Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (17 page)

As Laschinger explained in his book
Leaders and Lesser Mortals
, the idea of reaching out to “members” was marketing psychology. “People like to belong to groups and they are flattered to be asked to join a cause. Credit card companies, such as Diners Club and American Express (membership has its privileges) have long exploited the ‘belonging’ instinct,” he wrote. “The card idea worked in political fundraising in the United States, so the Tories appropriated it and introduced a PC Canada Fund card.” Although some were skeptical of the chances of success, it turned out that potential Conservative recruits were delighted with the cards, even if they were “meaningless and valueless piece[s] of pasteboard.”

The Conservatives borrowed another American political-marketing innovation, “exclusive” membership, to take this idea one step further. They created a “500 Club” for anyone who donated $1,000 or more a year. The lucky, well-heeled folks with this elite-level membership, which the credit-card companies were finding to be a boon, too, would get special invitations to receptions and increased access to people in power. In the 1988 election, the 500 Club was such a successful method of fundraising that it added $6 million on its own to the Conservative coffers. The Liberals, as usual, would pay the compliment of imitation, setting up a “Laurier Club,” with the same donation threshold: $1,000 annually.

Direct-mail marketing, the Conservatives were finding in the 1980s, was an ideal way to attract money and also stay in touch with the base—making members feel special or influential. Laschinger and fellow Tories would constantly be surprised to see how partisans treasured their political memorabilia and souvenirs, whether it was a photo with a politician or a sticker they got in the mail.

Flexible and Angry

The 1984 election was a display of two other big forces that would shape the future decades of Canadian politics: a more volatile electorate and a more adversarial media. First, the volatility: the days of predictable loyalty to parties were over, and getting a pan-Canadian picture was much more difficult. The Canadian body politic had become more “flexible,” in the marketing parlance of the time. Lawrence LeDuc, from the University of Toronto and one of Canada’s leading political-behaviour experts, titled his study of the 1984 election “The Flexible Canadian Electorate.” LeDuc’s study painted a picture of a populace that was now wildly shifting its party preferences, often within the space of months or even weeks—“highly sensitive in their attitudes and behaviour to a variety of short-term forces.” With the freedom to choose, it seemed, came the prerogative of changing one’s mind, over and over again. As Allan Gregg had been noting, too, Canada was moving well out of the days when 80 percent of the electorate could easily define their political allegiance. It was in Quebec, incidentally, where the pollsters first started to see political fealty unravelling in a large way—perhaps as a fallout of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the province also shrugged off its old religious underpinnings. By the mid-1980s, only about 40 percent of Quebecers were telling Gregg and other pollsters that they were loyal to one political brand or another. “That was the first time we saw the potential for the Conservatives to win [the next election] because people ceased to be anything,” Gregg said.

And then there was the sharper edge to the media. It had become far more adversarial and personal—no doubt at least in part as a fallout of Watergate, too. Throughout the two months of the campaign, the media was in hot pursuit of gaffes, primarily by Turner and the Liberals. Bob Hepburn, the
Toronto Star
’s Ottawa bureau chief at the time, said in an analysis of the 1984 campaign, “With Turner, we always went after him as a group. We smelled blood and we attacked. With Mulroney, we attacked at the end, but at the end people had already made up their minds.”

Mulroney became prime minister in September 1984, and within four months he flew to the New York Economic Club and declared before the blue-chip audience that Canada was now “open for business.” Although the comment infuriated Canadian nationalists and the old Liberal establishment, Mulroney was unapologetically pro-American, especially when it came to promoting business and political ties between the two countries. He had a warm friendship with Ronald Reagan, famously illustrated at the so-called “Shamrock Summit” on St. Patrick’s Day 1985 in Quebec City, when the two leaders sang “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”

The volatile, personal and aggressive new state of politics would take a toll on Mulroney’s early reign, especially in a chain of early cabinet resignations, over everything from strip club visits (Defence Minister Robert Coates) to tainted tuna (Fisheries Minister John Fraser). Mulroney would be also dogged by more personal media coverage, whether it was renovations at 24 Sussex Drive or the patronage jobs he was handing out to friends.

Canada’s consumer society continued to grow. Despite nascent hints of a growing environmentalism among the public and in politics—Mulroney used some of his goodwill capital with the United States to forge an acid rain treaty, for instance—Canadians were still spending increasing amounts of time shopping. It was during these Mulroney-government years that the courts started striking down all the laws against Sunday shopping—also an important, symbolic step on the path to creating a consumer-citizenry.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, religion was steadily loosening its bonds on the Canadian population as a whole. Statistics Canada charted the decline in its census reports every decade. In 1941, fewer than twenty thousand people told the Canadian census-takers that they had no religion. In 1951, that number had nearly tripled. By 1971, almost one million Canadians were in the “no religion” category—a tenfold increase since 1961. Subsequent decades would see the numbers continuing to climb, so that by the dawn of the twenty-first century, in the 2001 census, people with “no religion” accounted for 16 percent of the Canadian population, or almost five million people.

Martin Goldfarb, with his anthropologist’s eye, was learning through his research that the demand for Sunday shopping was a result of increasing numbers of working women and single-parent households in Canada. Their immediate concerns were logistical—where do we find the time to shop when we’re finished working? But the denial of Sunday shopping spoke to their values, too: why was the law curtailing their freedom, or discriminating against them? Goldfarb’s polling at this time repeatedly showed more than three-quarters of respondents heartily behind Sunday shopping. Canada’s changing immigration patterns were multiplying the ways in which Canadians observed their religion. The old idea of everybody at a Christian church on Sundays simply wasn’t reflecting many realities in the modern consumer nation. The populace didn’t want to be in a dusty old institution on Sundays anymore; people wanted to go shopping.

