Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (41 page)

Layton’s death from cancer, less than four months after the election, threw a question mark over whether the NDP would continue to march down the marketing path under new leadership. Topp stepped forward as a candidate, but he was defeated in March 2012 by former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister Thomas Mulcair. As Mulcair moved into the opposition leader’s office, many of the people at the centre of the Layton “project” stepped to the sidelines: Lavigne, McGrath and Anderson went on to other jobs. Topp took up a post with the British Columbia New Democrats.

But they left Mulcair with one parting gift: a TV ad, loaded with marketing wisdom gained from their extensive research after the 2011 election. Within a couple of weeks of Mulcair’s victory, an ad was launched to “introduce” the new NDP leader to Canadian TV viewers. Every frame of the ad, every word, every character in it, had been carefully chosen to appeal to target demographics. Olivia Chow appeared in the ad to assure the NDP base about continuity under new leadership. The words “fight” and “cares” had been inserted into the text because focus groups had been saying that these were positive traits associated with Layton. Plenty of women appeared in the ad, to thank them for supporting the NDP in expanded numbers in 2011. But the ad also featured shots of power tools and a workboots-sporting man climbing into his truck with his dog, because the NDP was now reaching out to yet another “next tier” of support: men, particularly rural men. With their eyes on the 2015 election, the NDP researchers had now identified seniors and men as their new targets among the electorate. So instead of airing this ad during
Grey’s Anatomy
, it went into heavy rotation in sports broadcasts. The NDP spent quite a bit of money—“seven figures” was all they would say—to make this political-marketing investment.

One more demographic group was at the front of NDP thinking when it made the meet-Mulcair ad: Liberals. After seeing how the Conservatives had pulverized two Liberal leaders with negative advertising, the New Democrats were adamant that the same thing wouldn’t happen to them. Now that they had a leader sitting in the Commons chair once occupied by Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, the NDP vowed that Mulcair would not succumb to the same death by a thousand advertising cuts.

Video Killed the Liberal Stars

Advertising was once the Liberals’ best friend. It helped turn Pierre Trudeau into a gunslinger and it sold a large part of the country on the constitution, complete with scenes of flying Canada geese. Liberals liked to try to solve problems with advertising, whether it was fighting inflation in the 1970s or separatism in the 1990s. But in the wake of the advertising and sponsorship scandals during Jean Chrétien’s reign, the long-time allegiance seemed to rupture. Indeed, that old friendship between Liberals and advertising started to look more like a curse in the twenty-first century. No matter where the federal Liberals turned from about 2003 onward, it seemed their fates were being undone by ads, and even more so by slick marketing.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Conservative ads that felled Dion (“not a leader”) and then the subsequent wave that greeted Ignatieff when he was crowned leader, uncontested, after the 2008 election. Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor and international journalist, was seen as the new best hope for putting the Liberals back in power. His urbane, freewheeling intellectualism would serve, many in the party hoped, as a natural foil to Harper’s strange but potent blend of populism and strict communications discipline. But that’s not how the battle shaped up at the front lines of the marketing wars, where the goal is to master the art of the “brutally simple.”

The Conservative attack lines on the two former professors were similar and aimed at people’s emotions, not their heads. Ignatieff would be pilloried for his “selfishness” and lack of patriotism. “He didn’t come back for you.” As with the Dion ads, the choice of attack lines came from extensive focus-group testing among the Canadians who didn’t pay much attention to politics, and who were suspicious of elites. Out rolled the “just visiting” campaign against Ignatieff, portraying him as an effete dilettante who had spent most of his working life abroad, only to return to Canada expecting to become prime minister. The ads began showing in the spring of 2009, not long after Ignatieff became Liberal leader.

“Why is Michael Ignatieff back in Canada after being away for thirty-four years?” the ads asked. “With no long-term plan for the economy, he’s not in it for Canada… just in it for himself. It’s the only reason he’s back. Michael Ignatieff: Just Visiting.”

