Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (25 page)

“In terms of political parties in Canada, we think it’s a serious omission by the government not to include that. The reality is, we all operate during campaigns—we phone, we do get-out-the-vote campaigns,” Conservative MP James Rajotte stated when he proposed amendments to the bill to the committee. Even the Bloc Québécois was on side. “We have to find a way to protect parties at both levels,” Paul Crete, a member of Parliament for the Bloc, said at this same hearing.

The tension, in short, was playing itself out in the early part of the twenty-first century. Was politics a business, or a public service? Political parties wanted to use the tools of business—advertising, telemarketing, polling—to reach the citizens. But they still saw their profession as something separate from the private sector. And what about those busy Canadian consumers? Did they see the distinction? Increasingly, when Canadians needed a fix of patriotism they weren’t looking to their governments, but to the places where they were shopping and consuming.

Doughnut Democracy

In 1997, Toronto’s local CBC radio station featured a discussion with a marketing director for Country Style doughnuts—not Tim Hortons—to talk about the emerging cultural importance of her product. Cathy Mauro made the bold suggestion that doughnut shops were to Canada what pubs were to Britain. “I find that if you really want to be where it’s happening at ten or eleven o’clock at night, you go to a doughnut shop,” Mauro said.

How did doughnuts so quickly become Canadiana? This was a remarkable bit of revisionist history, because doughnuts were seen in the 1950s as primarily an American product. Steven Penfold, a Canadian historian at the University of Toronto, devoted an entire book to the doughnut’s place in this country’s culture. Penfold unearthed a June 1950 ad in the
Canadian Hotel Review and Restaurant
trade magazine. “Your AMERICAN Guests want DOUGHNUTS,” said the ad, the text of which was wrapped around a picture of a dozen solid, plain doughnuts sitting on a lace-doilied plate.

Nothing about the founding or early days of Tim Hortons would seem to point toward its destiny as a Canadian political symbol. Tim Horton the hockey player had apparently become hooked on doughnuts while living in Pittsburgh from 1949 to 1952 and playing for the Hornets, a farm team for the Leafs. When he returned to Toronto, he became a regular patron of a little place called Your Do-nut Shop, right beside the barber who gave him his regular brush cut in Scarborough’s Colony Plaza. He decided to get into the coffee-shop business with the help of some business partners, notably Ron Joyce, who built the empire after Horton’s tragic death in a car accident in 1974.

It was a consumers’ empire built out of strict attention to quality and convenience and, maybe most important of all, predictability, reliability and same-ness. All Tim Hortons coffee had to taste the same. That apple fritter you bought in Thunder Bay had to taste exactly like the one you scarfed down in Vancouver. The logos, the packaging and the decor of all Tim Hortons franchise locations were carefully chosen to ensure ease of use for car owners, with drive-through windows and ample parking. It’s important to note what was happening. While other businesses in Canada were getting into niche marketing, Tim’s was keeping itself firmly planted in the mass-marketing mindset of the 1950s school of consumerism—the Fordist economy, as it was called. You might even say that Tim’s was a paragon of Fordism in the modern age.

Certainly, the doughnut shop was linked to the mass-production society of the car manufacturers who helped change the landscape and the political culture of the country in the 1950s. Tim Hortons’ head office is in Oakville, Ontario, in the shadow of the giant Ford Motor Company of Canada plant and surrounded by the affluent suburbs that arose in the postwar boom. Its product and even its employees and owners are created in assembly-line fashion, through the “Doughnut University” training centre for franchise owners. Cars have almost always figured largely in Tim Hortons’ choice of locations, too. A large part of the success of Tim Hortons was linked to car culture and the willingness of the company to make its retail outlets car-friendly, with drive-in windows and lots of parking.

