There were kudos aplenty floating around the #ONpoli Twittersphere this week once returning Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne shuffled her cabinet. However, as the “congratulations” and “congrats” flew long and loose, Premier Wynne was actually NOT the cabinet minister who received the single-most Twitter-based well wishes in the wake of her announcement.
The Ontario public affairs (PA) team at Hill+Knowlton used Radian6 software to discover which of the 27 Ontario cabinet ministers received the most amount of tweets containing both their official Twitter handle and either the expression “congratulations” or “congrats” post-cabinet shuffle. Wynne finished second in the field with 30 tweets total but it was newly-appointed Environment Minister Glen Murray who received the most tweets with 40. The survey data was collected between June 24-25.

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Following Murray and Wynne in the rankings were new Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins (26 tweets), new Transport Minister Steven Del Duca (22 tweets) and new Treasury Board President Deb Matthews (19 tweets). On the other end of the spectrum, there were no “congratulations” or “congrats” tweets that mentioned the official Twitter handles of returning Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Zimmer or Attorney General of Francophone Affairs Madeleine Meilleur.
Education Minister Liz Sandals is the only current Ontario cabinet member without an official Twitter handle.
The H+K Ontario PA team also created “conversation clouds” of the words that appeared most often in the congratulatory tweets of the top five-ranked ministers. While the #ONpoli hashtag was not surprisingly the common thread in all five, some of the more interesting words that appeared in these clouds included “toxins” (@Glen4ONT), “#redtape” (@DrEricHoskins) and “gridlock” (@StevenDelDuca).

Glen Murray

Kathleen Wynne

Dr. Eric Hoskins

Steven Del Duca

Deb Matthews