Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (32 page)

As a favour to his wife, Harper also made a surprise appearance at the National Arts Centre in 2009, to play the piano and sing the Beatles tune “With a Little Help from My Friends,” accompanied by internationally renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. That was such a public relations success that Harper went on to do more occasional musical appearances, such as when he sang “Sweet Caroline” and another few old favourites at the Conservative Christmas party in 2010. With increasing frequency, the PMO would also issue photographs depicting the prime minister in musical pursuits. Canadian rock star Bryan Adams thought he was going to 24 Sussex to discuss copyright legislation, only to find himself thrown into a “photo op” with the prime minister. “Quite disturbing,” he later told
Maclean’s
magazine. Alex Marland, the Canadian political-marketing expert, studied these photos to see what messages the Conservatives were trying to convey with their PMO-issued images. Marland tallied up all the photos released in 2010, and came up with a scorecard. More than 82 percent of the 2010 photos showed Harper in business dress, often attending to meetings or paperwork. More than 35 percent of the photos included Canadian flags. And more than 7 percent included Harper in scenes with the military, police or courts. Another 8 percent featured hockey or curling, just like Canadians’ favourite commercials for doughnuts and beer.

Once upon a time, established media outlets might have turned up their nose at using photographs generated by the government’s publicity machine. But the explosion of demand for content on the internet, as well as the cash-strapped state of media outlets, made it harder to refuse photos that reporters couldn’t get anywhere else. The name of Harper’s official photographer, Jason Ransom, began to appear more and more in the photo credits for mainstream and other media outlets.

Harper, says Soudas, was perfectly placed to pitch to ordinary Canadians, because he himself was an average guy from the middle-class suburbs—unlike his predecessors, who had more elite backgrounds from the halls of powerful businesses or leading Canadian law firms. He was the first prime minister since the 1960s, in fact, who didn’t have a law degree (with the exception of Joe Clark, the political science graduate who served briefly from mid-1979 to early 1980). Even after becoming prime minister, Harper fiercely guarded his average-guy pursuits—whether it was going to movies or holding low-key gatherings with friends and family.

“We don’t know the score, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper was spotted Tuesday playing a round of miniature golf in New York state,” Canadian Press reported in the summer of 2011. “Harper and more than a dozen guests reportedly dropped by at the Broadway Driving Range and Miniature Golf Course in Depew, outside Buffalo. Owner Tom Straus tells YNN cable news in New York state that he was notified a day earlier that an important dignitary planned to play at his course. Straus said the prime minister paid for his group’s round of golf.”

From the very beginning, Soudas said, Harper’s government went out of its way to keep communications simple, ordinary and non-elitist. One way of doing that, for instance, was to keep big dollar signs out of press releases and speeches. “Find me one press release during my time in PMO where the press release had a dollar sign. Never,” Soudas said. “You know why? People have never seen $300 billion. They’ve never seen $10 million. They’ve never seen $1 million. Look at PMO press releases. They always talk about what we are doing, not how much we are paying to get it.” The same thing held true for Harper’s speeches, Soudas said—far better for the prime minister to be talking about what people were getting for their money, not the money itself.

As for the so-called “visuals,” the Conservative government remained unapologetically, aggressively attentive to staging, backgrounds and props. Press releases were frequently issued with the warning “Photo op only” so that the prime minister or his ministers could hold events with no questions from reporters and a picture would be the only public record. On this front, the tension with the press gallery was a constant undercurrent. Harper and his ministers balked at using the old National Press Theatre, objecting to its old-fashioned desk and stage. At one early point in the ongoing press–PMO struggle, Harper’s office advised the parliamentary press gallery that government ministers would use the theatre if it was renovated to allow for high-tech screens, which could project the requisite visual images to serve as backdrops for announcements. The press gallery eventually obliged, installing the screens and renovating the stage to accommodate a podium, but even after two terms in office, the prime minister had only darkened the door of the press theatre a couple of times.

The main method for Conservative stage-management was the so-called message event proposal—a standard-issue, highly bureaucratic form that had to be completed by anyone in government who was planning a public event. Then the forms would be put into a chain of approval, usually with the Prime Minister’s Office having the ultimate say over whether the plan could proceed. The headings themselves on the MEPs revealed a scrupulous attention to marketing detail. Under “The Event,” for instance, would-be public performers had to say whether this was their own idea or a response to an invitation. Under “Messaging,” there were requests to provide “desired soundbites,” “desired headlines” and “desired picture.” Under “Logistics,” the form asked how long the speech would be and even what the person or persons were planning to wear. The final sections of the form dealt with “rollout,” including “marketing follow-through”—basically all the details of how the message landed. If nothing else, these forms demonstrated just how much planning was going into the slightest communication from this government, with not a thing left to chance.

Canadian Press was able to lay its hands on more than a thousand pages of these forms in 2010 by using an Access to Information request. “We discussed every single issue and micromanaged every news release—everything,” one former official from Harper’s government, who wanted to remain anonymous, told Canadian Press. “Pretty much any event, or any rollout of an announcement, would have an MEP that would lay out the strategy.”

Canadian Press offered a few snippets from the forms it unearthed. The July 15, 2007 announcement of $12,360 for a retirement centre in Edmonton was approved by the Privy Council Office for its “friendly and celebratory” tone that would help MP Laurie Hawn “highlight Canada’s New Government’s contribution to helping seniors.” An August 2008 MEP envisioned Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Public Works Minister Christian Paradis standing on the back ramp of a Chinook helicopter as the “ideal event photograph” for the announcement of new military copters and drones—a “proactive opportunity” to highlight the federal government’s commitment to provide life-saving equipment to the Canadian Forces. A 2008 request from an Ottawa journalism student for an interview with CIDA on its Canada Fund for Africa generated a detailed two-page MEP—even though there was only “remote potential for sale of the article to a Canadian magazine or weekend feature section of a national daily.”

