Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (43 page)

At each of the well-attended Trudeau events across the country, volunteers were on hand with sign-up sheets, pursuing names, numbers and addresses of attendees. With a spending limit of $950,000, the Trudeau campaign was not able to pay for many things, but it did fork over money to pay people to enter names and contact information into the database. “My hands are getting cramped,” one young student mildly complained as she sat at Trudeau’s campaign headquarters in Toronto with her fellow data-entry workers, putting the information into the computers at a rate of roughly forty to fifty forms an hour. It was an apt illustration of the Liberal party entering the age of digital campaigning.

The party overall had made this digital quest a little easier by setting up a system that allowed people to sign up as “supporters” of the party and vote for the leader in April 2013. This “supporter” class did not have to pay membership fees, but they did have to supply their contact information. Trudeau’s campaign team also created their own separate class of membership—“volunteers”—who committed themselves to some level of active participation in Liberal politics and thus also added their names to the burgeoning data files the party was amassing. By the end of the campaign, Trudeau’s team had amassed more than 150,000 supporters and 10,000 volunteers. In terms of direct marketing, it had been a runaway success. And like Ronald Reagan’s Republicans, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives or Tony Blair’s Labour Party, the Liberals were in pursuit of the disengaged, floating voters who had proved to be the most valuable commodity for political marketers since the 1980s.

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, after more than fifty years of borrowing the market’s tactics to deal with the public, all parties seemed to have no choice but to treat people as shoppers. Politics just wasn’t that important to people’s lives now, but their lives had become very important to Canada’s political marketers.

CHECKING OUT

I
n the fall of 2011, after a year of multiple elections in many parts of Canada, the Gandalf Group polled Canadians to see how they were feeling about advertising of all types. The poll, conducted on behalf of Advertising Standards Canada, carried good news for private-sector advertisers, but bad news for political ad makers.
A full 72 percent of Canadians said they saw commercial advertising as truthful, but only 30 percent believed they were getting any kind of honesty from political ads.

If those results were flipped, with fewer than one-third of Canadians saying they believed in commercial pitches, the nation’s ad industry would be in crisis. But these are cynical times with respect to our civic culture, when it is easier to believe in a beer company’s patriotic boasts than in a politician’s campaign promises.

And at the risk of adding to the cynicism, Harper’s Conservative government was showing all signs of developing an unhealthy dependency on advertising the longer it stayed in power, flooding the airwaves with “Economic Action Plan” ads at a cost of roughly $113 million between 2009 and 2013. In the fiscal year 2011–12 alone, $21 million was spent. It no longer billed itself as “Canada’s New Government,” but as the “Harper Government” instead. Opposition queries turned up more than five hundred instances of this label being slapped on government announcements in only the first few months of 2013. At the same time, the Conservative party also unleashed a wave of negative advertising against new Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, mocking his fitness to govern, on his very first day on the job in April 2013.

Backlash to the Trudeau ads was immediate, with some polls showing considerable public antipathy to the Conservatives’ attack methods. Trudeau himself launched a reply ad, featuring him sitting on a teacher’s desk and turning off the TV assault. Liberals and New Democrats were getting louder in their complaints about how much of the government budget was going to advertising. Liberals, for instance, started calculating how many summer jobs for students could be bought at the same cost of an ad.

Harper, however, maintained that advertising was not only a right, but also an obligation for governments to keep citizens feeling upbeat about their economy. The proof that the ads were working? “Canadians understand and are very proud of the fact that Canada’s economy has performed so much better than other developed countries during these challenging times,” Harper told the Commons in May 2013. “Government is not a product to be sold,” Mathieu Ravignat, the New Democrats’ Treasury Board critic, said in reply. Or is it?

For more than fifty years, Canadian political practitioners have been increasingly adopting the tools of the consumer marketplace as they’ve gone shopping for votes. Through the first couple of decades after the Second World War, our politicos were lured by the pitch of the advertising and market researchers, and how their methods could better reach consumer-citizens. It all seemed like good fun—political strategists as Mad Men in their smoke-filled, wise-cracking backrooms. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the bargaining began on both sides: what price were we willing to pay for mixing civics with shopping culture? Political consumerism marched on, however, hand in hand with rising voter cynicism and a larger mass of “flexible” voters shifting political allegiances election to election. With the arrival of the twenty-first century and the ascent to power of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, the marketing deal was sealed. Canadian politics itself, not to mention its parties, people and “products,” were being shaped by consumer demand. Voters were not only getting the governments they deserved, as the old saying goes, but also the bare, transactional governance they seem to have requested: deep discounts on their taxes, snappy slogans on their legislation, images over policy discussions.

In this democratic shopping trip, as with most forays into the stores, eventually the shopper lands at the checkout counter. And “checked out” may be the result, at least when it comes to the Canadian citizenry. For all of the political efforts to treat citizens as consumers, many Canadians simply aren’t buying. It’s not just the ads that are turning people off, but political participation altogether. Voter turnout has plummeted since those heady, postwar days of nearly 80 percent participation in federal elections. Fewer than 5 percent of Canadians belong to political parties and repeated public opinion polls show a deep and abiding cynicism toward the political class. Elections Canada, in the wake of the 2011 election, launched more than 1,400 investigations into allegations of fraudulent calls to voters, in more than two hundred ridings across the country, most revolving around bids to misdirect people from the ballot box. A simple calculation seemed to rest behind the alleged calls—that it would take little more than a nuisance phone call to divert people from their democratic commitments. So loose was the electorate’s attachment to obligations of citizenship, in other words, that an unexpected inconvenience would make people opt out of the system. If Canadian politics was a commercial product, this would be called a crisis of consumer confidence.

