It seems like one of the priorities of the new Ford government is to take a harder line dealing with refugees and asylum-seekers in Canada. Just after taking office, Premier Ford told Prime Minister Trudeau that his new government was basically getting out of the business of supporting the settlement of refugees and blamed the federal government for supposedly encouraging illegal immigration.
This is all a little surprising as the PC campaign did not really make any explicit hay out of anti-immigration sentiment.
A friend was wondering whether or not The Toronto Star or the Toronto Sun newspapers reached more New Democrats. So I decided to take a look at the data in our Ontario Provincial Election Study, conducted by the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy. Here are the raw results broken out by 2018 vote. The specific question respondets were asked in our online panel survey was whether they read any particular news outlet daily.
A lot of people will be watching the results of the Ontario general election tonight, me among them. While most people will be poring over exit polls and vote intention polls, I took the liberty of scraping a lot of tweets to the main Ontario election hashtags.
I took all the tweets that contained the words #onpoli, #onelxn or anty the user names for each of the party leaders and the three major political parties.
Yesterday, I showed some data that showed that Rob Ford was very popular among visible minorities, which cast some doubt on the narrative that right-wing populism always thrives on xenophobia. Usually, scholars and commentators divide explanations for support for populism into an economics and values dichotomy. The economic story usually emphasizes the role that stagnating wages or an eroded welfare state play in generating frustration, anger or anxiety at the loss of class standing that leads to populism.
Ontario politics got a lot more interesting on the weekend. It’s timely for myself and another colleague as we are preparing to finally (finally!) share some data that we collected during the 2014 provincial election.
At the time, I and others were a little mystified at the strategy the Ontario NDP was pursuing (opposing road tolls for public transit initiatives, being hostile to minimum wage increases). It felt like the NDP was trying to capture a little bit of Rob Ford’s support that had propelled him to the mayoralty in 2010.
One of my major research interests is the field of political communication and public opinion. I have used both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the influence of patterns of communication on political outcomes.