The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Serge Banyongen, whose interest is in political communication and agenda-setting on climate change during the recent Canadian election. Climate change has become an increasingly important political topic in Canada, but this is not always reflected in election results; this is in part because ecological discourse is being cannibalised by economic issues.
This study approaches the debate through a production, process, and perception triangulation, analysing political discourse, media content, and voter responses. This builds on framing theory, agenda-setting theory, issue attention theory, and issue voting theory.
Pre-election concerns include wildfires, extreme heat, melting ice in the northern parts of Canada, and drought; this is paired with the net-zero debate about the transition to renewables, concerns about competitiveness, regional differences between Canada’s east and west, and concerns about fossil fuel pipelines. These play out very differently across the five major parties in Canada: the climate-delayist Conservatives, the moderate-action Liberals, the centrist New Democratic Party, the climate-action Greens, and the Bloc Québécois with its very limited focus on climate change.
All of this is overshadowed also by tariff threats from the Trump administration in the US, which have climate policy impacts too. (And we’re out of time, so it’s not clear what the results of the study actually are.)
