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Month: February 2020

National Unity & Wexit

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Half of Canadians believe Canada
is in the midst of a national unity crisis

More than 80 per cent of Canadians are unaware of
Alberta’s financial contribution to Canada


CALGARY, Feb. 13, 2020 – A research study released by Navigator Ltd. found that 51 per cent of Canadians believe Canada is in the midst of a national unity crisis. Further, one-third of Canadians believe Alberta is the largest threat to national unity, second only to Quebec (50%).

“What we’re seeing is a real desire and acceptance across the provinces for greater provincial power and autonomy in response to concerns about national unity,” says Randy Dawson, Managing Principal at Navigator Ltd. “The West wants to be heard, but most of all, they want a federal government that acts on their concerns.”

Nationally, more than half of Canadians feel that the federal government has lost touch with their province, ranging from 77 per cent in Alberta to 57 per cent in Quebec. A significant number (38%) of Canadians also believe Albertans and Saskatchewanians have a legitimate reason to want to separate from Canada.

There is a significant division in Canada on the issues of national unity, particularly between Alberta and Quebec. With regard to the energy sector, Albertans want more pipelines built, but they do not want to stifle green energy at the expense of oil. Nearly two-thirds of Albertans and Quebecers believe more investment in solar and wind energy is beneficial; however, 74 per cent of Albertans and only 25 per cent of Quebecers agree more oil pipelines should be built. (For the rest of the country, the number is 49%.)

Perhaps most concerning from Alberta’s standpoint is that less than 20 per cent of Canadians are aware of the economic contributions Alberta makes to Canada.

“As the Prime Minister attempts to weave a balance between the environment and the economy, he does so against a backdrop of a potential national unity crisis in a minority parliament,” says Dawson. “This will be further exacerbated by issues that will define these challenges and test his national leadership on issues such as the impending Teck Frontier mine decision.”

More than 2,500 Canadians participated in the national survey from Jan. 3 to 10, 2020.

Startup Nation

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On the final episode of Legalized Season Four, our host – Danielle Parr – conducts two interviews focused on startups in the cannabis space and how they are trying to succeed during this challenging time for the industry.  The first interview is with Aaron Salz, founder and Principal at Stoic Advisory. Our second interview is with Michael Kniazeff and Ian Delves, founders of cannabis start-up, Super Anytime.

This is Legalized, Startup Nation.

The perils and power of digital media

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This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star on February 9, 2020.

If there is one lesson we learned this week, it is that digital media continues to shape politics in ways we still do not understand.

Since its inception, strategists and pundits have treated digital media as a tool: a way of better understanding constituents and expanding reach to them. The reality is very different. Over the past decade, social media platforms and the internet more broadly have fundamentally changed not just the channels we use but the very nature of politics itself.

Consider Donald Trump. It’s not just that social media is the cornerstone of his political strategy, it has defined him as an entity. Without Twitter and Facebook, President Trump simply would not exist. Firstly, Trump’s base of supporters are creatures of social media, which has enveloped them in an echo chamber, validating their feeling that the rest of America has lost its mind, not them. When Trump told them the same thing, that validation was made concrete.

But Trump is not just a master of social media, he is a product of it. From the moment he descended his golden escalator and announced his candidacy, his every impulse has been characterized by a desire to stir controversy and generate clickbait. His obsession with crowd sizes and viewer ratings reflects a metric of success familiar to any social media user: impressions and views.

Trump’s State of the Union address this week was tailor-made for the digital age. Realizing that very few Americans would watch the entire address, Trump opted instead to create made-for-Twitter vignettes to be shared around the world.

Trump was not content with merely calling out the travails of “Lenny Skutniks,” as the invited guests of each president since Reagan are known. Instead, the leader of the free world channelled Oprah and, in real time, handed out a school-voucher scholarship, reunited a military family and awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to guests in the crowd. Each dramatic moment fit perfectly into a 90-second clip for digital consumption.

And just as the digital age has shaped our politicians, it has shaped the process of politics, too. Chaos descended on the Iowa Democratic primary this week as malfunctions with a newly implemented reporting app wrought havoc on the process. The historic success of the Buttigieg and Sanders campaigns was thus overshadowed by concerns about the accuracy and consistency of the results.

Trump surrogates were quick to point to Iowa as evidence that Democrats are not ready to run a country. But the Iowa debacle also spoke volumes about a reality of the 2020 campaign: Republicans’ vast dominance over Democrats’ in digital capacity. Even compared to President Obama’s formidable digital operation, the Trump team is miles ahead.

For context, between his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, Obama grew his digital database by roughly 55 per cent. Trump’s team has already grown theirs by 150 per cent and are aiming for list growth closer to 300 per cent. They have invested four times more in social media than television. The reason is simple: in today’s world, digital strategy is the fundamental building block of campaign strategy.

