Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (19 page)

Harper said the party should become “a modern version of the Thatcher-Reagan phenomenon.” Essentially, without labelling them as such, Harper wanted Reform to go out and find the Canadian version of the Essex Men and the Reagan Democrats among working-class and urban-dwelling Canadians, giving them a “market-oriented” ideology. Reform, Harper wrote, should be concentrating on gaining “a sizeable chunk of the urban working class and rural sector ‘swing’ vote, without alienating its urban private-sector, middle-class ‘core.’ The key is to emphasize moderate, conservative social values, consistent with the traditional family, the market economy and patriotism.”

A Fury in the Land

Mulroney was aware that the ground was shifting in Canada and that his government was the target of a free-floating antipathy to everything to do with politics. So he put former
Ottawa Citizen
editor Keith Spicer in charge of a commission called the “Citizen’s Forum on National Unity.” This too was an attempt to bridge the ambivalence that the political class was feeling about the old political institutions versus the modern consumer market. Spicer’s commission was an old-style institutional inquiry into a contemporary sentiment at large in the nation. For a year, the Spicer panel went around the country taking the measure of public distemper toward the nation and its leaders—a giant focus group. Its findings showed a nation still very much attached to the idea of a collective Canadian identity in theory, but bitter and angry about how things were working in practice. Some of that “fury in the land,” as Spicer called it, was consumerist in nature. “We are living beyond our means,” one citizen in the Northwest Territories town of Hay River told the commission. “The one thing it [the GST] does do is remind me, every time I pay for an item or send out an invoice, how much I hate the government,” an Alberta resident said in a letter to the Spicer forum.

As well, in the midst of this anger, a new protest organization had been born: the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, formed when the Association of Saskatchewan Taxpayers and the “Resolution One Association” of Alberta joined forces in 1990. The group gave voice to the increasingly popular idea that the relationship between citizens and government was solely one of customer and service-provider. (The “taxpayers” label, incidentally, was also a US import. Kevin Avram, the founder of the Saskatchewan wing, had been at a conference in Austin, Texas, and came across someone from the Association of Concerned Texas Taxpayers. “As soon as I saw that name, I knew it was a sweetheart,” Avram would recall later.)

The new Canadian taxpayers’ group was non-partisan, but it had much in common with the raison d’être and methods of the nascent Reform Party. Its early tactics, like Reform’s, were populist and rural-based—petitions and small donations from disgruntled citizens. And in a throwback to the Dalton Camp strategies of decades earlier in New Brunswick, it also supplied local papers with pre-written commentary pieces, which were often just cut and pasted into the editorial pages. “Let’s Talk Taxes,” these commentaries were called. Camp’s slogan, and advertising pen name, remember, had been “Let’s Clean House.”

The first targets for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation were, naturally, government spending and debt, but also lucrative political pensions and anything deemed to be waste in general. They were tapping into the larger, anti-elite, consumer-citizenry outrage in the Canadian populace. The head of the group’s Alberta wing was particularly adept in putting the anger into consumer language. “We’ve all gotten used to Cadillac services from our governments,” a young Jason Kenney, executive director of the federation’s Alberta headquarters, said in a
Globe and Mail
interview. “But our Cadillacs are about to be taken back by the repo man.”

Kenney himself, just in his early twenties when he was hired to be the public face for the taxpayers’ group, learned a valuable lesson about political advertising in these years, which would serve him well as he climbed up the political ladder. At one point, the federation had conducted some major research about public-sector pensions and defined contributions. It was a complicated topic—and when the research paper was finally released, it yielded some minor news coverage and zero public attention. A week or so later, Kenney travelled to Ottawa to speak out against MPs who had opted into the gold-plated pension program. On a whim, Kenney went off to Canadian Tire and forked over $300 for a couple of hundred plastic-pig lawn ornaments, which he then planted on Parliament Hill to represent the “pension hogs” in the Commons. The media pounced. The Taxpayers Federation and Kenney were overwhelmed with requests for interviews for days and days afterward.

“After the dozens of hours and thousands of dollars we’d spent on the policy paper, the three hundred bucks I’d spent on plastic pigs was a major news story,” Kenney said.

Mulroney’s reign in office ended with one last constitutional adventure: the Charlottetown Accord, which went down in flames of rejection for politicians in a national referendum. It would be the last time in the twentieth century, and for some time, that anyone tried to distract Canadian shopper-citizens with matters of nation-building.
Allan Gregg, at his focus-group sessions in Toronto, was all too aware of the rage building against the politicians involved and had plenty of early hints of what was in store for this deal. He’d done his usual thing, inviting senior political strategists to watch what ordinary folks were saying about the Charlottetown Accord, which had consumed so much of the Canadian political class’s attention. Millions of dollars had been spent cobbling together the 1992 accord; millions more in the effort to sell it. (Vickers and Benson had been recruited for that advertising job, too, incidentally.) Behind the glass, again, Gregg and the strategists watched as all their focus-group participants were asked about the accord. None had heard of the deal; none could even say what was in it. One person did volunteer that he’d heard that Canada would have two Senates: one for Quebec, one for the rest of the country (that was false).

