Good News Stories and Federal Elections: The Fate of Negative Advertising

What does this federal election tell us about Canada? In a too previous blog I indicated that there were several under-reported stories. The story is a sea change, of some sort, with regard to environmental politics and the jobs versus the environment trade discourse. I argued that this discourse no longer worked for an increasingly large section of the Canadian population and thus Tory attacks on provincial NDP in Alberta, efforts to tar the federal NDP with the Stefan Dion brush after the McQuaig "oil in the ground" comment ... just no longer worked with the constituency to whom they were appealing.

The second thing that happened is that negative campaign advertising didn't work. Years ago I wrote a blog about how the federal Tories took a page from the Karl Rove book and tried to use a combination of low voter turnout and negative advertising and fear mongering to win elections. Negative advertising, at least as I am using the term here, is not saying "my opponent is incorrect." All parties do that in all elections. It might more better be called attack ads. Ads that paint your opponent as a bad person who will endanger others through immaturity or bad ideas. It is not disagreeing with your opponent because that is, after all, why they are your opponent and why we have elections. It is the effort to win elections by using thinly veiled lies and attack one's opponent on a personal level. Thus, when someone says "Stephen Harper's environmental policies are bad" ... that is not an attack ad or negative advertising. When someone says "Stephen Harper is immature or clueless" that would be an attack ad. So would splicing comments of your opponent together from different contexts to give a misleading impression of his or her ideas or saying something that was not true or that fear mongered or that played to people's worst instincts.

The Tories made a lot of use of negative advertising. I did not see a lot of NDP adverts this election, in part I suspect because I live a region of the country where the NDP won ... well ... nothing ....  so I can't speak to them. But, in the past, the Conservative attacks on Ignatieff and Dion were negative advertising and attack adverts. They had little or nothing to do with public policy and played on people's worst thoughts and fears while distorting their positions. Likewise the anti-Justin Trudeau adverts of various stripes were horribly negative because they focused on things like his hair and looks (immaturity), without addressing the substance of the Liberal platform.

I am not, I hasten to add, a Liberal supporter. I did not vote Liberal in this election or the last one or the one before that or the one before or that ... you get the picture. My interest here lies in diagnosing or explaining a process; not in taking sides.

What can we say about negative advertising? Several things. It may make a comeback -- in fact, I think it lurks on the margins of democratic politics for reasons that might be worth exploring some time -- but outside of the true believers -- the hardcore Conservatives -- it had little play in this election. Again, the mainstream media was slow to pick up on this. I read a story on CBC or in The Globe or somewhere that said something to the effect -- about a month into the campaign -- that the Tories negative attack adverts were finally working. What we can say now is that they weren't and they didn't. They got no traction out of the adverts at all.  The Liberals weathered their storm, Canadians tended, I think, to ignore them, and the Liberals ended up being able to make some hay be mocking them as the election date drew closer.

True to form, however, Tory adverts got nastier and nastier as the election date loomed. It was as if they had nothing else in their election toolbox. And, it is difficult, in some ways, to blame them. After all, from their perspective, they had gotten a good run out of negative advertising, taking down Dion and Ignatieff, reducing the Liberals to a rump caucus and securing a majority government for themselves. What they missed -- and what I am trying to point out in this blog -- is that the story changed. It changed, I think, for two reasons.

First, negative advertising is more difficult to use when you are the government. You can use it. But, attacking the opposition with it when you have to defend your own record is, in effect, saying "I don't stand by my record. I think you should vote for me because my opponent is an idiot." Second, I think -- again -- there has been a change. The Canadian electorate seemed less receptive to negative advertising this time round, more interested in discussing issues (which the Tories outside of energy and niqabs seemed to avoid), less willing to accept personalized attacks as legitimate. Moreover, that trend seemed to amplify as the election went along. The Conservatives ended the election campaign about where they began. The Liberals -- the subject of most of the attacks -- did not. They managed to dramatically increase their share of the vote. The more the attacks went on ... the more the Liberals vote increased.

The second storyline, then, is again optimistic. It points away from a lowest common denominator politics, where majorities are built around opposition or, in the case of the bond forged by attack ads, shared dislike. Instead, it points to a desire on the part of a large section of the Canadian voting population for something else. Whether or not the Liberals are this something else is not at all clear but they are doing their best to continue to occupy that position. The increased voter participation rate might be another example of this. Undoubtedly, a certain percentage of this increase occurred because people wanted to get rid of Harper and the Tories, but that does not tell the whole stories. Indeed, there is actually no reason people who disliked Harper and Crew had to vote. They could have just not voted, opting out of the process because they were completely disillusioned with it. The fact that they did not suggests, as I intimated before, that there is something other than disillusionment going on. Instead, the appears to be a desire for two things:

