Conservatives' reaction to Labrador byelection

Here is what the Conservatives had  to say about the by-election in Labrador tonight, in an email sent to the press gallery. As I understand this message, the Liberals should have done a lot better; the Conservatives were counting on a much bigger defeat. (Which is another story, you should probably raise with them.) 

please distribute to the Gallery:


As we know, majority governments do not usually win by-elections.
 
In fact, Liberals have won the riding of Labrador in every election in history except for two, so we are not surprised with these results.
 
What is surprising is the collapse of the Liberal support during this by-election.  When this by-election was called the Liberals had a 43-point lead in the polls.  Since electing Justin Trudeau as leader and having him personally campaign there, they have dropped 20 points in Labrador.  That’s a significant drop in only a few weeks.  Labradorians were able to see firsthand how Justin Trudeau is in over his head. 
 

Send us your new ideas too

Justin Trudeau is asking Canadians to submit questions to him, which he promises to ask in the House of Commons. Why does this sound like a vaguely familiar idea? Well, because it is.

Back in 1994, the newly elected Reform Party caucus (which included a young fellow named Stephen Harper) announced that it would be asking questions faxed to its offices by ordinary Canadians. Here's one of the first questions that Harper's boss at the time, Reform Party leader Preston Manning, asked after taking his seat in the opposition benches in the Commons.

Mr. Manning: I have a supplementary, Mr. Speaker, on the same subject of deficits and jobs.

This has come to us. It is an inquiry received on our question fax line from Dr. Dean P. Eyre of Ottawa. He asked the government this question. He said: ``The government proposes to spend $6 billion on infrastructure and create 65,000 jobs. Has the government calculated how many jobs might have been created if that $6 billion were simply cut from the taxes of individuals, property owners and small businesses?''

 

Then there was a guy named Michael Ignatieff, who gave the same technique a try in the fall of 2010.

Mr. Ignatieff: Mr. Speaker, last week at a town hall in Toronto, a young man named Derek asked me a question and asked me to ask it of the Prime Minister, so here it is. “My question relates to the fiscal waste and mismanagement that this government is doing. They emptied the cupboard. Their spending is a hodge-podge with no real vision or direction. Why is the Prime Minister throwing away my generation's money in such a reckless, incompetent and visionless way? Why?

 

It's not entirely clear that this tactic worked for either Mr. Manning or Mr. Ignatieff, but it seems Justin Trudeau has decided it's worth another try. For what it's worth, Trudeau has also been borrowing heavily from  Manning's oft-repeated rhetoric about MPs needing to be spokespersons for their constituents not their parties. Unlike Manning, he hasn't taken one of the Commons chairs on the road to make that point, but on the issue of democratic reform, Trudeau of 2013 sounds an awful lot like the Manning of 1993.

Senate expense scandal: money or morality?

Nothing focuses the citizens' minds more than waste/misuse of money -- which is why we're seeing a large amount of attention on the controversy over Senate living expenses, and whether some senators were  claiming  inappropriate (if not illegal) payments from the public purse.  "It's. Your. Money," the CBC solemnly announced tonight when it was previewing its story on the Senate mess. 

Here is what I keep  wondering, though -- is it really about the money? 

If  money is the only issue,  then everyone can calm down once the "taxpayers" have the cash back in their wallets. Once again, it's reduced to another story of Canadian politics as a simple business transaction: your money, their entititlements, and so on.  Government as a retail store: I'm not satisfied; I want my money back. 

At the risk of committing sociology, let's ask: why aren't we (and I mean citizens, not journalists)  asking some harder questions about the "root causes" surrounding  that other oft-used phrase --  "lack of accountability?" Where did these senators (and only a few of them) get the idea that they could use their public, privileged positions to feather their already-comfortable nests? Harder question: is it possible they were looking to the House of Commons and the government for signals on how to get away with pretty much anything? Why aren't we up in arms about lack of accountability from the people we actually elect? 

