Mapping Canadian Leaders’ Use of YouTube

Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial party leaders have an established and active presence on several of the most popular social media platforms, including Facebook, X/Twitter, and Instagram. Party leaders tend to be much less active on the video-sharing platform YouTube. With news media taking note of the success federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has found on this platform, the authors of this article sought to learn if it portends a shift in the extent it is used. They conclude that, to date, YouTube has still not joined the ranks of other popular social media platforms, likely due to the cost of production, the time it takes to create a YouTube video, and the disproportionate levels of engagement compared to content posted elsewhere. However, the authors hypothesize that with two other federal leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party and Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party, increasingly producing Direct to Viewer content in advance of the next general election, Canadian politicians may at some point in the future make use of this technology as much as their American counterparts.

Andrew J.A. Mattan, Aidan Harris, and Tamara A. Small

Andrew J.A. Mattan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University. Aidan Harris has completed a master’s degree in the University of Guelph’s Department of Political Science. Tamara A. Small is a Professor in the University of Guelph’s Department of Political Science.

Three days after the removal of Erin O’Toole as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, longtime Member of Parliament, Pierre Poilievre, released a video on YouTube and social media, titled I’m running for Prime Minister to give you back control of your life, to announce his candidacy. During the leadership campaign, Poilievre made extensive use of YouTube to by-pass the traditional media and speak directly to the party’s base, which he has continued to do as party leader.1 His success on YouTube has brought new attention to the platform. For instance, The National Post describes Poilievre’s use of YouTube as a “new era in political communications, where politicians no longer assume they have to get their message across in 30-second bursts on television or in short social media videos.”2 While digital technologies, particularly X/Twitter, have long played an important role in Canadian party politics, YouTube has remained largely underutilized and under studied.3 In comparison, YouTube has been a fixture in American politics for some time.4 The 2008 presidential election has been dubbed ‘The YouTube Election.’5 Ricke’s 2014 study of YouTube channels of sitting US congresspeople and senators demonstrated that they made extensive use of the social media platform, including online videos of floor speeches and congressional hearings, news clips, in-office activities, advertisements, and talking to their constituents.6

Using Poilievre as a starting point, this article seeks to map the use of YouTube by party leaders in Canada. We use the term ‘map’ because we simply do not know the state of play for how and in what ways YouTube has been (or hasn’t been) incorporated into Canadian party politics. We focus our attention on party leaders within legislative politics. Accordingly, we ask three questions: to what extent do leaders use YouTube? What is the nature of the videos posted? To what extent do users engage with the content of party leaders on YouTube? To cast our net as wide as possible, this analysis includes all provincial, territorial and federal party leaders whose parties have representatives in their respective legislatures. Overall, our analysis shows the vast majority of our most central political actors eschew this very popular social media. YouTube only plays a minor role in leadership politics in Canada.

The YouTubification of Politics

YouTube was established almost two decades ago in 2005. Google bought the platform the following year. Globally, YouTube is a very popular social media. It has over two billion monthly logged-in users worldwide, who watch more than a billion hours of video every day and more than 500 hours of video is uploaded every minute.7 According to polling firm Environics, it ranks as the second most popular social media site in Canada after Facebook, with 54 per cent of Canadians using YouTube weekly.8 YouTube is also heavily used by Millennials and Generation Z.

YouTube stands out from other social media because it focuses primarily on video content, whereas others prioritize text, images, and brevity. Beyond popularity, there are many reasons for politicians to incorporate YouTube into their online communication strategy. First, YouTube can be inexpensive, especially when compared to other forms of audio-visual political communication such as television.9 This allows political actors to communicate more often. For instance, in the lead up to the 2008 election, Barack Obama posted nearly 800 YouTube videos.10 Second, YouTube videos are not bound by a set time. Whereas traditional televised political ads are generally between 15 to 30 seconds, YouTube videos can be longer than an hour. This means political actors can engage in substantive discussion of policy.11 Third, YouTube, like other social media, creates an interactive channel for discussion, both through comments and video replies between politicians and citizens.12 Last, YouTube allows content creators to collect a multitude of analytic data about users, which allows politicians and their staffs to create content that is useful and relevant to their audience.13

Mapping Out the Presence of Party Leaders on YouTube

The first stage of mapping YouTube is to determine the extent to which party leaders use the platform. Answering this question was surprisingly more difficult than would be expected. Our dataset includes all party leaders that have seats in their respective legislature, including interim leaders. We include the House of Commons, the 10 provincial legislatures and the Yukon Legislative Assembly. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut are excluded, as they operate on a consensus government system and party politics is limited.

