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Sunday, November 8, 2009 12:03 PM
Copenhagen already a success
Within the next few weeks, the global media will turn its attention to Copenhagen with ferocious intensity.
The news will suggest that any prospect the planet has of surviving rests or falls on the achievement of an agreement. Some will argue that without a binding accord, the planet is doomed. Others will argue that with an accord, our standard of living will fall to miserable levels.
Most readers will be left a bit frustrated, the rest angry.
There is a huge dysfunction between the way the average voter comes at these issues and the way policy spokespeople in the corporate, environmental NGO and government worlds often do. And at no time is this more visible than when mega climate/carbon events like Copenhagen come around.
Most people are worried that the planet is under a lot of pressure, and many believe the climate is changing as a result. Considerably fewer have examined the science behind climate change, and fewer still the complex formulae that are at the heart of greenhouse-gas reduction targets.
But whether everyone embraces the evidence the climate is changing, or the techniques proposed to mitigate it, may be somewhat beside the point.
The strong public consensus is that we should reduce extravagant or unsustainable consumption of resources and do a lot more to avoid pollution, because we have a moral responsibility to do better by future generations. How well we do at living up to these goals is debatable, but the fact that we have embraced them more fervently than in the past is pretty hard to argue with.
And the reason we have done so has only a little to do with climate change.
When we feel impelled to take reusable grocery bags to shop, it's not because we have done the climate math, it's because we have adopted a new moral math.
Many climate-change stakeholders lose focus on the moral question in a rush to debate the details of climate science or the specifics of GHG reduction targets and tools. When this happens, millions of concerned citizens drift away from the coverage, and end up uncertain about whether anything is happening, and what if anything they should support.
The coverage that surrounded the Kyoto negotiations, and the subsequent debate about ratification was a good example of how dysfunctional this can be. One on hand, I'm sure there are many who would make the case that Kyoto was an unmitigated failure, since it resulted in no binding targets being adopted by countries like the United States, and progress that fell far short of the goals set for the accord.
But a counter argument can be made, that the Kyoto debate was one of several turning points in the flow of our collective psychology about the environment.
It caused many people to do a gut check, to consider whether we really believe that we have a responsibility to conserve the planet for those to come. When we look around us today, as markets for a wide variety of energy sources are taking shape, as the automotive industry is rushing to produce greener cars, as new building practices are taking root across the planet, as emitters in one part of the world prepare to pay other parts of the world to leave their forests intact, can we really conclude that Kyoto was pure failure?
The fact that our behaviour post-Kyoto did not correspond to a certain set of timetables and schedules of parts-per-million of carbon doesn't alter the fact that behaviours are changing and markets are forming to alleviate environmental stresses. My guess is that Copenhagen will be another important catalytic moment, agreement or not.
Whether we are changing quickly enough is another matter. But there can be little doubt that change is afoot, and will continue, deal or no deal.
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Wednesday, November 4, 2009 09:30 AM
Mother's intuition on flu
The most astute political analyst I’ve ever met, I married. Politics buffs will recall her as the legislative assistant to Joe Clark who informed him before his fateful budget vote in the House of Commons that he would lose the vote and face an election. Thirty years later, her judgement is even more acute.
Last night, we found ourselves talking about the chaos that has replaced the eerie calm that had been prevailing around government action on H1N1. My sense is that the federal government is facing heightened political risks, and it’s hard to predict if, when and how these risks will subside. It seems to me the Prime Minister has been following a carefully tuned and largely successful strategy of cutting cheques and otherwise staying out of traffic.
My wife Nancy offered a clear view of the challenge facing the PM, skipping past the soggy, overchewed “competency of Ottawa dimension” and focusing on the PM’s weakest demographic link, women. The H1N1 issue moved from rumoured problem to painful tragedy within minutes of the reported deaths of children. Everyone, and certainly every parent, was traumatized by and talking about these awful stories.
Notwithstanding the social evolution in the traditional roles of mothers and fathers, in most two-parent households, family health still falls to moms, and it’s hard to imagine anything that is a higher priority for them.
The deaths of these children, and the illness and anxiety besetting so many Canadian families right now, makes the politics of it seem worse than insignificant.
But setting aside any thought of partisan risk or advantage, the PM should understand that this is a singular moment where the demographic group that has only irregularly and tentatively trusted his leadership is going to be sizing him up.
Canada’s moms will intuit pretty quickly if for Stephen Harper, this is but one file of many, or the one that’s keeping him up these nights. It is for them.
