Shopping for Votes

How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them

Susan Delacourt

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781771621090
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771621106
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This second edition offers an insightful and provocative look at the inside world of political marketing in Canada—and what this means about the state of our democracy in the twenty-first century—from a leading political commentator.Inside the political backrooms of Ottawa, the Mad Men of Canadian politics are planning their next consumer friendly pitch. Where once politics was seen as a public service, increasingly it’s seen as a business, and citizens are the customers. But its unadvertised products are voter apathy and gutless public policy. Susan Delacourt takes readers into the world of Canada’s top political marketers, from the 1950s to the present, explaining how parties slice and dice their platforms for different audiences and how they manage the media. The current system divides the country into "niche” markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision. Little wonder then, that most Canadians have checked out of the political process: less than two per cent of the population belongs to a political party and fewer than half of voters under the age of thirty showed up at the ballot box in the last few federal elections. Provocative, incisive, entertaining and refreshingly non-partisan, Shopping for Votes offers a new narrative for understanding political culture in Canada.

Sealing the Deal

7

Market Leader

Before Canada’s political marketing tale plunges into the twenty-first century, a quick recap of the story so far may be in order. This shopping expedition through Canada’s political history has taken us from the heart of Toronto in the 1950s and back and forth to Ottawa through the following decades, with a quick stop or two in Alberta. Winding through the first few decades after the Second World War, we saw the political class getting swept up in all the fun of the advertising and polling worlds. But by the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian politics was being rocked by the same forces that were rippling through the consumer world: niche markets and the rejection or rebranding of old, established labels. Citizens were not clear whether business or government could do the best job of running the country.

Someone else was on a parallel journey all those years: a man named Stephen Harper, whose biography closely tracks the progress of Canada into the era of political marketing. Born on April 30, 1959, Harper was raised in Leaside and Etobicoke, middle-class enclaves of Toronto, where advertising, polling and television first gained their major foothold in Canadian political culture. At the age of nineteen, in 1978, a disillusioned Harper dropped out of the University of Toronto and headed to Alberta, where the grassroots foment against old, established politics was simmering.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Harper shuffled between big-brand and niche parties, much in the same way that Canadians were switching their loyalties to car companies or detergent labels. He had arrived in Alberta as a Liberal. “When Stephen first came to Edmonton, he was a Trudeau Liberal. He thought Trudeau was god,” Frank Glenfield, Harper’s first boss at Imperial Oil when he moved west, recalled in an interview with the Edmonton Journal. But soon after Harper’s immersion into economics at the University of Calgary, he shrugged off his Liberalism and became a Progressive Conservative. That didn’t last long, though. He worked on Parliament Hill as an assistant to Calgary Progressive Conservative MP Jim Hawkes for a while in the 1980s, then he went back to Alberta and got involved with the fledgling Reform Party. He rose quickly in those ranks, becoming a leading Reform MP in the 1990s, but Harper eventually walked away from that brand, too, choosing to take up a job with the National Citizens Coalition as the twentieth century was drawing to a close. This ambivalence about his ambitions closely matched Canadians’ shifting feelings about politics, it seemed, through these decades of waning attachment to parties and declining turnout at the polls.

Fatefully, though, Harper would return to politics in 2002, first to lead the Canadian Alliance and then, in 2004, a brand-new Conservative party created by the merger of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. Although he would see this as his signature achievement, it wasn’t the only merger Harper achieved. On his route to the top political job in Canada, this avid student of the marketing age would merge consumer and civic culture in a way that no politician had achieved to date in Canada.

Tim Hortons Canadians: The 10 Percent

In the fall of 2005, Harper and some of his top communications aides descended on Toronto to film some TV commercials, in preparation for an election that could come anytime under Paul Martin’s fragile minority government. Although Martin had seized power from Jean Chrétien in 2003 with huge hopes of revitalizing the Liberal “brand”—putting a new and improved label on a party that had enjoyed twelve years in power—the scandals over the waste and corruption of Chrétien’s advertising and sponsorship program had taken their toll. It was a fitting coda in this consumer-citizenship age: a political brand destroyed by a bad advertising campaign.

The Harper team had commandeered some vacant commercial space on Queen Street West—at the very trendy heart of the Liberals’ Toronto stronghold—to do the filming. While they were there, the man in charge of Conservative marketing, Patrick Muttart, was presenting the team with an arresting, visual slide show. Like many political strategists before him, Muttart had studied demographics, particularly the statistical profiles being provided by the party’s pollster, Dimitri Pantazopoulos, which allowed him to sort citizens into likely or unlikely supporters of the Conservatives.