Accountability isn't simply about accounting or counting when it comes to public service. It's about recognizing that citizens -- not mere taxpayers -- might want to keep an eye on how their trust in the state is being managed, and not just their dollars. 

Think back to former cabinet minister Bev Oda, and what ended her career: a $16 glass of orange juice. Think farther back, to how she misled the House of Commons about who made the decision to withdraw money from the KAIROS aid-and-advocacy organization. (Click the link. It's worth remembering.) 

In the larger scheme of things, that is, if you think public trust is a bigger deal than a few dollars for overpriced orange juice,  that should have been  the career-ending scandal. Oda was reinstalled in her job as soon as the 2011 election was over; the election that was triggered in part by her misleading of the Commons. 

 Lesson learned, though. Contempt of Parliament, meh. Pay too much for a glass of juice, well now you have the public's attention. Have we lost the ability to measure our politicians' duty to us in any other terms than cold, hard cash?  The Oda example is only the most vivid, too, on how we get all specific and hard-line about monetary offences and tend to shrug off matters that violate the fragile, but necessary terms of trust between the citizens and those we entrust to look out for our best interests in matters of state. Oda lied to Parliament, but what riled everyone was the money stuff. 

What has happened in the Senate, the waste of money, is justifiable reason for public outrage.  

But so are omnibus budget bills in the House of Commons.  So are the insulting-to-intelligence "talking points" spouted by the people paid to be your representatives in Parliament.  So is Question Period, where your government spends more time attacking its critics than seriously answering any queries about its business. Ditto for House of Commons' committees, rigged to make sure the ruling party gets its way. 

If lack of accountability bugs you, you might want to take a  glance  at how your money is being spent with barely a nod in the direction of the government explaining itself to the citizens through its elected representatives. That's not just a potential waste or misuse of your money, that's an offence to the relationship between the electors and the elected. 

Money is something that keeps changing hands. When it's misused, you can get it back.  Trust and faith in government is a bit more precious. Once that's gone, it doesn't come back. 

 

 

 

Whose history is it anyway?

History, it's said, is written by the winners. Does that mean that history is rewritten by losers? Consider:  

A phenomenal amount of attention was paid by this government to the way in which Canadians remembered the War of 1812. 

The Harper government looked to Sylvester Stallone for inspiration when it tried to overcome Canadians’ apathy and ignorance about the War of 1812, and the movie-trailer-style commercial it funded to celebrate the bicentennial was heavily micromanaged by senior players in Ottawa, documents show.

It’s further evidence of of how serious a political imperative the remembrance of the 200-year-old conflict is for the Harper Conservatives, who have sought to give military exploits a greater role in Canada’s identity.

 

A museum is being renamed to emphasize history over anthropology. 

 

And apparently, we learn via Postmedia, the government has also embarked on a detailed review of the way in which history is taught. 

Federal politicians have launched a “thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history,” in Parliament that will be led by Conservative MPs, investigating courses taught in schools, with a focus on several armed conflicts of the past century.

Yet we're being asked to believe that this same government, highly attentive to historical detail, somehow forgot to include Canada's first man in space at an unveiling of the Canadarm. 

Liberal MP Marc Garneau, who was Canada's first astronaut and led the Canadian Space Agency, is "ticked off" that he wasn't invited to Thursday's opening of a Canadarm exhibit and he blames Conservative partisanship for being left off the guest list.

"I'm not very happy," Garneau told reporters on Parliament Hill. "I wasn't looking for a role, I just wanted to be there in the audience."

 

The history that's at issue here is not Canada's history.  When things get this personal and petty, this is about historical grudges -- from a government with a majority. 

 Give it a few years. History may remember this government as the sorest winner ever. 

 

Charles King: Big loss

 There are two things you should probably know about my friend Charles King and why he would be really bugged by this blog post. 