• a focus on different issues (addressing the environment, First Nations issues, Canada's role in world affairs, etc.) 
• a desire for a more upbeat, less angry, more progressive type of politics where people can disagree with each other without accusing each other of having destroyed the country, or threatened national security, etc. Heck, even Rona Ambrose -- admittedly in the wake of the election -- got in on the act by reversing the Tories traditional opposition to addressing the grave problem of MMIW and promising that she would be a happier more upbeat leader of the opposition

Now, as I said, I don't think that negative electioneering and negative discourses have gone away. In a future blog, I'll explore this a bit and try to go a bit beyond the Karl Rove election politics of the Tories to address the prevalence of negativity in Canadian public life. In short, I don't think its just a manifestation of Conservative electioneering. The question, one supposes, is how long it will last and whether or not this shift is permanent.

I honestly don't know but ... for now at least I am going to enjoy this shift and the less vicious tones coming from the state and from the public.

The Election: Things to Watch For

What are we to make of the election campaign more than half way through? It depends on how you look at it. This leader said that; this party candidate said stupid thing X. Harper looked “cool under pressure.” Duceppe won the French-language debate. This is the normal type of reporting and there is a place for it. Election campaigns are important and do make a difference. I’d like to believe, however, that there is more to the campaign then a hockey playoff play by play. I’d like to believe that elections, parties, issues, etc., can tell us more about the character and nature of Canada and where it might be going. Let’s approach the election campaign in that way.  I will confess, however, that I have no crystal ball. Instead of suggesting that the election means, then, let me suggest some things to watch for.

First, youth vote. At the start of this semester, the vast majority of students in my intro class claimed at least to not vote nor did they express much interest in voting. At the end of the course, the vast majority claimed they were going to vote. The difference was not me. Formal education, we know, makes a difference in intention to vote. I hope, however, that something else might be underway, a political re-engagement among Canadians who have been alienated from the political process. One thing to look at closely, then, in this election is whether or not we see at least some of that re-engagement.

Second, the Quebec vote. The polls at the mid-point suggested an increased fragmentation of the vote in Quebec with the BQ dropping as low as 32.X percent. Again, this should not surprise us after what has happened to the  PQ in Quebec and what seems like an increasingly clear search, on the part of Quebecers, for other viable political alternatives. My bet is that a lot of that vote will return to the BQ. By yesterday the BQ was back up in the high 30s in projected pop vote and the distribution of seats means that even if they dropped to the low 30s, it might not seriously hurt their total seat count. I’ll save armchair quarter-backing for another day. It will be interesting, however, to see if the vote in Quebec fragments.

Third, how much will the Tories and Liberals be helped by the “first past the post” system. The details here would take a long time to explain but the Canadian political system has, for a long time, translated minorities of vote into majorities of seats in the House of Commons. Chretien never won a majority of the popular vote. Canadians don’t seem to like our current system but they also don’t seem to like potential alternatives to it. The NDP historically has been the big losers. I’ll comment on this in another post. The degree to which this trend continues will be interesting to note.

Fourth, what has happened to the Green Party? My gut tells me that a lot of their vote is migrating back to the Liberal Party. The Greens, from what I can tell, never took a lot of vote from the NDP. They seemed to be siphoning off middle class voters who normally would have voted Liberal. As time goes by some of that vote seems to be slowly moving back to the Liberals. Will this trend continue in the election?

There might be other things that are important to note, as well, such as the degree to which political reporting in major media outlets effectively assessing the implications of this election or even reflects the public mood. Perhaps you have some thoughts or this or some other matter?

Political Genius?

Far too much has been made of Harper's supposed political genius. This might not have a lot to do with Canadian public life. Indeed, I think that most public discourses places far too much emphasis on the degree to which party leaders make decisions themselves. It does happen, but everything that I've read suggest that the norm is something else. It suggests that leaders consult with advisors, the cabinet, key members of the civil service, caucus, pollsters, foreign leaders, heck all matter of people before arriving at a decision. In this sense, the Conservative's decision to go for a majority government last time round, bringing down their own minority government, was not Harper's alone. There are a lot of people who can be blamed for it.

I mention this because in retrospect, it seems like a very bad decision. The goal was to gain a secure hold on government with what I think Conservatives thought would be a majority, a slim one perhaps but a majority none-the-less. Heck knows they have worked hard enough for it. And, of course, they are still at it. Harper has been on non-stop foreign tours, they ditched their own economic philosophies in the face a recession and started dolling out money right, left, and centre; cut taxes; subsidized stay-at-home parents; pulled just about every political trick anyone could think of -- proroguing Parliament, violating their own election laws, attempting to cut finding to opposition parties -- are in permanent campaign mode with a loaded "war chest" that allows them to blanket media in a way that other parties can't. They've even sent out flyers on the public tab.