But the real genius behind Tim Hortons is modern marketing wisdom, leaps and bounds ahead of the era in which its nostalgic appeal lies. Tim Hortons is an idea, not just a product. It trades in images. Cleverly, Tim’s managed to align its brand with the same kind of citizens who had built the consumer nation in the 1950s—the commuters and the suburbanites, the canny shoppers looking for value and mass-produced reliability. These were exactly the kind of people who were proving useful to the political class, too—older voters or people disenchanted with politics, in search of simplicity in a complex consumer world. The alliance was sealed with some highly emotive advertising.

In 1997, Tim Hortons launched its “True Stories” ad campaign, to show the place of the doughnut shop in the lives of ordinary Canadians. It was this campaign—salt-of-the-earth citizens, mixed with the sweetness of doughnuts and double-doubles—that vaulted Tim’s from being a mere doughnut chain to being a patriotic icon in the Canadian imagination.

The ads were a result, no surprise, of market research, which showed that Tim Hortons represented more than a product to its patrons. In 1996, Tim Hortons’ marketing chief, Ron Buist, conducted focus-group testing on what people liked best about the restaurants. To Buist’s surprise, it was neither the doughnuts nor the coffee, but the daily ritual that Tim Hortons represented in Canadians’ lives and its place in their immediate communities—their familiar piece of home in a busy, unpredictable world.

The first “True Story” featured an elderly woman named Lillian who made a daily pilgrimage with a cane up a hill in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, to get her cup of coffee. The second ad showed Sammi the dog picking up coffee for his owner at a drive-through Tim Hortons. Subsequent ads, all inspired by real-life tales, would play up the familiarity of Tim’s in people’s lives. One of the most powerful, tear-jerking commercials, called “Proud Fathers,” told the story of how a Chinese immigrant had discouraged his son from playing hockey, only to reveal years later that he’d been watching and quietly cheering him on all along. Many of the commercials featured hockey. None included politicians, of course. Yet Tim Hortons’ “True Stories” were giving Canadian politicians a glimpse into the lives of people whose votes were precious in a consumer age. These ads were also giving political strategists, Conservative ones especially, some ideas about how to present politicians to consumer-citizens.

Patricia Cormack, a sociologist with St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, extensively probed the connection between those Tim Hortons ads and the rise of the doughnut shop to a national treasure and has written several scholarly works on the links between Tim’s and civic culture. In 2013 Cormack released a book,
Desiring Canada
, in which she and co-author James Cosgrave took a close look at the ways in which the Canadian identity was being shaped by pleasurable pursuits—eating doughnuts being one of them. In effect, Cormack argued, while politicians and governments were busy turning citizens into consumers, Tim Hortons was turning consumers into citizens. For Cormack, the Tim’s marketing campaign provided citizens with a virtual town square and a shared narrative—something that politics has always aspired to provide. “Banal nationalism,” a phrase coined by social-psychologist Michael Billig to describe the pride of citizens in their everyday existence, was the main patriotism on display in “True Stories.”

Cormack writes, “While some of the themes taken up by Tim Hortons—ruggedness, endurance, civility—do piggyback on clichéd versions of Canadianness, it is how and where these characteristics arise that shifts the ground of national identity to Tim Hortons itself. It is on this ground that the local, small, sensual and ambiguous articulation of national identity can thrive. It is also on this ground that Tim Hortons authorizes itself as the site and source of Canadianness.”

Moreover, in a country whose national symbols up to now had all been rural or historic—landscapes, the Rockies, the shores, the beaver, the forests—Tim Hortons landed as the first urban symbol. Or, more properly, the first
suburban
symbol, situated in the great, mass-market middle that politicians coveted.

Label This

The very first months of the twenty-first century saw a vivid display of ambivalence about the branding mania that had invaded the political and consumer culture in previous decades. Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, not even out of her twenties, in 1999 published her blockbuster book
No Logo
, which asked people to resist the corporate takeover of public space.
Klein warned that branding was unravelling the old order, turning the market into a competition for consumers’ minds, not just their money:

The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence. It may sound flaky, but that’s precisely the point… The brand builders conquered and a new consensus was born: the products that will flourish in the future will be the ones presented not as “commodities” but as concepts: the brand as experience, as lifestyle.