At the time of analysis, there were 42 party leaders with legislative seats across these 12 jurisdictions.14 The analysis itself was conducted between April and June, 2024. Since that time, some leaders have left office. As such, our analysis should be considered a snapshot in time.

Table 1: Leader Activity on Social Media as of April 2024 (n=42)

Platform	% of Accounts	% of Active Accounts
YouTube	76.2	21.4
Facebook	100.0	100.0
X/Twitter	97.6	92.9
Instagram	95.2	92.9

Our initial search for YouTube pages found that more than three-quarters of leaders (76.2 percent) in Canada have created a channel on YouTube (Table 1). On its face, this seems like a sizeable number. One might even conclude that YouTube is a relatively well utilized social media. However, once we took a deeper dive, we found many YouTube channels were inactive. Several of the channels, including those for Bonnie Crombie, leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, and Carla Beck, leader of the Saskatchewan NDP, were clearly created as part of their campaign for the party leadership and stopped being utilized once they were successful. Others had just been abandoned for no obvious reason or are used very sporadically. Given that merely having a channel is much different than actively posting videos to the channel, we sought to limit our analysis to ‘active’ channels. We define an active channel as one where there has been a video posted in the last 30 days (as of April 19, 2024) and at least 20 videos posted in the last calendar year. When we do so, the number drops precipitously to nine active channels (21.4 percent). If YouTube is a fixture of American politics, as argued by Ricke, we find the opposite to be the case in Canada. The vast majority of our most central political actors eschew this very popular social media platform.

To better contextualize the low uptake, we compare YouTube usage to the other main social media platforms. Table 1 makes clear YouTube is by far the least likely social media platform for leaders to both have an account for and be active on. Indeed, by contrast, all 42 leaders have an active Facebook account. X/Twitter use is much in the same vein, with all leaders, save for one, having an account and only two of those leaders having been deemed inactive. Even the most recently established platform, Instagram, is used more than YouTube. This contextualization is important as it demonstrates that Canadian leaders do engage in social media politics as part of their legislative work. However, we find that YouTube, for most party leaders, is not a platform of choice.

Table 2: YouTube Video Categorization

Advertisement	Video emphasising legislative work and initiatives.
Direct to Viewer	The speaker talks directly to the viewer in a highly produced and scripted format.
Interaction	Interaction between speaker and one or more people.
Legislative Speech	Speeches in the legislature.
Program Inspired	Video in the format of a broadcast or online program.
Public Speaking	Recordings of campaign rallies and speeches to a large group of people.
Talking to Press	Addressing the media or answering their questions.
Third-party Clip	Video is produced by a third-party (e.g. news media or other entity).
Other	Video not captured by the above.

Table 3: Perecentage of Video Type Per Leader (N=270)

Leader	Jurisdiction	Legislative Speech	Direct to Viewer	Talking to Press	Public Speaking	Interactions	Program Inspired	Third-party Clip	Advertisement
Claudia Chender	NS	83.3	3.3	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	13.3	0.0
Danielle Smith	AB	10.0	6.7	26.7	16.7	3.3	33.3	3.3	0.0
Jagmeet Singh	CN	0.0	33.3	0.0	20.0	30.0	3.3	0.0	13.3
Justin Trudeau	CN	0.0	63.3	0.0	0.0	36.7	0.0	0.0	0.0
Mike Schreiner	ON	90.0	6.7	0.0	3.3	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon	QC	63.3	0.0	26.7	6.7	0.0	0.0	3.3	0.0
Pierre Poilievre	CN	43.3	3.3	0.0	16.7	0.0	6.7	16.7	13.3
Rachel Notley	AB	0.0	26.7	46.7	20.0	6.7	0.0	0.0	0.0
Sonia Furstenau	BC	100.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
All Leaders		43.3	15.0	11.1	9.3	8.5	4.8	4.1	3.0

The Use of YouTube by Party Leaders

In order to determine how party leader use YouTube, we conducted a content analysis on the last 30 videos of ‘active’ party leader channels. Commonly used in political science, content analysis is a method of systematically “measuring or quantifying dimensions” of content (e.g. text, videos, images), that allows for researchers to draw inferences to the producers of those messages.15 Table 2 list the categorization of videos we analyzed. This categorization was based on previous analyses by Ricke and Harris.16 We also collected for production values, language, length of time, and engagement variables (views, likes, and comments) for each video. In total, we analyzed 270 party leader videos on YouTube.