Perhaps because the Liberals had been so previously in awe of the power of advertising, they responded to these ads over the years with a mix of paralysis and ambivalence. They argued among themselves, often in public, on blogs or political TV panels, about how to reply. They alternated between defensiveness or “sticks-and-stones-won’t-hurt-us” rhetoric. “They’re not attacking our family care plan or our early learning and child-care plan,” Ignatieff said after a new wave of ads was launched against him in early 2011. “It’s the same stuff they’ve been throwing at us for years, and it’s exactly what Canadians are tired about with Stephen Harper.”

Money was also a factor in the Liberals’ reluctance to grapple with the Conservatives’ attacks on their leaders. It costs a lot to wage an ad war, especially on prime time in non-election periods, and Liberals didn’t have the fundraising clout of the Conservatives anymore. Their traditional financial strength had been concentrated on attracting big corporate donations and when these were put under strict limits by Chrétien in 2003 and then banned outright by the Conservatives, the Liberals were caught short on the cash-flow front. They had not yet learned how to tap the grassroots for money on hot-button issues, as their rivals had done. In 2011, the numbers told the tale: while the Conservatives tapped more than 95,000 individuals for donations, the Liberals had barely one-third that number of donors—just over 32,000.

In the absence of a plan to match ad fire with ad fire, Ignatieff and the Liberals then tried other replies. Ignatieff published a 2009 book,
True Patriot Love
, which read like a protest-too-much reply to his detractors. But people who were persuaded by the Conservative attack ads, Muttart’s 10 percent of unengaged voters, were not likely to buy or read a book written by an academic. Nor were they following political developments all that closely, and the Liberals’ whole strategy seemed organized around the Ottawa “bubble.” The book spoke only to converted Liberals.

Ignatieff was surrounded by people highly connected to the formidable Liberal machine of the twentieth century. His first chief of staff was Ian Davey, son of the legendary “Rainmaker,” Keith Davey. His second chief of staff was Peter Donolo, the communications expert who had turned Jean Chrétien’s image around in the 1990s. In theory then, at least, Ignatieff’s circle was built on the glory of past Liberal marketing successes and should have been expected to march into the new era. Much had happened in Canadian political marketing, though, since Keith Davey’s time, and even since Donolo’s first stint in the 1990s. Most importantly, the Liberals were no longer in power, and they were still being pummelled by the Conservatives.

US consultant Frank Luntz, in his 2006 speech to the Civitas group, had urged the Conservatives never to let up on the Liberals. “I want you to do something for me because I know you might be able to make this happen,” Luntz said. “Your Liberal government was corrupt. It was disgusting. The way they wasted your hard-earned tax dollars was a disgrace. I want you to leave here committed and insisting that the Conservative government hold that previous Liberal government accountable… so that every Canadian knows and will never forget and will never allow another government to steal more from them.”

Harper wasn’t in the room when Luntz gave that advice, but he clearly shared some of his views. A Canadian website called openparliament.ca tracked “favourite words” of Canadian politicians based on what they said in the House of Commons over the years. Repeatedly, it found that Harper’s most oft-repeated word was “Liberal.”

All in all, it seemed abundantly clear that while their opponents were practising increasingly sophisticated marketing against them, Liberals themselves were tethered to what had worked for them in the past. They continued to see themselves, for instance, as defenders of the institutions they used to run. Former Ontario premier Bob Rae, who left the NDP to join the Liberals and seek the 2006 leadership, would politely chide reporters who used the word “taxpayers” in questions about how the Harper government was spending money. “They’re not taxpayers, they’re citizens,” Rae would say.

Inside Ottawa, similarly, there was a lot of Liberal outrage over how Harper had twice shut down Parliament and withheld information about detainees in Afghanistan and the costs associated with the G-8 and G-20 summits in Canada in 2010. Liberals remained fired up on what they saw as abuse of democracy, holding regular press conferences and seminars to denounce the affronts to institutions, but none of these issues appeared to resonate with Tim Hortons Canadians.

