Well, the federal election Leader's debate on Thursday evening was in the end a rather disappointing affair. It was essentially a series of thrusts, parries and spins on taxation, housing, immigration, energy, etc...but left out in the entire debate was any fundamental recognition of what I think is a major issue facing the future prosperity of the Canadian economy. Given that trade contribute's 30 percent of our GDP, what is the vision for us to continue making our way in the world? Perhaps a coherent vision is too much to ask of politicians seeking to get re-elected. In any event, I thought the next day was a good time to update the leadership Twitter feeds I have been following - see here and here.
I'm not going to provide a pie showing the distribution of Twitter followers as it is essentially unchanged from what it looked like on August 29th. As of approximately 2:30 pm on September 18th, Stephen Harper still had the largest number of Twitter followers at 894,000 - up from 877,000 on August 29th. Next was Justin Trudeau at 746,000 - up from 724,000, followed by Elizabeth May at 186,000 - up from 172,000, then Tom Mulcair at 173,000 - up from 162,000 and finally Gilles Duceppe also up at 91,000 from 88,400. Figure 1 plots the followers for each leader on the three dates in which I've taken the numbers and all five leaders have seen an increase in followers.
Figure 2 plots the growth rates. All the leaders saw an increase in their growth rates for additional Twitter followers compared to the previous period but the second period was slightly longer. For the August 29th to September 18th period, May and Mulcair show the largest increase in Twitter followers in percentage terms at 8.1 and 6.8 percent respectively. Trudeau's growth rate was 3 percent followed by Harper at 1.9 percent. Duceppe saw a 2.9 percent increase in followers. Although not shown in a chart, when it comes to tweets, for the August 29th to September 18th period, Mulcair led with a 7.2 percent increase in tweets, followed by Trudeau at 3.8 percent, then May at 1.7 percent and finally Harper at 1 percent. Gilles Duceppe also seems to be tweeting an awful lot more - going up 5.2 percent.
In any event, those are the numbers as they stand at last count.
The partisanship of CBC News in this election campaign has been a thing to behold. The CBC has essentially turned itself into an Anybody But Harper propaganda machine, particularly, but far from exclusively, their flagship TV public affairs show Power & Politics. When the 2015Q2 GDP estimates came out, one would have expected that Power & Politics, if it were to compare Canada’s economic performance to the rest of the G-7, to show something that would mimic StatCan’s own analysis, showing both quarterly and annual rates of change for 2015Q2. This would have looked something like this:
Country Growth Rate
2015Q2/2015Q1 2015Q2/2014Q2
US 0.9 2.7
UK 0.7 2.6
Germany 0.4 1.6
Canada -0.1 1.0
France 0.0 1.0
Japan -0.3 0.9
Italy 0.3 0.7
As one can see, Canada was right in the middle for G-7 countries in its annual growth rate, not so bad considering we were the only G-7 country that was hard hit by the oil price drop. Even if one looks at the quarterly change we did better than Japan and were within rounding error of the French growth rate. Rather than showing such a chart, P&P showed the 2015Q1 and 2015Q2 quarterly growth rates of all G 7 countries, quickly making the point that Canada was the only country to experience de clines in both quarters and not, of course, wasting any time pointing out that Japan lost as much output in 2015Q2 as we did in 2015H1.
The P&P host Roseanne Barton also sneered at the 0.5% growth in real GDP in June. She is either so clueless that she actually believed it was much inferior to the plus-2.0% growth the DOF had forecast for 2015H2 or she wished to mislead the viewers into believing this was so. The DOF forecast is an annualized growth rate. The 0.5% growth rate for June is equivalent to a 6.2% annualized growth rate, far stronger than the DOF forecast rate.
Posted by: Andrew Baldwin | September 21, 2015 at 08:23 AM