The 2014 Ontario Votes leadership pop quiz
Andrew Foote | CBC News | Posted: May 9, 2014 12:22 PM | Last Updated: May 9, 2014
How does Ottawa compare to Toronto?
A common election campaign question is which of the leaders you’d like to have a beer with.
However, you’d have to know who you were sipping suds with in the first place.
After CBC Toronto’s Metro Morning found only one out of more than a dozen people they asked in their city’s downtown if they could tell them who Kathleen Wynne, Tim Hudak, Andrea Horwath and Dalton McGuinty were, us here at CBC Ottawa decided to try a similar experiment.
- Ontario Votes 2014 coverage from CBC
- Hear the Metro Morning segment
- Ontario election turnout hits record low
We loaded a tablet with photos of Horwath, Hudak, Wynne and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and headed to the South Keys Shopping Centre parking lot to see how many people could identify them.
The (not at all scientific) results?
- 85.7 per cent could tell us the photo was Rob Ford
- 42.9 per cent could tell us the photo was Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne
- 42.9 per cent could tell us the photo was New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath
- 28.6 per cent could tell us the photo was Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak
Only two people were able to identify all four photos.
Watch Kamil Karamali’s story in the video player above to see more of the survey.
Remember it's the start of the campaign
Elly Alboim, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group in Ottawa, said it’s not unusual for people to be less knowledgeable at the start of a campaign.
“It’s pretty early, advertising hasn’t started, media coverage isn’t very deep, so it’s not surprising people aren’t paying much attention,” he said.
“Remember starting next week we’re going to be bombarded with television advertising on every program you watch, there’s going to be print advertising, media will start giving the campaign attention.
“Recognition will go up, awareness of the issues will go up but the question is will people pay any more attention than they do now and will they vote in numbers any larger than in the past?”
Alboim said Ontario does have a reputation for paying less attention to provincial politics.
“The turnout is very low… people don’t pay attention to Ontario politics between elections or even in elections,” he said.
Ontario set a record low in its 2011 election when 49.2 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot.
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