But when these citizens were asked how they were going to vote, they had some very definite views. All were going to vote “No.” Why? “Because those bastards [politicians] want it so badly, we’re not going to give it to them,” one focus-group participant said. There it was, in a nutshell—the citizens were starting to see Canadian politics as a simple transaction: voters give, politicians take. Citizens were becoming “taxpayers.”

THE BRAND-WAGON

I
f the future of Canadian politics would rest in a merger with shopping, Allan Gregg had a good head start. The
Decima Quarterly
reports produced by Gregg’s firm, available for a $20,000 annual subscription, were a compendium of incredibly valuable information about the mood of the Canadian consumer. On behalf of his blue-chip corporate clients, Gregg was getting a chance to probe the Canadian psyche in depth about everything from the cost of living to attitudes toward immigration. Up to this point, most analysis of voter motivation had relied primarily on the solid, old statistics of the Canadian Election Study, carried out by political scientists and academics at each election from 1965 onward. Their inquiries into the mood of the citizenry were largely confined to the public mood about politics, from which the voters were increasingly disengaged. The Canadian Election Study didn’t look into consumer preferences. The
Decima Quarterly
surveys, meanwhile, weren’t strictly intended to help Gregg in his political advisory work, but they turned into a treasure trove of tips proving handy to politics, as well. And that’s because those worlds were moving closer and closer together in the 1990s: what people wanted as consumers, they tended to want as voters. This put Gregg at the nexus of the blurring distinction between consumers and citizens.

“Voter choice is really no different from consumer choice,” Gregg would tell his political friends—a sentiment remarkably similar to what Martin Goldfarb had expressed in the 1970s about selling politicians like cans of tomatoes on a shelf. “It’s no different to the extent that what you have is a relatively rational calculation between the intersection of self-interest and self-image.” In people’s capacity as voters or consumers, whether trying to pick a brand of soap or decide where to put their “X” on the ballot, Gregg said their choice would boil down to two crucial questions: “Are they like me and are they for me?” A good politician would position the “brand,” Gregg said, “in such a way that your target voter is saying ‘yes’ to both questions.”

The use of the word “brand” to describe a political party was still new in the 1990s, but it was quickly catching on in popularity and expanding as a concept. It was going viral, we might say today. Where once a brand was known as a product name or trademark, it was now seen as a set of ideas. US marketing guru Seth Godin would describe it this way: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

Martin Goldfarb, equally entrenched in the consumer and political worlds in Canada, was seeing the same kind of trends at the end of the twentieth century. He was starting to realize the politicians’ folly in believing they could sort the Canadian public according to their mere geography or political leanings. All through the 1980s, Goldfarb and his firm had been honing their skills in “psychographics,” which the anthropologist/pollster saw as the bold new frontier in public opinion research. Psychographics were the result of polling people about their beliefs and value structures. Through these methods, Goldfarb had divided the Canadian consumer-citizen market into six basic groups by the dawn of the 1990s:

• • 
  Day-to-day watchers: Realistic, generally satisfied people, attentive to the world around them but content to be followers rather than leaders. About 24 percent of the Canadian population could be described this way in the 1990s, Goldfarb said.
  
• • 
  Old-fashioned puritans: People resistant to change, “conservative to the point of being defensive, traditional to the point of being inflexible, indifferent to the point of apathy.” These people, who sounded a lot like Margaret Thatcher’s Essex Men, represented 15 percent of the population.
  
• • 
  Responsible survivors: Cautious, risk-averse people who accept direction well, who accounted for 13 percent of the population.
  
• • 
  Disinterested self-indulgents: The 17 percent of the population who put their own wants and desires first.
  
• • 
  Joiner activists: The 19 percent of the population who were non-conformists, at the leading edge of opinion change.
  
• • 
  Aggressive achievers: These “confident, success-oriented people,” Goldfarb said, were focused on success and accounted for about 12 percent of the Canadian populace.
  

Essentially, these too were “brands” of people, sorted by their values, not their politics. The 1990s would see a stampede toward these notions of people, politics and products as brands, and a rush by political and private marketers to set up “niche” markets to suit this fragmented population. Instead of sorting the Canadian map by political support, the strategists would learn to see people for what they wanted from their politics and their supermarkets.

Grocery List for Democracy

One marketing whiz in Canada seemed to have figured out the new Canadian “psychographics,” too: Loblaws president Dave Nichols. Although the supermarket chain had been floundering a decade earlier, Nichols had tapped into two apparently contradictory consumer trends and rebuilt the grocery empire. First, Nichols had introduced a whole line of generic, “no name” brands, to capitalize on Canadians’ desire for value and rejection of the old, established brands. Then, he created his own niche market product line called “President’s Choice,” which appealed to customer demand for more exotic, higher-quality consumables. With these two marketing innovations, Nichols turned around the Loblaws chain, and also mapped the way toward methods that would be studied and imitated by the political class in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.

Actually, by the end of the 1980s, Nichols was arguably more of a success than any political party and his presidency could legitimately claim more adherents than any other political leader of the time. One A.C. Nielsen survey found that Nichols’s “Insider Report,” a mini-magazine filled with anecdotes, recipes and product recommendations, was diligently read by 59 percent of the Canadian population. (It probably didn’t hurt that Vickers and Benson was handling the Loblaws account, once again creating a mini-nation within the Canadian nation for its corporate client.)