One of the findings from The Real Outsiders is that politically disengaged Canadians are not as ignorant of politics as conventional wisdom holds.  Here is some of the reaction we received from a roundtable held on December 2, 2011:

The Maytree Foundation completed a study looking at community organization.  The found that executives/administrators had a perception that the community did not know about how the political system worked.  But frontline workers found that when they spoke to local communities, they in fact had a good sense of the political system.  Community members simply felt their voices didn’t matter. (Alejandra Bravo, Maytree Foundation)

These findings push back against the notion that knowledge does not factor into engagement.  This flies in the face of quantitative data in Canada.  There are different ways of measuring knowledge, which have been done in quantitative studies – these measures have a clear positive correlation with engagement. (Miriam Lapp, Elections Canada)

Civic education seems to do a good job teaching about the technical parts of government, but doesn’t do a good job in creating civic spirit or let people know how to get involved.  We just teach structure without making connections.  Is the erosion of civic duty to blame on the curriculums that we teach?  (Amy Robichaud, Historica-Dominion Institute)

Anecdotally when speaking to people informally about politics, it seems many people are self-conscious of what they know and tend to defer to having little knowledge.  These people tend to be disengaged.  The engaged, whether they know what they are talking about or not, will express their opinions regardless. (David Michael Lamb, CBC)

There is a lot of frustration at the grassroots level.  They don’t feel like they’re getting sufficient information.  There is a need for alternative information sources.  How do we keep people informed?  Where is this information?  How do we keep people engaged and how can we engage them? (Lori Abittan, Multimedia Nova Corp.)