Marketing was everywhere in Harper’s Ottawa. Tim Naumetz, a reporter with the
Hill Times
, picked up on the marketing lingo in early 2011 when he heard Soudas sending reporters at a press conference over to his colleague Sara McIntyre and her handful of press releases. “Sara has the product over there,” Soudas said. Naumetz also reported on an interview he heard with Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, on CBC Radio’s
As It Happens
, when she was asked why government hadn’t acted sooner to warn about carcinogenic chemicals in plastic baby bottles. “We issued a product…” Aglukkaq started to say, before using the more standard term, “news release.” Naumetz, in his story, noted that this was all in keeping with a government that was highly interested in marketing and “retail politics.”

Outside the corridors of Parliament, too, strict attention was paid to image and props. Conservative MPs showed up at community announcements with giant cheques to pose for the old-fashioned “grip-and-grin” photos with grateful recipients of government largesse. The problem, however, was that some of these cheques were emblazoned with the Conservative Party logo instead of the official Government of Canada wordmark (which was red)—a subtle suggestion that the money was coming as the result of partisan favour.

The idea for the big cheques reportedly came from cabinet minister John Baird when he was head of the Treasury Board. Baird, in his various jobs in cabinet, repeatedly showed his own acute attention to visuals. When he took over as Foreign Affairs Minister in 2011, for instance, one of his first acts was to order photographs of Queen Elizabeth II to be displayed in every Canadian mission abroad and his ministry’s headquarters on Sussex Drive in Ottawa. Baird also caused a mini-stir when news reports that same year revealed that he had ordered gold lettering on his new business cards and removed the name “Lester B. Pearson Building” from the address field, presumably to excise any reminder of the Liberals on a Conservative calling card. Baird also presided over ceremonies to rename Ottawa landmarks after former Conservative prime ministers. The old city hall became the John Diefenbaker Building and a stretch of scenic road beside the Ottawa River became the John A. Macdonald Parkway. The historic Bank of Montreal building on Wellington Street was also named after Canada’s first prime minister.

The Conservative government became fond of slapping advertising-type names on pieces of legislation, with politically friendly terms or loaded words. Thus, a package of Criminal Code reforms was called “The Safe Streets and Communities Act.” The bill to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board was the “Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act.” A crackdown on human trafficking was called the “Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act.” The budget was not simply a budget anymore: it was an “Economic Action Plan.” In early 2012, the Conservatives were caught fiddling with one of their legislative labels, obviously trying to do some marketing on the fly. A controversial bill to allow for internet surveillance was printed up and sent to the Commons as the “Lawful Access Act” for introduction in mid-February. But at the last minute, with grassroots opposition already building to the intrusive potential of the bill, the name was changed to the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.”

It all felt a little obvious, an affront to people who didn’t see politics as marketing. One of Canada’s top lawyers, Edward Greenspan, and a leading Canadian criminologist, Anthony Doob, assailed the bill-labelling practice in a hard-hitting
Toronto Star
commentary in 2012. Some of the titles on the “law-and-order” bills, they said, were at best misleading and at worst, just plain wrong. “Criminal justice policy is a product being shaped by the ‘need’ to attract votes. Conservative criminal justice policy is developed not to serve public or societal needs but to help market the Conservatives to specific constituencies,” Greenspan and Doob wrote. Allan Gregg, now well at a distance from this brand of conservatism, also spoke out against the labelling, calling it part of an overall “assault on reason.” In a major speech delivered at Carleton University in September 2012, Gregg called it “Orwellian.”

“By obfuscating the true purpose of laws under the gobbledy-gook of double speak, governments are admitting that their intentions probably lack both support and respect,” Gregg said. But lawyers and academics were not part of the target audience. Conservatives were aiming a lot of their governance at people who didn’t care so much about government or politics at all: the 10 percent of shopping voters that Muttart had identified as crucial to the party’s electoral fortunes.

Thierry St. Cyr, a Bloc Québécois MP, also openly called out the political-marketing slogans on legislation in a spirited address to the Commons in November 2010. St. Cyr noted that the opposition had been complaining for a while about the Conservatives’ penchant for slapping slogans on legislation, only to be mocked for focusing on unimportant matters. That very day, the Commons was debating the “Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants” legislation. (This was a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to charge fees to would-be immigrants, dangling the promise of acceptance to Canada in exchange for the right price.)

“Why does the government insist on giving its bills stupid titles?” St. Cyr asked. “This happens not just in the justice area but everywhere. They talk about cracking down on crooked consultants or protecting Canadians against something or other when the bill does not even do that. They talk about ending early release for dangerous criminals when this does not exist. These titles are complete lies… The government does it for political-marketing reasons.” But St. Cyr, in this rant, also appeared to acknowledge that Canada’s busy consumer-citizens were ripe targets for such marketing techniques—that it didn’t matter whether the political class was offended:

Obviously, the people at home are not going to get a copy of the bill and look at the changes it makes to the Criminal Code. They have obligations and work to do. They are very busy with families, children, jobs and homes. I understand that we cannot all study this country’s laws. So what will the average person rely on to try to form an opinion? The average person will rely on what he is told the bill does. If he is told the bill protects people against murderers, he will say it is a good bill. Who is opposed to protecting people against murderers? The answer is obvious. But the public is being deceived and fooled by the government. I think that is insulting to the public.

Recall that old advertising battle over how to view consumers—the choice between Barnum and Powers? St. Cyr was effectively saying that the Barnum view—a sucker born every minute—was prevailing in Canadian politics. St. Cyr, incidentally, lost his seat in the 2011 election.