Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (18 page)

The “bridge” being bombed was also probably the last link to the older, simpler world in which political advertising could not stray into the baser arts of the consumer marketplace. Around this time, people also started to notice that marketing jargon had totally infiltrated the political backrooms. Journalist and author Graham Fraser, in his book on the 1988 election,
Playing for Keeps
, remarked on the phenomenon, “It is worth noting that the language of marketing, polling and product sales had sufficiently taken over the senior levels of all three parties that all the strategists, regardless of the party affiliation, talked about the marketplace, market niche and moving numbers. It sounded as if the election process of choosing policies on the basis of their merits had been privatized.”

Lorne Bozinoff, a thirty-something pollster with Gallup during the 1988 election, was also fusing marketing and politics when author-journalist Claire Hoy interviewed him for his book
Margin of Error
. “If you understand politics, you’ll see marketing and politics are very similar. Not in a derogatory way, not the hard sell we associate with marketing,” Bozinoff told Hoy. “Politics is looking at people’s needs and how to meet those needs, selling ideas. Selling leaders is sort of like selling a product.”

In fact, though, negative attacks and the hard sell would become easier to do in the public sector than it was in the private sector. Allister Grosart’s long-ago warnings to 1953 Conservatives were being turned upside down. Now, you could be even more reckless selling politics than you could be vending soap or cigarettes (ads for the latter were well on the way to being banned altogether by the late 1980s). Thanks to the continued notion of politics as a higher calling—which was rapidly becoming antiquated—politics remained exempt from the Advertising Standards Canada code. That allowed political advertisers to slip under a lower bar. While a bank or a grocery store couldn’t take out an ad to savage an opponent, for example, a political party could. If the floodgates opened to all-out attack ads in the private sector, the reasoning went, there was a real damage that everyone’s profits would be hurt. Planting seeds of doubt about a competitor’s wares could cultivate suspicion about the product altogether, for instance.

Obviously, a political parallel is possible. If politicians are running down each other’s offerings, the citizens may sour on the whole civic “product.” This was a large fear when attack ads first started in earnest on TV in the 1980s and remained a worry into the next century. Some partisans and political scientists have argued that negative ads, with their appeal to emotion, actually can wake up a sleepy electorate, rousing them to join or fight off the attacks. But other researchers have found that negative ads may simply suppress voter participation, sending people to check out from politics all together.

The difference may lie in the target of the attack ad. If it’s a policy or a principle or an ideal under assault, it may well be that a jolt of emotion will fire up people on both sides. But the nasty personal attacks may be of a different order. Because it’s not something people see often in their ordinary lives or even in the commercial realm, negative advertising of the personal sort may simply convince citizens that they’re seeing yet more evidence of politics’ detachment from the real world. In the 1980s, however, the really harsh stuff hadn’t yet got under way in earnest in Canada, and political ads ran only in official election periods. That too would change.

You Want Us to Pay What?

Engagement was high in the 1988 election, though—75 percent, reflecting a lively debate on the future of the country. Mulroney and the Conservatives received their second majority government and the free trade deal was sealed by the end of the year. That left Mulroney free to pursue a plan that would definitely antagonize Canadian consumer-citizens. The collision would take place in the stores, and at the cash register—and have far-reaching reverberations through the Canadian body politic. It was called the goods and services tax (GST). Its fate, in the years ahead, would be a revealing glimpse into how politicians increasingly had to see citizens as consumers, or, in the building lexicon of this era, “taxpayers.”

Allan Gregg, plugged into the consumer and political marketplace, was acutely aware that the GST was going to be a hard sell. But Prime Minister Mulroney, while a believer in polling, wasn’t all that interested in any numbers except old-fashioned personal approval ratings for himself and his rivals. These were the only polling figures he regularly asked Gregg to provide. When it came to making decisions about government policy, Mulroney tended to go his own way.

