The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 18, 2023


Canadian Politics Is A Low Information Space


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

208.36803

Word count

1,919

Sentence count

72


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.260 It'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.
00:00:10.520 And 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.
00:00:18.060 Despite 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,
00:00:25.160 I think that the political ignorance problem might be worse in Canada these days.
00:00:29.960 Right now, we actually have a very high turnout in most of our federal elections,
00:00:33.640 which is a little bit scary when you think of the fact that many Canadians don't actually know what they're even voting about.
00:00:40.160 A 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,
00:00:51.320 despite that many people go out and enthusiastically vote for the party they voted for last time,
00:00:56.700 or maybe they switched it up, not knowing anything about their agendas or their records in government.
00:01:02.980 So I just want to pull this up. It was on Twitter posted by Brian Breguet from the Polera poll,
00:01:07.580 and it showed half of liberal voters can name a cabinet minister.
00:01:11.020 Now, that's deeply scary. I know it shows that with CPC voters, only 42% can name one,
00:01:15.840 and with NDP voters, only 26%.
00:01:17.820 But imagine the fact that there's been a liberal government in power for eight years,
00:01:22.220 and that somehow the people who voted for that government in one of the last three elections, at least,
00:01:27.720 I think this was based off people who voted liberal in 2021.
00:01:31.980 Imagine the fact that you can't actually name one of the cabinet ministers serving under Justin Trudeau.
00:01:36.800 I assume Justin Trudeau has 100% name recognition at this point,
00:01:40.060 because he's moved away from just being a political figure to effectively being a celebrity.
00:01:43.620 But being in a country where a lot of people can't name one of the important people in government,
00:01:49.440 and those same people go up and vote in favor or against that government,
00:01:53.140 is very, very hard to hear.
00:01:56.480 Of course, it's bad that the conservatives and the NDP voters also don't know the cabinet ministers,
00:02:01.640 but obviously they also have less incentives to know the cabinet ministers,
00:02:04.720 because they hate the government, really don't want to engage with it.
00:02:07.440 But I don't blame these bad stats, with 47% of men and 33% of women only being able to name one cabinet minister.
00:02:15.240 But I really, I don't blame individual Canadians.
00:02:18.160 I blame the political establishment and the legacy media, the legacy media especially.
00:02:23.820 In this country, because the legacy media is funded by the federal government,
00:02:27.880 a liberal federal government covered in scandals,
00:02:30.400 The legacy media, especially in the last few years,
00:02:34.580 is really incentivized to keep the political news boring and keep it overly wonkish and detailed.
00:02:41.520 So they won't really give people enough information to kind of know the bare bones of Canadian politics
00:02:46.520 so that they can maybe more engage with more information in their tool belt.
00:02:51.100 They effectively just do a very brief skim over the issues,
00:02:54.980 and then they bring on some sort of talking head wonk to talk in extravagant detail about things that Canadians do not need to know,
00:03:02.440 to the extent that most Canadians are just not going to pay attention and just click out of the news.
00:03:07.220 I think that this has been intentional in the media to make Canadian news basically hard to follow,
00:03:12.700 in the sense that everything just is covered in just gratuitous detail,
00:03:16.720 and things are not spoken about in a very direct manner.
00:03:20.480 People do not know who Stephen Gilbeau is because people are not talked enough about the impact that environmental policy has on the Canadian economy
00:03:28.560 and the failures around it.
00:03:30.700 The Canadian media very much is just acting as stenographers for the liberals.
00:03:35.120 So when Stephen Gilbeau, the environment minister, proposes some new tax,
00:03:39.160 or he's talking about some new regulation on logging or oil and gas,
00:03:42.700 they just explain what he said in the most boring terms possible.
00:03:45.960 This is Bill C, whatever.
00:03:47.980 It is called the Something Something Act,
00:03:49.700 and it is proposing to cut down on carbon emissions and blah, blah, blah.
00:03:54.080 Here's a 45-second clip of Stephen Gilbeau talking.
00:03:57.200 Some conservatives disagreed with him, and then they move on.
00:04:00.180 That is not conducive to having a population fired up enough about politics to take the issue seriously,
00:04:06.040 to then actually vote in a more intelligent manner on those issues.
00:04:10.500 And I think that this is why Justin Trudeau is heavily cracking down on the independent media with Bill C-18.
00:04:18.740 I know he's saying that he's trying to get journalists paid by trying to force big tech companies to pay them,
00:04:23.580 but that was just obviously a way of trying to extort big tech into just saying that they don't want to deal with Canadian news anymore.
00:04:29.960 And by doing so, I think that Justin Trudeau is hoping that enough Canadians end up kind of ignorant enough about politics
00:04:36.260 that a lot of people either stay home or just vote for what they voted for last time,
00:04:40.220 and it's enough to keep him in power.
00:04:42.080 That's a very cynical way of looking at it for my part,
00:04:44.680 but being in the independent media, it just makes a lot of sense to me.
00:04:48.480 But here's another poll that I thought was very, very concerning,
00:04:52.400 and I actually don't think that this results great for Justin Trudeau
00:04:55.420 because it shows that there's still a lot of room to grow for him.