Allan Gregg had done the same thing with his “typologies” back in the 1980s. Here, though, is where Muttart’s marketing knowledge came in handy. Unlike other strategists, who would present findings such as this with charts, statistics and graphs, Muttart had found a colourful way to explain to fellow Conservative operatives how he was “segmenting” Canadian voters: he created fictional archetypes out of the demographic data and gave these archetypes names and lives. “Dougie” was a single guy in his late twenties who worked at Canadian Tire, and who could be lured to the Conservative cause if they could get him to shed his political apathy and vote. He agreed with Conservative policies on crime and welfare abuse, but he was more interested in hunting and fishing than politics. Up on the screen, Muttart flashed pictures of a typical “Dougie,” along with his house, his car and the Canadian Tire where he worked. Then there were “Rick and Brenda,” a common-law couple with working-class jobs, who could also probably be persuaded to swing to the Conservatives if the party pushed the right buttons with their bread-and-butter concerns about taxes or the costs of keeping up their home. Up on the screen shone the faces of this couple, their suburban home and their minivan.

Conservatives had to go looking for their potential supporters where they lived, Muttart said. “That means going to Tim Hortons, not to Starbucks,” he said. “That means going to Canadian Tire instead of Holt Renfrew.” Of course, some voters were not worth chasing. “Fiona and Marcus,” for instance, were a high-income, childless couple who lived in an expensive condominium, who didn’t mind paying high taxes and would probably always vote Liberal. And in that same vein, Muttart’s little slide show finally landed on “Zoe,” a single, urban female, fond of yoga and organic food, living in a highrise in Toronto, who was probably a lost cause—nothing was likely to lure her away from the Liberals or New Democrats. Forget about Zoe, Muttart said.

Harper and the team watched the slide show with nods of approval and the occasional chuckle. This was an eminently clear way of seeing Canada’s political map, perfect for people like Harper, a baby boomer who had grown up with television images and characters. These weren’t just numbers; they were stories, or commercials. With Zoe’s face still up on the screen, lunch arrived for the group: plates of sandwiches—fussy, fancy sandwiches. The group burst out laughing when they saw who had supplied their lunch: Zoe’s catering company. Muttart had put a Canadian twist on Margaret Thatcher’s “Essex Man” or Tony Blair’s “Basildon Man.” Or, if you want to cast further back, you could say that Muttart had located Canada’s version of Reagan Democrats, or those marketing-susceptible voters who were sketched out in Canadian Forum articles by the mysterious Philip Spencer in the 1940s.

Muttart believed that a Canadian conservative coalition could be built by appealing to multiple segments of the population, some with little to no interest in politics—the squeezed working class who saw themselves reflected in those Tim Hortons “True Stories” ads, for instance. Other segments were generally apathetic to politics but might rouse themselves to vote if they heard something they liked about their consumerist concerns. This smart-marketing politico was figuring out how to turn Canadians’ shaky attitudes toward politics into an asset for his party. In advance of the 2005 campaign, Muttart had spent a lot of time travelling and reading and divining the lessons of other successful political marketing campaigns to woo the middle class. He was politically ecumenical in his studies, finding things to learn from Tony Blair’s New Labour as well as from Margaret Thatcher and the Republicans under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Muttart had pored over past Canadian election campaigns, too, taking careful note of everything from the “visuals” to the personal dynamics. But it was in Australia, under Coalition Prime Minister John Howard, where he found some of his largest inspiration. Howard had also built a base of appeal around the working class—the “battlers,” as they were called Down Under. In a 2004 radio interview, Howard described this demographic slice of Australia in terms of their aspirations: “The battler is somebody who finds in life that they have to work hard for everything they get… somebody who’s not earning a huge income but somebody who is trying to better themselves.”

Whether you wanted to call these people battlers or Essex Men or Tim Hortons voters, Muttart knew that the most distinguishing characteristic of this constituency was its lack of attachment to politics. Unlike the voters of earlier times in Canada, they didn’t base their ballot choice on any brand loyalty—if they voted at all. They were neither right nor left on the spectrum; indeed, they might have right-wing views on one issue, left-wing views on another. They were not the kind of people who gathered around the TV every night at ten o’clock to watch CBC TV’s The National or political-panel discussions on any of the networks. That mass-media market, and the fuzzy, familiar middle-political mindset, had exploded into a five-hundred-channel universe. Tim Hortons voters were more likely to catch a snippet of the news from supper-hour broadcasts, which had more of a local focus—if they watched the news at all. If they were feeling stirred to patriotism, that was probably the result of an ad for doughnuts or beer.

