The Ontario Progressive Conservatives may be getting more pre-election attention than their political rivals, but according to results of a new survey, the conversation is largely negative.
Results of an analysis conducted by Ipsos Reid for CTV News and CP24 found the majority of references to the Ontario election on Twitter focused on the PC party, with Tim Hudak's Million Jobs Plan leading the way.
From May 2 to June 6, Hudak and the PCs were the focus of 47 per cent of all election-related mentions on Twitter, compared to 35 per cent for the Liberals and 18 per cent for the NDP.
The survey found that conversations about the Conservatives and Liberals have been "overwhelmingly negative," divided between Hudak's jobs plan and the Liberal handling of the gas plant scandal.
Tweeters questioned how public service job cuts would translate into private sector job gains, and Hudak's math was questioned when some economists said that his proposal counted eight jobs for each one actually created. In total, 61 per cent of PC mentions were negative, compared to 10 per cent positive.
Criticism of the Liberals ranged from the MaRS real estate bailout to the $1.1 billion gas plants scandal, with most focusing on the party's past rather than its current platform. Negative mentions outnumbered positive mentions by about two to one, with 44 per cent negative and 18 per cent positive.
Twitter conversation about the NDP was more evenly split, with 29 per cent of comments skewing positive compared with 24 per cent negative.
Ipsos Reid's analysis is based on a sample of messages posted from Ontario on Twitter between May 2 and June 6, 2014. The messages were found through an Internet search for all parties and party leaders, excluding official party Twitter accounts and search terms associated with federal parties by the same names. Ipsos said a total of 251,719 tweets were collected in the scan. Each week of the survey, 300 mentions of each of the three leading parties were randomly selected for analysis.
