At glance

This document is part of a series of weekly reports on the coverage that Indigenous issues are receiving on social media and more specifically Twitter. To support our analysis, we consider the tweets produced by the different candidates of five parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green, Bloc Québécois) competing in the electoral competition. This series of weekly reports will provide a synthetic overview of the evolution of the debates and the level of attention given to Indigenous issues.

Already, we can see that between September 11, the official opening date of the election campaign, and September 20, in English the word “rights” is the word that was the most twitted, while in French it is “santé”. We also note that the most popular hashtag in both English and French was elxn43, which is not suprising since it refers to the actual electoral capmpaing. In addition, by clicking on the links in the boxes below, you can view the most favorite and retweeted tweets.

Number of Tweets

It is clear that the New Democratic Party was the most prolific during the period from September 11 to 20, 2019. On its own, it produced nearly half of the total number of tweets published by all political parties. The Green Party and the Liberal Party are almost equal in the number of tweets. The Conservative Party does not seem to attach much importance to Aboriginal issues, as can be seen in the graph below. Paradoxically, the Conservative Party still has the largest number of candidates with a Twitter account. The majority of Conservative candidates have a Twitter account, unlike the New Democratic Party, which is among the parties with the fewest candidates and the fewest candidates with a Twitter account. As far as the Bloc Québécois is concerned, it seems at first glance that Aboriginal issues are given very little consideration in candidates’ tweets. It should be noted, however, that this may be explained by the fact that it is the party with the fewest candidates, with only 76 out of 338 electoral ridings. Its low statistical representation can therefore be explained simply by a number effect. In the coming weeks, we will be able to test this hypothesis.

The graph below shows that overall, between the New Democratic Party, the Liberal Party and the Green Party, the big difference in the number of tweets is observed on September 13, 2019. To date, there has been a very significant spike in the number of New Democratic Party tweets and this is what mainly creates the difference observed in the number of tweets overall. It should be noted that this peak reflects the positions defended by the NDP during the first debate. On September 19, there was also a gap between the number of tweets from the New Democratic Party and the other parties. The Conservative Party, as already observed in the number of tweets, almost does not integrate Indigenous issues through the tweets of its candidates.

Apart from 13 September, the day of the debate, when the number of tweets reaches a very high level, for the other days there is a certain stability in the number of tweets produced. The Maclean’s/CityTV National Leaders debate contributed to media attention on Indigenous issues. Rather than tweeting on the night of the debate, candidates preferred to wait the day after to publish messages. The fact that Indigenous issues received its own dedicated segment during the debate helped put these issues on the political radar. It should be noted again that this peak observed on September 13 is due to the strong publication of tweets on Indigenous issues by the NDP that day.

Number of Tweets by Province

The largest number of tweets related to Indigenous issues is focussed in Ontario as indicated on the map below. In British Columbia, there is also significant attention paid by British Columbia’s candidates. It should be noted that Ontario is the province where the New Democratic Party is most represented in terms of candidates and British Columbia is one of the provinces where Indigenous issues are predominant.

Number of Tweets by Riding

With respect to ridings, tweets tended to come out of ridings in Northern Territories or districts in Northern areas of provinces such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba. We can also observe attention devoted to these issues emanating from urban ridings in the Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver areas. In general, we observe a greater number of tweets published on this subject in ridings located in regions with a in regions where there is a greater concentration of Indigenous communities.

Content analysis

Correlation Analysis

The graphs below identifies salient themes from networks of words in either French or English. The graph in this section shows how the correlation between the most popular words in published tweets allows us to see how these words are related to each other and the themes that emerge from them. We see here two main clusters of correlated words identifying two main ones, namely climate change issues (mainly driven by the Green Party) and water rights in communities. This analysis confirms what we had already observed in the previous section. There are also two other themes, less salient than the first two, but which were published this week, namely the Commission on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls and Reconciliation. It remains to be seen whether these themes, which have been very present over the past four years, will be more important in the coming weeks.