Event Date: April 2, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: FSS5028, 120 University Private, Ottawa

Presented by CIPS 

Democracy is becoming a toxic environment, rife with trolls, bots, fake news, and computational propaganda. Why, and what can be done?  Canada’s lead pollster and data expert Nik Nanos gives an insider’s look into the surprise outcomes that favored Trump, Trudeau, and Macron, along with the Brexit and UK election votes. Nanos asserts that it is more the tyranny of small numbers fueled by economic anxiety than a massive populist wave.

Nik Nanos leads Nanos Research, one of Canada’s most distinguished research companies. The Nanos Research Group of Companies includes Signal Leadership Communications, a social public relations firm with images to create, issues to manage, relationships to build and reputations to protect in a digitally disrupted era. It also includes Nanos-dimap Analytika, an analytics and targeting research practice which is a joint venture with dimap, one of Germany’s top research organizations.

He is the Chief Data Scientist and Founder of Nanos Research, a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, and a research associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is also the current Chair of Carleton University in Ottawa which has 28 thousand students and a budget of over $500M.

Nik leads the team behind the weekly Bloomberg Nanos Canadian Confidence Index, considered a must-have resource for senior executives and is also featured in a weekly segment on CTV’s News Channel, Nanos on the Numbers, which focuses on the latest political, business and social trends. He is the pollster for CTV News, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, the Globe& Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, Bloomberg News in Canada.

His book, The Age of Voter Rage: Trump, Trudeau, Farage, Corbyn & Macron – The tyranny of small numbers, explores how the marginalized and the margins are rewiring democracy through populist style politics, small swings in voter sentiment and computational propaganda. The Age of Voter Rage was recently named a top 10 non-fiction bestseller among independent publishers in the United States.