As demonstrated in Table 3, leaders are posting a wide variety of videos; however, there is a particular emphasis on Legislative Speeches (43.3 per cent). As the name implies, legislative speeches are videos of the leader speaking in their respective legislative assembly such as the video called Mike Schreiner debates Bill 39 at Queen’s Park (at just under three minutes in length). We believe that the high prevalence of Legislative Speech videos can be explained by the relative ease of production. There has been recording of proceedings and committee meetings in all legislative assemblies for some time. For instance, television broadcasting of the proceedings of the House of Commons began in 1977 on CPAC and began live-streaming on ParlVU in 2004. Televised broadcasts of Queen’s Park begin in 1986 with webcasting in 2008. As such, the raw ingredients of these videos are produced elsewhere. Here, minimal editing is required of staffers to make it available on YouTube; far less time and resources are required for this type of video. Similarly in the American context, videos from within Congress were the most common type of YouTube video; politicians can “enhance and affirm their political brand by demonstrating for the public via video the activities that they are undertaking while in office.”17

Pierre Poilievre has been particularly lauded for is his Direct to Viewer videos – that is, videos where the speaker talks directly to the viewer in a highly produced and scripted format.18 Harris found that Direct to Viewer videos were the most common type uploaded by Poilievre during the 2022 Conservative Party leadership race. However, we only find around 16 per cent of videos of this type in our dataset. As Table 3 shows, Justin Trudeau, not Poilievre, had the most of this type of video (63.3 per cent). How to build a house, faster is an example of Direct to Viewer video for the Trudeau channel; in this 48-second clip, Trudeau makes a casual—yet scripted—jaunt through a modular housing factory. Unlike most leaders, Trudeau did not post a single Legislative Speech. The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh and Rachel Notley also made greater use of Direct to Viewer videos (33.3 and 26.7 per cent, respectively) while avoiding Legislative Speeches completely. To be sure, Table 3 shows that these three leaders were the exceptions rather than the rule, with the vast majority of leaders not posting Direct to Viewer videos.

The low number of Direct to Viewer videos in our dataset does not mean that most videos posted to YouTube were raw and unproduced. Indeed, 51.9 per cent of leader videos were found to have some added production value component in the video. This is exemplified in Education Infrastructure by Alberta’s Danielle Smith. The video is of an announcement made by Smith for the construction of a new school. The video cuts together various parts of the press conference as well as images of the design plans of the new school. Smith’s speech narrates the video. In general, we found that most videos produced by the three federal leaders had added production elements, while provincial leaders, on average, did less to the videos they posted. For instance, BC’s Sonia Furstenau never added any production elements to her videos. Indeed, if we examine a leader’ s proximity to power: of the videos posted by first ministers (Trudeau and Smith) 93.3 per cent are produced and only five per cent are Legislative videos; for leaders of the opposition (Notley and Poilievre) 81.7 per cent are produced and 21 per cent are Legislative videos; and for other opposition leaders (Singh, Chender, St-Pierre Plamondon, Schreiner and Furstenau), 23.3 per cent are Produced and 67.3 per cent are Legislative videos. This reflects evidence of the normalization hypotheses, as argued by Small and Jansen, suggesting that better resourced political actors have more opportunities to take advantage of the potentials of digital technologies.19 While YouTube can be inexpensive, those with more resources (money and personnel) are able to produce more, different (and higher production quality) content.

The average video was six minutes and 27 seconds. The videos range from a 29-second clip of (then) Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley discussing the 2024 Alberta budget to a one hour, 13 minute, and 13 second video of Parti Québécois (PQ) leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon giving a conference speech at l’Université de Montréal. Indeed, when compared to the average TV advertisement or even Facebook post, nearly six and-a-half minutes of content is quite a dramatic jump. Evidently, the platform is providing party leaders the space to make lengthy political statements and some leaders are making effective use of this. The longest video types are Program Inspired at over 21 and-a-half minutes, while the shortest video types are Advertisements, at 55.9 seconds. On top of being the shortest, Advertisements were also the most infrequent. Overall, party leaders are very infrequently uploading videos that are outside of Legislative Speeches, Direct to Viewer videos, and videos Talking to the Press.

