[MUSIC PLAYING]
How many people in the room voted in the last Federal
Election? [LAUGHING] All right.
So that's a good number.
I'd say about a third of you .
So it depends-- there's a selection bias in the room,
to an extent.
The time people who would come out
to a "Ted Talk" in the middle of a polar vortex
are a particular type of people and kudos to you.
But it's not necessarily representative
of broader trends in the population.
In fact, if we look at voter turnouts since Confederation,
we see some alarming trends Specifically
if we look at the trend line throughout the course
of Confederation to the present.
And that trend is a significant decline in voter turnout.
When we dig into the age dynamics of that decline,
we find that voter turnout is particularly
low among young people.
And I know, this isn't a groundbreaking claim.
But it's important to note, that especially
if you look at people within the age ranges of 18 to 24
and 25 to 34, less than 50% of eligible voters in those age
ranges vote.
Now, for the most part, young people
are often blamed as being apathetic.
They're accused of being apathetic
and that this is a shameful thing,
that they should engage in the process,
that we should all be engaged in this process,
and that this apathy is our own agency.
And we should try to eliminate it.
But actually, what we see is that I
don't think it's apathy that the problem.
I think that it is a resigned complacency about a system
that we no longer feel we have the ability to change.
If we look at cynicism, if we look at disenfranchisement,
among all citizens-- not of any particular age group
but among all citizens-- you see there's
been a steep decline since 1965.
And this is taking data from the Canadian Election Study, which
let's us look at affinity towards parties and politics.
You see that decline is particularly pronounced though,
again, among young people, in this case,
among people under the age of 34-- well below the average,
well below the other two age groups, and sharp decline.
Now, this resigned complacency is a privilege.
There are many places around the world where complacency means
a loss of livelihood, means a loss of liberty,
and it means a loss of life.
So we're privileged to be in a place
where we can have this complacency
around our government and around our politics.
That said, I think it's also a problem when
we shame people who don't turn out to vote,
for the purposes of-- because they're cynical;
because they don't feel that the system speaks to them;
because they don't feel they're engaged;
because they feel disenfranchised.
And I think that the lack of civic engagement
says more about the state of our democracy
than it necessarily does about our citizens.
And I think that's an issue.
So we're in an information age.
And it seems almost absurd to me, that in an information age,
we wouldn't have more means by which
to engage with the mechanisms of government
and with the political institutions that govern us.
So what I did is try to create a very small crack
in this seemingly impenetrable structure that
causes this apathy and disenfranchisement.
And that's Vote Compass.
Now, Vote Compass is based on a simple premise.
And the premise is that citizens should have access
to information about how political parties are
positioned on a range of issues.
That information should be straightforward.
It should be as free of spin and rhetoric as it can be.
And it should allow an easy comparison, an easy framework
for engagement with politics and with election campaigns.
Now, a lot of people would say, this already exists.
Parties go out, and they campaign
on certain promises during election campaigns.
And they have political platforms.
So I'm going to do another straw poll.
How many people in this room, in the last Federal election,
read every page of every platform
of every political party, just out of curiosity?
Nice, nice-- OK, we have a few, far fewer than voted though.
And you know what?
I don't blame you.
These political platforms are marketing
materials in many ways.
They talk past each other, instead of to each other.
They create a discourse that is characterized
by rhetoric and spin attack ads.
And it makes it difficult for us to engage with them,
in a substantive and meaningful way.
So what we did with Vote Compass is we said,
well, let's take all of the information
that's available to us.
Let's take all the data we can get.
And we took a team of political scientists,
looked at every public disclosure that
was made by the political parties,
in the lead up to the election campaign.
And we coded it, and we put it into an application that
allows users to easily organize, sort, and assess
their alignment with the political parties.
So the application is really quite simple.
You access the application.
You answer a series of questions that are topical in an election
campaign, ranging across a variety of issues.
And I should say, far more issues
that are normally prevalent in the discourse
an election campaign.
You assess how important each of those issues are to you
or each of those issues clusters are to you.
You get to assess the leaders and the parties.
And based on that assessment, it shows you a very simple sense
of how you align with the political parties
during the election campaign-- how your views correspond
with their views, how your priorities correspond
with their parties.
And it lets you dig deeply into each of the questions
and the various data that's been used
to arrive at that calibration.
So it's a simple idea.
It's one of those ideas that you probably
are saying, OK, how come that doesn't already exist.
I actually had that question.
But even though it's a simple idea,
it had an incredible amount of traction.
And I think that traction demonstrates
that we are a society that wants to be engaged.
We are a society that wants to be
part of the political process.
But the mechanisms that enable us
to do that in the digital age are absent.
To give you a sense of why I think that,
look at the traction Vote Compass has had to date.
We've already had three major media partners worldwide,
so the CBC and Radio-Canada have sponsored five editions
of Vote Compass-- one in the Canadian election
campaign and four provincial elections.
We ran an addition of Vote Compass
in the 2012 Presidential election
with the "Wall Street Journal."
And we recently concluded an edition
with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
for the Australian Federal election.
So we've had seven iterations in three different countries
and also at the provincial level.
And in that time, we've had five million people worldwide take
this survey and learn more about how
they align with the political parties.
Now that, to me, is a massive number-- two million people
in the Canadian Federal Election campaign
alone, 1.4 million people in the Australian campaign.
So this is a huge win for new mechanisms
and new media for engagement in a digital age.
What it also does though is it gives us
an incredible resource, in terms of understanding
public opinion.
So it doesn't end with the tool.
It doesn't end with Vote Compass.
When people use Vote Compass, they also
engage in a practice of public expression
that we don't have many outlets for.
