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Canada's political parties don't give a Twitter about using new media to engage the country's younger and increasingly wired voters, a new poll suggests.
Just 9 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 25 said a party had reached out to them using e-mail, text message, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter during the first week of the federal election campaign.
It's a missed opportunity considering that 83 per cent of respondents had a Facebook profile, the majority had cellphones, and more used the Internet – 35 per cent – as their main source of information on the election than any other, including TV, newspapers, radio, family and friends.
“For all the talk, the political parties haven't caught up,” said Marc Chalifoux, executive director of the Dominion Institute, which commissioned the poll.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday: His campaign is renowned for its reliance on the Internet and technology. (Chris Carlson/Canadian Press)
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“New media is offering a golden opportunity to essentially go where young people are in the online space, and we're finding Canadian political parties simply aren't occupying that space,” he said.
Only 42.2 per cent of eligible first-time voters cast a ballot in the last federal election.
Carmi Levy, a technology industry analyst with AR Communications Inc., said the parties need only look south to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which leveraged a dynamic website, social networking, and even independently produced viral videos (remember Obama Girl?) to mobilize volunteers and raise millions.
“Canada really does represent a new- and social-media backwater so far as political parties are concerned,” said Mr. Levy, who has watched closely as the Canadian party leaders experiment with Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows bursts of simple text messages to be broadcast to a group of followers.
Rather than use new media to engage young voters in a two-way dialogue, the parties continue to “push” out their message as they do in traditional sound bites on TV, radio and in print, Mr. Levy said.
“They're using new tools in the same old way. ... Voters are increasingly media savvy, especially younger demographics, and they perceive all this as insincere,” he said.
Mr. Levy said Canadian campaign managers tend to be older and less comfortable with new technology than those south of the border. Mr. Chalifoux suggested it's a matter of scale: The Republicans and Democrats pour far more resources into their e-campaigns.
Both experts agree that Canada's political parties have treated new media as an “add-on” to the traditional campaign of photo-ops and bus tours, when it should be fully integrated.
Other poll findings:
Bloggers are more likely to vote than non bloggers.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they were concerned over low voter turnout among Canada's youth.
Three in five said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online.
The majority – 65 per cent – said they oppose lowering the voting age to 16.
The poll involved 1,000 respondents aged 18 to 25 surveyed from Sept. 10-15 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
Week 3 of the campaign
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