Canadian political parties have been slower in taking this lesson to heart. In 2016, the Trudeau Liberals significantly outspent other parties’ social media advertising. That said, conservative platforms like Canada Proud and Rebel Media have changed the digital playing field, reaching millions of Canadians with highly engaging content.

In the current CPC leadership race, Erin O’Toole’s campaign has already signalled its belief in the importance of social media. In late January, the campaign rolled out a sizable Facebook ad buy.

But just as digital media can provide momentum, it can also kneecap an otherwise solid campaign. Peter MacKay’s campaign was criticized this week for an aggressive Twitter ad that mocked the prime minister’s penchant for yoga classes and spa visits. The reality is that most Canadians have no appetite for the kind of social media attacks that have become the norm in America.

And therein lies the rub. Just as I wrote last week about the lack of consensus when it comes to online grieving, we are now experiencing the same lack of consensus in online campaigning.

Litmus Test

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This week on the “Litmus Test” edition of Political Traction, host Amanda Galbraith sits down with Conaptus Principal Jamie Ellerton to unpack the LGBTQ voice in Conservative politics, and what it means in the upcoming leadership race. Then, the two will go head-to-head with off-the-cuff thoughts on the Iowa caucuses, trans-mountain decision and the State of the Union speech.

Searching for a new consensus on grief in the digital age

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This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on January 2, 2020.

Once upon a time, grief was something private. We took pains never to speak ill of the dead. When a person of some profile died, an obituary might appear in the morning paper. Early acts of public grieving were proper and decorous. One’s legacy was given time and space to settle, and the reckoning, if there was to be a reckoning, came later.

As with so much in life, social media is changing the way to handle death — how we mourn the loss of public figures, think, talk, and remember the recently passed. There are still obituaries, but a telling new sub-genre has emerged. You might call it the Honest Reckoning. It’s an immediate and public grappling with the good and the bad — acknowledgments of family, work, and achievement, but also addiction, cruelty, and suicide.

When it happens online, the messy work of grieving — the sausage-making of legacy — has been accelerated and democratized.

As with so much else, it now plays out as much on our Facebook timelines as in the newspapers. There have always been hired wailers, but lately, grief has became even more performative, imbued with this new power. The meaning of a public figure’s life and death is determined today by the collective and often corrective outpouring on social media, which chases a celebrity’s death like a shadow.

So it was that I followed with interest this past week’s first tragic and unexpected celebrity death — the death not of Kobe Bryant, but Mr. Peanut, the monocled, 104-year-old Planters Peanuts mascot who was killed off in a commercial set to air during the Super Bowl.

As with all the best Super Bowl ad campaigns, this one went viral. In the 30-second spot, Mr. Peanut is ejected from the Nutmobile and sacrifices himself to save his fellow passengers. The ad was the first of two parts. A second one was planned featuring Mr. Peanut’s funeral.

The multimillion dollar campaign was developed by VaynerMedia for Kraft Heinz, which owns Planters. The agency says it was inspired by the reaction online to the death of an Avengers superhero. “We started talking about how the internet reacts when someone dies,” explained the campaign’s creator. “When Iron Man died, we saw an incredible reaction on Twitter and on social media. It’s such a strange phenomenon.”

Strange, but also potent: the ad has already garnered more than 6.5 million views on YouTube, having been shared by devoted fans of Mr. Peanut, mourning the loss of the beloved legume. The genius of the campaign was that it went viral by encouraging the public to mockingly enact these now-familiar rituals of grief.
But the very dynamic that Kraft Heinz relied upon to amplify their campaign is ultimately what undermined it. After the real-life death of Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, Planters paused the advertisements. Social media users had begun complaining about the disorienting sensation of scrolling through posts that mixed real grief for Bryant with mock grief for Mr. Peanut.

In deciding to hit pause, Kraft Heinz is playing by the old rules, but by no means does everyone feel so obliged.

This week, in the aftermath of Bryant’s death, Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez was suspended for tweeting a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article detailing the sexual assault allegations made against the NBA great. She was reinstated two days later, which is precisely how long it took her newsroom bosses to realize what was already obvious to anyone living online: The adage against speaking ill of the dead has long since been discarded.

Or has it? Even as the Post’s own media critic condemned the suspension, tens of thousands of fans and mourners online hurled abuse and death threats at Sonmez.
Clearly, some people still felt strongly that it was disrespectful to raise the topic of sexual assault so soon; just as others felt it was disrespectful to carry on pretending to mourn Mr. Peanut while actually mourning Mr. Bryant.

If the morbid events of the past week have demonstrated one thing, it’s that — whether we are grieving or aggrieved, beat reporter or obituary writer, brand manager or Twitter troll — we remain far from a new consensus about death.