Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (44 page)

The Green Party, to its credit, gave it a try before the 2011 federal election, releasing an “attack ad on attack ads.” Featuring a YouTube video that collected tens of thousands of views within a few days, the Greens asked Canadians to speak out against the democratically corrosive, negative political ads. “The cynicism of the spin doctors and the political party machines is devaluing the whole business of democracy at a very fundamental level and it is very, very wrong,” Green leader Elizabeth May said when she launched the anti-attack-ad campaign. “Attack ads work by making voters think that it’s all too unpleasant. They tune out political discourse because it’s all dreadful.”

Thousands of people may have applauded the Green Party initiative, but weeks after the “attack on attack ads” was launched in March, Canadians were subject to new waves of negative ads during the 2011 election campaign. Liberals were forced to concede that their leader, Michael Ignatieff, had been doomed before the election began by nearly two years of negative advertising. The Liberals’ resolve, post-2011, was to fight fire with fire, setting up a special fund to ensure they could buy ads to reply to future advertising against their leaders. And so the cycle will continue.

Citizens interested in the long-term health of the political process may want to demand that the politicians, like the private-sector advertisers they’re imitating, sign up to the same Advertising Standards Canada code of conduct. Or, perhaps in the same way that political parties negotiate the rules around TV debates, talks could be held among the parties to come up with a new code for political advertising.

Canada’s political class is also getting away with no rules over those databases the parties are building. As citizens and consumers, Canadians have powerful legal rights to privacy. The federal Privacy Act puts strict limits on how the government collects information about individuals, and gives people the right to see what kind of data the government has accumulated about them.

The federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) meanwhile, offers most Canadians similar reassurances in the commercial sector. (British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta have their own similar laws.) Citizens have a right to demand informed consent about sharing their personal information, and transparency on the part of the banks, stores and service companies.

The political party databases, however, were a glaring exception to Canadian privacy rules in 2013, a good decade after they started being built in earnest. They were in a legal limbo, not covered by the Privacy Act or PIPEDA. Canada’s chief electoral officer, Marc Mayrand, called the databases a “black hole” in terms of privacy when he started arguing for a crackdown in early 2013. So if you wanted to see what the Conservatives or Liberals or New Democrats knew about you, you were out of luck. Was there a happy face or a frowning face beside your name and address in CIMS? What new technological wizardry was contained in the new CIMS, called “C-Vote”? The Conservatives didn’t have to tell you. Did you want to change the information that was stored about you in Liberalist or NDP Vote? You had no legal right to see or change that data.

Moreover, the rules were murky or non-existent on whether these databases were culling information from the files of members of Parliament. Former Conservative MP Garth Turner had said he was expected to log information about his constituents into the party database. Yet another former Conservative, Michael Sona, the staffer accused of involvement in the robocalls controversy of the 2011 election, also publicly acknowledged that it was part of his job in MPs’ offices to put citizen information into CIMS. Members of Canada’s gay and lesbian community received that mass political email in 2012 from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, their addresses gathered from a petition sent to his office a year earlier. Hard questions need to be asked, it seems, about how government information turns into political data. In a March 2013 report, Mayrand urged more stringent privacy controls over the databases if Canada wanted to avoid the kind of fraud and abuse allegations that seemed so rampant in the 2011 election.

Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has become more aggressive during her tenure with online data-gatherers such as Facebook or Google. She also took steps in 2012 to commission a study on the political databases and the privacy limbo in which they were operating. One of the authors of that study, Colin Bennett, wrote in
Policy Options
magazine in 2013 that the failure to deal with this issue was a real democratic threat: “Lack of attention to the protection of personal information can erode the already low trust that Canadians have in political parties and in our democratic system.” Once again, though, the demand for stronger rules would probably to come from the public. The more that Canadians come to know about these political databases and the grey legal zone they inhabit, the more pressure they should be expected to exert to rein them in to the same privacy standards expected of governments and the private sector.

Another heartening lesson about the party databases, as Sasha Issenberg observed in
The Victory Lab
, is that consumer information only goes so far in analyzing the motivations of the American electorate. Although the inspiration for databases came from the consumer world, the important findings have ultimately been made by social scientists, especially those working with Barack Obama and the Democrats. All the high-tech bells and whistles of micro-targeting and databases can, in fact, be distilled down to some common-sense, old-fashioned political wisdom: that people are more influenced in their voting decisions by their neighbours and face-to-face contact with politicians. Voting in the US is still more Main Street than Madison Avenue, in other words. If past practice holds, this would be another lesson that would have to migrate north from the US to Canada: voter data, and the rules over databases, may come to be viewed as social science and not pure marketing.

Rules alone, though, cannot reverse a culture shift. Citizens became consumers and democracy became a shopping exercise over the last half-century or so because of larger, almost irresistible forces shaping all of society, in Canada and globally. Canada is not the same consumer society today that it was in the rollicking days after the Second World War, when the suburbs, the highways and the middle class were all expanding.

The worldwide financial crisis of 2008, sparked by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States, threw a light of sober reflection over those old dreams of home ownership for all. The subsequent bailouts in the North American auto sector were another marker of how far the economy had travelled since the 1950s, when good manufacturing jobs paid for the consuming lifestyles of middle-class households.