1. It's about him. Charles, a rare breed in Ottawa, wasn't a big seeker of attention. 

2. It's written in the past tense. This city lost a very good man early this morning, far too early all together, in fact, when Charles, at the age of 47, passed away after a battle with cancer.  That feels very unfair and ridiculous. And trust me, nothing bugged Charles more than unfairness and ridiculousness.

So even though  what I'm about to say would bug  Charles,  and even why many of you reading this blog may not have known him,  I'd like to use this space  to try to explain what we've lost; why Ottawa feels a bit sadder, a bit more subdued today.

  Charles King (R) with Patrick Kennedy (L) at the 2010 Politics and the Pen dinner. Photo courtesy of Writers' Trust.

 

Charles, in his most recent job, was the vice-president of government relations for Shaw Communications.  Before that, he worked for years at the prestigious Earnscliffe Strategy Group. He wasn't one of those strategists you saw on TV, however. Charles, as I said, worked diligently to get attention for others and other causes, but not for himself. (I think that's what made him good.)  Don't get the idea he was some shrinking violet, however -- quite the opposite. Everyone seemed to know  Charles,  and admire him -- across all kinds of divides in this fractious political universe.

I first met Charles more than 20 years ago, when he was in his early 20s and working as an assistant in the Liberal party's national  headquarters. I soon realized, as others did, that Charles wasn't the first stop in the search for information at Liberal party central, but the last stop. He knew everything, and bonus, he was hilariously non-deferential. No sucking up to the media, ie:  "What the hell (or worse expletive) do you want to know that for?"  Fluently bilingual, brought up in Northern Ontario, he could tell you to take a hike (or worse expletive), charmingly, in French and English.

I remember when Jean Chretien's communications director, Peter Donolo, started having to deal with Liberal Party HQ more extensively in advance of the 1993 election. We were talking on the phone one day and he said: "You know Charles King? He's amazing. He's the Radar O'Reilly (M*A*S*H reference) of the Liberal party." (For those too young to recognize the 1980s-TV allusion, Donolo was talking about Charles' ability to know/find anything in the Liberal universe.) 

After the Liberals won the 1993 election, Charles moved on, appropriately, to bigger and better things -- in Lloyd Axworthy's office, with the Canadian cable broadcasters' association, and then with Earnscliffe during some interesting years.

Though many of the key players at Earnscliffe were associated with Paul Martin's Liberals through the 1990s, somehow Charles became one of the few partisans in Ottawa who did not get tied up with one faction or another.

I came to rely on Charles as a precious voice of balance amid all those Liberal feuds of the late 1990s and early 2000s.  He didn't choose neutrality simply because he had beloved friends on both sides (which he did.) Typically for Charles, he chose to stay in the middle because the excesses on both sides were pissing him off.  Though an extremely forgiving sort,  Charles wasn't the type to tolerate a lot of ridiculousness, as mentioned. And silly partisan games and hyperbole were ridiculous to him.

 By luck, in the very heat of much of the past Liberal drama, I chose Charles  as my "date" for the 2002 Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. This event, some might remember, was held on the very same weekend as the famous showdown between Martin and Chretien, which resulted in Martin quitting/getting quit/whatever from Chretien's cabinet the next day. That gallery dinner, held at the National Arts Centre,  was filled with intrigue and gossip, and I just happened to be there with one of the few people in town who straddled both sides; who was hearing all the rumours from all quarters that night. It wouldn't be the first or last time that it made Charles a perfect source for analysis of Liberal party dynamics and dysfunction.

 Charles had triumphantly fought his first bout of cancer earlier that year, in 2002, and the gallery-dinner invitation was a celebration of sorts. We were all sure it was behind him forever, and it almost was -- until another, more worrying diagnosis late last spring.

For much of the last year, I kept forgetting that Charles was ill. I don't say this callously -- I saw him quite a bit around town, here and there, and he was his same, old self, looking good, happy to share a laugh at the latest outrage or with the funniest remark he'd heard recently. If you asked how he was doing, health-wise, he'd say something optimistic and shrug off any melodrama. I think Charles would be happy I kept forgetting. I know it bothered him to think that people were only looking at him and only seeing the big scary word, cancer, written across his forehead (metaphorically speaking.) Charles just wanted everyone to act normally around him; no bullshit.

