Research Memo #2: The Climate Change Conundrum
Taylor Owen, Peter Loewen, Derek Ruths, Aengus Bridgman, Robert Gorwa, Meghan Keenan, Stephanie MacLellan, Eric Merkley, Andrew Potter, Beata Skazinetsky & Oleg Zhilin
August 2019
Executive Summary
Over our first two surveys, two clear electoral issues are emerging: climate change (for Liberals and the leftleaning parties) and ethics (for the Conservatives). But if the Conservatives are having trouble finding an audience for ethics concerns, even among their core supporters, the Liberals appear to have an even more difficult conundrum: The very people who actually believe in their main issue don't appear to have much interest in doing anything about it.
KEY FINDINGS
Issues and Policies
The environment remains a top-three political issue for most Canadians, along with the economy and healthcare, with ethics ranking further down the list for supporters of all three major parties.
Climate change is the most important component of the environmental discussion for politicians, journalists and members of the public alike.
Public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is high, but support for an increase in the carbon tax is low. In general, public opposition to a carbon tax rises as the proposed cost of the tax increases.
Media and Information
Media coverage about the environment is also more likely to involve climate change than other environmental issues such as single-use plastics or conservation. But while news organizations might be covering the environment, and journalists we monitored on Twitter frequently shared that coverage, there was far more disproportionate sharing of ethics-related stories, especially around the SNC-Lavalin story.
It is possible to make Canadians better informed about the facts that underpin policy issues, regardless of their political leanings. However, even if they are provided with correct information, it is unlikely to influence their beliefs about the policies needed to address those facts
This is the second report from the Digital Democracy Project, a partnership between the Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The project uses data from both public opinion polling and online media analysis to examine the media habits of the broader Canadian public as well as the political and journalistic class, with an eye to understanding the various relationships between media use, partisanship, political knowledge, and concern over policy issues.
