Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (16 page)

Advertising, though—that was becoming huge in Canadian politics in the 1980s. The government had caught the advertising bug. Under Pierre Trudeau, government had increasingly seen advertising as the solution to all problems, a proclivity that would carry on for decades. Canada now had something called the “Federal Identity Program,” complete with an officially sanctioned brand label for the country: a “wordmark” featuring the word Canada and a small flag over the final “a.” The Liberals set up “Information Canada” to co-ordinate all public communications from government, which were often earnest efforts to get Canadians behaving better. (That office had arisen from a 1979 Task Force report, “To Know and Be Known,” which urged the government to embrace the tools of modern public relations.) Participaction, for instance, was a nation-wide exhortation to fitness and good health, all conducted through advertising. By far, though, the grandest Trudeau-government advertising spending was the constitutional exercise, which earned its own special unit, the Canadian Unity Information Office, spending more than $32 million when all was said and done, to knit together the country and to fight Quebec separatism.

The big ad firms were recruited to the cause first of selling Canadians on the idea that we needed our own constitution, then on selling the deal that was hammered out by Ottawa and all the provinces except Quebec. In the fall of 1980, the Trudeau government unleashed a wave of TV ads produced by the MacLaren firm, featuring nature scenes, landscapes and flocks of Canadian geese. These were all about emotion and love of country. No one was going to try to draw Canadian consumer-citizens into complicated constitution-speak through these TV pitches. While a folksy version of “O Canada” played in the background in one, for instance, a narrator intoned, “Freedom is an important part of our heritage as Canadians. The right of each and every one of us to strive, to rise, to be free, riding the winds of freedom, working together to make our hopes and dreams come true for all Canadians.” These were appeals to citizens to get behind Trudeau’s constitutional quest—advertising in the service of a national project. However high-minded the goal, the campaign looked more like Madison Avenue than Main Street. In some ads, the word “constitution” wasn’t even mentioned. Moreover, this unprecedented ad splurge was raising eyebrows all over Canada, where people were objecting to their government—not just politicians—being sold to them like soap.

J.L. Foley, chairman of the Institute of Canadian Advertising, delivered a speech in Calgary lambasting the “unbelievable growth” in government advertising budgets—$29 million in 1979, making the government the largest single advertiser in Canada. Only a decade before, Foley said, the government had been the number-seventeen advertiser in the country. Foley condemned the Trudeau government’s plan to create a central agency of record to handle all its advertising and the practice of granting accounts as partisan favours (which had been going on for decades). In his speech, he also cast all these advertising efforts as a way to bypass the people who should be communicating with the public—the Members of Parliament. All this money being spent on advertising was “a further emasculation of Parliament and parliamentary democracy,” he said.

When the Trudeau government tried to kick off a special debate in the Commons on the constitution in the fall of 1980, the opposition held up proceedings for two hours so they could hammer away at the explosion in advertising and polling costs. Here too, the ads and polls were called an affront to parliamentary democracy. Toronto Conservative MP John Bosley wondered whether “we now have a new policy that public money will be used to tell people what they ought to think?” The NDP’s finance critic, a fellow named Bob Rae, said, “I’ll never look at a beaver or Canada goose in the same way again. I’ll see them as Liberals in disguise.”

Trudeau, for his part, had kicked off this raucous debate with a somewhat provocative insistence that he had nothing to do with polls. “I don’t give a damn about polls. And I don’t take polls.” Of course the Liberals were indeed relying on polls, as Martin Goldfarb’s increasing clout would attest. “Government by Goldfarb” was a real phenomenon. Allan Gregg was also on his way to becoming a national celebrity. Canadians were becoming altogether enamoured of polls, and everyone was getting into the act.

Newspapers and the media were commissioning their own polls—yet another innovation that came to Canada courtesy of Goldfarb and the
Toronto Star
. Through research with
Toronto Star
readers, Goldfarb had learned that newspaper audiences wanted to read stories that were “exclusive”—stories they couldn’t get in other media. They wanted to read about themselves, too, and their own lives, without a filter. Thus was born the regular
Star
poll, appearing four times a year or so, featuring raw survey results on matters deemed to be of interest to the paper’s readers. Soon other newspapers joined in, commissioning expensive polls with questions designed by the editors of the paper and then duly reported on, at great length, often with multiple stories and charts, within the editorial pages.

“It made no difference what the subject may be, politics, censorship, health, spending, consumer behaviour or whatever, people wanted to hear and read and learn about themselves,” Goldfarb wrote in his book
Affinity
. “This is what polling does. It allows people to find out whether they themselves are typical or atypical of the general public. They find out all of this by reading the results of polls.”

Politicians of the 1980s may have wanted to continue to see their profession in high-minded, institutional terms—civics as akin to religion, education or even military service. But by the 1970s, thanks to a variety of factors, this more exalted view of politics had taken a bit of a battering. There was the Watergate scandal in the United States, for instance, which had led to the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon. On top of Watergate’s corrosive effect on the public view of politicians, it also paved the way for a more aggressive, oppositional form of political journalism, in which the media was more actively looking for scandal and corruption in the halls of power. That kind of coverage was confirming and fuelling public cynicism toward government—and the sense that business could probably handle things better. Closer to home, high inflation and gas prices—and the government’s seeming powerlessness to stop them—had put Canadian consumers in a surly mood. Furthermore, Canadians—and especially the baby boom generation, who were in their adulthood—had been immersed in several decades of expanding freedom and choice, in the grocery aisles and in their public and private lives. Trudeau, who had helped bring in the legislation that made it easier for Canadians to divorce, appeared to be heading in that direction himself, with the very public deterioration of his marriage to Margaret. Television had bred a new familiarity with politicians that was also headed away from deference—and even into contempt.