Monday, November 2, 2009 03:05 PM
How Ignatieff swung the axe
The performance of the Liberals in the polls made it inevitable that we would see changes in the way things were done.
Adam Radwanski raised the question whether Ian Davey's departure really need to be so brutally handled. Others opined that maybe the ham-fisted treatment was simple incompetence, or that humiliation comes with the territory. Possibly, I guess, but Adam's is the most important perspective as I see it.
Peter Donolo is a very talented, successful fellow who made what I'm sure wasn't an easy choice to uproot and go back into the service of a party he cares about and a country he loves.
I haven't known Mr. Davey as long, but he strikes me as a highly intelligent, exceedingly decent person, who similarly put everything he had into the candidate he supported and the work he was asked to do.
We all need people of this calibre to sign up for these assignments, in every party. We should want their efforts to be respected, and thus inspire others to do the same.
To dismiss this dismissal as simple ineptitude is to lose sight of one of the most important roles a leader needs to play. To inspire loyalty, leaders have to show how it’s done, including when making very hard choices. To recruit great talent, leaders need to reassure people that they can count on a team to support them, when times get tough.
It’s on Mr. Ignatieff, I'm afraid, that someone who gave so much to him appears to have been treated so poorly. It's in the Liberal Leader's interest to find some way to make this more right going forward, for his own sake, if not for Mr. Davey's. He can't afford to let his partisans think this was a telling "glimpse into his soul."
Sunday, November 1, 2009 02:33 PM
Will greens shift?
Lots of people think politics is a blood sport, but it's a rare week when that is more than a metaphor. The environment can stir emotions.
As far as I am concerned, it was a bad week for environmentalists.
Yelling from the gallery of the House of Commons, being dragged out kicking and screaming, is pretty tired.
Worse still, all the speculation that this was an NDP tactic more than a group of non-partisans anxious about the planet.
These days, most Canadians are bored with the spectacle of politics, fed up with manufactured drama and predictable posturing.
Their scepticism is not only directed at parties, governments and corporations, but toward NGOs too.
Our research has shown that many Canadians appreciate the role that environmental groups have played in raising the profile of issues. But now, they want environmental groups to get collaborative, be practical, to pursue progress even if it’s not perfection.
Bringing Parliament to a stop in the land of “peace, order and good government” is not exactly in line with that desire.
I'll wager there wasn't much outrage that one of the protesters was a little bloodied in the scuffle with security. I'd also bet that very few Canadians came away either more informed, sympathetic or passionate about the ideas of the protesters.
Canadians are not satisfied with the status quo when it comes to the health of the planet, nor with their own role in protecting it. We get that we all contribute greenhouse gas emissions, just as we understand that oil and gas are produced because we use it.
Most of us want to find ways to evolve and do better, and want Canada to do so as well.
Most will not get hung up on timetables, or percentages, as long as there’s a sense that we’re getting on with it. (Lots of Canadians liked Kyoto, but for the principle and the idea of progress, not the details of the targets and the timetables.)
Voters want clearly presented, clever ideas about how to blend and maximize our economic and environmental goals. They'll be happy to hear these from environmental groups, but just as happy if solutions come from governments, or massive corporations.
The market for outrage is saturated. The market for pessimism is also oversold.
The market for what we do next and how it gets better is where all the action is.
The question is whether and how well environmentalists will choose to play in that market?
Monday, October 26, 2009 02:07 PM
Our H1N1 calm
Stories from around the world scream out that H1N1 is a pandemic.
An emergency, Barack Obama says.
Ottawa is spending millions on ads designed to get us to take more precautions, including getting vaccinated.
Yet it’s pretty clear that many Canadians don't share that anxiety.
From the work I’ve done over the years, this isn’t shocking. It takes an awful lot to get Canadians into a state of high anxiety about this type of risk.
Lyme disease and West Nile spawned lots of coverage, much less fear. As fears of avian flu swept the world, most Canadians were not indifferent, but not terribly preoccupied.
When a handful of cases of BSE showed up in Canada, the typical Canadian response was to assume the best, and plan for the best. We took it on faith that these were isolated cases, and our food supply was safe.
SARS was an outlier in this pattern, in my estimation because it looked like the disease had compromised our ability to keep health care facilities safe.
At the end of the day, when we are talking about risk, there seem to be two factors that determine our level of dread.
The first is our level of confidence that our prevention systems will limit the scale of the risk.
