Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (26 page)

In 1980,
Second City TV
comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas introduced the hoser characters Bob and Doug McKenzie to their audiences—beer-swilling boors, clad in toques and lumberjack plaid, who delivered wisdom from the “Great White North” on a couch surrounded by Molson Canadian beer cases. Their characters were an instant hit, north and south of the border. A comedy album of their routines sold 350,000 copies in Canada in 1982 and a whopping 3.5 million in the United States. A
People
magazine article from that year said that the show’s Canadiana catchphrases— “g’day,” “eh?” and “take off”—were “on adolescent lips from Halifax to Victoria.”

No beer company has performed the task of nation-building better than Molson Canadian and what came to be simply known as “the rant.” In April 2000 Molson unveiled the now-famous ad during the annual broadcast of the Academy Awards. In the one-minute spot, Joe Canadian, clad in a plaid shirt and jeans, stands in a movie theatre against a flickering backdrop of national images, telling Americans what Canadians are, and what we aren’t:

I am not a lumberjack or a fur trader, and I don’t live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzie from Canada although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. Uh, I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it about, not a boot. I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping not policing, diversity not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal! A toque is a hat. A chesterfield is a couch. And it is pronounced zed! Not zee, zed! Canada is the second-largest land mass, the first nation of hockey, and the best part of North America. My name is Joe, and I am Canadian!

Molson had some hints in advance that this ad would go over well with Canadians. Its ad firm, Bensimon Byrne, had done extensive research in its bid to cement the Molson brand as the paragon of patriotism. During test runs in movie theatres, audiences had actually stood up and cheered. Bensimon Byrne, in later analysis, would acknowledge that this was an “audacious” escalation in the long-running beer war between Molson and Labatt. In focus-group testing, ad executives learned of an interesting culture shift that was under way in the country: Canadians were not so willing anymore to be reserved about their attachment to the country. “Younger Canadians want to shout it from the rooftops. Many of us regard flag-waving patriotism as distinctly American. Younger Canadians told us, and showed us, that this is simply not the case for them,” the ad firm wrote in a 2001 piece for “Canadian Advertising Success Stories,” a regular news bulletin issued by the Canadian Congress of Advertisers. Molson and Bensimon Byrne estimated that the sheer news coverage had generated the equivalent of nearly $9 million in free advertising for the product. But more than help sell beer, it also helped “sell” the idea of Canada—to Canadians.

There was a somewhat amusing irony here. Ever since the near-victory of separatism in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the federal government had been trying to come up with ways to talk up Canadian patriotism. Heritage Minister Sheila Copps had been handing out flags and the Chrétien Liberals were spending millions of dollars on government advertising and sponsorship, including a flood of “Heritage Minutes” TV ads, intended to enlighten citizens about their shared history. But a simple beer commercial found a much swifter route into the hearts and minds of Canadian consumer-citizens.

In the pages of
This Magazine
in late 1996, Nicole Nolan flatly declared that Copps should pass the patriotism-building torch to the beer companies—that they were doing a better job of inspiring love of Canada, especially among young people. “Copps and her flags seem trapped in an agonizingly archaic dance, recycling dusty notions in a desperate attempt to fuel national spirit,” Nolan wrote. “Witty, cosmopolitan, simultaneously proud and self-deprecating, the Molson and Labatt ads are the only blips on the radar that are even attempting to rethink what ‘Canadian’ means in the late twentieth century.” Faced with a choice between the Canada in the beer ads and the country depicted in the “gruesome” Heritage Minutes, Nolan said it was no contest. “The government’s heritage moments, promoting such Canadian high points as the Underground Railroad and the first female MP, are so smarmy and sugar-coated that they’ve been parodied by both
Saturday Night
magazine and
Frank
.”

Nolan’s cheeky reproach spoke volumes about how commercial companies—beer, but also Tim Hortons—were doing a better job of speaking to Canadians than politicians were. Certainly, the advertising was superior. There were several reasons for this mismatch between political and commercial advertising, some of it similar to the warnings about the differences that Allister Grosart underlined in his 1953 memo to the Conservatives. Fifty years later, some of those rules still held true. Private companies had more money, naturally. They could take risks, without fear that one wrong move could spell ignominy and doom with the Canadian public. Commercial advertising also had the luxury of time to build a product into a much-vaunted brand. As Terry O’Malley had found in the 1970s and 1980s, the deadlines, urgency and “finish line” of election day meant that the pace of political advertising was more rushed and ad hoc. Political ads ran on TV only during elections for the latter half of the twentieth century. Tim Hortons could spend months, even years, unfolding its “True Stories” to Canadian viewers. Beer companies could take decades to come up with the ads that Nolan found so Canada-friendly. Political parties, however, had just sixty days, and then, when election campaigns shortened in the 1990s, just thirty-six days to establish their “brand.” In that shortened time frame, political-ad makers seemed to agree, one couldn’t afford to be subtle, creative or even funny. Humour is notoriously difficult to pull off in politics.

