How Does Social Media Analysis Help Politics

From within the countless scroll of the Twitterfeed, its glitter and gutter, one specific tweet known as me to a halt. It was from Catherine McKenna, the local weather change minister, and was posted hours after the Americans put a tariff on Canadian steel. The minister is nothing if not quick. Proud to be sporting my new hammer necklace right this moment in honour of my hometown, Hamilton.

Our authorities will stand up for Steeltown jobs - and the jobs of aluminum and steelworkers throughout Canada - right now and day-after-day. Slightly than dance round, let's go with the plain question instantly. When was the final time the minister had a tweet about oilpatch jobs? The place was that swift digit hitting the Twitter freeway following the assorted, deep hits to the oil industry, which has been under so many guns — prices, protests and pipelines — for thus a few years. Instantly the minister for climate change has a word about jobs. It brings me to ask, what does it take to acknowledge a crisis? If it's in Ontario, a matter of hours. If it is in Alberta, years.

The disaster in Alberta jobs has been current for years and the assorted forces blocking Alberta vitality have been energetic, current and pressing for a similar period. But it took the desperate measure of Kinder Morgan setting a deadline to abandon the challenge for good before either the federal government or the national press wrapped their busy minds round Alberta's dilemma.

It's more than unusual that it took so lengthy to get thus far. For until the deadline — at the very least exterior Alberta — the nationwide press and nationwide politicians had been informal, sporadic and basically not serious of their attention or coverage. But over, at a minimal, the past two years at the least, the crisis could be seen building, almost on a daily basis. It is useful to review the atmospherics that led up to the final week of May and the flurry of concern that all of the sudden manifested itself.

It is easily recalled when Power East was cancelled and the little attention that received. Here was a genuinely all-new undertaking destined to deliver Western oil to the Canadian East Coast, and finish the embarrassment of feeding Japanese Canada from suppliers as far afield as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. It was as much a nationwide challenge as Kinder Morgan's is insisted to be. Yet when it went by the wayside there was hardly a peep.

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Likewise with Trudeau's off-hand fiat on Northern Gateway. One other pipeline cancelled. No large deal. Just the same old blather from the federal management, the usual self-congratulation: save the atmosphere, leaders on local weather change, and all that. Much the identical with the ban on any new West Coast tankers. This dropped into the news line with the mildest of mild thuds, although it meant another twisting of the garrote round export of Alberta's No. 1 useful resource.

Add to that the charade of the "social licence" deal. The Alberta authorities genuflected to social licence, brought in the carbon tax — and two years later social licence is a dead phrase. With each venture cancelled, or hurdle erected, the enviro consortia tasted recent ecstasy. Any alternative that hamstrung the oil trade and villainous Alberta raised a cheer from Sierra, Suzuki and Greenpeace. But, when all this was occurring, other than a number of tepid responses, a scattered warning that shutting down all outward access from Alberta might, in some unspecified time in the future, show a problem, might stir issues up between B.C.