Klein didn’t invent this notion of consumer products turning into symbols. Cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard had been writing on the same themes for some time. “Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved—commitment to a scenario, whether it be a political or an advertising scenario,” Baudrillard wrote in his book
America
, a study of the culture of the United States in Reagan’s time. The marketing world had also been talking about the quest for customer “mind-share” and “mental real estate” since the 1970s. But Klein took these ideas into the realm of activism and the anti-corporate resistance emerging in North America as the old century ended and a new one began.
No Logo
became an immediate international bestseller, described by the
New York Times
as a “bible” for the anti-globalization movement, and it was summarized this way by the
Village Voice
: “Nothing short of a complete, user-friendly handbook on the negative effects that nineties überbrand marketing has had on culture, work and consumer choice...
No Logo
may itself be one of the anti-corporate movement’s best hopes yet.”

Even as Klein’s book was still flying off the shelves, Canadians were finding yet another brand to rally them to new heights of patriotism. No, not in doughnuts, but beer. Beer already was a point of Canadian pride and history. The two big beer giants, Molson and Labatt, could boast corporate origins dating back to pre-Confederation times. John Molson started brewing beer in the late 1700s in Quebec and the Molson descendants had their hands in every major business of Canada’s founding—railroads, hotels, even banks. Labatt was founded in 1847 by John Kinder, beginning its brewing history in London, Ontario, that petri dish for consumerism through much of the 1900s. Labatt’s pilsner lager, Blue, borrowed its name from the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and Labatt’s 50 ale was so dubbed to mark the midpoint of the century that shaped Canada.

Beer drinking and the great Canadian sport of hockey also went hand in hand, thanks largely to the brewers’ historic sponsorship of hockey teams and TV’s
Hockey Night in Canada
. Beer consumption in Canada and the brewers’ profits were tied to the NHL season. Endless commercials for Molson and Labatt played on the hockey theme, featuring strapping young Canadian lads knocking back some beer after a pickup hockey game or enjoying some brew while they watched the pros play.

With their provenance so tied up in Canadian history and culture, it’s probably not an accident that the fates of beer also ran parallel to political and consumer trends in Canada. When the country was preoccupied with American influence, Canadians would toast the differences between their superior beer and the inferior American brands. In 1985, for instance, the
Washington Post
reported on how Canadians had been forced to swallow their disdain for US beer during a brief brewers’ strike in Ontario, when bar owners were forced to stock their shelves with what patrons complained were more “watery” brands. “Nobody really likes it, but when there’s nothing else around, it’s okay,” Shelley Whitteker, manager of Toronto’s Black Bull Tavern, told the
Post
. In 1993, after Mulroney’s free trade deal paved the way for American beer to pour into Canada,
Montreal Gazette
columnist Jack Todd vented, “American beer is watery, sugary near-beer. It’s what you drink when you’re out of beer. It’s what you’d get if you poured yourself a half-glass of Labatt’s finest and then topped your glass off with Tang.”

When Canadians started turning against the big established brands in the commercial and political world in the 1980s, the beer industry replied with an explosion of new brands and micro-brews. And as wine consumption was steadily climbing in North America over the decades after the Second World War—Canadians drank five times more wine in the 2000s than they did in the 1960s, according to StatsCan—drinking beer was a way to proclaim common roots. Politicians loved to be photographed hoisting a brew with blue-collar folks on the campaign trail. “I’ve been working all my life,” Chrétien boasted for the cameras in 1993, as he helped load a case of beer into a truck. In the US, the class divide within the Democratic Party was dubbed the “wine track” versus the “beer track.” Beer drinkers, like Tim Hortons customers, didn’t want fancy, foreign names for their beverages. Beer drinkers could even be a country unto themselves, as ad man Terry O’Malley learned way back in the 1960s when he dreamed up the anthem and thumbs-up salute for “Red Cap Nation.”