00:04:58.340 But a lot of Canadians don't even know who the federal Conservative Party leader is.
00:05:02.640 Only 57% of people know who Pierre Polyev is and could name him.
00:05:07.020 And although it's really funny, if you see some of the results,
00:05:09.340 they had people try and spell his name,
00:05:11.280 and a lot of people did not know how to spell his name,
00:05:13.540 so they had to get creative on deciding whether or not a misspelling at least counted
00:05:17.620 as someone kind of knows who he is.
00:05:19.360 But there's only 25% of people who have a general idea of who he is but don't know his name.
00:05:24.320 4% of people did not have the correct name at all,
00:05:26.840 and 15% of people were unsure.
00:05:29.020 So while this is very sad,
00:05:30.500 because Polyev has almost been the Conservative Party leader for a year now,
00:05:34.640 and he's been in politics since 2004,
00:05:36.900 and a lot of people still can't pick him out of a crowd.
00:05:40.180 The good thing for Polyev, though,
00:05:41.500 is with the Conservative Party polling 40% to 42%,
00:05:44.800 and the Liberals still around 26% to 29%,
00:05:47.780 this proves that Polyev actually has a lot of room to grow in terms of name recognition.
00:05:52.340 And with name recognition, especially for an opposition leader,
00:05:55.160 does come a lot of popularity.
00:05:56.960 Because when people don't really know the opposition leader,
00:05:59.040 or he seems boring,
00:06:00.080 a lot of people do bandwagon and just vote for the popular party or the incumbent one,
00:06:05.440 which is Justin Trudeau right now.
00:06:06.860 It doesn't matter how bad his policies are.
00:06:08.460 I think a lot of people have to understand
00:06:10.360 people like to vote for a name they recognize,
00:06:12.760 because it makes them feel in the know,
00:06:14.660 which, again, backs up my theory,
00:06:16.740 that I think a lot of the legacy media is attempting to keep Canadians ignorant,
00:06:20.660 because if they don't know who Pierre Polyev is,
00:06:22.580 you might have a lot of people who step into the voting booth and just say,
00:06:25.820 well, I like Justin Trudeau.
00:06:27.300 I've seen his hair on television sometimes.
00:06:29.480 I'm going to throw my ballot his way.
00:06:30.900 And if that's really Justin Trudeau's political strategy,
00:06:34.800 that's very deeply sad when you think about it,
00:06:38.720 that that's the political position he's now in,
00:06:40.960 just hoping people are dumb enough and miseducated enough to vote liberal.
00:06:45.220 But anyways, I just wanted to talk about this today,
00:06:48.360 because I think that this is one of the really big undergirding issues that stops a lot of positive
00:06:53.480 political change from happening in Canada.
00:06:55.040 I think this is why a lot of things like the carbon tax have had more lasting power in this country
00:06:59.520 than they really would have anywhere else.
00:07:01.960 Because when a lot of people just hear from the news that Stephen Gilbeau or Catherine McKenna
00:07:07.000 or anyone else from the liberal government said,
00:07:09.620 carbon tax, good, it cut down on emissions and you get rebates
00:07:13.360 and you actually make money from carbon tax.
00:07:15.720 A lot of people, when that's the most boring, dumb explanation always given to them by the legacy media,
00:07:21.220 either they check out because this is the most horrifically boring thing they've ever heard in their lives,
00:07:25.900 or people just, because it's been repeated enough, say,
00:07:28.820 oh, the carbon tax must be good because it's supposed to cut down on emissions and people get rebates.
00:07:33.580 Not realizing that basically neither of those things are really true.
00:07:37.160 Some people get rebates and they still end up paying more in the carbon tax
00:07:39.960 due to all the adjacent costs of the carbon tax,
00:07:42.740 and the carbon tax does not cut down on emissions.
00:07:45.140 This happens with tons and tons of other issues.
00:07:47.360 If the liberals just basically throw out some blind accusation about a conservative to smear them,
00:07:52.640 the media will just cover it, say, oh, well, there's a lot of commentary about whether a pure polyethic extremist or not.
00:07:58.980 And people move on and some Canadians will be like, well, I guess he must be an extremist.
00:08:02.600 Or a lot of Canadians just get frustrated because it seems like no actual,
00:08:05.920 like, there's no meaty information coming out of the legacy media
00:08:09.120 to give them more than just the most bare-boned, dumb understanding of what's happening in this country.
00:08:14.840 That's why our independent media in this country is more popular than ever,
00:08:19.400 and Justin Trudeau is having to try and crack down on us.
00:08:21.880 Because if people actually understand the issues and people don't just react to dumb talking points
00:08:28.300 that the stenographers and the media put out by just repeating everything the liberals say
00:08:31.820 and then kind of saying what the conservative rebuttal was and moving on,
00:08:35.560 that maybe these people might actually be able to vote against a lot of the liberal agenda.
00:08:40.500 Anyways, that's it for me today.
00:08:42.120 If you want to donate to my legal fundraiser, it's down in the description of this video below
00:08:46.400 at the Give, Send, Go link.
00:08:48.320 There's also a TNT email list.
00:08:50.040 Sign up for that if you want to be able to get our emails and articles sent directly to your inbox.
00:08:54.820 I actually do have a new article I've written.
00:08:57.200 I've been writing a lot of articles because Bill C.A.T. makes it impossible for me to put articles out on Facebook,
00:09:01.800 my main vector for article views.
00:09:04.300 My new article on Justin Trudeau is in the description of this video as well.
00:09:08.240 Make sure to read some words today.
00:09:09.720 It's good for you, and I'll see everyone next time.