Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (22 page)

Protest Power

Throughout the 1990s, the NCC and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation became ever more vocal, making vigorous use of advertising and publicity stunts to protest against what they saw as spending waste and excess in government. Even after Chrétien’s government had brought in its historic 1995 budget, with its drastic cuts to health and social transfers to the provinces, and with Canada’s fiscal circumstances headed back into the black (helped by that revenue from the GST), the Taxpayers Federation and the NCC kept up their steady drumbeat against government spending.

The NCC spent $150,000 in one ad wave alone in 1996, for instance, to tell Canadians what they called “tales from the tax trough,” protesting money spent on a canoe museum and financing for social-science research on obscure subjects. A full $105,000 of government money had gone to a study comparing hockey coaches and symphony conductors, according to the “trough” tales. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation showed a similar fondness for alliteration in its regular news releases. Spending at the Department of Industry, then headed by minister John Manley, was assailed with a 1996 news release titled “Taxpayers Tricked by Manley’s Treats.” How were their campaigns working? There was no question that the groups were attracting more members and more media attention; they had gone from being fringe elements to being commentators on the federal scene—reflecting a harder edge within the citizenry as a whole.

The increasing allegiance between the Reform Party and these groups was apparently sealed when Stephen Harper, the co-founder of the Reform Party and by far the biggest star of the caucus, announced before his first term as an MP was up that he was leaving politics to head up the National Citizens Coalition. It seemed like an odd match. Harper wasn’t much of a populist and had seemed hugely uncomfortable with some of the Reform Party’s over-the-top anti-government stunts in the early years, such as trying to sell Manning’s limousine or threatening to turn the opposition leader’s residence into a bowling alley. No one could really picture Harper buying a bunch of plastic pigs and planting them on Parliament Hill. It was widely expected that this thoughtful, policy-wonk politician would tone down the NCC, making it more of a think-tank than an advocacy organization. He would make it more institution-friendly, in other words, and less attached to the consumerist revolt that had driven it to date. At around the same time, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Jason Kenney decided to leap into elected politics.

Dalton Camp, the man who had helped lead Canadian politics into the advertising age, wasn’t at all delighted with how that allegiance had turned out. By now, after some time in Mulroney’s backrooms, not to mention a heart transplant and some health crises, Camp had situated himself safely in the spectators’ stands. On top of his weekly job as a panellist on Peter Gzowski’s
Morningside
show, Camp also penned a regular column in the
Toronto Star
.

In a 1994 column, Camp complained that political advertising was indeed, as British ad man David Ogilvy described it, “the most dishonest in the world.” Camp blamed television: “The truth seems to be no medium is better suited for the propagation of untruths than television; there is no medium so effective as television not only for dissembling and distortion but for inventing reality.” The source of Camp’s vexation was mainly US political advertising, especially the ads he had been watching about gun control and health care south of the border. “Only television can use obfuscating charm and sleaze to such powerful effect. A well-packaged lie can penetrate the thickest skull, given enough frequency, a modicum of cleverness and the money avarice can command.” In tone, it was harder-hitting than the defence of advertising that fellow ad man Terry O’Malley had penned in 1978, but it rang a familiar alarm. Camp and O’Malley, the pioneers of political advertising in the modern age, were serving a warning that in the wrong hands, TV ads could take our civic life into dark places. The problem, though, was that the citizenry was already headed to that dim view.

All over Canada, not just in Ontario, the mid-1990s saw pockets of citizen discontent with the old line of politics. In British Columbia, the provincial government set up legislation that would allow citizens to “recall” their MPs if they could accumulate enough signatures on a petition. In essence, it was the equivalent of a money-back guarantee in the stores. Unhappy with your political product? Send it back and get a full refund—no stamped, self-addressed envelope necessary. The BC government also made it possible in the 1990s for citizens to initiate referenda on issues of their choosing.

