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Schaan, Grace

University of British Columbia

Carbon taxation has been widely advocated for by economists as a cost-effective tool to reduce GHG emissions. However, previous studies have found that implementing carbon taxes is politically challenging and often evokes misinformation. Political communication literature indicates that because social media, particularly Twitter (recently renamed X), allows politicians to speak directly with the public, it has been used to spread misinformation and selectively frame policy issues. The province of Saskatchewan provides an opportunity to explore the intersection of carbon tax politics and political communication via social media. There is strong opposition to the Liberal federal government’s carbon tax on households, imposed in 2019, among the general public in Saskatchewan and the governing right-of-centre Saskatchewan Party. In this study I analysed tweets from Saskatchewan politicians, elected at the federal and provincial level, to explore how they framed the federal carbon tax on Twitter. This study finds that, as expected, right-of-centre parties at both the federal and provincial level opposed the tax, employing framing familiar from carbon tax debates in other jurisdictions. Furthermore, only politicians from the federal Conservative Party and provincial Saskatchewan Party shared misinformation about the carbon tax, mainly through misleading and selective statements. The federal and Saskatchewan NDP were largely silent on the issue, and when they did tweet there was little overlap or coordination in how they framed the tax despite the federal and Saskatchewan NDP being a single party. Their silence was notable because, in the context of a subnational jurisdiction on which a federal carbon tax was imposed, and with almost no provincial representation from the federal party advancing the policy, there was next to no defence of the carbon tax on Twitter from Saskatchewan’s own elected politicians.

Text

2023-10-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86135

Resources, Environment and Sustainability

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/