The Week in Polling: A lack of support for government media subsidies, Canadian millennials lean Conservative, and growing Holocaust skepticism in Canada

Analysis

A counter-demonstrator carries an Israeli flag as protesters gather outside an Indigo store in Toronto, on Thursday November 30, 2023. Chris Young/The Canadian Press.

This is The Week in Polling, your Saturday dose of interesting numbers from top pollsters in Canada and around the world, curated by The Hub. Here’s what we’re looking at this week.

The majority of Canadians do not support government news subsidies

According to exclusive polling conducted by The Hub and Public Square Research, seven-in-ten Canadians are not supportive of the government funding the salaries of journalists at private news organizations.

The Trudeau government enacted measures through Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which includes subsidies to support the payrolls of private news media outlets, providing tax credits on news subscriptions, and mandating Google to put $100 million per year into the Canadian news industry. The Hub‘s Publisher, Rudyard Griffiths has said, “We’re pretty close, by my estimations, to a 50 percent wage subsidy on journalist salaries up to $85,000 per year.”

More than three-quarters of Canadians think that the government subsidizing journalists’ salaries at private outlets will negatively impact journalistic objectivity. Moreover, 73 percent of Canadians believe that the government subsidizing journalists’ salaries will make it more difficult for news outlets to hold the government accountable.

Canadian millennials are planning to vote Conservative

With 66 percent of Canadian millennials, people born between 1981 and 1996, worried about home prices and 64 percent about inflation, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s promises to “build the homes” and “axe the tax” seem to be resonating with younger voters.

According to Abacus Data, in 2021, more millennials became eligible to vote in Canada than Baby boomers, making them the country’s biggest voting bloc. If secured by Poilievre, the millennial vote could lead to a substantial victory over the reigning Trudeau Liberals and Singh NDP.

In 2015, 45 percent of young Canadians, the vast majority being millennials, voted Liberal as opposed to 25 percent for the NDP and 20 percent for the Conservative Party.

Along with growing antisemitism in Canada, Holocaust distortion and denial is growing, too

In November 2019, pollsters at Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found just 17 percent of Canadians thought that fewer than the proven death toll of six million Jews died in the Holocaust. By May 2024, that statistic has grown to 24 percent. Canadians between the ages of 25 and 34 were most likely, at 31 percent, to be skeptical of the official Jewish death toll of the Holocaust, followed by 27 percent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 24.

This statistic comes during a disturbing rise in antisemitism in Canada. In its most recent annual audit, B’nai Brith Canada found the number of antisemitic occurrences in Canada more than doubled from 2022 to 2023 and has reached a record high.

After the tragedy of October 7, there has been a surge of hateful attacks on Holocaust museums, Jewish day schools, businesses, synagogues, community centres, and hospitals within Canada.

Aiden Muscovitch

Aiden Muscovitch is a student at the University of Toronto studying Ethics, Society and Law. He is The Hub's Assistant Editor. He…

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