Many of us wondered why he kept going to work, except then we'd remember that hard work and diligence defined Charles. I'm sure he was a bit lucky to have employers, first at Earnscliffe, then at Shaw, who were unbelievably supportive through his health struggles. But that can't be a coincidence -- I think they felt lucky to have him too. I think we all felt a bit lucky to know Charles.

Most of the health updates about Charles in the past months came from gracefully  eloquent emails sent out to his many friends by his wife, Kelly Mounce. I wish I could show you the vast range of people on the email list; the sheer number and variety of friends who were hanging on every word, cheering every bit of good news, trying to  play down  the gathering shadows of bad news.

It should be noted, and not just because I am one, how many women were on that list. Charles had an amazing number of strong women friends; he seemed to enjoy the company of women as much as the often-raucous gang of men friends he hung out with. It was no surprise to us that he would fall in love with and marry a woman like Kelly, who shared Charles' no-nonsense attitude and appreciation for fun, friends and laughter. Of course I'm writing this blog post for her too; to let her know we're still standing with her.

There will be a formal service later this week in Ottawa,  which will  provide  a vivid picture of all of those people whose lives were touched by Charles King. I'm just one of them, giving him the attention he never sought, at a far-too-early date and with a finality many of us feared. 

I've always thought there should be more people like Charles King in Ottawa. Now I'd be happy if there was still just one.

 

How to start a Twitter conspiracy

Last night, I received a disturbing little glimpse into how social-media outrage works. 

Glancing at Twitter as  I watched the news -- much of it consumed with the bombings in Boston -- I saw people on all sides of the Canadian political spectrum still arguing about the wisdom of Conservative attack ads launched on Monday against the new Liberal leader.  It seemed like a perfect example of how perspective  can get  lost amid toxic partisanship -- who cares, given larger events in the world, whether this was strategic genius, a political fumble, etc.? It all looked very small. (And it should have been an argument to pull down the ads and put the conversation on hold for a while, I believed.) 

So I posted a small, sarcastic  tweet of objection: "To be fair, it takes a certain amount of strategic genius to launch attack ads on the same day as terror bombings." The idea being, of course, that red-meat partisans and conspiracy theorists, left to their own devices, would take these conversations  to their usual, ridiculous lengths -- and that's about as ridiculous as you could get. And to underline the fact that this was a tweet about tone and perspective, I included the hashtag #lookingsmall. 

Sarcasm is hard to pull off on Twitter. Had I been sitting with a bunch of people in my living room who were arguing about political ads while the Boston news was on TV, and said: "Yeah right, this is  an appropriate time to be arguing about who's got the smartest political strategy," my meaning may have been clearer. 

But a surprising number of people, including  a few  who actually know me, thought I was seriously seeing a plot behind the bad timing of the ads. (Really??)  And here's what  can happen when you make a  sarcastic comment  on Twitter about outrageous conspiracy theories -- you become enmeshed in even more outrageous conspiracy theories.

In some quarters of Twitter, where people are disinclined toward me anyway, this was enough to set off a chain of  vitriol  in which I was suddenly accused of everything from  politically exploiting  terrorism to making light of tragedy. *** Oh wait. See update:  a couple of days can make a huge difference. ***

  In other words, I had stirred up exactly the kind of small-minded partisanship that prompted the tweet in the first place. I keep forgetting that once you've fallen down that rabbit hole on Twitter --  the world where people see the absolute worst in each other --  that it's difficult to get out.  I sent out a few tweets of clarification, asking people to check their own Twitter feeds for signs of lost perspective, but I suspect these were a lost cause.  I thought about simply taking down the tweet, but figured that by doing so, I would just feed more conspiracy theories or feed (btw wrong) speculation that I was sitting in some bar somewhere, sending out cocktail-induced, random thoughts. 