Television and the mass media had democratized the public sphere, in ways that everyone was still trying to assess. Canadians had more access to information and news than ever, but they were also passive spectators. The political conversations they were seeing on their television screens and reading in the media were taking place before their eyes, but without their active participation. As Neil Postman, the US cultural critic, would put it in his similiarly named book, they were being “amused to death.”

The voters liked entertainment. They liked business and shopping even better. Perhaps all that Cold War propaganda had seeped into the citizenry, with all the talk of how better shopping choices made for a more successful democracy. It may have been that people thought businesses were more responsive to their needs than their governments—given that they had far more transactions with the private sector, every day at the cash register. Allan Gregg told journalist Richard Gwyn in 1982 that his quarterly surveys at Decima were showing people losing faith in all the government-run industries, but rising confidence in the private sector—even advertising companies. “People don’t trust businessmen and never have,” Gregg said. “But they do give them high marks for effectiveness. I think what’s happening is that people are starting to say, ‘Let’s give businessmen a try and see if they can’t get us out of this mess.’”

This was the same year that the constitution was formally patriated and the year when CBC launched its flagship show
The Journal
, featuring host Barbara Frum and lengthy “double-ender” interviews with leading newsmakers of the day. Within months of its launch,
The Journal
was drawing 1.6 million viewers each night, almost double the audience that CBC had dared to imagine for it. The Commodore 64 computer, a forerunner to the modern PC, was making its debut in stores, while the number-one TV series in the US and Canada was
Dallas,
the saga of a wealthy Texas oil family.

In this atmosphere, as Trudeau’s reign was winding down, and with the business-friendly Reagan installed in the White House, it probably wasn’t a surprise that Canada’s two main parties went looking for their own business types to take over the leadership. Eighteen months after that Gwyn article, the PCs chose Iron Ore Co. president Brian Mulroney to be their new leader, and a year later the Liberals plucked John Turner back from Bay Street and installed him as Trudeau’s successor. At the same time, politics was starting to attract more MPs with managerial backgrounds. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, there were roughly three times as many lawyers in the House as MPs whose career experience was in business or management. By the 1984 election, the numbers were roughly equal. Gregg’s prediction was coming true: the 1980s would be a time when governments increasingly picked up on the language, practices and people of business. In so doing, the political class would encourage citizens to develop even more consumer-like expectations of their federal government.

Direct Marketing

For all their differences, there is one objective that political parties and businesses share—the need for cash flow. Staffers need salaries, advertising gobbles up money and party offices are expensive to run. So it is in the area of fundraising that political parties have had the most to learn from the marketplace.

By the 1980s, the Conservatives had mastered the ability to make direct contact with voters, thanks to US Republican know-how and the import of raw consumer-marketing techniques into politics. In the United States, an early pioneer of direct-mail methods was Robert Odell, a Republican, who kicked off the practice with mass-mailings of hand-typed, “personalized” form letters to potential donors in the 1960s. The real boost to his efforts came through fundraising appeals during political ad campaigns. As the flood of small donations poured in, so the mailing lists grew. By 1972, the Republicans had raised $8 million for Nixon’s re-election campaign through direct-mail contributions. Throughout the fallout of the Watergate scandal, Odell solicited donations with long, carefully crafted letters that cast the potential donors as “friends” whose “help” was required.

Canadian Conservatives took note, and in 1973 when John Laschinger was the national director for the party, he took a trip to Columbus, Ohio, and learned the magic of the Ruby Red Grapefruit Company. Because this was an enterprise that operated by mail order, offering home delivery of Florida fruit, it had a valuable database of customers who trusted the mail and who had cash to spare, the kind of people that politicos need to fill party coffers. Laschinger learned that these private-sector lists were available for sale, and managed to pry $50,000 out of the cash-strapped Conservative coffers to go “prospecting,” as it’s called. He purchased all the names of the Canadian clients on the Ruby Red Grapefruit mailing list, as well as rafts of magazine subscription contacts and whatever other names and addresses he could lay his hands on in Canada. Laschinger bought the names of all the Canadian subscribers to
Playboy
, believe it or not (presumably the people who bought the magazine for the articles, as the old joke goes). He also sought out “list brokers”—people who purchased lists from the private sector and then sold them at a premium to charities or other groups who wanted to get into fundraising. The usual price was roughly one dollar a name. But if it yielded a fifty-dollar donation, that was an enormous profit. The Conservatives even enlisted Odell’s help as a consultant, to help design the direct-mail system.

The federal New Democratic Party was also exploring this new fundraising system, inspired by methods borrowed from the charitable sector. Stephen Thomas, a former geography and history teacher, was working at the Oxfam international aid organization when he started to see how the right kind of direct mail could yield a steady flow of donations. In the 1974 election, Thomas lent that wisdom to the NDP, directing a mass-mailing of letters that were signed by famous Canadians with an environmental or leftist bent: popular scientist David Suzuki and authors such as Farley Mowat and Margaret Laurence. Five years later, Thomas’s work had netted the NDP enough money to wage its first truly national campaign, active in all parts of Canada. Thomas went on to found his own firm and become one of Canada’s fundraising giants, honoured for the work he did to help the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Greenpeace, to name just a few organizations.

Slowly, steadily over the decade after discovering direct mail, the Conservatives built their list to eighty thousand names by the early 1980s and had raised $7 million in direct-mail donations for the election that brought Mulroney to power. That was a massive sum—the party only spent a little more than $6 million for the entire 1984 election campaign.