You vastly underestimate the power of the media.
The media forms people's opinions, 100%. Not just a few people, but a strong majority. That's because most people actually don't think for themselves at all, they just gobble up propaganda like hungry pit bulls, and like Mr Twain said: "It's easier to fool a person than to convince them that they have been fooled".
For example: 99% of people will say that Trudeau fought covid successfully but he botched literally everything, 100%. He didn't actually do a single, solitary thing until March 16th aside from give very bad advice, allow planeloads of infected people in, let them wander freely without being screened, got his own wife infected with covid, gave away all our PPE to China and got back junk, ordered Chinese vaccines instead of American ones (then we had to poach vaccines from the 3rd-world-country pool, Canadians didn't care because they weren't told to care), and hid in his basement. Then he held press conferences, pretending that they were models of covid safety because he was socially distanced, but there were 15 reporters huddled under a tent together. They pretended that the lab leak theory was bunk, that healthy people and kids were at risk of dying, etc. Canada has the world's 39th-highest population, universal health care, we are 189th in population density, we're on a different continent from where the virus originated, and we were top ten to 5,000 covid deaths. There are metropolitan areas (Tokyo for example) with populations comparable to our entire country who had far less deaths than we did. Their population density is higher than ours by orders of magnitude. If they had Trudeau's leadership they'd have hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Literally everything that Canadians think that they understand about C19 was wrong, and they could have easily figured it out if they though about it, but they are incredibly stupid and they just regurgitate what they hear. Our media gave Trudeau a shining star and Canadians believe that he was our saviour.
Honestly, go ask some Canadians what they think of Trudeau's 'fight' against covid. You'll laugh.
The media controls Canadians, outright.