The Supreme Court of Canada struck down the federal Lord’s Day Act in 1985, effectively forcing provinces and municipalities to sort out their own laws on whether stores, bars, restaurants and malls should be open on Sundays. Sunday shopping, while hailed as a liberating, modernizing move, broke down another barrier between old pillars of society and modern consumerism. No longer was there a day put aside for non-shopping activities. Canadians were on their way to becoming 24-7 consumers.

During his two terms in office, despite the shift to a shopping culture, Mulroney would prove to be more of a provocateur than a panderer to Canadian consumers. His Conservative party may have been aggressively importing marketing know-how from the United States, but it was all in the service, for the most part, of “selling” conservatism to the mass market. Mulroney’s party, in other words, was more about sales than marketing—more “SOP” than “MOP.” In government, while he was routinely accused of paying too much heed to the polls, Mulroney pursued policies that were decidedly at odds with mainstream opinion, and Gregg’s market-research findings. He also wasn’t totally in sync with his friends Reagan and Thatcher, who were having much more success tailoring their conservatism to market demand. Thatcher would often joke with Mulroney that he was too progressive; he would shoot back that Canada was a large and complicated country.

Free trade with the United States, for instance, sharply divided Canadian consumers when the negotiations started during Mulroney’s first mandate. The Consumers’ Association of Canada had historically supported the idea of free trade, but it was only a lukewarm supporter of the actual deal being hammered out between the Mulroney government and the United States. It pointedly refused on a number of occasions to endorse the Canada–US free trade deal—reflecting a deep ambivalence within the membership. And once the election got under way—the famous free trade election of 1988—the Consumers’ Association remained mutely on the sidelines.

The External Affairs department, bracing for consumer worry, had in early 1988 pulled together a study loaded with reassurances about free trade’s positive potential for consumers. According to the department, free trade would eventually bring about a 3-percent dip in the cost of living for low-income people, $800 in annual savings for middle- and high-income families, $85–$130 in annual savings in food spending and $8,000 in savings in the cost of setting up and furnishing a home. More competition would bring lower prices and more choice in the shopping aisles, External Affairs predicted.

But for all of free trade’s potential to disrupt or improve the Canadian-consumer universe, the 1988 election wasn’t really about consumerism or consumer-citizenship at all. In keeping with the larger, Canadian existential mood at the time, it was about sovereignty—not Quebec sovereignty, but the sovereignty of the entire Canadian nation in the face of the American giant to the south.

The 1988 campaign was another leap ahead in terms of snazzy machinery. Gregg’s polling operation was at its apex. Decima was seen as the pre-eminent polling firm in the country. Gregg had understood that Canada was in the midst of a shift away from mass marketing, toward niche specialization. The culture shift would apply to politics, too. In an interview with the
Globe and Mail
, Gregg laid out the impressive capabilities of his polling research and its ability to micromanage the Canadian electorate: “We can target not just the possible swing ridings, but the swing polls within those ridings, and key voters within those polls. We can identify on a block-by-block basis their historical voting behaviour, their demographic profile, their inferred preference—and reach them, not by the old mass media techniques, but by telephone and direct mail.”

And here’s a not insignificant point: the pollsters and the party now had the machinery to do this better than individual MPs or local riding associations. The old party hands were no longer the experts. It was much like the tension on display in the 2011 movie
Moneyball
, when the baseball-stats whiz keeps confounding the veteran talent scouts with superior information about the pitching and batting records of potential recruits.

Gregg was using his stats to plan Mulroney’s travel schedule, arranging to have the prime minister pay a call on the ridings more important to the party and its future electoral hopes. If his research picked up a softening of Conservative support in the British Columbia interior, the PMO would arrange to have Mulroney fly in for a visit to shake some hands and bolster spirits. Where once this intelligence had been gathered by longtime partisans on the ground, following their political noses, sophisticated market research such as Gregg’s could show their information to be outdated, even irrelevant or wrong. The Liberals, with their calculations about “winnable” ridings and where to devote resources, had already been going down the same path.

“This line here. It’s just getting in the way.”

The 1988 election in Canada was notable for a sharper turn in the political advertising, with the Liberals unleashing a go-for-the-jugular attack on the Conservatives’ attachment to the nation. Their big-guns ad was one in which Canadian and American free trade negotiators were seated at a table featuring a map of North America. In the ad, the American says, “There’s one line I’d like to change.” The Canadian asks, “Which line is that?” And then a pencil eraser begins to erase the forty-ninth parallel. The American then says, “This line here. It’s just getting in the way.” The script was written by Terry O’Malley at Vickers and Benson, and it was written with his native St. Catharines hometown in mind, where people feared what free trade might do to the thousands of jobs dependent on the huge General Motors operation in that city.

Gregg was conducting focus groups throughout the campaign. The first time he showed the Liberal ad to a group, they laughed. The second time, they went silent. Based in part on that reaction, the Conservatives decided to fight fire with fire. They quickly pulled together an ad showing the border being redrawn, with the tagline “This is where we draw the line.” And then they released a wave of their own ads, mocking the Liberals’ fitness to govern. Whether anyone liked it or not, Canadian politics had now embraced the utility of the attack ad.

In Gregg’s view, attack ads only work when they confirm suspicions already lurking among the electorate. So in a big way, they are the offspring of market research—you have to plumb the depths of voters’ emotions to find the vulnerable spots of your opponents. Attack ads are also the byproduct of the cynicism toward politicians that had started to surface in Canada in the 1980s. In all his polling and focus groups, Gregg kept seeing reasons to believe that “bombing the bridge,” as it was called, would find a target with the voters. “It became very, very clear very early on that negative advertising was more comprehensive and comprehensible because people could understand it,” he said. “But it was also more credible. It was way more credible to say your opponent was a crook than to establish your own bona fides as virtuous.”