insurance program and was deeply involved in Manitoba's guaranteed annual income experiment in the 1970s).

Writing in APL

He developed a lifelong love of Israel, where his daughter, son-in-law, and four grandchildren now live.

And when his government work ended, he took up computer programming to write (using the esoteric language APL) the software he needed to bring his public opinion research tools to life.

His reading and search for knowledge was never-ending and catholic in breadth. For four decades he shared with friends his enthusiasms for John von Neumann, game theory, neurolinguistic programming, the Feldenkrais method, meditation, the odds of life after death, ways around Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, Judaism, Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman, clearer writing, the business side of professional hockey, the nature of storytelling, the paranormal, charitable work (his services), and on and on.

When he didn't know the territory, he queried endlessly — say, about the mechanics of newspapers or the fraught relationships between editors and publishers. With help, he once surveyed more than 70 newspaper editors and publishers across North America, trying to set up an "information exchange" for people in the business.

Hello, social media

Among other things, he found that one of the strongest indicators of job satisfaction among them was being sued. They knew they were doing something right if they were under attack.

Separately in the 1990s, he found repeatedly in newspaper town halls that readers wanted their daily paper to be a two-way street, where they could contribute more. Hello, social media.

His library of 40,000 books created navigational hazards in the family's basement and later in his attached garage/workshop. His daughter Susan remembers as a child watching him move among the stacks, never disturbing the delicate balance.

There were occasional missteps. In the mid-1980s, when a U.S. syndicate was persuaded to sell Winnipeg-style newspaper town halls to scores of its clients, there was a misunderstanding between Arthur and the marketers over what results could be ultimately be delivered.

It emerged late enough in the game that the syndicate felt humiliated, shortchanged, and angry. Arthur differed strenuously and tried hard to settle the matter, but was expensively defeated. He remained a study in calm, doing things his way.

'Don't forget health care'

As his polling business drew a North American client list of insurers and other businesses, it attracted politicians in the U.S.

His work among Democrats included findings that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992. "It's the economy, stupid" was Clinton campaigner James Carville's famous admonition to strategists, along with "Change vs more of the same." To that was added "Don't forget health care."

Arthur showed the Democrats that the issue of health care benefitted Clinton uniquely.

In fact, every time then-president George H.W. Bush — who had introduced health-care legislation earlier in the year but allowed it to languish — mentioned health care at all, he was helping his opponent, reminding voters of Clinton's plan and his own shortcomings.

Over the years, there were numerous attempts to buy, enlarge or merge his one-man business. Sometimes they were initiated by him, as a way of keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. How about getting together on this opportunity? Isn't there a book in this? Come to Boulder, Colo., for the seminar being organized on my new methods. He was still proposing projects in his final year.

And sometimes, people had schemes to monetize him. A fellow in Washington, with Arthur's initial approval, started the P Street Institute to develop Gillman methods and give them greater currency. It foundered as Arthur gradually withdrew.

'You don't see that a lot'

In Toronto, a management-advice huckster sank his teeth into Arthur's leg and had to be discouraged from misrepresenting his ability to deliver Gillman-style results.

Arthur remained dedicated to staying small, not getting rich, avoiding fame, even while seeming to seek those things. While the joint ventures inevitably stumbled, he worked hard at keeping his friendships even after differing with people, doing it his way.

"He was," said a long-time friend and occasional collaborator, "a smart man and a nice man at the same time. You don't see that a lot."

As his son Avery said at the funeral: "He did allow himself to become hard in one singular way, and that was in reserving his own right to make his own decisions."

That was the lesson he had learned from overcoming all the hurdles life had set up for him, including being fired in his early 40s with a young family.

Over the years, his intellect led him away from his early methods and much deeper into what looked like a mingling of math, philosophy and psychology. He could credibly analyze an individual's motivations or lay out the structure of a group's thinking on any subject. He had put polling behind him.

After the death a few years ago of an American rabbi who'd worked in Winnipeg in the 1950s and had urged him to move to the U.S. and take up rabbinical studies himself, Arthur wrote:

"I demurred, to become a mathematician (Abstract Algebra — 'nearer to God') instead. Which of us got nearer to God? Now he knows. Inevitably, I too will find out."

The smart money's on Arthur.

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Doug MacKay was one of the editors who met Arthur Gillman at the Winnipeg Free Press.