Federal Election Report 2: Canada’s Biggest Subreddit Is Talking, And Eyes Are on the US

In the first days after the election was called, what were people on r/Canada (Canada’s largest subreddit) talking about? Last week, we looked at why Reddit is an important platform for Canadian civic engagement - particularly for linking to, sharing, and discussing print news. This week, we dig into popular trending topics during the first days of the election period to help us understand how the federal election is really playing out online.

For this report, we analyzed 56,136 Reddit comments made on r/Canada between March 24, 2025 at 00:00 ET and March 27, 2025 at 23:59 ET, made on 278 different r/Canada submissions. This period encompasses the first four days of the 2025 federal election period.

Summary

• Discussion on r/Canada was dominated by the Canadian election and Canada-US relations. In fact, 38% of all posts or submissions referenced our neighbours to the south.
• Party leaders who aren’t Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre received very little attention. Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, Donald Trump, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith were the most referenced people in r/Canada comments during this period. 
• Comments labeled as abusive highly referenced Donald Trump. “Trump” was the fifth most common word and the most common non-explitive word among abusive comments ("shit" "fuck" "fucking" and "stupid" were 1st-4th most common).

Topics about Canada-US relations dominate discussion

We manually coded the topics of each of the 278 submissions present in our dataset. We found that discussions about the election and about Canada-US relations dominated discussion on r/Canada; during this period, 38% of submission titles referenced Canada-US relations (107 submissions). Outside of submissions titles specifically referencing the Canadian election, Canada-US relations took up the most conversational space. The United States as a topic  significantly overshadowed policy issues including housing (5 submissions) and healthcare (9 submissions), as well as well-outpacing conversation about other foreign policy relationships, including China (10 submissions) and India (10 submissions). 

Submission titles: Carney and Poilievre in the spotlight

Among federal party leaders, Liberal Party of Canada leader Mark Carney and Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre were the most referenced in r/Canada submission titles. Carney was referenced 65 times and Poilievre was referenced 39 times. Interestingly, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was referenced more frequently than other federal party leaders (16 submission titles). Smith was in the news during this period because of controversial comments she shared with the right-wing American media outlet Breitbart. 

Other federal party leaders were much less frequently referenced in submission titles. Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, was referenced 8 times. Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québécois, and Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault, co-leaders of the Green Party of Canada, were referenced twice. There were no references to Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada.

Digging into the comments: Carney, Poilievre, Trump, Smith dominate

We measured the frequency of words used in Reddit comments to attempt to better understand the frequency of how often party leaders were being discussed on r/Canada.

We found that in Reddit comments, amongst party leaders, references to Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre dominated conversations. References to other party leaders were comparatively much rarer during this period.

We noticed that other Canadian and American public officials were mentioned often in this dataset as well, namely Premiers Danielle Smith, along with significant numbers of references to American President Donald Trump. Thus, we also searched for the number of comments where these individuals’ last names were referenced, along with US Vice President J.D. Vance, and billionaire member of the Trump administration Elon Musk. Additionally, we noticed that “Trudeau” was often referenced as well. 

We found the following; that overwhelmingly, Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, and US President Donald Trump were the most highly discussed individuals on r/Canada during this period. This was followed by Justin Trudeau, Danielle Smith, Jagmeet Singh, and Elon Musk.

We analyzed each Reddit comment and totalled how many unique comments mentioned the last names of Canadian party leaders and other frequently discussed Canadian and American political figures. We searched only by last name for each of these individuals (ex. searching for instances of the text string “Carney” only - not “Mark” and “Carney” as Mark is a commonly used name and word in other contexts). 

There were three exceptions though: Pierre Poilievre, Jagmeet Singh, and Elon Musk. We noticed that more frequently (on r/Canada at least) Poilievre was often referred to as “PP” for short, rather than by name. To make sure we captured these hundreds of references in our analysis, we searched for any instances of the text string “Poilievre” and standalone instances of “PP” in his case. For Singh, we recognized that at times commenters would refer to Singh by first name only, and as he has a unique first name, we were confident that searching for comments that contained either his first or last name would sufficiently identify when only he was being discussed. Therefore, we searched for instances of “Singh” and “Jagmeet”. We identified that Elon Musk suffers a similar phenomenon, so we searched for instances of “Elon” and “Musk” in his case. 

We did not search for data on Green Party of Canada co-leader Elizabeth May for this analysis since “May” is such a common word in multiple contexts and we felt like this type of analysis could not be accurate in her case.

We recognize that some names could have inflated values due to having common last names, namely, Danielle Smith. However, due to her prevalence in the news during this period, we’re confident she was highly discussed. We also recognize that “Trudeau” could also refer to other people aside from Justin Trudeau in some instances, namely another former Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau.

The text search was not case sensitive.

Comments containing abusive sentiment included significant discussion of Trump

When looking only at the 1,737 Reddit comments that were classified as abusive, we noticed a high prevalence of the use of the word “Trump” - Trump was the 5th most common word (used 183 times) and the most common non-expletive word among abusive comments ("shit" "fuck" "fucking" and "stupid" were 1st-4th most common). Negative sentiment about Donald Trump is likely accounting for many abusive comments in this dataset.