The second is whether we have confidence that once a large scale problem exists, that our health facilities and personnel will be able to limit the severity and ease the suffering and harm.
For the most part, we live confident that we have extraordinary competencies and infrastructure to meet both these tests. This can be both blessing and curse. For organizations that need to condition people to take measures to protect themselves, our confidence in the system makes us tune out some warnings.
The situation with H1N1 is a reflection of a couple of fascinating things.
First, news of a dreadful disease spreads far more rapidly than the disease itself, in our digital, 24/7 information marketplace. For months and months we’ve been hearing about this phenomenon, and for many people, there has to date been little local or personal evidence of the disease. This reinforces the belief (misplaced?) that we are successfully preventing its spread.
Second, news coverage and political discourse about a major health risk like H1N1 tends to focus on the most severe, awful, and unprecedented, and this characterization feels at odds with what most people seen of H1N1 first hand. Lots of people think this is little worse than what millions of Canadians cope with every year.
In other words, the experience of H1N1 is that it is spreading less widely, more slowly, and with less severity than predicted. The result seems to be a remarkable calm, and possibly a dangerous disconnect between health experts and average Canadians.
Friday, October 23, 2009 06:37 PM
When you’re smiling...
As the song says, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. (Having argued of late about the importance of substance over style, permit me a lighter topic in this post)
In 25 years of polling and exploring how people feel in focus groups, I’ve learned a lot about human nature.
In the realm of politics, few of those lessons have stuck with me as much as the way people react to visible signals of ebullience or worry in the faces of their political leaders.
The whole idea of well educated, largely self reliant people choosing leaders is a bit odd, when you think about it. While we logically choose to have government pursue collective goals or deliver common services, and we would want someone competent to run our government, it’s not as obvious that we would feel a need to have someone play the role of “leader” of our society.
And yet, as cynical as we can be, most of us can articulate what we want in a leader, and certainly can describe what repels us.
When characterizing what we like or don’t like, we often rely on concepts such as strong or weak, hard-nosed or vacillating, warm or cold, introspective or popularity addicted, determined or lacking fire in the belly. All good, all relevant, based on my work.
But one thing that’s frequently underestimated is the enormous power of optimism, an infectious enthusiasm for the future. It's human nature: offered a menu of hope or fear, we dine on hope.
Think Jean Chretien, Bill Clinton, Brian Mulroney, Barack Obama. These are people whose basic pitch was the future looks so bright, let me hand you some shades.
Then think about leaders who occupied the other end of the spectrum, folks who looked troubled by the harsh realities they foresaw, and wanted us to know just how disturbing the future looked. In recent memory, Kim Campbell and John Turner both seemed to morph from the leaders we wanted them to be: sunny, confident, determined to make the best of our great prospects, to leaders who seemed to be telling us to worry about this or that, but don’t squander a single night on sleep.
Now I know that there are many other factors that people will rush to tell me helped spell the unfortunate outcomes for these leaders, but my point is a more general one. And, there is actually quite a bit of science about the social effects of smiling, and even a name (Duchenne smile) for the type of facial expression that seems the most sincere and spontaneous.
Leaders who smile, who signal that we are going to succeed, are leaders we are drawn to. Leaders who signal just how bad things are or could be, who appear to be bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders, find us slipping their embrace.
As Stephen Harper reflects on why his stage performance came off so well, and as Michael Ignatieff ponders the tone and style of his forthcoming “adult conversation,” both would do well to bear this aspect of our psychology in mind.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:35 PM
Misplaced euphoria and despair
The parade of recent polling results has some Conservatives giddy, and more than a few Liberals troubled.
This is to be expected since the results create a lens through which everything they do now is viewed. A party experiencing a bad patch of numbers watches as everything they do that isn’t obviously brilliant is often ignored. Every slight misstep is caricatured and magnified in importance, used to explain their chronic failure.
Conversely, the party with the wind in its sails enjoys Midas-touch analysis. Little missteps are brushed off, and small successes enlarged to help explain that the party on top is in fact brilliantly run.
But there’s plenty of reason for Conservatives to avoid euphoria and Liberals to step back from despair.
Underneath the surface of what often seems a pretty narrow trading range of weekly polling numbers, there is a fundamental truth about Canadian politics today that is reason for nervousness and hope on everyone’s part.
Based on the exensive data gathered over the last three years by Harris Decima and The Canadian Press, my view is that the real "core" vote of the Conservative Party, the folks who won't consider voting any other way, is about 15 per cent. Roughly the same number can be claimed by the Liberals.