One columnist in the
Vancouver Province
, Alan Twigg, saw the recall legislation as a symptom of cranky consumer-citizens, bringing their “culture of complaint” in the stores to the political realm. “Trouble is, nearly everyone is a complainer these days; almost everyone is a victim. If you read the papers, you’d think society has been transformed into a pack of wounded banshees,” Twigg wrote. “Sometimes we have to take our medicine. If the nurse or doctor dispenses medicine to us that doesn’t taste good, should we throw a tantrum and ask the hospital to remove the nurse or physician from the hospital staff? The recall legislation allows our push-button culture of complaint to seek immediate redress for any bad-tasting medicine.”

But by tapping into this vein of grievance and consumerist demands on the state, Canadian conservatives were seeing the shape of politics to come. In the meantime, a man named Tony Blair in Britain set about a rebranding exercise on the left that would be much studied and imitated by the left and the right in Canada for years to come. Blair proved that any kind of politics could be framed as marketing-friendly.

Labour, New and Improved

Britain’s Labour Party, like Canada’s Liberals, had suffered from reputation malaise during its time in opposition in the 1980s and 1990s. Confronting the real prospect of two decades of Conservative hegemony in Britain, Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party, cast about looking for ways to revitalize the party in the run-up to the 1994 election. Like Thatcher, he was not afraid to reach into the commercial realm for some political lessons. Philip Gould, a former ad executive, was recruited by Labour to take the pulse of modern British citizens, not just to test their politics, but their deeper hopes and fears, just like a market researcher would. He went out to the middle-class suburbs and sought out former Labour voters who had become converts to Thatcher-style politics—the people Labour was going to need if it ever hoped to reclaim power in Britain. This was an exercise primarily in emotions, not ideology, and as such, it was closer to the consumer model of market research, where Gould’s real experience lay. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that context, the British focus-group participants framed much of their talk about hopes and needs in terms of what they wanted to buy. Here’s how the BBC documentary
Century of the Self
summed up the findings of Gould’s focus groups: “They no longer saw themselves as part of any group, but as individuals, who could demand things from politicians in return for paying taxes, just as business had taught them to do, as consumers.”

Gould called these people “aspirational” Britons, who could be lured to vote Labour if they were assured it wouldn’t cost them or damage their upwardly mobile lifestyle. Despite Gould’s advice, however, Kinnock and the Labour Party went into the 1994 campaign with a promise to increase taxes—and were battered at the polls. That defeat, and the lessons contained in it, paved the way for the ascension of leader Tony Blair and his ambitious effort to overhaul the old party into a “New Labour” movement. In that effort, Blair would be guided by Gould and his ongoing focus groups.

“I found that the people had become consumers,” Gould said in an interview with the
Century of the Self
documentary-makers. “People now wanted to have politics and life on their own terms. Not just in politics but in all aspects of life, too. People see themselves, as they are, as autonomous, powerful individuals who are entitled to be respected, who are entitled to have the best, not just in going to Tescos or wherever, but the best in terms of health and education, too.”

Thatcher, recall, had dubbed these folks “Essex Men” and in Blair’s time, they would come to be named “Basildon Men,” a more geographically precise descriptor. Basildon is the capital of Essex county, and an epitome of the “aspirational” suburban culture in Britain. And then, thanks to a speech by Blair himself in 1996, yet another even more consumer-friendly name would emerge: “Sierra Man” or “Mondeo Man,” after the type of car these Brit voters typically drove. Blair had told a convention of Labour Party faithful an anecdote about an encounter with a self-employed electrician in his Sedgefield constituency who had chatted with him while polishing his Ford Sierra: “His dad voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour, too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing very nicely. ‘So I’ve become a Tory,’ he said. In that moment, he crystallized for me the basis of our failure… His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him. But that was never our history or our purpose.”