Now, I am not blaming the Conservatives for this nor am I saying that they are any worse than any other political party. I've noted before that I think their political philosophy has problem and I think their electoral strategies -- which appeared modeled on the American Republican Party -- are intensely problematic. I would argue that they have moved politics to a different level, but politics is, after all, politics and we would be naive to believe that a political party would not take advantage of opportunities to defeat their opponents and maintain themselves in power.

And ... opportunities the Conservatives have had. They got lucky in that Paul Martin staged a coup inside the Liberal Party, deeply dividing it and just about killing a large chunk of its organizational structure. In other words, the civil war in the Liberal Party did not divide the Party the way the Progressive Conservatives fractured in the last years of the Mulroney government, but it did seriously hamper the ability of the Party -- and the desire of the Chretien wing of the Party -- to fight an election. Add to this, Martin's lack of vision; media that had become intensely hostile to the Liberal Party, an ineffective successor who few in the Liberal Party wanted; further disaffection; the collapse and discrediting of the Quebec wing of the Party; the collapse of the Party's funding; a revitalized NDP and a vibrant if ineffective Green Party siphoning votes away from the Liberals on the soft left; and policies that Canadians neither understood nor seemed, at least at the time, to want. Moreover, the Conservatives had the benefit of balanced budgets. They did not need to prudent -- at least in the short run! They could cut taxes and increase spending.

Put all this together and our understanding of the last two Conservative victories requires no interpretation at all. The character of the opposition parties virtually handed the Conservatives an election victory. Now, again, this is not anything to blame the Conservatives for. If we were in class, we'd analyse the election results to determine exactly how popular the Conservatives (or, their policies) really were. We're not so I won't. What I will say is that Conservatives found themselves in a situation that was similar to -- not the same as but similar to -- the Liberals in 1993. The Chretien Liberals won 1993 almost by default. There were other reasons, of course, but one big reason was that they took advantage of a fortuitous situation. And, they were able to parlay this luck into a series of election victories.

Here is where political genius might enter into our discussion. The Conservatives have not been able to do this. It was genius or calculation or strategy that helped the Conservatives into power. Strategy might have played a role but, in retrospect, the Conservatives were handed a golden opportunity. They took it ... but, so far at least, have not done very much with it. Let me pick just one example to illustrate my point. Again, the situations are different so my example is a bit forced by in 1993 the Liberals entered office with a defined economic plan. One might like it; one might dislike it. But, they had a plan and they stuck to it. The Conservatives entered office with an economic plan -- return the Canadian economy to a more free market basis -- but abandoned it quickly. They introduced meaningless tax cuts that served only to impoverish the capacity of the state, unleashed a dramatic increase in state spending, and, when the going got tough, tried to ignore world economic problems -- I'm actually not convinced that they ignored the problem; I think they actually may not have understood the magnitude of the problem -- and then abandoned their own economic plans completely. Now, Harper says (and, I believe him) that the Conservative government will consult with Canadians to determine in what direction they should move. This sounds to me a lot like they are unsure themselves. Ultimately, the Conservatives lack of faith in their own economic platform and their quick grafting of another platform onto theirs has created problems for them. They appear indifferent to problems and then unable to provide the resources they said were "in the tube" for stimulus. They have driven up a huge debt, with their numbers changing almost monthly and have declared that they don't have much of an idea about how to proceed  from here.

This is not political genius. Political genius is the ability to determine policies in advance, ensure that those policies have some effect (or, that they work) and then stick to them. Political genius is the ability to take advantage of the opportunities with which you are presented. And this, the Conservative government has not done.

Proroguing Parliament: The Message

Is proroguing Parliament undemocratic? Depends on how you look it. It is unusual but also a prerogative of a Prime Minister. In other words, it is not outside the rules by which the Canadian parliamentary system functions. On the other hand, the Parliamentary system is not static. To use a procedural trick -- a technicality, let's call it -- to avoid facing the music is something that is clearly of questionable ethics. Even if proroguing is a prerogative of a PM, it is not clear that Canadians believe such technicalities should be used to cut of legislative discussion of important issues.

There is a more important issue here, however, and it is this: I don't think Harper is lying. I don't think he is trying to avoid Parliament. That might be a side benefit and some of his ministers and MPs might be happy to have a chance to recover from the shell shock of some recent problems, but I think he's telling the truth when he says that he wants to test the pulse of the country. I think he is being completely honest when he says that he wants to figure out what Canadians think before bringing in new economic policies. And, this, is the problem.

Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament is a sign of the problems with Canadian democracy not because he is shutting off debate. That debate will continue in the news, in speeches, in door-to-door campaigning, in blogs, etc. (I'm not saying these are a substitute for a legislature!) Instead, this is a sign of the demise of democracy in the sense that it indicates that Harper intends to "govern by polls." In some ways, this should not be surprising. He and others have already suspended, for reasons of political convenience, key elements of conservative ideology. Why not go the next step and not even bother to put your ideas "out there" to see how Canadians respond. Why not go and find out what Canadians want and then give that to them?