True, both parties can usually expect to assemble at least another 15 per cent support, but that support is nowhere near as assured as it was, and it doesn’t always come from the same voters.
Most of these semi-attached voters, the second 15 per cent, fall into one of two categories. Some are hardcore pragmatists, truly up for grabs, evaluating the two parties on their current, not past, merits, and on the ideas they champion. These voters are the hardest to win, and arguably the most important to win, because they create momentum.
The rest are very, very lightly engaged by politics. They will vote, but won’t spend a great deal of time evaluating their options in depth. Their decision will often turn on a sense of where the momentum is, or some idiosyncratic event like a rogue Reformer’s intemperate comments, a Mountie investigation launched, a beer-and-popcorn reference, a particularly biting negative ad.
If some of you reading this piece think this idea of tiny core vote is implausible, since both parties consistently poll between 28 per cent and 38 per cent, ask yourself these questions.
Do most people you know have firm party attachments or not?
Have many of your friends struggled with the choice of which party to support in the last few elections?
Do you know more than a few people who pay little attention to the tough policy choices and react instead to the "entertainment values" of a campaign?
I’ll wager the answer to all those questions point in the same direction.
And what it implies is that either of those two parties could experience extraordinary success or monumental collapse, the amount of soft and shifting vote is that great.
That’s why the Conservatives, riding semi-high, need to avoid the twin evils of complacency and arrogance. And why the Liberals need to cauterize their wounds, quickly restore spring in their step, avoid stigmatization as the party of the doomed. They should believe in their potential to regain lost ground, while also being aware that they have not necessarily found a floor.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 04:40 PM
Blue-sky ideas
It’s an easy criticism of our political system to say that it focuses too much on the tactical and short term, and too little on the most critical choices facing the country. In post-Thanksgiving mode, thankful for the general state of our democracy and the relative health of our economy, I hesitate to restate this criticism.
Instead, a few suggestions of issues where I think a vigorous public debate among our political leaders about policy alternatives would restore some lustre to our political system:
1. Governments in the United States and other parts of the world are pouring money into the transformation of their economies creating new energy alternatives and seeking better carbon outcomes. Biomass based energy is one of the most rapidly developing areas, one that will have potentially major repercussions on demand for energy as well as supply of biomass feedstock, such as forest fibre. Canada’s stake, as the world’s largest exporter of forest products, and one of the world’s biggest suppliers of energy to the United States, could hardly be more material. We need our leaders to chart a course for the country, one that exploits our comparative advantage and embraces our environmental responsibilities.
2. By many accounts, the U.S. dollar may weaken compared to other currencies for a long time. Whether a function of brutal fiscal problems, or a deliberate plan to stimulate American exports, the challenges for Canada may be without precedent. If not a typical cyclical swing, but a fundamental shift, it will demand creative policy and concerted focus. How much to worry is easy, what to do is hard - especially if the most obvious tool is hiking interest rates. This is a leadership question, one that calls out for clear positions.
3. Our involvement in Afghanistan is a matter that is growing increasingly uncomfortable, as the United States openly debates the likelihood of failure in that country, unless significantly more troops are involved. We have gone from justifying our role as a trusted ally of the Americans in the fight against terror, to stalwarts in nation building and human-rights protection, to preparing to depart regardless of what we can say or not about the efficacy of our mission. Lately, the U.S. Administration has opened the door to the prospect that the Taliban could remain in positions of some authority for the long term, and there are rampant concerns about the legitimacy of the recent election. For the sake of our forces and their families, and for the idea of letting Canada have a clear and notable voice about a cause on which we have lost lives and spent treasure, we need our leaders to deliver fresh, clear assessments of where we are, and what we will or might not be able to accomplish.
It’s curious, and perhaps good news that these are not really matters of hugely charged partisan division, at least not yet. But maybe we’d be better served if they became that way. Politics is at its best when parties are competing to offer the best solutions to the biggest problems. In the last few days, we’ve seen signs that Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff are raising these issues. Let’s hope for more of the same going forward.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 01:29 PM
A six-month plan for Ignatieff
The next six months will likely bury or ignite Michael Ignatieff’s political career. He needs to change three things to avoid the worse of those fates.
First, he must abandon the “light under a bushel” strategy, whereby he shares as little as possible about the ideas he loves for the future of his country. This is a time for big thinking, he is a big thinker, and he is ignoring his competitive advantage. He has the luxury of competing with an incrementalist in a time when there is a latent fear of being too incremental. He has the unique opportunity to run against a fiscal conservative who has accumulated the largest single deficit in Canadian history.
