Controversial Customer Survey Includes Racist, Sexist Questions, Prompting Apology from Company

When Canadian doctorate student Lacey Willmott agreed to take a customer survey for bonus airline miles, she did not expect to be grilled about her thoughts on racial purity. However, the Canadian loyalty program, Aeroplan, included controversial survey questions about immigration, gender roles in society and same-sex marriage, CBC reported.

Willmott was one of the customers who complained to Aeroplan, a service that originally belonged to Canada Air before spinning off into a separate entity that gives rewards to customers of several different Canadian airlines and businesses. Some customers received an email link to a customer survey, which promised 100 miles to anyone who completed it.

However, the survey that was labeled as a “shopping and life habits” questionnaire shifted into provocative questions. Users were given a series of sentences and a number of possible responses, ranging from “totally agree” to “totally disagree.”

Per the CBC, the prompts included topics that read: "Whatever people say, men have a certain natural superiority over women, and nothing can change this" and "Overall, there is too much immigration. It threatens the purity of the country," as well as "The father of the family must be master of his own house."

Willmott told CBC she was “alarmed and extremely concerned” by the questionnaire, for which she complained to Aeroplan. That kicked off a domino effect that ultimately led to Aeroplan doing damage control on Twitter, promising that the statements in the survey did not reflect its values and the data collected from it would be discarded by the company.

The questions were outsourced to a marketing firm called CROP, which claimed they were included to get a sense of which Aeroplan customers were “modern” and which were “traditional.” Though there was no indication that the data would be used by anyone but Aeroplan, the situation was uncomfortably close to the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal that continues to rock Facebook.

Canada’s federal policies have a reputation as generally being more socially liberal than the United States, but there are conservative elements within the country that would agree with the statements in the survey. Right-wing, anti-immigration protests hit multiple Canadian cities in 2017, coinciding with similar rising sentiments in the U.S. and Europe.

CROP’s data collection found that 45 percent of the 6,000 Canadians surveyed at one point in 2017 agreed that there was too much immigration in the country, according to the CBC.