Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (4 page)

In Canada, the first credit cards arrived on the scene in 1968. “Chargex” cards on simple plastic with blue, white and gold horizontal stripes were offered to bank customers in good standing, but also carried a whopping 18 percent interest charge. Canadians loved them though, and it wasn’t long before “MasterCharge,” with its distinctive overlapping circles on its card, came in to compete with the Chargex and American Express cards, too.

Consumer debt was steadily climbing—from $835 million in 1948 to $11 billion by 1969. In 1948, consumer credit amounted to 7.5 percent of Canadians’ disposable income. By 1969, it was up to 21.5 percent. By the early 1970s, it was estimated that more than 10 million credit cards were in the wallets of Canadian consumers and Canadians were actually outpacing Americans in their use of consumer credit.

Drivers of Democracy

“Fordism” is the name given to the type of economy that Canada was building in these decades. The term, coined by cultural analyst Antonio Gramsci, described the pervasive, mass-production methods of automobile maker Henry Ford and his assembly lines. After the Second World War, mass production emerged to accommodate jobs and goods for the burgeoning population. Fordism was about more than cars. It was about building a world in which people were paid well for low-skill work, so that they could afford all the consumer products that their work was churning out. Still, the car stood at the centre of this economic and cultural revolution. As any chronicler of the postwar era knows, the automobile changed everything. In 1945, only 1.1 million automobiles were registered in Canada. In 1952, car registrations had doubled and by 1961, there were 4.3 million cars in a nation of 18 million people. Or, if you prefer, you could look at it this way: when the Second World War ended, one in ten people had a car in Canada; by the dawn of the 1960s, roughly one of every four Canadians had a car. Four was also, probably not coincidentally, the size of the famed “nuclear family”—a mom, a dad and two kids, one of each gender, which also happened to be the ideal of the 1960s.

The car would indeed change Canada in fundamental ways, going far beyond the jobs it provided in the auto sector or the fuel costs it incurred for the daily commuter. Cars changed the actual landscape of Canada, with the arrival of multi-lane highways, driveways, garages and parking lots, not to mention the drive-in restaurants, motels and movie theatres. A whole new way of looking at the world, from the window of the automobile, ushered “carchitecture” into the design lexicon, and buildings and signs were created to catch the eye of passing motorists. The McDonald’s golden arches were a classic example; so too, for that matter, was the Tim Hortons sign, with its own oversized, bold, brown-and-white design. Cars made the suburbs financially possible, indeed attractive, for the increasing numbers of people working and living in urban areas.

As Richard Harris notes in his book
Creeping Conformity
, a chronicle of how Canada’s suburbs were built, “The automobile allowed men, especially, to live much further from work and encouraged suburbs to spread at lower densities. Instead of twenty-five-foot lots, forty- and fifty-foot lots became the norm, larger still around smaller cities and in affluent suburbs.” Don Mills, in Toronto, was one of Canada’s first real suburbs, the brainchild of financier E.P. Taylor, who commissioned the design of quadrants and cul-de-sacs that would distinguish the future geography of most suburbs. Taylor acquired the necessary two-thousand-plus acres of land from North York from 1947 to 1952. More than fifty builders would work on the homes to fill the new suburb, and the first home opened on Jocelyn Crescent, to much fanfare, in 1953.

Don Mills, just outside downtown Toronto, became the exemplar for a brave new world. In 1954, CBC’s
News Magazine
travelled across the country to document the housing situation at mid-century, noting approvingly the rise of planned suburbs such as Don Mills. “A key word to Don Mills—community,” the narrator said, lauding the way that the neighbourhood had been designed to put stores, schools and homes within walking distance of each other, and all of this fewer than ten kilometres from the city centre. In March 1955,
Chatelaine
devoted a whole issue to “How to Live in the Suburbs,” featuring stories such as “Is the Coffee Party a Menace or a Must?” and “How to Furnish a New Home Without Panic Buying.”

Although the original intent of the suburbs was to create instant neighbourhoods and community, front porches became increasingly uncommon, with inward-looking suburbanites favouring back decks or basement recreation rooms instead. And of course, in a nod to the rising dominance of the automobile, driveways and garages became distinguishing, prominent features of the suburban landscape.

It’s worth reflecting on what the car and the suburbs did to Canada’s existing political architecture as well. Canada’s Parliament, like most Western democratic legislatures, was designed in a time when people lived and worked in the same riding or electoral district. So voters could expect their local MP to understand the breadth of their day-to-day concerns, whether they were related to their home or their jobs. But a whole new commuting class of Canadians meant that many voters (mainly men) spent a large part of their day out of their home riding. Their political views may have been informed by the places where they worked, but their votes were cast in the places where they lived. A factory employee with strong union views, for instance, may have been inclined to vote for the NDP because of where he spent his day, but found himself voting in a riding where the Conservatives had historically held sway. A businessman working in a downtown office all day could find himself leaning toward Conservative policies, but cast his ballot in a riding where the Liberals had created jobs or opportunities.

