Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (31 page)

On March 24, 2006, Harper’s new communications director, Sandra Buckler, sat down with the executive of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery. Buckler had a considerable pedigree in Conservative politics, federally and in Ontario, but she had also worked as a lobbyist with some big corporate players in Canada, including Bombardier, Coca-Cola and De Beers. One of Buckler’s goals in sitting down with the press gallery, it appeared, was to spell out the ways in which the government would be adhering to marketing principles in its dealings with Parliament Hill journalists. “We’re a different kind of government and we place a heavy value on communications and we like the visuals,” Buckler said. “This is a government that places a high emphasis on communicating directly to people and finding the best opportunity on how to do that.”

The media had already noticed. Harper was holding occasional press conferences, but in the Commons foyer, where he was flanked by flags and a podium—visual reminders of his power. His office, primarily through Buckler and press secretary Dimitri Soudas, was insisting that reporters put their names on a list to ask questions, a request that stirred outrage in the press gallery because of fears it would lead to the Conservatives picking the questions, and the questioners, that would be most friendly to the government. At one testy encounter with journalists in April 2006, Harper pointedly refused to take a question from CBC TV reporter Julie Van Dusen because she wasn’t on the PMO-approved list. “Why are you ignoring the lineup? We’re in a lineup, and I’m next,” Van Dusen snapped at the PM.

PMO–press relations were rapidly deteriorating by May of 2006, so much that journalists staged a walkout at a Harper press conference. Not long afterward, Harper himself announced he would have nothing more to do with reporters working in the parliamentary press gallery. “Unfortunately the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government. They don’t ask questions at my press conferences now. We’ll just take the message out on the road,” the prime minister said. Many reporters were arguing that press conferences were part of the public-service part of the prime minister’s job. Harper’s office, however, appeared to see them as marketing opportunities—“getting the message out.”

Buckler, in her March meeting with the gallery executive, had seemed genuinely perplexed that journalists wouldn’t see things that way. On more than one occasion, Buckler had assured reporters that she was sensitive to their needs for eye-grabbing pictures and juicy stories, seeing these as marketing needs, too. The problem, however, rested in a classic collision between public service and marketing. Many of the press gallery reporters were long-serving denizens of Parliament Hill who saw their role as part of the democratic process, not as representatives of a business.

Buckler’s explanation about the importance of images, like Luntz’s speech, would prove to be an accurate forecast of the style of government to come, one that would go to great lengths to micro-manage its every presentation before the public, with great attention to props, backdrops and staging. Like Liberal governments of the past, the Harper government would become very attached to the ad business. Spending on government advertising climbed from $41.3 million in 2005–06 to $136 million in 2009–10. Much of this was spent plastering billboards, construction sites and highways with big “Economic Action Plan” signs: bold blue and green upward-pointing arrows telling Canadians where their tax dollars were being spent. One such sign was even thrown up in Charlottetown to boast of a doorknob replacement, much to the outrage of the opposition.

“This is not a government, it is a propaganda machine,” Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez thundered one day in the Commons. “Just look at all the money being wasted to put up signs. A doorknob is changed and a sign goes up. A doorbell is repaired and a sign goes up. A sign has probably already gone up to announce the upcoming installation of another sign.”

Meanwhile, the steady increase in communications operatives, which had already begun in earnest under the Liberals in the early part of the twenty-first century, continued apace within the public and political service. A public-service survey in 2008 showed a 23 percent increase in the number of communications personnel working for the government between 2003 and 2007. Even more tellingly, that same survey showed that over a third of the PMO’s staff was involved in communications work, while only 8 percent were working on policy. A rough count by the Ottawa-based
Hill Times
newspaper in 2011 found more than 1,500 communications staff people working in federal offices, including a whopping 87 alone within the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office.

A search through the federal government’s electronic directory in the Harper years would reveal roughly three hundred public servants with the word “marketing” in their titles. Some of these were explicable, for people whose jobs involved government oversight of marketing operations in the private sector. But plenty of others appeared to be tagged on to roles that were once simply called “communications” or “public affairs.” The all-powerful Privy Council Office had a couple of jobs with the title “analyst, advertising and marketing.” The proliferation of marketers within the halls of the public service spoke to the growing sense that when it came to talking to the citizens, the conversation would be between marketing experts and consumers of the government “product.”

No one in the media was shocked at this dramatic rise in attention to communication at the top levels of government. Where journalists had been accustomed to freewheeling access to cabinet ministers and MPs in past governments, Harper’s government maintained a strict discipline over every utterance from its spokespersons, elected and unelected. Other governments had issued “talking points,” for instance, to keep everyone toeing the party line in public pronouncements, but under Conservative rule, these were scripts from which no one could veer. The talking points were also sent out as friendly emails to Conservative bloggers and online personalities, to make sure the chorus was as large as possible. Media inquiries to ministers’ offices would yield terse, generally fact-free emails, which read more like advertising slogans than replies. “Our government believes in accountability,” for instance, would be a typical reply to a question for more information or transparency. These replies were usually generated from within the PMO, which required staff to clear all communications at the “Centre.” The same kind of slogans would then be cycled through the statements in the Commons, then regurgitated on political TV shows every evening. The MPs or ministers who were best at repeating the talking points, adding inflection or enough drama to make it seem like they thought up the lines themselves, were the most promising salespersons in this marketing-fixated government.