Those lifestyles, too, had exacted a huge cost by the twenty-first century. Rising personal debt levels in Canada were prompting sounds of alarm from the government and from the Bank of Canada after the 2011 election. “We cannot grow indefinitely by relying on Canadian households increasing their borrowing relative to income,” Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney said in a speech to the Canadian Auto Workers in the summer of 2012. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, meanwhile, steadily tightened rules around mortgage eligibility and homeowner loans so that Canadians wouldn’t follow Americans down the same ruinous financial path.

These admonitions alone should serve to shake the idea that citizenship goes hand in hand with consumerism. For years, the cry to rein in consumer-citizenship had come primarily from the environmental movement, imploring people to put the planet’s well-being over the insatiable demand for consumer goods. This wasn’t a message easily compatible with marketers, political and otherwise, who encouraged people to think like consumers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But other shadows have also fallen over the Canadian consumer state: rising income inequality in Canada and the growing awakening of politicians and voters to the shrinking middle class. The Occupy Wall Street movement, launched by the Canadian magazine
Adbusters
in 2011 and then rapidly proliferating to “Occupy” movements worldwide, shone public attention on the global wealth divide between rich and poor—the wealthy 1 percent and the rest of the world. “We are the 99 percent,” the Occupiers cried. By the fall of 2012, everyone from US presidential candidates to Liberal leadership contenders in Canada were saying that the first task of any political leader was to revitalize the hopes and dreams of the middle class.

Taken together, all these developments could be welcome steps along the way to untangling consumerism from citizenship. As soon as Canadians start seeing themselves as something more than shoppers, they may demand more of the politicians who are treating them as marketing targets. David Ogilvy, that twentieth century advertising giant, is probably best remembered for his warnings about the perils of underestimating your audience. He said, “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.” Ogilvy apparently did not share that old nineteenth-century view of circus master P.T. Barnum, about the sucker who was born every minute.

Political marketing, if not held in check, veers dangerously close to the view of consumers as morons. In its extreme forms, it plays to people’s emotions, not their thoughts. It operates on the belief that repeating a catchy phrase, even if it’s untrue, will seal an idea in the mind of the unknowing or uncaring public. It assumes that citizens will always choose on the basis of their individual wants and not society’s needs. It divides the country into “niche” markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision. Patrick Muttart, Harper’s marketer-in-chief, unapologetically declared that much of the Conservatives’ political marketing was aimed at the 10 percent of Canadians who didn’t pay attention to politics. So the conversation, such as it was, had to be “brutally simple.” But that conversation also threatens to debase the currency altogether. Political advertising aimed at this 10 percent isn’t rocket science, or even political science, but raw, often nasty stuff, chosen to jolt people out of their apathy.

Little wonder, then, that large swaths of the voting public have checked out, preferring to offer their loyalty to doughnut shops or beer brands than to the political system. That migration is a stinging verdict on the success of political marketing. Instead of turning consumers into citizens, it has accomplished the reverse. Canadian politics went shopping for votes, and the voters went shopping.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has taken quite a while to write and almost equally as long to get to publication. It’s a long story, so I have a lengthy list of people who helped me along this sometimes-bumpy road.

F
irst off, my immense thanks to all the folks at Harbour Publishing (especially editor Silas White) who lifted this book out of the purgatory where it landed when Douglas & McIntyre faltered last fall. They have done a very good thing; not just for me, but for the Canadian book publishing industry.

Trena White, of the old D&M, was the first to say yes to this project, though, and she brilliantly and deftly steered it throughout, making it a much better book with each of her suggestions. Chris Bucci, my agent at Anne McDermid and Associates, introduced me to Trena and kept things moving on this book when it sometimes felt they never would.

Within the book and in the accompanying notes, you will see evidence of the many people, of all political stripes, who agreed to be interviewed, sometimes repeatedly, for this story. I obviously could have not done this without them.

My editor-in-chief at the
Toronto Star
, Michael Cooke, made it possible for me to juggle this book with my day job as a parliamentary reporter. My other colleagues in the Ottawa bureau, especially bureau chief Bruce Campion-Smith, but also Tonda MacCharles, Les Whittington, Joanna Smith and Tim Harper, as well as Chantal Hébert in Montreal, not only put up with the absences and distraction, but actively encouraged the book and my interest in this whole subject. Same goes for former bureau colleagues Richard Brennan, Allan Woods and Chris Carter (the title of this book comes from Chris, who’s now with the CBC).

I was away from the bureau, on a Canadian Journalism Fellowship, when I first got the idea for this book and chattered incessantly about it to the people around me at Massey College. It really started, in fact, when I wandered fortuitously that year into a class on “material culture,” taught by Sarah Amato at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College. So thanks to Sarah for the initial inspiration (and a fascinating class) and thanks to all the folks who shared 2008–09 at Massey with me, particularly college master John Fraser, administrator Anna Luengo and Michelle Gagnon, who still manages to be my fellow fellow, even though we’re back in our respective jobs and cities.

Michael Valpy, another denizen of Massey and an old
Globe and Mail
colleague, linked me up to Luke Savage, a former university newspaper editor (like me) who turned out to be the best kind of researcher an author could have.

My new friends in the field of political marketing, Alex Marland of Memorial University and Thierry Giasson at Université Laval, opened up a whole new academic world to me. Watch these folks: they are the future of political science. Daniel Paré at the University of Ottawa and Andre Turcotte at Carleton University are also among the smart people who have helped me out in this field.