Muttart and Pantazopoulos had done some digging into media-consumption habits in Canada, and by their estimates, only half of the Canadian voting public paid any attention to news at all, either in newspapers or on TV. The strategists also calculated that people who follow the political news usually have a point of view on which party they support; these news consumers often knew, even before election campaigns began, how they were going to cast their ballots on election day. That meant that 50 percent of the electorate was unlikely to be swayed by campaign twists and turns. What about the other half, though? A hard truth: most of them didn’t vote at all; turnout rates were hovering at about 60 percent in Canada in these modern times. But by Muttart’s rudimentary calculation, that still left about 10 percent of the population who would vote, even though they hadn’t been following the news regularly. In a close election, this floating, politically disengaged part of the electorate could be crucial—and they wouldn’t be getting their information through the media. For these people, you needed other ways, sometimes “brutally simple” ways, to get their support, Muttart believed.

And that’s where the marketing knowledge was important—which Muttart happened to have in spades. “The only way to reach these people is through television advertising or direct-mail postcards,” Muttart explained in a 2012 interview, rattling off some more numbers. “With television advertising, you’ve got a thirty-second spot… which roughly equals eighty-two words.” In more direct marketing, the type in which political material is delivered to homeowners through the mail slot, Muttart said that there’s a “three-second rule.” Three seconds is the time it takes for someone to decide either to read the postcard or toss it in the trash. Whether it’s three seconds or thirty seconds, neither of these methods of communication lend themselves to subtlety, Muttart contended: “Academics usually criticize people like me for this type of communication, but what are you supposed to do, when you’re down to the final weeks of the campaign and you’re competing for the attention of the least informed, the least engaged and the least intense voters, who are going to decide the outcome of an election campaign? This is why political marketers have to be so blunt and so direct.”

The Marketing Department

Many marketing and advertising people have lent their expertise to Canadian political parties over the years, but none had ever really had a figure like Patrick Muttart, so pivotal to the inner circle. André Turcotte, who did polling and a bit of market research for the old Reform Party in its early days, describes Muttart as essentially the vice-president of marketing for Harper’s Conservative party.

“The most important change that Conservative strategists made after the 2004 election was to bring all market intelligence in-house,” Turcotte, now a communications professor, wrote in an analysis of the Conservatives’ political marketing success. “They broke away from the usual practice of relying on a pollster-of-record and took internal control of the market intelligence process.” Not only did Muttart watch the polls, but he actually was the author of the overall “campaign narrative”—a combination of polling intelligence, policy, image and advertising, all in one linked package. And now that Canada seemed to be entering a period of minority government, the campaign didn’t start or stop with elections. A big part of Muttart’s job was to consider everything the Conservatives did in terms of potential gains or losses in future elections, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, similar to how Canadians were consuming their products and services.

Muttart’s talents stood out largely because they were unusual in the Conservative party, as it was constituted circa 2005. Bright, young, in his early thirties when he came to work in Harper’s office, he had honed his marketing skills working for the Delta Hotels chain and also in the Navigator public relations firm in Toronto.

“There are not a lot of Conservatives or people on the political right who have an interest in design, in the visual presentation of political ideas,” Muttart said. This was especially true among the ranks of conservative-minded politicos in Canada, who tended to be “policy wonks” or people attracted to issues of procedure or ideology. Conservatives drew a lot of their supporters from business, military and engineering backgrounds, for instance, where you’d find people primarily concerned with political “mechanics” or systems. “Advertising, marketing, design, staging—you don’t tend to find a lot of people on the Conservative side of politics or the political right who tend to go into those disciplines,” Muttart said.

How did he come by these skills? Even Muttart himself is not sure. For all his appreciation of creativity when he sees it, Muttart doesn’t paint, draw or play a musical instrument. He grew up in a working-class family in Woodstock, Ontario, and first became interested in politics while delivering the Woodstock Sentinel-Review after school in the early 1980s. Walking between his customers’ homes, he’d start reading the paper. In 1984, when he was twelve, the Liberal leadership race was under way, and young Patrick was fascinated by the battle between John Turner and Jean Chrétien. He liked the looks of Turner and was intrigued by the way he was pitching himself as the candidate with winning credentials. Muttart was also fascinated with the parties’ signs and logos, especially the way the Turner team had fashioned the Liberal logo to incorporate the candidate’s name into the design. He was delighted when Turner won, and volunteered to help the local Liberal candidate in the 1984 election: a fellow named Alfred Apps, a former student council president of the University of Western Ontario. Muttart would go on to be a volunteer for Apps in a couple of subsequent provincial campaigns, but by the time the 1988 election rolled around, when he was eligible to vote, Muttart had migrated to the Conservatives. (Apps, meanwhile, would end up as president of the Liberal party from 2009 to 2012.)