Labour’s goal, Blair said, was to prove that it no longer stood for the kind of government that would interfere with consumerist hopes and dreams. So the New Labour formula for success was to focus on the high aspirations of these consumer-citizens, while simultaneously preaching low ambitions for government. It was neither right nor left, but the “Third Way.” Blair went into the 1997 election campaign with five modest promises, framed as a “pledge card” to wary citizens. Those pledges included vows to cut class sizes, fast-track punishment for young offenders, cut waiting lists for national health care, get under-twenty-five-year-olds off the jobless lists and the solemn promise not to raise income taxes and to keep heating taxes and inflation low. These were all replies to the concerns that Gould had heard in his suburban focus groups, designed to touch the “aspirational” Britons where they lived.

Blair’s ascent to power in 1997 relied heavily on the political-marketing successes of the previous decades, notably his supposed political rivals on the right-hand side of the spectrum. Not only did he copy Thatcher’s pitch to the suburbanites, he also took his inspiration from Clinton and yes, even Canada; Blair’s pledge to voters was also inspired by the success of the Liberals’ Red Book. Political-product guarantees were still very much in fashion. And political marketing, pegged as it is to people checked out of politics, continued to prove that it could leap partisan divides.

So by the late 1990s, a progressive left wing trio dominated the Canada-US-Britain triangle of democracies, as surely as Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney had presided over the 1980s. And just as the Republicans and the British and Canadian Conservatives had lent each other political-marketing tips and examples, the same was true of the Clinton-Blair-Chrétien triumvirate. In both decades, though, the Canadian efforts would be somewhat less intense than those of either the Brits or the Americans. The puzzling question: Why?

One simple word may explain Canada’s laggardly pace in political marketing and toward consumer-citizenship: “sovereignty.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Canada was preoccupied with successive Quebec referenda, constitutional crises and existential debates about the future of a united Canadian nation. The free trade election had also churned up angst-ridden discussion about Canadian sovereignty with respect to the United States. While the political pros in the backrooms were playing with the increasingly sophisticated tools of political marketing, the governments themselves were, well, governing. Moreover, as we’ve seen with the Liberals’ GST troubles, total brand overhauls and true marketing—adjusting the product to consumer demand—are far more difficult to do when a political party is in power.

But the Chrétien government did embrace sales language and sales techniques in its time in power—especially advertising. Nowhere was this more evident than in the response to the near-loss of the federalist side in the 1995 Quebec referendum, which set in motion the events that would crush the Liberals.

Chrétien and the Liberals had been unprepared for the closeness of the struggle, believing that a low-key, managerial reply to the separatists would be the best strategy. It was the wrong approach; Quebec’s separatists came within less than 1 percent of winning a mandate to break away from Canada on the night of October 30, 1995. In the aftermath, Chrétien and his cabinet built a recovery plan that was based partly on reason—a Supreme Court of Canada reference on the terms of separation in future, for instance—and partly on emotion. To win a place for Canada in Quebecers’ hearts, the Chrétien government scrambled to amass every single advertising tool they could muster. They wanted props: Canadian flags and the Canadian symbol inserted wherever possible in Quebec. Heritage Minister Sheila Copps launched a massive giveaway campaign of hundreds of thousands of Canadian flags. And fatefully, the federal Public Works Department was put on notice to saturate Quebec with advertising for the federal cause. In one of many testimonies that he would give about this effort, Charles (Chuck) Guité, the civil servant in charge of the advertising and sponsorship program, said, “We were basically at war trying to save the country.”

This war would produce many casualties in the end, not the least of which was the Liberal rule over Canada. Through increasing revelations of how federal money was spent and squandered by Liberal-friendly ad firms, Canadians would come to see this whole program as crime and scandal. Much of that scandal was exposed in agonizing detail in the media and then through Justice John Gomery’s painstaking commission of inquiry through 2004–05. But Chrétien and his advisers, even after the fact, determinedly stood by the fundamental principle: the sovereignty of Canada had to be defended in the political marketplace, with the tools of consumerism. It’s worth a somewhat lengthy look at Chrétien’s testimony to the Gomery Commission, for a blunt, no-apologies explanation of why the government of Canada felt it had to get into the advertising business to fight Quebec secession: