Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (21 page)

Chrétien put Paul Martin, the businessmen’s businessman, in charge of the platform leading up to the 1993 election. His co-author was former Ontario cabinet minister Chaviva Hosek, who hailed from the leftward end of the Liberal spectrum and who had been working as an adviser to Chrétien since shortly after the David Peterson government defeat in 1990. Hosek and Martin were tasked with the job of creating a credible, comprehensive platform that could bridge the big-government Liberalism of old and the new, more business-friendly politics of Canada in the 1990s. In format, it would be similar to Clinton’s 1992 campaign document
Putting People First: How We Can All Change America
. But the Liberal document would be even more specific: it would list all the promises, properly costed out over four years. No other political party had tried this before in Canada, but the party had to prove its credibility in an era of damaged political brands. The Liberals were changing the product in response to the market—much more than advertising or mere selling.

The result was the famous Red Book of Liberal promises, titled “Creating Opportunity.” The labelling was a political synonym for “new and improved”—the political equivalent of a product upgrade. No longer would the Liberals be known as the advocates for big- government programs. In fact, a lot of their promises revolved around what Liberals would
not
do: buy more helicopters and add to the national debt, for instance. Chrétien liked to say he had three promises: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” The days of building governments were over and the days of enhancing individuals’ lives had arrived. Deliberately, the Liberals had chosen to make the Red Book look like a corporation’s annual report—another nod to critics who said the party was out of touch with the corporatism of 1990s Canada.

The Red Book also functioned as a political-product guarantee. Consumer citizens were delighted with guarantees in the commercial sector. In the 1990s, the marketing world in Canada and beyond was embracing the importance of “customer relationship management” and “after-sales service.” The proliferating big-box stores on the Canadian landscape, as well as the expansion of goods available through freer trade, meant that sellers in the Canadian marketplace were vying for intangibles such as loyalty and reputation. The same was true in the political sector. Marzolini, in his week living among the low-income people in Regent Park, had listened closely one evening when chatting to a woman who said that politicians should arrive in power with a checklist of tasks and be kicked out of office if they failed to deliver. The platform became that checklist, which Chrétien brandished as a talisman—literally waving it in the face of doubting citizens or skeptical journalists.

“It’s all written here,” Chrétien said at the Ottawa campaign launch of the Red Book in mid-September 1993. “You can come with this book in front of me every week after I’m the prime minister and say, ‘Where are you with your promises, Mr. Chrétien?’ And we are going to check—I’m telling you everything that is written there I intend to implement.”

This election campaign was launched in a very different world than any previous one in Canadian history. Canada now had an all-news network, CBC Newsworld, which promised to greatly accelerate the speed of exchanges between the rival parties. Where once a political party could count on a whole day to “get out the message” to the public, the rapidly changing headlines in the all-news universe meant that rivals could pounce within the hour. The daily airwaves carried fast-changing, back-and-forth squabble among the parties. It was all more noise for average citizens to digest—or tune out.

The 1993 election was a great leap forward in the world of digital political marketing, too. Thanks to a couple of by-elections and then the 1992 referendum on the Charlottetown Accord, Elections Canada had been experimenting with putting voters lists in computer-friendly format. By 1993, the agency was able to come up with a national list, rather awkwardly named the Elections Canada Automated Production of Lists of Electors, or ECAPLE for short. It meant for the first time Canadian political parties had access to a digital database, filled with precious names and addresses of supporters and would-be supporters. This was a goldmine for politicos—a wealth of information far more vast than any Ruby Red Grapefruit Co. list or private-sector mailing list, such as the type “prospected” by John Laschinger in the 1980s. With advances in technology, too, parties could begin to adapt this basic list to develop their own, more specialized databases. The Liberals, for instance, enlisted the services of a company called ProMark Software to manipulate the voters list into user-friendly lists for campaigning and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts in the 1993 election. They also sought out the help of Compusearch, a new “geo-demographic” data service, to map out ridings according to voters’ incomes and lifestyles. Custom maps for local campaigns were provided to local Liberal ridings for a nominal cost. In this way, information that used to be gathered by local volunteers and politicians was now professionalized, digitalized and centralized—another step in taking politics further away from art and more toward science, just as polling had done.

The Reform Party, seriously in contention in a federal election for the first time in 1993, had feared that as outsiders from the West they would see an onslaught of negative attacks through this campaign. Still relying on advice from Frank Luntz, Reform attempted to “inoculate” the media against any negative campaigning, sending out a letter to journalists in the weeks before the writ dropped. “We hope in the interests of fair play, you refuse to be co-opted by any negative advertising campaign... whether directed against the Reform Party or anyone else,” said the letter, which was signed by Reform spokesman Allan McGirr, and accompanied by a small book by Luntz. Reform, for its part, served notice that its campaign would be the opposite of slick—no leader’s plane, no fancy bells and whistles, and advertising filled with so-called “ordinary Canadians.”

“It’s the same kind of war that’s going on with soft drinks. The generic brands are cheaper and they taste just as good,” McGirr told one reporter. So while the Liberals were going with “Chrétien classic,” the Reform Party upstarts were going generic. Interesting strategy—using ad culture to fight against the creep of advertising into our higher, civic life.

Reform’s worries about negative campaigning did come to pass in the 1993 campaign, just not in the way the party had anticipated. As a Liberal victory seemed increasingly imminent and the Conservative campaign grew increasingly desperate, the election airwaves were suddenly punctuated with a hard-hitting assault—on Chrétien’s face. His lopsided countenance, the product of an unknown childhood affliction, was put front and centre in a wave of Conservative ads with the tagline “Is this a prime minister?” In the ad, ordinary voters attested to their discomfort with Chrétien: “I personally would be very embarrassed if he were to become prime minister of Canada.” Reaction was swift and furious, prompting the Conservatives to quickly pull the ads. Telephone lines at Tory headquarters were jammed with calls and even Conservative candidates went public with their fury. “Distasteful,” said one in Vancouver.

Election night in October 1993 smashed the old political order in Canada, leaving just one mass-market “brand” party on the landscape—the Liberals. Turnout had dipped below 70 percent for the first time since the 1950s, marking the beginning of a decline that would grow even worse within ten years. The new, separatist Bloc Québécois represented the majority in Quebec; the Reform Party represented a large swath in the West. Neither the New Democrats nor the Conservatives won official party status; they were reduced to rump status in the Commons. In this new, regionally “specialized” Canadian political marketplace, the governing Liberals were left to try to tap into the mass mood of Canadian consumer-citizens.

Immediately upon taking office, the Liberals borrowed a little bit of inspiration from Loblaws’ Dave Nichols and pitched themselves as the “no-frills” party, all about value for the dollar. Chrétien dispensed with the Mulroney limousines and the special prime ministerial aircraft, which the Liberals dubbed the “flying Taj Mahal.” The new Liberal government issued its first budget in plain, generic packaging—a simple white cover, with no fancy graphics or extravagant type. “This is a Chevrolet government, not a Cadillac government,” Chrétien liked to remind people after he took power.

The fixation on brands and labels in Canadian politics, up to this point, mostly was at the sales end of things. Although the Liberals had slightly modified their product at the Aylmer conference, adjusting the party’s philosophy and outlook to be more business-friendly, their branding efforts could not really be called “marketing,” in the true sense of the word. Once entrenched in power, where they would remain for the next twelve years, Liberals would flirt with a lot of modern marketing concepts and tactics—branding, focus groups and, of course, the now-ubiquitous advertising. But all those efforts were more about selling than changing their “product” to suit Canadian consumers or citizens.

