It has never been harder to get through to Canadians.
Canada’s political sphere is increasingly fragmented, where traditional paths to public engagement have been splintered into micro-communities, social media platforms, and niche influencers. No single message reaches everyone and successful campaigns must navigate through these niche communities and platforms to rally support for their message. Cultural fluency is increasingly important, the ability to speak authentically but broadly across multiple audiences. The fragmentation is demographic, psychographic, technological, and at the simplest level partisan.
Today, the job in public affairs is not only to craft the message, but to navigate through dozens of niche digital communities and figure out what is authentic to each. It is what to say, how to say it, and where to say it.
We all follow different accounts, we all use different platforms, we all consume different legacy media sources, and we all like different pop-culture. We all hear our news in different ways. These fragments feed us different information, opinion, spin, and emotions. All shaping our distinct interpretations of the same story.
According to the Media Ecosystem Observatory influencers accounted for almost half of the political content in the 2025 federal election. Influencers had the loudest voice because they are the most effective at speaking to, and connecting with, these online micro-communities.
No matter what your industry is, cultural fluency is critical to move your message and garner success.
Whether you are a housing advocate, a pro oil and gas coalition, or an agricultural association, cultural fluency is critical, yet few organizations are navigating the role of social media in politics well. Steel is a good example of this necessity. In the wake of U.S. tariffs, it is integral for the steel industry to reach the masses, however there has not been a surge of social media advertising from big players. It is the same for the canola industry amidst the Chinese tariffs. Among the top advertisers in Meta’s ad library, we see environmental groups, pro-pipeline advocates, and even the forestry industry are running active campaigns. All recognizing the importance of reaching Canadians where they spend most of their time and where the bulk of the conversation happens, social media.
If oil and gas advocacy opted for cultural fluency over traditional lobbying (or at least, an integrated campaign which includes both), we might be building multiple new pipelines as we speak. Canada’s inability to build pipelines over the last 15 years is at least, in part, a demonstration of their inability to rally voters and lobby politicians in a fragmented society.
Whether you like it or not, every stakeholder group is now in a content war. A growing soup of opposition, misinformation and conspiracy theories that affect our culture and politics. Just because you are not invested in content, does not make one immune from being discussed.
To win public opinion today, smart public affairs campaigns are fragmenting their content with localized targeting and messaging. There is too much noise, and voters are more likely to engage with a message if it is directly targeted at them. Talking to Canadians is great, but successful campaigns now speak differently to mechanics and tradespeople, resource-sector workers in places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, millennial moms, and urban professionals in city centres like Calgary or Toronto. Culturally fluent messages land with groups that feel the message is meant for them.
Once your message is with your audience, cultural fluency is about distilling and refining your issue until it feels hyper relevant to each audience, and taking them along the journey as it evolves. If your issue is not relevant yet, that does not mean it will not be, it means you have a challenge in front of you.
Effective campaigns are not reactive, they are proactive, and they shape conversation of the relevant issue of tomorrow. The job in public affairs is to bring your audience towards you and cultural fluency is the bridge between a national narrative and the individual impacts that make the issue relevant today and why it will matter tomorrow.
Politicians follow polls, polls follow culture, beliefs, and opinion.
And too many stakeholders are culturally illiterate. They continue to try to squeeze TV creative into a social media world. Users crave the authenticity of real personal experiences instead of generic, birds-eye-view b-roll that evokes no emotion.
We even saw the Liberal Party’s “Elbows Up” campaign during the last federal election as an illustration of cultural fluency. It is deeper than the level of using hockey terminology as the focal point, or latching onto the celebrity appeal of Mike Myers. The campaign embedded itself within micro-communities. They talked on podcasts, went to town halls, and then reached younger audiences through TikTok and Instagram. The Liberals created a unique movement that could tailored content across platforms. What the “Elbows Up” campaign uniquely did was evolve into a grassroots movement. It was not strictly political, but it cut through the noise and became a broader Canadian cultural moment.
This mosaic approach to information understands that engagement with your message requires going where Canadians already are. The old world of one newspaper, one news broadcast, and one conversation is gone. There are thousands of conversations going on for every topic.
It is all linked to how modern Canadians consume information. Gen Z might hear of a major policy via a meme or TikTok, while boomers see it on the morning television news. Some might see their news in a Facebook group or on the explore page on Instagram. Polling shows that almost a third of Canadians under 30 learned about recent political events on social media, while most over 60 still prefer legacy media on TV.
But it is even fragmented beyond that. While there were always various television news channels, with watchers perhaps learning about Trump’s latest tariffs on Canada through Fox News or CBC depending on their preferences, on social media there are literally thousands of different channels distributing this information to their own micro-audiences, with a 20-year-old male perhaps learning the same story from a local hip-hop news page that a woman in her early 40s might learn from an alternative health page.
It is critical for successful campaigns to be able to cast a wide net on these fragments. Success means being able to not only reach these fragments, but to find a way to resonate with them. Impactful campaigns will navigate not only the broad trends of algorithms, but break through to the individual feeds.
Public affairs demands agility. Not only posting on multiple streams to get your message across, but monitoring them too. The modern Canadian does not have one information stream, they have multiple. Successful public engagement strategies recognize this reality and build their campaign accordingly.
Jeff Ballingall is the founder of Mobilize Media Group.
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