Even before the 1988 campaign, Mulroney’s government had announced its intention to wind down the tax on Canada’s manufacturers, and instead place a tax on goods and services, but the proposal didn’t get a lot of attention amid the roar of the free trade election. The shift of the tax from manufacturing to consumption reflected the shifting view of Canada’s economic future at the time. Manufacturing was the boom driver of the immediate postwar years—consumption, or plain old spending, would be the future. This was the beginning of the Second Industrial Divide, after all, and consumer demand, not mass marketing, would shape the markets of the future.

Around the mid-1980s, Canadian manufacturers were starting to get into the consumption business, with direct-from-factory sales to shoppers. Already, the shopping universe was expanding for Canadian consumers, paving the way for the big-box-store revolution to come. A glance through the pages of any newspaper in those years would feature ads boasting “factory direct” sales from bedding manufacturers, or big discounts from the No Frills superstore: “Closest Thing to Wholesale.” Everyone, it seems, was in the mood to cut out the middleman (or middlewoman)—the retailer with the provincial sales-tax burden. The giant Costco Wholesale chain had arrived in Canada, with its wildly successful retail formula of select membership lists and rock-bottom prices. For a minimal Costco membership fee, shoppers could feel elite and special, even as they were saving money. Homegrown competitors would soon arrive. The Canadian Warehouse Club, a Costco imitator with more than ten thousand square metres of shopping space, opened in Vancouver in 1988 and attracted six thousand shoppers and $300,000 in sales each day of its opening weekend.

In that climate, with shoppers feeling simultaneously special but stingy, the idea of imposing a new federal tax on Canada’s citizen-shoppers was going to provoke “a helluva political row,” as Mulroney described it later in his memoirs. “Voters would never accept that this was just a simple replacement of the MST, a tax that they had never even heard of. Here was a tax on everything that moved, from your laundry bill to the doughnut you bought at the coffee shop.” It was, in other words, a blow to Tim Hortons Canadians.

Mulroney was correct. His own Conservative caucus, taking soundings in their ridings at the Christmas break in 1987, reported back that constituents would not tolerate this new tax being imposed on food. The provinces also balked, resisting any initial suggestion about “harmonizing” the new tax with provincial sales tax systems. This may have been the right thing to do, but who was going to explain that to Canadians, who were simply looking at their receipts and seeing more money leaving their wallets? Gregg, with his pollster’s ear tuned to the electorate, also warned Mulroney that the GST was a perilous path, but the PM wouldn’t be swayed. Friends would often joke to Gregg that he was working for a politician who was a slave to the polls. The mere suggestion made Gregg laugh. “Do you think I came to him and said this is what the consumer population really wants? They want to pay a bigger tax on everything they purchase?”

The GST, just like free trade and the constitution, simply made Gregg’s job more difficult. As the Conservatives kept getting on the wrong side of surly consumer-citizens, Gregg was having a harder and harder time giving Mulroney the good news he sought when he was asking about popularity. And besides, the public wasn’t in the mood to hear from the politicians anymore.

Meanwhile, in Alberta
…

It is here in the story of political marketing’s emergence that our gaze has to turn westward. Toronto may have been the birthplace for the influence of advertising and marketing in Canadian politics, but the future was starting to be written in Alberta in the late 1980s. A fledgling political movement called the Reform Party was tapping into many of the forces that would feed the power of political marketing for years to come. Reform’s founder was Preston Manning, son of the long-reigning Social Credit premier Ernest Manning. The young Manning had tried and failed to go into the family business in the 1960s, with a losing run for a provincial seat, and had settled into life as a management consultant in Calgary. The dual experience gave him a chance to see politics as a business—and business as politics. Wearing his management-consultant’s hat, he tended to deconstruct the established order of things. When he decided to make another political run in the 1980s, Manning resolved to deconstruct the federal Progressive Party and Mulroney’s grand governing coalition.

