It’s interesting to see which people Québécois say they trust the most when asked.
The polling firm Ipsos Reid recently conducted a poll for the French version of the magazine “Reader’s Digest” (Sélection Reader’s Digest).
Some of results came somewhat as a surprise to me. What particularly came as a surprise was that so many of the personalities are Montréwood pop-culture television stars. (There were some other surprises as well, which I’ll go into over the course of the next few posts).
To an extent, I suppose it does make sense that a good number of the people on the list are television stars. Québécois statistically watch more television than anywhere else in Canada (whereas Anglophone Canadians outside of Québec tend to statistically spend more time on the internet than anywhere else in the world).
There are a number of nuances regarding why I believe some of these television personalities ranked where they did. I was also surprised at where some of the “non-TV” personalities ranked on the list.
Below are the rankings.
- Pierre Bruneau
- Mario Dumont
- Paul Arcand
- Sophie Thibault
- Denis Coderre
- Véronique Cloutier
- France Charbonneau
- Céline Galipeau
- Thomas Mulcair
- Philippe Couillard
- Chantal Hébert
- Alain Gravel
- Guy A. Lepage
- Régis Lebaume
- Julie Snyder
- Pierre Karl Péladeau
- Jean-René Dufort
- Stephen Harper
- Anne-Marie Dusseault
- Richard Martineau
Over the next few posts I’ll go a bit more in-depth with respect to who these people are, and why I believe they have earned the trust of enough people to rank as the 20 most trusted people in Québec. Like I’ve said in the past, pop-culture and star-qualities make for “soft power”, and we certainly can see its influence in this list.
It part of the story of Québec which is part of Québec’s cultural and societal fabric (beyond just pop-culture. I have always found it to be quite a fascinating part of our cultural heritage. Hopefully you will too.
I’ll see you soon as we go deeper into it over the next few posts!
Quebec Culture Blog 