Table 4: Average Engagement by Party Leaders

Leader	Views	Likes	Comments	Total
Pierre Poilievre	22,645.0	1,925.2	395.0	24,965.2
Danielle Smith	9,652.6	883.2	161.9	10,697.7
Jagmeet Singh	3,594.1	85.1	91.2	3,770.4
Justin Trudeau	3,103.8	55.8	306.7	3,466.3
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon	2,970.7	125.1	49.3	3,145.1
Rachel Notley	1,714.4	34.8	27.2	1,776.4
Mike Schreiner	180.3	5.9	1.4	187.6
Sonia Furstenau	129.7	4.2	0.9	134.8
Claudia Chender	21.0	0.2	0.2	21.4

User Engagement with YouTube Videos

Having established what types of videos are being produced and by whom, we briefly address engagement with these videos. Recall that YouTube, like other social media, allows for engagement between producers and users. This leads us to question: to what extent do users make use of and engage with the YouTube of party leaders? There are different ways users can connect with YouTube content. For instance, users can subscribe to a particular YouTube channel. When a user subscribes, they receive notifications about new content on their own accounts. Unsurprisingly, given the media attention surrounding his YouTube use, Poilievre has the largest subscriber base, at approximately 450,000. At the other end, Nova Scotia NDP leader, Claudia Chender, has 53. While Chender’s number is low, we also recognize that numerous factors such as length of time on the platform, proximity to power, and jurisdiction size will impact the number of subscribers. Given these factors, it is imprudent to directly compare engagement across leaders. Rather we highlight some interesting trends and instances of engagement in our dataset.

Table 4 presents the average level of engagement for each leader per video on the last 30 videos. We consider three engagement variables found on YouTube – views, likes and comments. For every posted video, YouTube provides how many people viewed the video. Next, a user can click on the thumbs up (I like this) or thumbs down (I don’t like this) button. YouTube provides a running count of these engagements. Finally, a user can provide a comment about the video. These engagement measures can be seen on a continuum with comments being the most engaged; comments involve more time and cognitive resources, “as people usually comment when the content is really meaningful for them.”20 Within marketing, engagement, in the form of likes, comments, and shares has the capacity to strengthen a user’s investment in the brand at different levels.21

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pierre Poilievre has the most viewed and liked videos by a large margin, more than doubling the next closest leader with an average of 22,645 views, 1,925.2 likes and 395 comments on his videos. His 18 minute and 54 second video called Debtonation: Episode 2 had the most engagement in the analysis. The video mirrors the episodic structure and format of a traditional documentary program. While Poilievre is not seen in the video until the final moments, he is the narrator. Debtonation: Episode 2 received 103,731 views, 8,000 likes, and 1,345 comments. The top comment on this video, which garnered more than a thousand likes, expressed enthusiasm for voting for him/his party. This means that users were not only engaging with Poilievre’s content but also with one another. At the other end of the spectrum, some third-party leaders have as few as an average of 21.5 engagements on their videos. Therefore, the communication challenges that leaders of smaller parties face offline, such as less media attention and speaking time in the legislature, exist online as well. It is worth pointing out that a high number of engagements should not necessarily be seen as an endorsement of a leader, their policies, or videos. Justin Trudeau, for instance, has the second highest numbers of comments despite having the fourth most viewed and fifth most liked videos (Table 4). In his video, What is the government doing to address housing challenges in Canada? (Direct to Viewer), all the of top comments are negative. It appears that both supporters and opponents are engaging with YouTube content.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was the second most viewed and liked leader after Poilievre, with an average of 9,652.6 views and 883.2 likes. This is intriguing to us because scholars have long suggested the current growth of populism worldwide is fueled by digital technologies such as social media.22 Research shows that populist leaders, worldwide, have used social media to circumvent traditional media channels to communicate directly with supporters.23 As Poilievre and Smith have tapped into the neoliberal populist tradition in their policies and presentation, perhaps, we are seeing evidence of the relationship between populism and social media here in Canada. Given the gulf between Poilievre and Smith and their contemporaries, we are left to maintain that their success on YouTube make them the exception rather than the rule.

Why Isn’t YouTube Used More?

This article began with the notion that Pierre Poilievre had created a new type of social media politics in Canada with his current use of YouTube. However, our mapping of the use of YouTube by Canadian party leaders reveals this is not the case – at least not yet. Even though YouTube offers benefits to politicians, the two-decade old social media platform is still heavily underutilized in Canada. Of the 42 current party leaders only nine are ‘active’ on YouTube. This rate of 28 per cent is extremely low, especially in comparison to the other main social media platforms, which are all above 92 per cent active usage.

What factors might explain the low take up of YouTube? We suggest that YouTube underutilization is likely related to the cost of production, the time it takes to create a YouTube video, and the disproportionate levels of engagement. Simply put, it is significantly easier for a leader and their staff to write a tweet/X post or post on Facebook/Instagram. Even a high- quality photo or infographic can be produced in-house and posted on social media with relative ease. On the other hand, some types of videos, such as Direct to Viewer videos or Program Inspired, require significant production on the part of the leader and staff. Factors such as appropriate location, lighting, and a script would all be involved. Moreover, editing may include jump cuts, snappy transitions, text overlays, graphics, and other audio-visual components. While these videos might attract the attention of the mainstream media, as Poilievre did during the leadership race, really compelling videos require much more time, effort, and resources than content for other social media.