Harper’s government was also the first one to really have to contend with the new communications universe on social media—blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of which only came to be popular in Canadian politics after the 2006 election. On the one hand, these fast-moving modes of communication were a boon for a government that wanted to get around the traditional media “filter.” Marketing messages could be delivered directly to citizens, whether it was a PMO-produced video or a 140-character tweet. On the other hand, the fragmentation of the audience made it even more of a challenge to stay on top of all the communication, through all channels. There was the irony: the more democratic political communication became outside Ottawa, the more control that had to be exercised from the “Centre.”

Thanks to social media, individual voices were now more significant, and maybe more powerful, than any group in modern Canadian politics. Voters who wanted to get involved in the political debate at one time would have to get in touch with their local MP or party riding association, and then go to a meeting to chat about their views. Or they could contact the media and drum up interest in their causes and concerns. Through Facebook, Twitter and blogs, now every person could be a publisher, and there was no need to test one’s views with the editors or in the crucible of brokerage-party debates. Angry about the gun registry or how the government handled foreign policy? Throw your opinion online, gather your own constituency. Think your party chose the wrong leader? Write a blog or a Facebook post, get immediate feedback. The lesson in all of this was that there was no mass-market audience for communication, at least not in the ways that had existed for previous governments. Every Canadian could be a “micro-target.”

Customer Satisfaction

As soon as the swearing-in was over, the Conservative government got busy keeping all those consumer-friendly promises it created in the platform overhaul of 2005. The accountability act was unveiled with much fanfare. The child-care agreements Paul Martin’s government negotiated with the provinces were wound down, and parents began to receive their $100 cheques in July of 2006.

On June 30, 2006, Harper made a large show of living up to his GST promise—or, at least, the first half of it. The big prime ministerial entourage pulled up at a Giant Tiger discount store in the south of Ottawa and Harper announced that Canadians were just a day away from happier moments at the cash register. With the help of some cardboard props, Harper stood at the checkout counter in Giant Tiger and flipped the “7 percent” sign to show “6 percent” instead, the new rate effective on Canada Day. At the end of December 2007, Harper sealed the whole deal, appearing at the same Mississauga store where he unveiled the original election promise, flipping more signs to announce the new 5-percent tax, effective on New Year’s Day.

It was hard to find an economist in Canada who thought this was a good idea. The huge cut to the treasury, amounting to billions a year, would plunge the budgets back into deficits within a couple of years. Stephen Gordon, a professor of economy at the University of Laval, repeatedly warned that sound economic policy had given way to love of consumption—by the populace and by Canadian politicos. “What is revealing here is not that the cut was popular, but that no one in federal politics dared suggest reversing it,” Gordon said. “The winning electoral recipe—on the left and on the right—is to offer free money. Gone is the sense that there are trade-offs and costs that have to be shared with the benefits.”

The Conservatives were using other tax measures for marketing purposes, too—an idea inspired, in fact, by Bill Clinton and the small, micro-targeted tax breaks he offered to Americans during his time in office, such as for school uniforms. These tax measures even had a cute retail name: “boutique tax cuts.” Need to buy hockey equipment or ballet shoes for your kids? The Conservatives would give you tax credits of up to $75 a year for each child. Are you a tradesperson who needs to buy tools? Here’s a tax deduction for you, too. Do you volunteer as a firefighter? Take this $3,000 tax credit, as thanks for your service. Canada’s tax laws suddenly started expanding with all these pockets of very carefully targeted measures, aimed at the “market segments” the Conservatives wanted to attract in the electorate. All those “Dougies” out there working in the trades were expected to remember the cash-back-for-tools discount, for instance, when they went to the voting booth.

This micro-targeting was also behind the steady stream of small, sometimes obscure funding announcements emanating from the government. Why, for instance, did the Conservative government feel it necessary in 2011 to give $256,675 to a snowmobile club in the Pontiac riding of Lawrence Cannon, just across the river from Ottawa? Because the marketing strategists had been combing through poll numbers and realized that people who drove snowmobiles fit the profile of potential Conservative voters. Again, in any number of ways, the government was shaping its “product” around its market research.

The Conservatives, like their Liberal predecessors, also kept a keen eye trained on multicultural segments of the Canadian population, and remained ever ready to accommodate them. The Liberal party had traditionally been the home for newcomers to Canada, largely out of habit or the various ways in which the Grits historically pitched themselves as open to immigration and multiculturalism. But Jason Kenney was given the job of luring these communities to the Conservative fold once the party gained power, and he set about the task with a whirl of tours to festivals, churches and local gatherings. He realized that Conservatives could connect to these citizens the same way that they reached Canadians who were born here—through their consumer and pocketbook concerns.

“At the end of the day, people choose to immigrate to Canada not because they want to live a seminar on diversity, not because they have particular grievances related to their country of origin,” Kenney would say. “They come here for opportunity. They come here with the expectation that if they work hard, they’ll be able to have a higher standard of living, and pass on their future to their kids, significantly more prosperous than what they could have had back home.”

Music and Pictures

Dimitri Soudas ended up doing nine years at the centre of communications for Harper, in opposition and in government from 2002 to 2011. Patrick Muttart stayed only for the first few years of Harper’s government, working quietly behind the scenes in the PMO before departing Canada to take up a marketing job with a large American firm. The real communications manager, the real brander-in-chief was Harper himself, Soudas said. “People try to analyze who are the strategists, the brains, this, that—it’s him.” And no one should underestimate Laureen Harper’s influence on the branding effort either, according to Soudas. With her own background in graphic design and a creative flair, Laureen Harper was Harper’s “number-one adviser,” especially when it came to presenting the public face of the prime minister. It was Laureen Harper, for instance, who kept communication lines open to select reporters, sending periodic emails about events in the Harper household: the adoption of a new cat or the acquisition of a new blue motorcycle for the doyenne of 24 Sussex Drive.