This new commuter class was a boon for radio, too, which provided news, sports and information to all those Canadians driving back and forth to work each day. Sixty-two new radio stations opened in Canada between 1945 and 1952, meeting a demand that was fed in part by the new commuters. Cocooned in their automobiles, they became a captive audience, ripe for advertising or political persuasion. By 1962, there were over two million car radios in Canada. The surge in car ownership, in fact, rescued radio from potential extinction. Though radio had been the second-largest medium in Canada up until the early 1950s, just behind newspapers, the arrival of television meant that radio lost its position as the central entertainment unit for the whole family. This would fundamentally change the nature of and the market for radio: it went from family audiences to an audience made up of individuals, most of them in their cars, listening at peak times between seven a.m. and nine a.m, and again, to a lesser extent, between four p.m. and six p.m. Rather than try to be all things to all people, radio stations looked for niche markets and target demographics. The radio dial was divided into specialized channels: mellow music and commentary for commuters, rock and roll for teenagers, country music stations for those whose tastes ran in that direction. This “fragmenting” of the market was a foreshadowing of changes to come in the political market, too, several decades later.

In the meantime, television took over as the mass-market medium. Canada’s own television industry officially launched in 1952, with the opening of the CBLT station in Toronto and CBFT in Montreal. Canadians close to the US border, with strong antennas, had been able to pick up American channels for several years by this point, but these two new CBC stations were homegrown. Just a year before, in 1951, the Massey Commission had handed down its report on Canadian culture, warning that measures had to be taken to protect Canada from the mass-market culture of our neighbour to the south. “We benefit from vast importations of what might be familiarly called the American cultural output,” the Massey Report stated. “Of American institutions we make the freest use.” In the movie theatres, the commission stated, the problem was most acute. “The cinema at present is not only the most potent but also the most alien of the influences shaping our Canadian life. Nearly all Canadians go to the movies; and most movies are from Hollywood. The urbane influences of Carnegie and Rockefeller have helped us to be ourselves; Hollywood refashions us in its own image.”

The first Canadian-made TV broadcasts were done live from the studios in Montreal and Toronto. Viewers were treated to piano performances from Glenn Gould and singalongs from staffers or puppet shows for children. On the debut evening of Toronto’s TV channel, news announcer Lorne Greene informed citizens solemnly that the notorious Boyd Gang had escaped from Toronto’s Don Jail. TV brought the political life of the country into people’s living rooms as well. In 1955, for the first time, Canadians could follow along on television as ceremonies were held to mark the opening of a session of Parliament.

Although those first made-in-Canada TV channels reached only 10 percent of the Canadian population when they first went on the air, TV rapidly expanded across the country in just a few short years. By the end of the 1950s, there were forty-eight TV stations up and running in the country, beaming grainy black-and-white programs into the homes of roughly 75 percent of the Canadian population. Advertising revenues rose by a staggering 1,400 percent in this decade, making the ad business into a lucrative career for creative, educated, ambitious types—the kind who might be attracted to politics, too.

Better Lives Through Science

After the Second World War, Canada was also caught up in the worship of science, evidence and systems—fuel for the politicos who were keen to bring that same discipline into their often unpredictable world. Military service during the war had elevated the virtues of drills and organization; it was no accident that politics had borrowed heavily from armed forces lingo to do its own organizing, complete with battles, troops and campaigns. Science transformed people’s homes in the second half of the twentieth century, too, including bringing plastic dinnerware into the modern housewife’s cupboards, and the design of kitchens and bathrooms began to resemble clean, sterile laboratories. Science could solve every problem, but it created some, too.

Malcolm Wallace, principal of University College, put it this way in his submission to the Massey Commission: “Most of the changes which have transformed our daily lives, our standards in matters of government and education, our hopes for the future of man, and indeed those general ideals which serve as lanterns to mark our path—all these changes have originated in the dominating role which science has come to play in our lives. No such fundamental change has ever before been recorded in so brief a period of human history. Science has taught us to increase human productivity of goods to an incredible extent; we not only enjoy comforts and conveniences hitherto undreamed of, but power to create a new Eden on earth. As a matter of fact we have chosen to indulge in the most expensive of all luxuries—recurring world wars. Our discovery of the atomic bomb would seem to guarantee bigger and better wars in the future.”

The atom bomb, of course, loomed large in the collective, global imagination after the Second World War, with the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in their own Cold War nuclear arms race. Canadians were following every twist and turn in the tension of mutually assured destruction, and the federal government built the “Diefenbunker,” in Carp, Ontario, near the capital, to house the prime minister and cabinet in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Canadian schoolchildren were watching films that demonstrated to them the superiority of democracy and the dread of communism. One measure of a truly free society, Canadians were told, was the freedom to choose and the freedom to shop. In Eastern Bloc countries, people lined up for everyday staples, but in free and democratic nations, people could browse plentiful wares in the store aisles. Shopping wasn’t a chore, then, but a high democratic privilege.

People liked the idea that science could even shape minds and allow people to choose their own destiny—which before then had been shaped by geography or genetics. Sigmund Freud’s ideas of the subconscious mind and the idea of a “self” had taken hold by the mid-twentieth century in Europe and North America. Psychoanalysis, Freud’s pioneered method of putting people in touch with their deeper selves, was a growing method of therapy in Canada, with the founding of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in the 1950s. But it was in fact Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who put Freud’s ideas into use in the commercial and then political sectors, to work arts of persuasion on the masses. It was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a gentler term than propaganda, and Bernays who also dreamed up some of the tools that are still in the arsenal of the PR professional today—press releases, for instance. Bernays’s clients in the early twentieth century included the United Fruit Company and President Woodrow Wilson. Bernays, who has been called the “Father of Spin,” could also be called the great-grandfather of modern consumer- citizenship. Where Freud operated on the more democratic principle that minds should be opened, Bernays shaped his methods around mass minds that would remain closed.

“In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind,” Bernays wrote in his book
Propaganda
, a title evidently chosen before that word had somewhat darker connotations.