Manning got together with a couple of bright thinkers from the University of Calgary, two men by the names of Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper, a professor and a graduate student, respectively, and began planning how to sever the western base from the federal Tories—with a whole new political party. They were building a niche market in the midst of the old mass-market PC party. All of these Reform Party founders believed that the old Liberal–Conservative compact in Canada was disintegrating, and that “realignment” was coming. Manning had co-written a book with his father titled
Political Re-Alignment: A Challenge to Thoughtful Canadians
. They weren’t actively planning for a future era of consumer politics, but they were laying important groundwork, especially in the arguments for Canada to be more sharply divided between right and left and for politics to rest on rugged individualism.

The consumer revolt over the GST was super-charged fuel for Manning and Reform. In 1989, Manning was one of the lead speakers at a giant “Axe the Tax” rally in Alberta, the first of many mass rallies against the hated tax. “The federal government should not be given additional tax revenues or levers like the GST unless and until it demonstrates the ability to control its spending,” Manning told the crowd. About 1,500 angry Albertans had flooded into Edmonton’s convention centre, vowing to use their consumer power to punish the Mulroney government.

Like all ambitious political parties in Canada before it, the Reform Party was also trying to see what it could learn from the United States. Virgil Anderson, one of Manning’s chief strategists, had met a Republican political consultant, Frank Luntz, at a campaign management seminar in Washington, and pulled him into the planning backrooms in 1991. Luntz was then just getting his start in the polling and political-advice business and he’d worked with the legendary Richard Wirthlin, the man who had plied his polling magic for Reagan. Luntz had a Ph.D. in political science from Oxford and he’d penned a well-received book called
Candidates, Consultants and Campaigns
. His real expertise, like that of Wirthlin, was in delving beneath the simple numbers to find underlying emotions and values in public opinion. In an $80,000-plus poll for Reform, Luntz had found strong support in the Canadian populace for no fewer than a dozen of the party’s policies, especially the ones that played to the discontent also simmering in the consumer world, like those on reducing debt, balanced budgets and stronger guarantees from politicians.

Flanagan noted that Manning liked to talk in terms of “selling” policies, an approach the political scientist called “populism as methodology.” He would criticize Mulroney’s initiatives with a curt dismissal: “They’ll never be able to sell that.” By and large, though, Manning’s politics weren’t pitched at consumer-citizens. He preferred to tell his potential supporters that they were producers of democracy. If someone on a doorstep asked what he was selling, Manning was fond of turning the question back on the voter: “What are you going to contribute?” In this, though, Manning was tapping into the distemper of the times—the disgruntled, disengaged voters who believed that they could do a better job of running the country than the politicians had done. In just a decade, Canadians appeared to have gone through a staged process of withdrawal of faith in government. At the outset of the 1980s, they thought businesses were better suited to run things; by the end of the 1980s, it was the citizens themselves who thought they should be running the country.

But Manning’s appeal to voters also vacillated on that age-old advertising question—the Barnum-versus-Powers conundrum—of whether the audience needed information or confirmation of their worst instincts. Manning borrowed a bit from both approaches. He said he wanted to generate a higher level of debate, but he also made dead-politician quips. (One of Manning’s typical jokes on the circuit: “What’s the difference between a dead skunk on the road and a dead politician on the road? There are skid marks in front of the skunk.”) Manning’s politics exhibited a mix of his religious, public-service upbringing and the modern world of marketing management. Like typical Canadian voters at the time, he was going back and forth between the fading model of politics as an institution and politics as just another shopping outlet.

There was also some tension within the fledgling Reform movement, notably between Manning and his young policy chief, Stephen Harper, which would play out in significant ways in the years ahead, with many implications for political marketing in Canada. In March 1989, Harper prepared a long strategy memo for Manning outlining what he saw as the weaknesses of populism as the core philosophy for the new Reform movement. Some of that memo first appeared in Tom Flanagan’s 1995 book on the founding of the Reform Party, titled
Waiting for the Wave
.