Making effective YouTube content is resource heavy. Not surprisingly, we found that most videos that were uploaded by party leaders were Legislative Speeches, a type of video that requires little to no production and takes far less time to create. At the same time, however, YouTube has been a success for some leaders. These leaders tend to be first ministers or those in the federal parliament – both of which provide the leader with very large constituencies of users to draw from. Considering the scarcity of engagement for the YouTube videos on active channels, we are not surprised that most leaders have prudently stayed clear of a platform which seemingly requires a lot of work for very little engagement.

That said, our analysis suggests that YouTube may play a role in the next federal election. As discussed, Pierre Poilievre has long been committed to YouTube. We find that Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh are also focussing on the platform; both leaders have been producing Direct to Viewer videos of late. As these are some of the most produced and complicated videos to create, this could suggest that Trudeau and Singh’s communication teams have taken notice of Poilievre’s success on YouTube and are actively trying to incorporate these videos into their social media strategies. Perhaps the 2025 federal election will be the ‘YouTube election’ of Canadian politics but, for now, our map remains scant, and for seemingly good reason.

Notes

1. Aidan Harris, “JustInflated: Pierre Poilievre’s Neoliberal Populist Style on YouTube” (Masters Research Project, Guelph, ON, University of Guelph, 2023).
2. Thomson, Stuart. “‘This Is the New Standard’: Poilievre’s Latest Mini-Documentary Could Set off an Online Arms Race.” National Post (Online), December 27, 2023. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/poilievres-latest-mini-doc-could-set-off-arms-race.
3. Harold J. Jansen and Tamara A. Small, “Conclusion: Optimists, Skeptics and the Uncertain Future of Digital Politics in Canada?,” in Digital Politics in Canada: Promises and Realities, ed. Tamara A. Small and Harold J. Jansen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020, 287–98.
4. Ricke, LaChrystal D, The Impact of YouTube on US Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).
5. Towner, Terri L. and David A. Dulio, “An Experiment of Campaign Effects during the YouTube Election,” New Media & Society 13, no. 4 (February 16, 2011): 626–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810377917.
6. Ricke, The Impact of YouTube on US Politics.
7. YouTube. “YouTube for Press.” YouTube (blog). Accessed July 16, 2024. https://blog.youtube/press/.
8. Brittany Denham, “2024 Trends: Social Media in Canada.” Web log. Environics Research, May 9, 2024, https://environics.ca/article/2024-trends-social-media- in-canada/.
9. Ricke.
10. Ricke.
11. Borah, Porismita, Erika Fowler, and Travis Nelson Ridout, “Television vs. YouTube: Political Advertising in the 2012 Presidential Election,” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 15, no. 3 (May 28, 2018): 230–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1476280. 
12. Towner and Dulio. “An Experiment of Campaign Effects during the YouTube Election.”
13. Ricke.
14. The Green Party of Canada and Québec Solidaire have co-leaders. We also do not include sites that appear to be created by the government.
15. Benoit, William L. “Content Analysis in Political Communication.” Essay. In Sourcebook for Political Communication Research, 268–279. Routledge, 2011.
16. Harris, “JustInflated: Pierre Poilievre’s Neoliberal Populist Style on YouTube”; Ricke.
17. Ricke, 94.
18. Thomson, “‘This Is the New Standard’: Poilievre’s Latest Mini-Documentary Could Set off an Online Arms Race.”
19. Jansen and Small, “Conclusion: Optimists, Skeptics and the Uncertain Future of Digital Politics in Canada?”
20. Munaro, Ana Cristina, Renato Hübner Barcelos, Eliane Cristine Francisco Maffezzolli, João Pedro Santos Rodrigues, and Emerson Cabrera Paraiso. “To Engage or Not Engage? The Features of Video Content on YouTube Affecting Digital Consumer Engagement.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 20, no. 5 (March 29, 2021): 1336–1352, 1337.
21. Munaro et al.
22. Gerbaudo, Paolo. “Social Media and Populism: An Elective Affinity?” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 5 (May 8, 2018): 745–753.
23. Engesser, Sven, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, and Florin Büchel. “Populism and Social Media: How Politicians Spread a Fragmented Ideology.” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 8 (July 8, 2016): 1109–1126, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1207697.