What the MPs said in March: Wrangling Ottawa's Political Discourse
What the MPs said in March: Wrangling Ottawa's Political Discourse
What the party leaders and the parties overall focused on in March, as well as party-breakdowns for most salient key-phrases.
Dear reader, on this Easter Monday and Carbon Tax launch day, we’re launching our first “What the MPs said last month” issue, which will be a new recurring monthly feature in Queen Street Analytics going forward. The idea of this new feature is to give a sense of the month-to-month ebb-and-flow of what each party and each party’s leader chooses to emphasize in their public political speech.
The data we use is from LobbyIQ, which parses each MP’s political speech over the course of a full month, and then runs machine-learning and AI-enabled key-phrase extraction algorithms over the resulting corpus of text for each MP. The algorithm selects for phrases that are “central” to characterizing an individual MP’s focus, while selecting against phrases that are generic or common in a broader corpus of non-political text.
1. What the party leaders talked about in March
Exhibit 1 shows the key-phrases (across all Hansard text) used by each of the leaders of the four major parties in March, rank-ordered top to bottom by their centrality.
The top-three key-phrases of both Justin Trudeau’s and Pierre Poilievre’s speech revolved around the Carbon Tax which launches today, but obviously with quite different connotations, with Trudeau focusing on the need for it and the associated programs reducing its impact, and Poilievre focusing on the tax increase element of the policy.
Meanwhile, Jagmeet Singh was most focused on Palestine, and Yves-François Blanchet was most focused on regional concerns and government services.
2. What the parties said in March
In this section, we aggregate individual MPs’ keywords to the party level. Variation in the number of keywords can arise from less speech (fewer MPs) and from more homogenous speech within-party.
Exhibit 2 shows the results: While the Liberals were more preoccupied on discussing a counterfactual Conservative Government, the other parties were more focused on discussing the Liberal Government, although Conservatives do also seem fond of discussing a potential Conservative Government. The policy of Carbon Tax was more prominent for political speech in the ranks of Conservatives and the Bloc, while Liberals and the NDP were more preoccupied with discussing what the policy is meant to address, i.e. Climate Change.
Beyond that, Liberals were more pre-occupied talking about support for the Ukraine, and helping Canadian businesses and families, Conservatives were more pre-occupied talking about taxes, food banks and home heating costs, the NDP was more pre-occupied with Palestine, Human Rights, and Indigenous Communities. In the wake of ArriveCan, discussion of parliamentary budget officers also continued to pre-occupy Conservative and NDP politicians.
3. Key-phrases broken down by party
In Exhibit 3, we rank-order the key-phrases by their overall salience across party-lines. Across the columns, we break out the number of MPs by party for whom a key-phrase was central to their political speech in March. Within a key-phrase row, we highlight cells when one party was clearly most pre-occupied by a phrase, e.g. Conservative politicians when it comes to the Budget (row 2).
One interesting observation across the first four rows is that Liberals and Conservatives are more pre-occupied talking about the other side, while the Bloc seems more pre-occupied talking about itself. We leave it to the reader to draw their own observations and conclusions from the rest of this Exhibit.