In previous decades, the marketing and advertising people had to navigate around politicians who felt decidedly ambivalent about borrowing sales techniques from the commercial sector—bristling at being sold like soap or tomatoes. But Muttart didn’t face any such obstacles in the Conservative inner circle. “Never once was there a debate about the importance of marketing or the need to use marketing strategies to deliver political messages to Canadians,” he said.

First and most importantly, Stephen Harper saw the wisdom of marketing. Contrary to what one might have expected from this serious, dry student of economics, Harper also paid vivid attention to political packaging. When he had been running as a Reform MP in the 1993 campaign, he had parted ways with the uniform, centrally approved brand and put up his own style of signs. And when he took over the Conservative leadership, once the Canadian Alliance had merged with the old Progressive Conservatives, one of the first items on his to-do list was redesigning the party logo.

There were robust discussions over type styles and colours. Harper himself had been sketching out ideas in his spare time. It would be mainly blue, of course, since Conservatives of all stripes in Canada had been embracing that colour for a century. “Stephen thought blue was a good strong colour,” Tom Flanagan said. But what should the accent shades be? The old Reformers had wanted to include some green, to evoke the links to the grassroots. Meanwhile, the traditional PC logo, to the consternation of some in the Alliance/Reform wing, had included a red flag. Red was seen as the Liberals’ particular hue, and the presence of it pointed to a certain lefty leaning among the PCs. Inside the fourth-floor boardroom of the opposition offices in Parliament’s Centre Block, a lively debate ensued over whether to mix green or red into the new Conservative label. Harper finally weighed in, choosing a red maple leaf to hover beside a big blue “C.” He told his caucus that this new Conservative party could not keep allowing the Liberals to wrap themselves in the red-and-white flag of Canada—that Tories would have to take back the colour red from their rivals.

Harper had also been struck by an old story about Ronald Reagan and his understanding of how images worked in politics. Back in the 1980s, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl had gone back through Reagan’s public appearances, posing with disabled athletes or at a nursing home, and shown viewers how the pictures were direct contradictions of the president’s deeds, particularly cuts in funding to these very constituencies. It was a tough piece, and Stahl expected the White House to be furious with her. But they were not. In fact, Reagan’s staff was delighted. “Nobody heard what you said,” Stahl was told. The pictures were all that the viewers remembered. Harper took that lesson to heart, and his staff would learn to pay as much attention to the staging of his announcements as to the substance within them. He found himself a makeup artist to keep on staff. And even though his tastes didn’t run to beer or coffee, Harper would market himself as the kind of guy who would be happy to linger over a double-double at Tim Hortons or knock back a few ales after a hockey game. If everything else in the Conservative camp was getting a marketing makeover to suit the consumers, so would the leader. People would only remember the pictures anyway.

“Stephen Harper was probably the first true, modern communications prime minister. He was born in the TV era. He grew up in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s. He spent a lot of time following politics,” Muttart said. Harper had also dabbled in some marketing himself. His stint with the National Citizens Coalition from 1997 to 2001 had taught Harper a thing or two about how to lob political ideas into the marketplace. From its humble beginnings as Colin Brown’s protest against government spending in the 1970s, the NCC had grown to be a powerful grassroots ally to conservative politicians in Canada. The NCC and the Taxpayers Federation had been wildly successful at driving home to Canadians the idea that they were consumers of government services, and cranky ones at that.

“Throughout my time with him he would personally reference [NCC] campaigns that he ran,” Muttart said. “He ran an organization that was in the business of erecting billboards, running direct-mail campaigns. So I don’t think we’ve ever had a prime minister who had direct, personal experience being a marketer.” This, Muttart said, was the crucial difference between Harper and any of his predecessors in the job—he was Canada’s first marketing prime minister.

Much of his marketing knowledge came from on-the-job training. When he first arrived at the NCC offices, Harper had wanted to ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Dollars and Change
• The Pitch
• The Bargaining
• Sealing the Deal
• Acknowledgements
• Notes, Links and Further Reading
• Index