Politicians couldn’t even be funny about beer. Jean Chrétien, in 1994, had joked that beer and joblessness went hand in hand. Explaining why he’d rather see the government pay people to work than leave them unemployed, Chrétien inelegantly put it this way: “It’s better to have them at 50-percent productivity than to be sitting home drinking beer at zero-percent productivity.” Chrétien was forced to apologize. And then, more infamously, there was the famous “beer-and-popcorn” remark during the 2005–06 election campaign, which helped convince Canadians that the Liberals really were out of touch with the average voter. Prime Minister Paul Martin’s communications chief Scott Reid was on TV, arguing that it was better to have a national child-care program than the Conservatives’ $100-a-month child benefit. But then he brought beer into the discussion. “Don’t give people $25 a day to blow on beer and popcorn,” Reid said. “Give them child-care spaces that work.” In the ensuing days, Conservatives refused to let the issue drop, pronouncing themselves saddened by the Liberal “insult” to Canadian parents.

The only innovation in political advertising from the 1950s, it seemed, was the negative ad—attacks on competitors that wouldn’t be tolerated in the commercial world. Did Tim Hortons go on TV to attack the patriotism of Starbucks, erasing the borders between Canada and the United States? Did the beer companies make fun of the facial features of rival beer drinkers?

In 2000, the
Toronto Star
assembled some ad experts to judge the advertising on offer during the federal election campaign. For the most part, they turned up their noses. Politicians just didn’t get it, they said. One of the people judging the ads was Jack Bensimon, whose firm created the Molson rant. “Political strategists aren’t comfortable in working the way we work,” Bensimon told the
Star
. “They find a bigger comfort zone working in the area they’re most familiar with, negative advertising, and that’s rational and issue-orientated.”

So when Canadians wanted to find ads that connected to their emotional, patriotic selves, they were looking to the TV pitches for beer and doughnuts. An unlikely diet for a healthy nation, perhaps, but a potent mix for a politics that could be built on the same images that made Canadians feel so warm about those products. The shape of Canadian politics to come in Canada would turn on these questions, which amounted to a dare for any political party bold enough to complete the bridge between consumers and citizens; between politics and marketing: What if you could learn the lessons of the beer-and-doughnut marketing success, and turn it into a political force? What if you could snatch political power from the same forces that made Canadians so proud to be consumers of beer and Tim Hortons products?

What if you could pull all this off with a leader who didn’t drink beer or coffee?

MARKET LEADER

B
efore Canada’s political-marketing tale plunges into the twenty-first century, a quick recap of the story so far may be in order. This shopping expedition through Canada’s political history has taken us from the heart of Toronto in the 1950s and back and forth to Ottawa through the following decades, with a quick stop or two in Alberta. Winding through the first few decades after the Second World War, we saw the political class getting swept up in all the fun of the advertising and polling worlds. But by the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian politics was being rocked by the same forces that were rippling through the consumer world: niche markets and the rejection or “rebranding” of old, established labels. Citizens were not clear whether business or government could do the best job of running the country.

Someone else was on a parallel journey all those years: a man named Stephen Harper, whose biography closely tracks the progress of Canada into the era of political marketing. Born on April 30, 1959, Harper was raised in Leaside and Etobicoke, middle-class enclaves of Toronto, where advertising, polling and television first gained their major foothold in Canadian political culture. At the age of nineteen, in 1978, a young, disillusioned Harper dropped out of the University of Toronto and headed to Alberta, where the grassroots foment against old, established politics was simmering.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Harper shuffled between big-brand and niche parties, much in the same way that Canadians were switching their loyalties to car companies or detergent labels. He had arrived in Alberta as a Liberal. “When Stephen first came to Edmonton, he was a Trudeau Liberal. He thought Trudeau was god,” Frank Glenfield, Harper’s first boss at Imperial Oil when he moved west, recalled in an interview with the
Edmonton Journal
. But soon after Harper’s immersion into economics at the University of Calgary, he shrugged off his Liberalism and became a Progressive Conservative. That didn’t last long, though. He worked on Parliament Hill as an assistant to Calgary Progressive Conservative MP Jim Hawkes for a while in the 1980s, then he went back to Alberta and got involved with the fledgling Reform Party. He rose quickly in those ranks, becoming a leading Reform MP in the 1990s, but Harper eventually walked away from that brand, too, choosing to take up a job with the National Citizens Coalition as the twentieth century was drawing to a close. This ambivalence about his ambitions closely matched Canadians’ shifting feelings about politics, it seemed, through these decades of waning attachment to parties and declining turnout at the polls.

Fatefully, though, Harper would return to politics in 2002, first to lead the Canadian Alliance and then, in 2004, a brand-new Conservative party created by the merger of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. Although he would see this as his signature achievement, it wasn’t the only merger Harper achieved. On his route to the top political job in Canada, this avid student of the marketing age would merge consumer and civic culture in a way that no politician had achieved to date in Canada.