Hence this longer blog post. Points of clarification for  the literal-minded out there:

No, I didn't see a deep dark plot in the bad timing of attack ads.  Yes, I believe that for last night at least, the only kind of attacks worth discussing were the ones in Boston. No, the point of the tweet wasn't to make a joke about tragedy -- it was to make a joke about people who can't set partisan politics aside long enough to see the bigger picture. Oddly enough, by asking for a suspension in small-minded partisan hostilities, I merely gave people another target for them.  

I  do know the perils of using sarcasm on Twitter, and this was another lesson on that score. In an attempt to tamp down crazy talk, I whipped it up. #lookingsmall, last night at least, was a hashtag fail. 

Update: Today, on Wednesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apparently decided that the statute of limitations was over on politicizing the Boston tragedy. Yes, go figure. I haven't checked the Twitter feeds of all those who were scandalized by that idea a couple of nights ago, but trust they are, true to their principles, sending their vitriol in the direction of the PMO tonight, since they seemed to be very upset about domestic politics being in any way associated with the Boston tragedy.  For the record, I  stand by the looking-small thing. 

From Trudeau to Trudeau

If my count and my memory is correct, today will be the sixth time that I've attended a gathering for federal Liberals to choose a new leader. That's six leaders since the party said farewell to Pierre Trudeau in June, 1984 -- and that's not counting all the interim or acting party leaders along the way. And if all the speculation is correct, I guess this takes my reporting-on-Liberals career kind of full circle: the first convention I attended was the one to replace Pierre Trudeau, while today's event will likely install his son as leader. 

Some random memories: 

Ottawa, 1984: I had been only working at The Globe and Mail for a year, as a copy editor, but I'd arrived there with a degree in political science, not in journalism, and I'd been riveted the year before to the Conservative leadership race. (That convention, in which Brian Mulroney emerged as leader, had lots of drama, long-time political junkies may remember.) So I wanted to see this Liberal one in person, and my new friends in the newsroom at 444 Front St. said all I needed were press credentials. I asked and amazingly, my Globe bosses agreed, so off I went to wander around for a few days at Landsdowne Park and watch the Liberals choose John Turner as leader. Things I remember: Seeing  a media room at a convention for the first time, and watching reporters work close-up. Standing on the floor and seeing Liberals trying to haggle over ballot choices; seeing grownups all outfitted in political gear, dancing to the too-loud music between ballots. Watching Jean Chrétien talk to his troops and realizing it was probably true (as party president said on stage) that while he was first in Liberals' hearts, the party  was headed in a different direction. 

Calgary, 1990: In terms of political spectacles, sitting at the front row of history, etc., this remains one of the most tumultuous, vivid events in my long   career covering Canadian politics. The Liberals fatefully chose to  have their convention on the same day that the Meech Lake constitutional accord faced a deadline for ratification -- June 23, 1990. Much of the Liberal leadership race had been a faceoff between the pro-Meech Paul Martin and the Meech dissenter, Jean Chrétien. Much of June had been consumed in high drama on the national stage with attempts to save Meech, including a marathon, week-long first ministers' meeting in Ottawa. 

When Meech died on June 22, the day before Chretien was elected leader, events at the Calgary Saddledome exploded too. (And it's interesting to think of how some of the fallout is still reverberating through Canadian politics today.)   As Meech came to a crashing demise in Ottawa and Quebec, the national rifts were making themselves felt in Calgary.  Some of Martin's Quebec supporters donned black armbands and one of his leading MP supporters, Jean Lapierre, ended up leaving the party to help form the Bloc Quebécois in subsequent days.  Other Liberals were jubilant. I was caught right in the midst of a triumphant embrace between Chretien and Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells (whose then constitutional advisor, Deborah Coyne, is also a candidate in the current leadership race.) Pierre Trudeau, who had articulated/galvanized  the early opposition to Meech, wandered the stadium dressed in a saffron-coloured shirt, impossible to miss in that sea of red and white. (Coyne gave birth to Trudeau's daughter 11 months later, but that's another story.) I stood in a room and watch Trudeau thank a First Nations' meeting for all the help that aboriginal people had given in helping to sink Meech. Meanwhile, the then Liberal premiers of Ontario and New Brunswick, David Peterson and Frank McKenna, were also on hand in Calgary, bitter and disappointed that their efforts to save Meech had been squandered. The whole scene in Calgary was a bit surreal, actually. No Liberal convention since, or any convention really, has matched that drama. 