He should stake out his ground, make his pitch, take the sterile partisan debate to a new level. Get himself out of the weeds of political strategy and tactics. Never feel a need to utter the word lieutenant again. The idea that the role of opposition parties is to oppose and nothing more is a lousy refuge that doesn’t look or sound right to voters, and fails miserably in a time of perpetual minority government. Voters logically expect a good deal more than knee-jerk rejections of government policy. Platforms might seem scary, but lack of platform should be starting to feel a little worrisome about now too.
Second, he must address his communications shortcomings. If the people closest to him are allowing him to believe that his skills in this area are right up to scratch, he needs to ask them to be more candid, or he needs to ask other people. His style is stiff; he comes off looking over-handled, rarely happy and generally under-inspiring. He is becoming better at staying on message track, but is losing the battle to make his message track sound like something he is excited about, or something we should be excited about. He must come across as looser, more confident, more optimistic, more compelling, more human.
Third, one of the odd dysfunctions in the consulting business is that those who become good at consulting end up managing consulting businesses, something that requires different talents and motivation. In politics, how often have we seen people who are great at many things but have no background managing anything become party leaders and struggle because they either micro-manage, resist hiring a peer-type strong manager, or decide management isn’t all that important and let the chips fall as they may. Mr. Ignatieff needs to strive for that balance of fresh thinking talent, smart and strong personal loyalists, and top drawer management of people and process. The last six months or so have seen too many misfires to ignore the role that strong management discipline must play.
Finally, Adam Radwanski succinctly described the other day how Ottawa gets way ahead of itself, obsessing about and exaggerating the effect of political events that barely register in the rest of the country. No matter what he hears in the corridors of the Parliamentary precinct, the problems Mr. Ignatieff faces are entirely reparable, and the slide in public opinion so far is modest and soft. There is no reason to overreact, which is not license to under-react. The next six months are his story to write, and a happy ending is certainly within reach.
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Sunday, October 4, 2009 10:01 AM
A political master stroke
By all accounts, Stephen Harper puts a lot of effort into his job as Prime Minister. And over time, it’s pretty easy to see areas where his diligence is paying off. For all of the hard work of policy and management, though, last night may have been one of the best nights the Prime Minister has had since entering politics - and it had nothing to do with taxes, crime, terrorism, the machinery of government or accountability.
While some people are always looking for a reason to hate politicians, most people would rather find a reason to like them, at least a little bit. Last night, the Prime Minister gave those who are still on the fence about him a bit of a glimpse into his soul, and a pretty good one at that.
At a crowded NAC gala co-hosted by his wife Laureen, the kind of event Harper has rarely if ever been spotted at before, the Prime Minister played piano and sang the Beatles With A Little Help From My Friends, accompanied by Yo Yo Ma. This was a remarkably good decision by the PM, and a strikingly good performance. The lyrics were, in this context, ironic and fun, and he looked to be enjoying himself greatly. A spontaneous standing ovation ensued.
Politically, this was a master stroke. The video clip of the PM, singing in tune, having a laugh and enjoying a great piece of music is now launched on the Internet, and the viral impact will likely be extensive. Not a moment of it looked false, even though it could hardly have been more carefully planned.
With this revealing moment, the PM also threw down the gauntlet in the general direction of Michael Ignatieff. For months, the Conservatives have been painting the Liberal Leader as diffident, elitist, not really one of us. Liberals could be excused for wondering if Harper would really be able to win a contest around personal likeability.
Today, they have something more to be worried about than they had yesterday, and they already had plenty.
Bruce Anderson Contributors
Bruce Anderson
Bruce Anderson has been a leading researcher and communications advisor for more than two decades. He started working on Parliament Hill in1979 and moved to the private sector in 1983. He was a founding partner of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group and has done two stints with Decima Research, including as CEO from 2004 to 2008. He has worked on national campaigns and advised politicians in both the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties. During the 2008 federal election, he authored the Harris Decima nightly poll for The Canadian Press. He is presently pro-politics but non-partisan.
Today, Anderson serves a range of public and corporate clients on subjects including financial services, telecommunications, energy, trade, homebuilding and the environment. He provides research-informed advice on branding, marketing, reputation and issues management and is simultaneously senior associate with Harris Decima and senior vice-president with National Public Relations.