A new poll shows that half of Canadian voters can't even name one of Justin Trudeau's cabinet ministers, and 47% of men and 33% of women can't name a single cabinet minister. What does this say about the state of Canadian politics?
00:00:00.260It's obviously very difficult, if not impossible, to make positive political change in a system where the general public just doesn't know enough about the issues to properly weigh in when elections come up.
00:00:10.520And this is why I think one of the biggest, most crippling issues in Canada these days is just the fact that we've developed a very low information political space.
00:00:18.060Despite the fact that the legacy media and many individual Canadians like to rip on Americans and make fun of them because they're supposedly politically ignorant,
00:00:25.160I think that the political ignorance problem might be worse in Canada these days.
00:00:29.960Right now, we actually have a very high turnout in most of our federal elections,
00:00:33.640which is a little bit scary when you think of the fact that many Canadians don't actually know what they're even voting about.
00:00:40.160A new poll that came out of Polera, I think, was deeply important so that Canadians can really take a good hard look at just the fact that a lot of people out there just don't know the basic things about politics,
00:00:51.320despite that many people go out and enthusiastically vote for the party they voted for last time,
00:00:56.700or maybe they switched it up, not knowing anything about their agendas or their records in government.
00:01:02.980So I just want to pull this up. It was on Twitter posted by Brian Breguet from the Polera poll,
00:01:07.580and it showed half of liberal voters can name a cabinet minister.
00:01:11.020Now, that's deeply scary. I know it shows that with CPC voters, only 42% can name one,
00:01:56.480Of course, it's bad that the conservatives and the NDP voters also don't know the cabinet ministers,
00:02:01.640but obviously they also have less incentives to know the cabinet ministers,
00:02:04.720because they hate the government, really don't want to engage with it.
00:02:07.440But I don't blame these bad stats, with 47% of men and 33% of women only being able to name one cabinet minister.
00:02:15.240But I really, I don't blame individual Canadians.
00:02:18.160I blame the political establishment and the legacy media, the legacy media especially.
00:02:23.820In this country, because the legacy media is funded by the federal government,
00:02:27.880a liberal federal government covered in scandals,
00:02:30.400The legacy media, especially in the last few years,
00:02:34.580is really incentivized to keep the political news boring and keep it overly wonkish and detailed.
00:02:41.520So they won't really give people enough information to kind of know the bare bones of Canadian politics
00:02:46.520so that they can maybe more engage with more information in their tool belt.
00:02:51.100They effectively just do a very brief skim over the issues,
00:02:54.980and then they bring on some sort of talking head wonk to talk in extravagant detail about things that Canadians do not need to know,
00:03:02.440to the extent that most Canadians are just not going to pay attention and just click out of the news.
00:03:07.220I think that this has been intentional in the media to make Canadian news basically hard to follow,
00:03:12.700in the sense that everything just is covered in just gratuitous detail,
00:03:16.720and things are not spoken about in a very direct manner.
00:03:20.480People do not know who Stephen Gilbeau is because people are not talked enough about the impact that environmental policy has on the Canadian economy