 

 

Toronto, 2003: Chretien stayed at the helm for 10 years, but the real Liberal leadership drama took place in the three or four years before the convention, as Paul Martin wrestled to become the successor.  By the time Liberals arrived at the Toronto Convention Centre to elect Martin as leader in November, 2003,  the  victory was a mere formality.  That's probably why I don't have many memories of this convention, beyond the odd, Cirque de Soleil tribute to Chretien (a performer rolling around inside a transparent ball) and a Paul Anka serenade to the departing leader. Oh of course and who can forget Bono's appearance? "My name is Bono and I'm a rock star." I guess maybe in retrospect that all this attention on celebrities, as opposed to politics,  probably said something about where the party was heading. 

Montreal, 2006: Nearly exactly three years after the tidy victory of Martin, the party gathered, in the wake of his January 2006 election defeat, to choose his successor. One of the things I remember about this convention: the strange presence of Stephen Harper's PMO staff at the event  and even some of them handing out buttons to mock the Liberal leadership candidates. (Yes, this is odd; normally prime minister's offices are busy doing stuff like, oh, running the country, and would send party operatives to do such partisan tasks. Another story, again.)  I don't believe I expected Stéphane Dion to win at this convention; that surprise victory would also introduce us to some new rifts within the Liberal ranks in the coming years  -- Bob Rae Liberals versus Michael Ignatieff Liberals, etc.  

 

Vancouver, 2009: With Dion defeated in the 2008 election, the Vancouver Liberal convention was another formality -- installing Ignatieff as the unchallenged leader.  Vivid memories? The beauty of the new convention centre in Vancouver and the agonizingly long proceedings on the Friday night; hours and hours of speeches -- including an odd, overlong, I-was-right-all-along  speech by Dion -- which left only  a handful of audience members in the room at the end. (One MP joked how the crowd at the back was using standing ovations to stage their exit strategy.) 

 

And that takes us to today's event, also a formality, but bound to be much much different from any of the previous five I've attended. There's no real drama or excitement here; no huge national turmoil in the background. There's no expectation of immediate or massive victory on the horizon. No rock stars, no speech by the former leader (Ignatieff won't even be there), no Pierre Trudeau. 

The guy who's expected to win today, like me, was present at the 1984 convention, I believe. (There for his dad's tribute.) But while I was 23, he was 12, and for the first time, Liberals may be electing a leader who is younger than I am. 

 

 

 

And now for a bucket of cold water

 

While Liberals may be getting giddy about all these repeated spikes in the public-opinion polls, and their rivals may be getting nervous, it may be time for everyone to step back a bit and get some perspective on the numbers in the news. 

It's worth remembering that  the people who may well decide the next election -- two years from now -- are not paying attention at the moment. Don't take my word for it: have a look at what Stephen Harper's former strategic guru, Patrick Muttart,  says in this excerpt from the Canadian textbook on political marketing. 

"Close campaigns are decided by the least informed, least engaged voters,” says Muttart (2011). “These voters do not go looking for political news and information. This necessitates brutally simple communication with clear choices that hit the voter whether they like it or not. Journalists and editorialists often complain about the simplicity of political communication, but marketers must respond to the reality that undecided voters are often not as informed or interested as the political and media class are." 