This may well be the true, democratic price of seeing civic life in the same terms as consumer culture. Choice, that hallowed tenet of the Cold War period, now pervades every aspect of Canadians’ lives, in their supermarkets and in their democracy. Choosing not to pay any attention to politics, not to shop or vote at all, is part of that equation. André Blais, a political scientist the University of Montreal, has been researching the decline of Canadian voter turnout in these terms, tracking the decline of “duty” and the rise of choice. The generation that flocked to the polls in the 1950s and 1960s in Canada was raised in a culture more keenly attuned to civic duty, through very recent acquaintance with military service and wartime sacrifice. When voting is seen less as a duty and more of a choice, Blais has found, turnout at the ballot box suffers.

It has been noted, too, that consumer-citizenship and managerial governance take a toll on the notion of public service. Donald Savoie, the predominant public administration expert in Canada, released a book in early 2013 titled
Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?
, documenting how the culture of public service had been corroded by its attempts to mimic the business world. “The public sector can never operate like the private sector—it cannot duplicate market forces and public servants cannot be motivated by the profit motive,” Savoie wrote. “Competition in the public sector can never be made to look like competition in the private sector, and accountability in the public sector is as different from that in the private sector as night and day.”

There are other aspects of consumer culture, too, which don’t sit all that easily with governance and democracy. The old adage “the customer is always right,” for instance, turns political leaders into panderers. Customers may always be correct, but citizens are not. Sometimes the most intractable political problems need to be solved with education or building bridges between solitudes in the population, divided by language, culture, age, income or simple geography. That more noble feat of governance is difficult to accomplish if citizens constantly need to be told that they’re right—that their views don’t need to change. What’s more, marketing is about giving people what they want, rarely what people need (though the most clever marketers can make people believe that their wants and needs are one and the same). Government, on the other hand, is the art of balancing the needs of the many. The long-running saga over the goods and services tax in Canada is a textbook example of what happens when marketing shapes economic policy—when the desire for lower prices at the cash register eventually trumped sound economic policy and the need for precious government revenues.

Some consumerist wisdom, it should be said, has brought net improvements to the Canadian political system. Who could argue with the sharper demand for guarantees around politicians’ promises? The increasing tendency to see Canadians as “taxpayers,” while threatening to turn citizenship into a mere monetary transaction, has also made elected representatives more attuned to potential waste or mismanagement of funds. And whatever one may think of the “micro-targeting” by political parties and all that accumulation of data about citizens, there’s no question that these innovations have given the political class better insights into the lives of the people they purport to represent. The Canadian pollsters best able to micro-target the citizens have been arguably the most successful: case in point, Dimitri Pantazopoulos, Harper’s old strategist who helped the British Columbia Liberals pull off a stunning, surprise victory in the spring of 2013 through what was called a “swing team strategy.” This was, in essence, a concerted effort to reach those crucial floating voters in tightly contested ridings, through close analysis of their individual needs and wants. In the United States, voter turnout has been steadily increasing in the decade since Republicans and then Democrats started using micro-targeting data to drive more people to the polls. The 2008 presidential election saw particularly gratifying increases in voter registration by young people, African-Americans and members of the Hispanic communities. As Canadian political parties build up their databases, accompanied by a more focused outreach to citizens, it may be reasonable to expect increases in turnout here, too.

What is concerning, though, is the
selective
way in which consumer methods have been mixed with Canadian democracy over the past few decades. Politicians have imported many of the tools of the marketplace into the civic realm, but free of the rules that govern their use in the commercial sector. If Canada does want to put the brakes on marketing’s influence in politics, a good place to start that discussion would be around the disparity between rules for private and political marketers.

Start with advertising, for example, and that large mismatch between how Canadians view the trustworthiness of political and commercial ads. People are far more likely to believe what the brewers are selling than what the politicians are promising. It could be that beer ads are more credible simply because the brewers aren’t spending all their time trying to knock down their competitors. Labatt and Molson adhere to the code of Advertising Standards Canada, which states, “Advertisements must not, unfairly, discredit, disparage or attack one or more products, services, advertisements, companies or entities, or exaggerate the nature or importance of competitive differences.”

Tim Hortons, the beloved coffee-chain icon, also sets out strict guidelines for its corporate practices toward competitors, expressly forbidding “false or deceptive statements about a competitor’s product, business practice, financial status or reliability,” as well as “disparaging remarks about a competitor with the intention of damaging that competitor.” So don’t look for any “True Story” ads in which ordinary Canadians are spitting out their Starbucks lattes onto the sidewalk or mocking the coffee they get from Second Cup. Canadian political parties have no such rules or guidelines against trashing their competitors. Worse, they appear to pay no price at the ballot box for using attack ads. It is difficult to imagine, then, that they would want to voluntarily abstain.