Even though we have social media,
even though we have blogs, even though we have YouTube,
the way we can speak directly to government
is limited, because you need representative samples
and representative studies, in order
to convince government that what's
being said by the citizens is indeed accurate.
Well, I'll come back to that in one moment.
What I was really impressed about, when looking at the data
from Vote Compass, is that you definitely
see a high engagement among young people.
Again, I think that's saying, there
need to be mechanisms for young people to engage in politics.
And they need to be mechanisms that are within the context
that young people already operate in.
So earlier on, I spoke about how little participation and how
low voter turnout there was for young people in election
campaigns.
But if you look at the participation in Vote Compass
in the yellow bars versus voter turnout,
you see that these kinds of mechanisms
are much more likely to see young people engaged,
to see them being participants in our democracy
and in the decisions that affect them.
Now, let's look at the data.
Here you see a map, a time-lapse sequence
of the Canadian Federal Election campaign.
And this is the data from Vote Compass.
In it, you see all the themes play
that happened during the election campaign.
So you see what was called the Orange Surge in Quebec,
the NDP really taking a stronghold in Quebec.
You see really the demise of the liberal party
in many constituencies across the country.
You see the conservatives pick up
ridings in the 905 area in Southern Ontario.
What this does is, it tells a story,
a really fascinating story about what's
happening during the campaign.
And it does it with Vote Compass data.
What's important about that is that people usually
say that data that comes in through the internet,
through online sample is not representative,
so we can take it seriously.
And I agree with that, in cases where
you're talking about 1,000 person sample.
When you're talking about two million people
from all over the country, who choose to express their voice
and who choose to have a voice in politics
and say where they stand on certain issues.
Well, that's a much different story.
There are methods and methodologies and techniques
that can take massive data sets like that.
And they can actually reflect the opinions of the public back
to the public, giving them a powerful voice
to say to government-- look, we may
have voted you in on the horse race.
But it doesn't mean that we agree
with every position in your policy platform.
In fact, there's a heterogeneity of interests and values
and preferences among the population.
And we need to be more attuned to the complexities
of our society.
And so my colleagues and I who brought Vote Compass to Canada,
we then decided there needs to be a next step.
This data is valuable.
It can be a means to really push democratic expression.
And so we've created in an institution Vox Pop Labs.
Now, Vox Pop is actually a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Vox Pop is from the Latin vox populi,
which means voice of the people.
But also among journalists-- and those of you in the room who
are practicing journalists or who have practice journalism
will know that a vox pop is also the common parlance
for the person on the street interview, the streeter.
When you see news clips and they go on the street.
And they randomly interview people about a certain subject.
It's called a vox pop.
Now, typically, vox pops are non-representative.
You select a few people on the street.
You don't know necessarily how much
that reflects public sentiment.
But if you do enough of them, if you
ask enough people enough important questions
about topical issues that matter,
if you get two million people answering these vox pops,
then you can actually weight and match that data,
using population estimates, using the census,
using other population estimates, in such a way
as to make that data representative.
And this is a powerful tool for democracy.
So at Vox Pop Labs, we want to do three things.
We want to engage people with tools like Vote Compass
that exist in the context and operate
in the context in which people currently
operate, one that's accessible to the public.
And then we want to inform the public,
because there's a lot to be said for getting out the vote.
There's something else to be said
for getting out an informed vote.
And a really robust democracy requires an informed vote.
And finally, taking the data, taking people's sentiment
and reflecting it back to society
allows us to empower the public, in ways that they've not
previously been empowered.
And what I mean by that is that it's all well and fine
for a politician to say that this is how Canadians.
And this is how Canadians feel about this issue.
But that's quickly taken from spurious data at best.
What I would like to do and what this institution
is aiming to do is take these types of data
and actually say how Canadians think about issues, because we
can do fine-grained research.
We can look across demographics, across constituencies
at a very fine level.
And that helps us to learn about ourselves.
And it helps us to learn about each other.
And I think that's something that's
missing in the polarization of contemporary politics.
It's that we don't know enough about each other.
And so we rush to judgment on the opinions of others that
are different from ours, instead of trying
to learn to understand them.
And these kinds of data sets can get us there.
So we can look at big issues, like the war in Afghanistan
and how the different constituencies, riding
by riding, differ.
And that's important.
But we can also look at why they differ.
And what are the underlying causes and mechanisms?
And how can we find a path forward together,
which speaks to all of our interests
and values and preferences and goals?
Now we've gone even further.
So we're not only looking at compass data.
Now, we're looking at big data writ large.
So on Twitter, in other social media aspects,
we're able to look at these data sets.
And were able to that find where public sentiment is and build
credibility in these methods, so that governments have
to be held accountable to the will of the public.
Now, this isn't a perfect pass.
It's not one, two, three democracy.
There are perils along the way.
Some of the perils are that we're not
trying to build digitally mediated populism.
And that's important.
We live in liberal democratic societies
in Canada and elsewhere.
And the judiciary has a role, and legislators have a role.
And these roles are important, and they
should be acknowledged.
What we're trying to do is make them more responsive.
There are many other data sets out there
that people use in efforts to manipulate us,
to manipulate our views, to polarize the discourse,
to further their own ends.
So we want to put out, in good faith, data that is actually
reflective of the way people are thinking about politics,
of their families, of their societies,
and how they can move forward.
I'll end on a quote from George Bernard Shaw, which
is, "Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed
no better than we deserve."
And I think that's important.
We are custodians of our own liberties.
We're stewards of our own freedom.
And to that extent, we need to find
ways to ensure, that as our societies move forward,
that we maintain the fundamentals of democracy
by ensuring that they're reflected
through new media, new means, new mechanisms
for making sure that the public will and the public interest
is of the ultimate value.
So I appreciate your time, and thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]