This is the main reason that I'm paying very little heed to current poll numbers. It's also why I am only marginally interested in party-membership numbers.  Roughly speaking, the three main political parties have chosen their leaders from a pool of  about  100,000 eligible/engaged  voters each, give or take some tens of thousands  (100,400 voted in the  Conservative contest  in 2004; about 127,000 are eligible to vote for the Liberal leader and about 131,000 were eligible to vote in the 2012 NDP leadership race.)   

Add it all up, and you get only about 350,000 people who have cared enough to make a choice about the leadership  of the three main parties over the past eight years. That's about 1 per cent of the Canadian population. (Remind you of another percentage? Maybe an Occupy slogan?) The  people who make up the other 99 per cent have other things on their mind and may change their vote preference over and over again before they walk into the polling booth on 2015 (that's assuming that they don't get a call telling them that their vote location has changed..) 

While I was writing the eRead on Justin Trudeau, I learned that he and his wife have recently taken up "extreme surfing." Whatever that is, I imagine it teaches skills that come in handy for handling the current waves in public opinion.  But right now, two years away from an election, these are waves in a very small pond. 

 

 

Justin Trudeau: The Brian Mulroney connection

Perhaps you've seen this picture, which went a little viral, showing Justin Trudeau dancing with his wife Sophie Grégoire before his big speech on Sunday afternoon at the Liberal leadership showcase. 

 

And on seeing the headline to this post, you may be wondering -- what does this have to do with former prime minister Brian Mulroney, avowed political enemy of Trudeau's dad? 

Well, this is another father-son story. The photographer who snapped that picture is Adam Scotti, who is also following in his dad's footsteps (he goes by his mom's last name.) Adam's father is Bill McCarthy, the well-liked man who served as Brian Mulroney's official photographer during his time in office. All of us who covered Mulroney and travelled with him loved to have Bill around -- he was a perpetually sunny presence. 

And now his son has taken up the camera too, to take pictures for Trudeau. You can see some of his other photographs by clicking on this link. 

Small world, yes, but not the only link between Mulroney and Trudeau. Ben Mulroney and Justin Trudeau are friends (Mulroney attended the Trudeau-Grégoire wedding.)  And yesterday, on CTV's Power Play, Mulroney had some kind words for Trudeau: 

“I’ve known Justin since he was a child. He’s young, articulate, attractive – a flawlessly bilingual young man. What’s not to like with this picture?” Mulroney told host Don Martin. 

“Anybody who … treats Justin Trudeau with scorn or derision or underestimates him, does so at his own peril,” he said. “We’ll see what happens in the future; it’s a long way from here to there. But no one should underestimate Justin. He’s a man of some consequence.”

I chatted to Mulroney yesterday too, to tap some of his memories about Margaret Thatcher. We didn't talk about Trudeau (or his former photographer) but he did send some not-too-subtle signals on how he regards Stephen Harper's brand of conservatism.  It came up when we were discussing how he and Thatcher didn't see exactly eye-to-eye, ideologically: 

"Margaret thought that I was too progressive and not conservative enough. And I used to say to her: 'Margaret, Canada is not the United Kingdom. We are a different country, with 125 years of different traditions and so, I'm a conservative, I will not govern at all ideologically the way Pierre Trudeau did. ... But that said, I know she thought that I should be more radical on the conservative side and less so on the progressive side.  But I never followed that. I never believed in that. I was the leader of the PROGRESSIVE Conservatives and we did very well, thank you very much, two elections in a row, by being progressive conservatives.  What I find interesting now, Susan, is that the so-called far right conservatives have found that there's no way they can govern or win elections without becoming progressive conservatives. So what I'm seeing now is something that ... I think I've seen this movie before." 

So there you go: Brian Mulroney still stirring the pot. You might say he haunts us still, but I think another former prime minister has trademark on that phrase. 

 

 

Thatcher's legacy in Canada

It feels like only yesterday that I was watching Margaret Thatcher hold forth on her view of politics and society.