I see this as a sign of democracy because it displaces serious public debate on important issues not by proroguing but by abandoning one's perspective and turning one's party, as it were, into political mercenaries. Conservatives long said that they were unfairly demonized by liberals. They were not scary. That's wrong. They were scary to a lot of us. They rejected equality, believed in a free market system that ... ahem, seems to be having some serious empirical problems, opposed bilingualism, rejected the idea of a national polity (remember the "firewall"?), opposed gun control, rejected the idea that women should control their bodies, wanted to dramatically lower immigration, wanted Canada to be fighting in Iraq, supported Bush, Jr's Star Wars II missile shield, and argued for a two tier health care system. This is scary stuff and, with some exceptions, they have moved away from most of these ideas or let them drop into the past or left them to private members to raise.

Now, you can tell by the way I have phrased these comments that I'm no C/conservative. I believe in equality, support bilingualism, was glad Canada did not involve itself in Iraq or in the missile shield. I support gun control and believe women should control their bodies. I'm pro-diversity and pro-immigration and think socialized medicine is wonderful. What I want, however, is democratic discussion of these issues and that requires someone to carry them forward. The most logical people to do that are the people that believe in them: conservatives. After all, if you rely on me to play Devil's advocate and argue against gun control for the sake of having a discussion about it, I won't do a very good job.

Proroguing Parliament indicates clearly that the Harper government has extended its "party for hire" approach to politics into the economic sphere. They'll spin Canadian views in the way that is closest to their believes, to be sure, but what Party doesn't? What they are telling us, however, is something other than spin. What they are telling us is that they don't want to put their own ideas on the table because Canadians might reject them and they could lose power so they are just not going to do that. I guess I can't blame them for this. Having power must be awfully appealing. It is, however, a missed opportunity for Canadians to consider their future.

An Election

Will Canada have an election this year? It appears that this is increasingly the case although exactly why is not entirely clear. Perhaps it will, in part, be the embarrassment of different party leaders: cooperating with each other would seem something akin to cooperating with the Devil. Perhaps this or that leader and his coterie will spy an advantage that they believe will either allow them to attain a majority government or to rest power from another party. In short, if Canada has an election, it will likely be for political reasons.

And, I say this because there appear to be no substantive policy issues that will be "on the table" in an election campaign. The Conservative, for instance, have discovered that they can stay in power only by ... well ... not being conservatives. Their self-made national economic disaster is a bit of a God send for them. Conservatives, these days, always feel better preaching restraint. If they have budget surpluses -- particularly surpluses created by liberals! -- they don't seem to know what to do with them because their long-held "cut the waste" mantra does not work (witness the arts cuts and the fake cuts to the Status of Women). We might, therefore, have some debate about what to do to re-balance the national budget. But, that debate will be technical. The substantive issues that it should involve will not be discussed, at least by the Conservatives because they would lose an election if they did so.

On the other hand, the Liberals are in the embarrassing position of having won even while they have lost. Basic tenets of liberalism seem safe: regional economic development, bilingualism, equality for gay and lesbian citizens, multiculturalism. Yes, the Conservative have been messing around with the way in which university based research is funded in Canada and in my gig that has some important implications but ... is anyone going to fight an election on this issue. Economically, it would be difficult to find significant differences between the Harper Conservative economic platform and the Liberal economic platform of the 1990s. In other words, and no one is discussing this, the Liberals are having a hard time generating a distinctive platform not because of a failure of leadership but because many of their ideas are so commonly accepted that Conservatives must necessarily adopt them if they want to remain in power.

What about the Bloc, NDP, and Green Party. Well ... what about them. The NDP's flirting with a re-branding indicates how badly off they are. Their politics should be different. They should be involved in an educational programme designed to build a new type of society organized around a different set of values. At least that is what socialists are supposed to do. But ... what are those values? The NDP has done a pretty poor job of articulating them because, frankly, I don't know what they are. Equality ... well, sure. But, that is hardly unique to the NDP. Support for "small business"? for the "little guy"? How does that differentiate the NDP from the Conservatives? Again, the very successes of the left in Canada -- gender equality, for example -- have undercut its raison d'etre or at least it chances or organizing a different type of discourse.

Add to this a defensive-oriented Bloc, which must necessarily be defensive because of their political aspirations and a Green Party that can't get any traction and we have a potential future election campaign that will likely be an odd re-run of what we've had over the last few years regardless of who wins.

This is a shame. This is a shame because there are important issues that need to be discussed. Canada's approach to environmental protection, the shape of aboriginal self-government, persistent poverty, the gender gap in wages, Canada's role in world affairs, among others. On all these issues and likely more too Canada needs a new political conservations. I doubt we will get it.