Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

Table of Contents

The Pitch

Let’s Get Canada Shopping

Sold Like Soap

Scientific Shopping

The Bargaining

Market-Tested

The Brand-wagon

And Now, a Word from Our Sponsors

Sealing the Deal

Market Leader

Retail Rules

Sliced and Diced

This Little Party Went to Market

Checking Out

Acknowledgements

Notes, Links and Further Reading

SHOPPING FOR VOTES

Copyright © 2013 Susan Delacourt

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

P.O. Box 219

Madeira Park, BC, Canada V0N 2H0

www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Silas White

Print edition text design by Mary White

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-92681-293-9 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-92681-294-6 (ebook)

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

PREFACE

T
his book began as a search for a new metaphor. In over twenty years covering federal politics in Canada, I had run out of ways to tell readers how political life resembled the world outside the Ottawa “bubble.”

Once, it was easy to tell my readers that politics was like a courtroom or a university classroom. The grand, architectural edifices of their institutions, in all their solemn grandeur, are certainly similar. But as time wore on, it was increasingly difficult to argue that the political players were in pursuit of higher knowledge or a considered judgement.

For a while it worked to think of Parliament as one big workplace, or political parties as families. Then those metaphors fell short as well. Where, besides the most dysfunctional offices or families, could people yell past each other all the time? Sports and theatre comparisons ran their course, too. Enough with “knockout punches” and performance critiques.

And soon, like many others, I started to recognize the creep of shopping language into the political marketplace: brands, products, selling and buying. It was hard not to notice, too, that the parties paying the most attention to marketing trends were more successful than those resisting marketing’s influence on politics. The politicians who were speaking in shopping language were clearly winning. So I decided to try to unravel this comparison, to see where it started and, yes, to see what price we were paying for mixing consumerism with democracy.

Along the way in that unravelling exercise, I stumbled across the relatively new study of political marketing in Canada, which also seemed to be concerned with developments highly relevant to the kind of politics I saw every day. This book, though, is more of a story than a study. As much as politicos love to use marketing language, they also love to talk about the need for a “narrative.” Here, then, is a new narrative for how we look at our political culture in Canada, complete with bars of soap, cans of tomatoes and, of course, generous helpings of beer and doughnuts.

TIM HORTONS VOTERS

A
mericans can have their Tea Party. In Canada, the political beverage of choice is coffee—Tim Hortons coffee, in particular.

In the fall of 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper skipped a summit meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, opting instead to sip hot chocolate at Tim Hortons headquarters in Oakville, Ontario. Rather than sashaying about on the world stage, rubbing shoulders with political celebrities and sketchy foreign despots, this fifty-year-old dad and baby boomer planted himself close to home. Harper was there to hail the return of Tim’s from the US as a Canadian, publicly traded company—an unsubtle way to persuade Canadians of Harper’s true patriot love and homespun authenticity.

In his remarks, Harper delivered an ode to the doughnut chain and its hallowed place in Canadian iconography. In the space of a couple of minutes, in fact, Harper managed to link this doughnut store to many great things about Canada: hockey, family and even Pierre Berton, chronicler of Canada’s nation-building efforts. And not accidentally—this prime minister never said anything accidentally—Harper’s tribute to Tim’s cast the business in the sepia-toned hues of a simpler Canadian past: a time when there were only six teams in the National Hockey League and when his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs were winning Stanley Cups.

“Now, if I were to look back to the early days,” he said, “I think there were a couple of things about Tim Hortons that really connected with Canadians. First, of course, was the name and reputation of the co-founder, the great Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Tim Horton. Baby boomers who grew up watching the Original Six remember him as one of the strongest and sturdiest blueliners ever to play the game. And, of course, for millions of long-suffering Leafs fans across the country, the name Tim Horton conjures up their four Stanley Cups and the glory years of the 1960s.”

Naturally, being a politician, Harper inserted himself into this picture as well. “Millions more Canadian hockey parents like me know well that when it is twenty-below and everyone is up for a six a.m. practice, nothing motivates the team more than a box of Timbits and nothing warms the parents in the stands better than a hot double-double,” he said. “Perhaps no one said it better about Tim Hortons than the great Canadian author Pierre Berton. Let me quote: ‘In so many ways, the story of Tim Hortons is the essential Canadian story. It is the story of success and tragedy, of big dreams in small towns, of old-fashioned values and tough-fisted business, of hard work and of hockey.’”

It is a truism of Canadian politics in the early part of the twenty-first century: everybody wants the support of the “Tim Hortons voters.” It now seems easier to categorize Canadian voters by coffee choice rather than their loose, partisan affiliation. This is a cultural development roughly a half-century in the making. When the first Tim Hortons store was opened in 1964, most Canadians cast their ballots in elections based on loyalty or attachment to a party—only about 10 to 20 percent changed their vote choice between elections. Fifty years later, that mass of “shopping” voters had swelled to as much as 30 or 40 percent in each election. People were far more attached to their brand of morning coffee than they were to the Conservatives, Liberals or New Democrats.

Canada’s modern Conservatives, it’s fair to say, were the first to figure this out. Between the 2004 and 2006 federal elections, as the Conservative party was in the midst of overhauling its brand and its platform, top strategist Patrick Muttart would repeatedly drill this wisdom into the troops who were out trying to expand Conservatives’ support: “[It] means going to Tim Hortons, not to Starbucks.”

So what is a Tim Hortons voter? The Tim Hortons constituency speaks of solid, double-double-drinking citizens, looking for politicians to serve them up simple, plainspoken truths in Timbit-sized, consumable portions. They are the “ordinary” Canadians depicted in the hugely popular “True Stories” ads for the doughnut chain, which helped vault this fast-food outlet to Canadian-icon status. Tim Hortons voters don’t like fancy, foreign synonyms for their morning coffee and they like their politics to be predictable, beige—just like the doughnuts and decor at their national treasure of a food retailer. Tim Hortons voters support the Canadian troops. That’s why there was an outlet of the doughnut shop in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where thousands of Canadian troops were stationed through most of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And that’s also why Tim Hortons was chosen to be the exclusive corporate distributor of the special poppy-embossed quarters to honour Canadian veterans in 2004. Tim Hortons voters are older Canadians, maybe even retired from their jobs, who remember the real Tim Horton, just as Stephen Harper does. Conveniently, for all those politicians hanging out at Tim Hortons, older Canadians are the ones who vote, in far higher proportions than younger people. And, as Harper pointed out, Tim Hortons voters like hockey. They also like that other true-Canadian sport: curling. The annual men’s curling championship in Canada is actually called the Tim Hortons Brier, thanks to the chain’s sponsorship.