Rae, former Ontario premier and MP, and author of “What’s Happened to Politics?”, laments campaign strategies that ‘slice and dice the electorate into ever smaller pieces that can be bought off.’Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The former Ontario premier speaks with Rudyard Griffiths of the Munk Debates about the perpetual nature of messaging and campaigning in the social media age.
How is the current election, in your view, an extension of a "perpetual campaign"?
In Canadian politics, the gap between governing and campaigning has pretty much disappeared. I know from my own experience and talking with other politicians that governing was always seen as something different from campaigning. What we're seeing now is that campaigning never stops. The relentless messaging; the use of Question Period for messaging; the use of every government press release as a way of packaging, identifying and branding never stops, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The perpetual campaign makes it very hard for citizens to see the process of governing and how Parliament is supposed to work as a deliberative body.
How should Canadians be making sense of the developments in the Duffy trial?
The e-mail excerpts and the evidence that have come out so far reveal how a very small team in the Prime Minister's Office attempted to control not only the messaging coming out of Mr. Duffy's repaying his expenses, but how the Deloitte audit would work, how the senators would themselves manage this, down to how the Senate committees work. It's a level of command and control that I don't think we've ever quite seen in Canada.
What really concerns me is the corruption of the process of governance itself. One of the things that our system has to have in order to function is a degree of checks and balances: the fact that Parliament, including different houses of Parliament, and the executive are distinct. It's ironic to me that, when Mr. Harper was running for office, he said to Canadians, don't worry, you've got an independent civil service, you've got the Senate, and you've got the Supreme Court of Canada, so you can trust me with government because I've got all these other checks and balances that are there to keep me in line. We can now see Mr. Harper has been systematically trying to erode the independent capacity of the civil service, the independence of the Senate, and attack the independence of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Talk to us about how you think elections themselves have changed and the impact this is having on our larger political discourse.
Two things at work here. The technology of campaigning is way more sophisticated and advanced than it was in the earliest days of polling. In my book, What's Happened to Politics?, I talk about my own father's experience with polling in the years before the war, and then talk about my own experience campaigning and canvassing and identifying the vote and getting the vote out. What is new is the use of "big data" to refine a political or policy message and use that message to target smaller and smaller numbers of voters. The problem with this is it removes the capacity for politicians of conviction to say what they really think on issues and to speak from the heart on subjects that matter to them. It also creates elections where we don't engage with the big, difficult and urgent issues, because inside the campaigns most of the effort is dedicated to figuring out how to slice and dice the electorate into ever smaller pieces that can be bought off or appeased with highly targeted policies.
You also don't think that the high-tech, big-data, message-driven campaigning we are seeing right now is very effective. Why?
These tactics don't get the traction they used to. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons why voter participation is down. I think it's one of the reasons voters are less likely to choose one party and stick with them. I think it's one of the reasons we are seeing more and more elections decided by voters making up their minds at the very end of the campaign. I refuse to be cynical about politics, but I do think that people have to understand the diminishing returns on the kinds of campaigns that are being increasingly practised by the political parties.
We are going to see a lot of negative advertising in this election. What is its cumulative impact on voters?
The question of turnout and how to mobilize an increasingly cynical or uninterested electorate is a big challenge. I do think one of the ironies of everyone engaging in negative campaigning is that it ultimately turns people off the process. Imagine, as my friend Charles Krauthammer used to say, Chrysler, Ford, and GM all spent their time criticizing each other's cars and running negative ads on everyone else's cars. In the end, a lot more people would end up buying bicycles or motorcycles or anything but an automobile.
Are Canadians resigned to the state and play of elections today?
I think there is a pushback in the works. I see social media having a positive impact. There is a great deal of joking, wry skepticism, and people making fun of each other on social media. A lot of the conversation and debate on social media is about debunking the ritualized campaigning of television ads, press conferences, etc. Also, there are more groups than ever who have very strong opinions about individual policies and who are using social media to inject their views into the centre of the political discussion. I find this quite liberating, personally.
You dedicated this book to your parents, Saul and Lois. What would their generation have to say about what politics could or should be today?
This last year was an emotional one for me and my family, because my mom passed on. She was very much the centre of our family. She died at the age of 100, and she and my dad had a wonderful life together. Their life together was very much one of public service and of public engagement. I remember once asking my dad why he left the business world to become a diplomat. He replied, "Well, sometimes turning heads is more important than counting heads." I think we are at risk of losing sight of that simple fact: Engaging in the hands-on and difficult task of public persuasion is every bit as important as the data-driven fixation for "counting heads" that has taken over much of the political process.
Rudyard Griffiths is chair of the Munk Debates, Canada's leading public-affairs forum.