Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (24 page)

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS

I
t is here in the story of consumer-citizenship that we have to pause and take a step out of politics and into the radically altered landscape of the Canadian consumer nation in the fifty years since the end of the Second World War. When we see just how much shopping changed in half a century, we may be able to better understand how our politics, influenced by the marketing world, was changing, too. While Canadian parties were wrapping their minds around marketing at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the “market” itself was in the midst of several tectonic shifts. Put simply, consumers weren’t the same people they were when Keith Davey was telling his radio station to pursue the buying power of “young marrieds.”

In the first place, being young and married was no longer a typical condition in Canada. Starting with the 1991 census, that old scenario of an Ozzie-and-Harriet-type family—two parents at home, with children under age twenty-four also under the same roof—was true for fewer than half of Canadian families. By the time the 2001 census rolled around, only 44 percent of Canadian families fit that description. And just as Canadians were living their lives differently, they were also buying things differently. The changes in just twenty years, in fact, had been staggering.

Big-box stores had arrived in Canada, and with them, the decline of traditional department stores and independent retailers. Eaton’s closed its doors in 1999, amid much commentary on the death of a Canadian institution. Big bookstore chains were imperilling local independents—a US trend that formed the plotline for the hit romantic comedy
You’ve Got Mail
. The same thing was happening with Canadian grocery stores and drugstores, which had increasingly become concentrated within the hands of a few large supermarket players, such as Loblaws, Sobey’s and A&P. What’s more, the free trade agreements sweeping the globe had opened up the Canadian market to a lot more imports. Canadians who wanted to buy shoes in 1989, for instance, would find that about half the footwear for sale was foreign-made. In 1995, imports represented 70 percent of the footwear market. Imports had flooded the pharmaceutical industry, too—from 18 percent of the market in 1983 to 76 percent in 2000. Along with all these changes came the birth of the “connected” consumer—with access to shopping all the time through the internet and their banks—whose transactions mostly revolved around pushing buttons and swiping plastic with magnetic strips through machines. And lastly, but most significantly, came the arrival of a lot more choice for services such as telephone and cable and even energy, which had once been more or less monopolies in Canada because of heavy regulation. Now, instead of just calling up Ma Bell or the gas and cable company and asking to be hooked up, Canadian consumers had the luxury, and the burden, of figuring out which service to choose. Freedom and choice, those tenets of the postwar consumer boom, were alive and well in the Canadian commercial world. Now people weren’t just spending their hard-earned money on stuff, but also on mysterious, invisible things they couldn’t touch, such as cell service and broadband space.

In what would prove to be a significant shift for political parties, too, the economy was in the midst of eliminating the middleman (or middlewoman). Where Canadians once went to travel agents to book their trips, for example, they could now use their own online booking systems. Travel agents were quickly becoming extinct, and the same fate seemed to be awaiting brokers in other career realms, whether real estate, banking or the stock market, and even in education, publishing and journalism. In a world where anyone could publish on the internet through blogs or ebooks, would we soon need newspapers or book publishers to serve as gatekeepers? The fancy term for this trend was “disintermediation”—popularized in Don Tapscott’s 1995 book
Growing Up Digital
. All of these developments collided to create a world in which Canadians were busy—pumping their own gas, doing their own travel arrangements and reading up on which telephone or cable service to get, or how best to spend or invest their money.

The sheer pace at which new electronics were arriving in the market was staggering. Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, most Canadian music listeners had replaced their old records with eight-track tapes, then cassette tapes, then compact discs, then MP3 files. Their television sets and telephones were becoming obsolete every couple of years with new advances in screen and satellite technology. And the voluminous instruction manuals for their new gadgets would leave people feeling they needed an engineering degree. It left Canadians precious little time to read up on politics, let alone volunteer or attend a political meeting. Thanks to the incredible complexity of their commercial world, citizens didn’t have a chance to be anything but consumers. Who could blame them for checking out of political discussions that seemed increasingly remote from their day-to-day concerns? Who had time to figure out what those politicians were arguing about in Ottawa, when you couldn’t even figure out how to program your home-entertainment system?

In 2002, the federal government wanted to get a picture of this new consumer. It commissioned focus-group testing (naturally), which was carried out over several fall evenings in Halifax, Calgary and Montreal. While observers sat behind glass, these Canadian citizens told their interviewers about their all-consuming job of consuming. No matter which city or which group, participants were virtually unanimous—they believed that they were now consumers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even when they weren’t actively buying stuff, they felt they were shopping. Merely researching a product purchase made a person into a consumer, the participants told the interviewers. Perhaps most significantly, these Canadians also told interviewers they were consumers when it came to government:

A number of participants also pointed to examples when they were a consumer of government products. Examples included taxes, labour laws and unemployment. One respondent in Montreal mentioned the health-care system as an example of consuming government services, while education—particularly post-secondary education—was a popular example in the four English groups.

The ostensible purpose of this focus-group research was to find out how citizens would be served by a new government internet “gateway” to help handle their consumer concerns. But the larger finding was a significant cultural marker for a new century: Canadians were now having trouble seeing where their lives as consumers stopped and their existence as citizens started. They were one and the same. As the report put it:

Consumption, for these participants, is about much more than buying products and services. Canadians are faced with endless situations in which they are consumers—from shopping and comparing before they buy, to transacting with retailers and service providers and dealing with the same organizations after the transaction (perhaps to complain or call upon a warranty). Participants also told us that being a consumer extends far beyond traditional products and services to include utilities, education and government services… Even when they are not actively engaged in a purchase or post-purchase activity, they must cope with the impulse to buy and the unceasing flow of advertising and other commercial messages. In this increasingly complex environment, they find themselves needing more consumer information than ever.