And the Liberals would repeatedly invoke the rule of law as a favoured reply to the gut appeal of marketing politics. Liberal senator Dennis Dawson tried to fight back against the Conservatives’ ad blitz with earnest legislation, introducing a bill in 2011 that would clamp down on any party flooding the airwaves with ads in the three months immediately before an election. Dawson’s bill proposed to make any ads airing in this time period count toward the official limits imposed during formal election periods, to address what he saw as a growing loophole in the laws. “For decades now, political parties have always waited for the election call before launching their official campaign. But now, the Conservatives are trying to impose on Canadians permanent campaigning, the same way it is done in the United States,” Dawson said when he introduced his bill. “The Canadian way is to debate ideas, not to throw money around all year long to try to discredit your opponents. The Canadian way is also to work and govern between each election, not to spend most of your time campaigning against the other political parties… Do we want to be in permanent electoral mode as the Conservatives are trying to do, or do we want to preserve the Canadian tradition of having fair elections, where ideas prevail over money?”

Dawson was asking reasonable questions for another era in politics, but the world had moved on. The days of the Commons as a legal debating society had started to fade back in the 1980s, when the number of lawyers on the MPs’ benches was being matched and then overtaken by people with business backgrounds. Many Conservatives liked to boast that Stephen Harper was not a lawyer, the first prime minister in decades who wasn’t groomed for office in the courts or in one of the country’s big law firms. So while Liberals were inviting citizens to peer more closely into the halls of lofty institutions, to see the world through the same legal frame that they did, their chief opponents were out talking to those same citizens in the shopping aisles. The Liberals seemed to lack the language or the motivation to pursue hard-sell political marketing. It was an echo of that long-ago 1957 federal election when the Liberals hewed to their plodding, institutional brand of politics while Dalton Camp and the Conservatives ran advertising rings around them.

One other large impediment stood in the way of Liberals becoming a true marketing party in the twenty-first century: a strong central head office in Ottawa. Historically, the Liberal party has functioned as a loose federation, with strong provincial wings and various other commissions in charge of youth, women or aboriginal members. Political marketing, as the New Democrats and Conservatives had learned, requires tight control from the centre, which the Liberals lacked. Herding Liberals into tight message discipline was like herding cats. Not a week would go by without a disgruntled leak from the Liberal caucus, or a Liberal blog post bemoaning the state of the party. Up until 2007 or so, the party didn’t even have a national membership list or any central fundraising apparatus. Various party presidents and executive directors had been trying to address this situation, but short of blowing up the entire Liberal organization, the party was stuck with a structure ill-suited to impose the discipline and marketing control of their rivals.

One Country, One Mass Market

Ignatieff took to the road in the summer of 2010, on what was called the “Liberal Express” tour. His bus would make frequent stops at Tim Hortons on its travels across the country, to prove his down-to-earth Canadian credentials. But the leader’s heart didn’t seem to be in this idea of wedding politics to consumerism. “It’s something I actually don’t like about the Conservative vision of the country. I don’t think there’s a division between a Tim Hortons nation and any other nation,” he told the
Toronto Star
in an interview in 2010. “I don’t think there’s a division between people who’ve lived outside the country and people who’ve lived inside. I don’t think there’s a division between people who go to Tim Hortons for their coffee and people who go to Starbucks for their coffee. I see one country, right?”

This was the nub of the problem. Neither Ignatieff nor Liberals in general had the appetite to do the kind of scrupulous micro-targeting that the Conservatives and the NDP were capable of doing. That Liberal bus was travelling mainly through friendly territory for the party, and not into the terrain of those disengaged voters who increasingly decide elections, as the Conservatives had learned through market research. This wasn’t just a case of squeamishness on the part of the Liberals. Modern marketing methods, many in the party believed, sat directly at odds with the traditions of Liberals as a mass-appeal voice of the moderate middle.