Perhaps because of their long history in government in the twentieth century, the Liberals were still reasonably old-fashioned about the idea of government as something separate from the consumer marketplace. Chrétien, very much in keeping with the managerial, administrative style of Liberal rule in the 1950s, with the “systems men,” exhorted his ministers to rely on their public servants and their departments. The old Consumer Affairs Ministry, incidentally, was wound down when Chrétien took power and absorbed into the larger Department of Industry, which was envisioned as a kind of super-ministry to oversee the entirety of private-sector interests.

Soon after coming to office, Chrétien asked Marzolini to test the public’s appetite for limits in government spending—a bitter pill the Liberals were going to have to swallow, to fight the out-of-control federal debt, at more than $40 billion and climbing in 1993. Marzolini told Chrétien that cuts to spending would be incredibly risky. Partly because Canadians had been so focused on the constitution for the previous decade, the populace had some knowledge of how the country worked, but economic literacy was woefully low. Only 25 percent of Canadians knew the difference between a deficit and a debt and only 40 percent knew how many millions were in a billion. Nor could Marzolini detect any useful ways to improve this situation in his polling data—Canadians were busy with their own lives and not all that receptive to getting economic lectures from politicians or even the so-called experts. When Marzolini asked a thousand Canadians how they would get federal finances back into the black, a full 20 percent of respondents believed that the massive drain on the federal budget could be resolved by getting rid of free haircuts and subsidized meals for MPs—a drop in the bucket, expense-wise, for the federal treasury. These responses also signalled that Canadians saw government as more of a problem than a solution in the early 1990s.

The GST loomed large as a problem, too, its fates tied to the emerging forces of political marketing and consumer-citizenship. Canadians believed that the Liberals were going to scrap it and Chrétien had only himself to blame for this perception. Although he had in fact been careful during his leadership and 1993 election campaigns, saying the $18 billion in annual GST revenues would have to be retained, Chrétien was haunted by his reckless 1990 vow to make the tax “disappear.” Canadians weren’t interested in the fine print of this promise—the business about replacing the tax revenues, for instance. Citizens were reminded of their resentment toward the tax, and by extension, the government, every time they went to the cash register.

Some were so angry that they were avoiding the tax altogether, through the so-called underground economy that emerged in the 1990s, which was basically a shoppers’ revolt against the GST. These people were conducting their transactions away from the eye of the taxman, exchanging goods and services under the table. In essence, they were revolting against the idea of government.

“The underground economy is not all smugglers. It is hundreds of thousands of otherwise honest people who have withdrawn their consent to be governed, who have lost faith in government,” Paul Martin said weeks after he was made finance minister in the Chrétien government. Actually, what Martin may well have been describing was simply the modern consumer-citizen—the kind of person who put his or her consumer needs ahead of a willingness to be taxed. A “taxpayer” more than a citizen, in other words.

For a couple of years, the Chrétien Liberals would wrestle with how to handle the hot potato of the GST. The dilemma perfectly captured the ambivalence of the times, between the rigours of governing and succumbing to the demands of the angry consumer-citizens. Privately, the government polled on the wisdom of reducing the GST by a couple of points. Polling of course showed that the measure would be hugely popular, but the nation’s fragile financial recovery couldn’t handle the loss of revenues. Martin tried a public apology of sorts: “We made a mistake,” Martin said at a 1996 news conference where he unveiled the details of the “harmonized” tax deal with the Atlantic provinces, yet another bid to calm the troubled waters. One minister, Sheila Copps, went so far as to resign (then quickly run again, successfully being re-elected) to show her regret over promising to axe the GST during the 1993 election campaign.

Somehow, however, the Liberals were able to ride out the GST controversy relatively unscathed. Yet cynicism and anti-elitism—necessary conditions for marketing in politics—were alive and well in 1990s Canada. The Reform Party, under leader Preston Manning, was using its new bully pulpit in the Commons to slam government as too large and too wasteful. Reform had some powerful advocacy organizations amplifying its voice, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the National Citizens Coalition. The way in which these protest groups eventually moved to the pinnacle of power in Canada, like the story of the GST, teaches us a lot about how the forces of marketing and consumer-citizenship took over Canadian politics in the years ahead.