The consumer overload didn’t end there, though. Something interesting happened in the shape of Canadians’ household finances as they became 24-7 consumers at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Up until this point in the country’s history, Canadians spent less than their disposable income each year, meaning that some of it was put aside for saving or investment. However, from 1996 onward, they spent almost all of their earnings, leaving very little for saving. It followed, then, that personal debt, reliance on credit, was increasing. From 1992 to 2002, consumer debt grew by 10 percent each year on average for each Canadian. Between 1980 and 2005, per capita consumption expenditure in Canada more than tripled—from $6,870 to $23,560.

Canadians were spending much less of their household budgets on needs, and more on what they wanted. In 1961, clothing and footwear costs amounted to 9 percent of Canadian consumer spending, while food, beverages and tobacco accounted for 19 percent. Nearly fifty years later, these percentages were cut in half—just 4 percent of total consumer spending was devoted to clothing and footwear and only 10 percent went toward food, beverages and tobacco. (Some of that latter decline is probably partly explained by declining rates in smoking, too, which was once lumped in with spending on other basic “need” items.) As always, Canadians were still spending a lot of their budgets on their homes, in rent or mortgages and furnishings.

While politicians were being eviscerated for out-of-control spending and inattention to debt, Canadians were in a buying and debt spree of their own. Clearly, these were “do as we say, not as we do” times in terms of the fiscal disconnect between Canada’s citizens and their politicians. But it’s not as if the politicians could bark back—in a consumer nation, as we know, the customer is always right.

One uproar in the late 1990s illustrated the simmering anger in the consumer-citizenry—over “negative option billing,” the practice of automatically adding charges for extra services to customers’ monthly bills without asking for approval. It was up to subscribers to be alert to the additional charges and decline them; otherwise, the companies would simply assume everyone wanted them. Seven new cable channels had been rolled out on January 1, 1995, and added to the services of 7.5 million customers in Canada. Within three weeks, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission had received over nine thousand complaints from angry citizens.

The issue captured the distemper of the times for Canadian consumers, who felt overwhelmed by new charges for things they used to get for free, and by a mind-numbing array of choices. But it also poked at national unity issues—some of these new cable channels were French-language services. If you gave Canadians the choice simply to tune out French, what did that say about the still-fragile efforts to build bridges between the two solitudes in this country? The taxpayers, not the citizens, were asking, “What, we have to pay to keep the country together?” In short, if Canadians were simply consumers, unconcerned about larger unity matters, would they want French-language TV channels?

By 1999, Parliament did manage to pass a law making it illegal for companies to bill with the “negative-option” tactic, but the result was simply more paperwork. Service agreements became even more laden with fine print to obtain customers’ consent for extra charges. One survey by Visa Canada, carried out many years after the legislation on negative-option billing came into place, found that only one in four web shoppers read all the online text and 27 percent said they read nothing at all.

Just Hang Up

Canadians were also getting annoyed with advertising. One study of the time, by the Leger and Scholz marketing firm, showed that Canadian consumers were pummelled with an estimated four thousand “promotional stimuli” each day, and TV was only part of the problem. Billions of flyers were being stuffed into mailboxes, and ads were appearing on public transit and in washrooms. On top of all that, there had been an explosion in “telemarketing”—sales calls to people’s homes, often using predictive-dialling technology. In 2001, one survey showed that 61 percent of Canadians would prefer not to receive any such calls in their home. The United States had introduced a do-not-call list to rein in this practice, and Canada decided to follow suit.

In late 2004, Paul Martin’s Liberal government introduced Bill C-37, called rather vaguely “An Act to Amend the Telecommunications Act.” The exisiting Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Act already required individual companies to keep their own lists of people who asked not to be called. The do-not-call-list was an attempt to give consumers one-stop shopping, so to speak, in opting out of annoying calls at home. Here again, things got interesting on the political front. Political parties were not expected to be covered when Advertising Standards Canada brought in its code of conduct in previous decades, the idea being, as we’ll remember, that no one wanted to interfere with their freedom of expression. When the government introduced its own legislation for a do-not-call list in Canada, however, there was initially no mention of keeping political parties outside the law.

This sent a chill through the collective political class in Canada, regardless of party stripe. All the political parties relied on telemarketing: for fundraising, for building memberships and for get-out-the-vote efforts during election campaigns. John Laschinger, with his Ruby Red Grapefruit and
Playboy
subscriber lists, had set that ball in motion. The very things that were bugging Canadians in the private sector, advertising and unsolicited phone calls, were now vital tools of the political trade. Charities in Canada had also become reliant on telemarketing for finding donations, and newspaper outlets had been rounding up subscribers with phone-call campaigns. What did charities, news media and political parties have in common? They all claimed to be more than mere commercial interests—they played a public-service role, too. And so, after some intense lobbying from these groups, formally and informally, the do-not-call legislation suddenly landed before the Commons Industry Committee in May 2005 with a series of amendments, granting some wide exemptions to the registry. In fact, in a rare show of consensus among rivals, the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition were in hearty agreement that it would be wrong to limit political parties’ ability to place phone calls to Canadian households.