Actually, it was just last week. Thatcher, in fact, is a big part of the political-marketing phenomenon that I've been researching and writing about for the past few years (subject of a book due out later this year, and some radio work I've been doing lately.)  And on this matter, Thatcher is still influencing how we see politics being carried out in Canada today.

Much is being written today about Thatcher as a woman of strong convictions, iron will, and so on. But another huge part of her legacy was as a pioneer in the realm of political marketing -- shaping  herself and her politics into a product according to market research. Thatcher's endeavours on this score actually gave birth to a whole new field in political science, pioneered by Margaret Scammell, a lecturer in media and communications at the London School of Economics. (See image right)     

And just last week again,  another expert in this field, Jennifer Lees-Marshment, was talking to me about Thatcher's lasting imprint on political marketing --  the ways in which the former British prime minister used her advertising geniuses at Saatchi and Saatchi to develop policies that would expand the conservative base. 

"Margaret Thatcher was interesting because she was one of the first leaders to use market research and communication advice to develop a product that would appeal to those citizens  who had voted for Labour," Lees-Marshment said.  "She’s somebody who is normally seen as a conviction politician... But actually research uncovered that at the beginning of her leadership, she was the opposite. She was very much listening to those who were  doing the research, and segmenting the markets into, say for example, people who owned state houses or council houses, and being strategic about developing policies to suit them."

So adept was Thatcher in this realm that she was also called "Maggie the Marketed" and  many of her practices have been studied and imitated throughout the United States and Canada -- by yes, people at the very heart of our current Conservative government too.

Back in 1989, in fact, a bright young fellow named Stephen Harper was trying to figure out how to put the fledgling Reform Party on the map and he wrote a "root-and-branch" memo to then-leader Preston Manning. The details of that memo are in Tom Flanagan's 1995 book, Waiting for the Wave, and it's interesting to look back now in retrospect at the tension between Manning and Harper. While Manning was more of a populist, Harper thought that an ideologically  conservative coalition could be built in Canada, inspired by -- you guessed it -- Margaret Thatcher. Here's a little excerpt from page 60 of that (excellent, instructive) book.

As an alternative Harper proposed that the Reform Party could and should become a "modern Canadian version of the Thatcher-Reagan phenomenon."  It should seek its core supporters in the private-sector middle class of Canada's urban areas, offering these voters a market-oriented ideology.

No surprise, then, that when Harper eventually took over the Conservative party, he had his own crack team of marketing experts, including one Patrick Muttart,  studying the Thatcher-Reagan brand of politics and trying  to put it to work here. Muttart is  long  gone from the PMO, but he's still well known as an international expert himself in political marketing, because of how he applied the Thatcher lessons to help Harper win power in 2006. 

Have a look at this 2010 article from a British Conservative website known as conservativehome.

So I reached out to Patrick Muttart, former chief of staff (sic *** see note)  to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. Muttart is perhaps the world’s leading expert on working-class voters in English-speaking countries, having studied their behavior and attitudes not only in Canada but also in Britain, Australia, and America. He has found that in each country, working-class voters may form the base for successful center-left governments but are crucially responsible for the rise of center-right leaders like Harper, Australia’s John Howard, and Margaret Thatcher. 

He was kind enough to speak with me at length. He emphasized that working-class voters do not fit neatly on the traditional left-right continuum. They are fiscally conservative, wanting low rates of taxation and wanting government to live within its means, but economically populist, suspicious of trade, outsourcing, and high finance. They are culturally orthodox but morally moderate, in the sense that they don’t feel their lives will change much because of how social issues play out. They are patriotic and supportive of the military, but suspicious of foreign adventures.

 

In his statement today to mark Thatcher's death, Prime Minister Harper didn't explicitly mention how her marketing approach to politics had influenced him, but make no mistake -- it was arguably as  inspirational, if not more so, than her ideology. Margaret Thatcher changed many things in politics in her home country, but thanks to Harper and Muttart and others,  her legacy lingers here in Canada too, to this day.

 

*** Patrick Muttart was never chief of staff to Harper. He was deputy chief of staff.