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Toews in heady company among most-Googled politicians

By: Mia Rabson

Posted: 12/12/2012 8:46 AM | Comments: 0 | Last Modified: 12/12/2012 9:57 AM | Updates

Vic Toews (ADRIAN WYLD / THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES)

OTTAWA-- Canadians didn't just want to tell Vic Toews everything this year, they wanted to know everything about him, too.

Manitoba's regional minister and the Conservative MP from Provencher was the third-most-commonly-searched-for politician on Google this year, according to an analysis of the search engine released this morning.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper topped the list. Liberal leadership hopeful Justin Trudeau was second.

Last winter Toews was in the spotlight after he made a throw-away comment during question period, suggesting MPs who did not support his bill to make it easier to get information about Internet users were on the side of pedophiles.

The bill itself was heavily criticized as too invasive and Toews comment unleashed a backlash that included an initially anonymous Twitter user leaking details of Toews' divorce 140 excruciating characters at a time. That person was later found out to be Liberal researcher Adam Carroll, who was fired and later hauled before a House of Commons committee to explain his use of Parliamentary resources to create the Twitter account.

At almost the same time another man started a hashtag #tellviceverything, encouraging Canadians to use it to tweet Toews mundane details of their lives in protest of his desire to find out information about them. The hashtag led to often humorous posts and trended on Twitter for several days.

The Zeitgeist analysis of Google searches includes more than a dozen categories including most searched for beers (Molson), Canadian food (bacon), sports teams (Toronto Blue Jays were number one, Winnipeg Jets were number five) and celebrities (Whitney Houston).

The list can be found at www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#canada

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca

History

Updated on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 9:57 AM CST: adds photo

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