Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (23 page)

The visibility in Quebec of the Government of Canada had been significantly reduced from the mid-1980s until I became prime minister. The visible face of the government of Canada had even been removed from postboxes, from the airport in Montreal and even from immigration court. There was a vacuum and the vacuum was being filled by the Quebec government with constant, subliminal messaging... We were going to restore the visibility of the government of Canada in Quebec. Whatever Quebec’s Parti Québécois government was doing which, in our view, directly or indirectly promoted separation, we, as the Government of Canada, would at least match to promote a united Canada.

If they were putting up billboards, and they did, the Government of Canada would put up billboards, and we did. If they were advertising on the radio and television, and they did, the Government of Canada would advertise on the radio and television, and we did. If they were sponsoring community events, and they did, the Government of Canada would sponsor community events, and we did.

Sponsorship is much more than just billboards, flags and word marks. It is involvement with organizers of community events, people who are often opinion leaders in their communities, letting them know that there is also a Government of Canada that relates directly to citizens, that the Government of Canada does more than just collect taxes while the Québec government delivers programs. This type of federal presence amongst community leaders was part and parcel of our overall strategy. That is why we committed to spending a significant amount of money every year to be part of community events. And we did not restrict the program to Québec because the Government of Canada should be present in communities across the country.

Note in Chrétien’s explanation how much advertising is seen as the solution to government’s most serious problems, and how citizens are seen as passive consumers on issues as important as sovereignty and the future of the country. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. If government is primarily in the business of communicating, or advertising its services, then every problem becomes a publicity concern. And attention to image and communications was making itself felt within Chrétien’s government in a number of ways after the deficit was wrestled down in the late 1990s, not just in Quebec. Between 2001 and 2003, public service jobs in communications grew by a whopping 28 percent. It was entirely in keeping with the ever-increasing trend to see the citizens as consumers of their own government. Throughout Chrétien’s tenure as well, the civil service exploded with talk of citizens as government “clients,” and increasingly it looked like the sole job of the state was to supply services to its taxpaying citizens. All the bureaucratic buzzwords revolved around “client-centred service” and value for the tax dollars of consumer-citizens. Take a look at this federal Treasury Board publication from the early 2000s, boasting of a new “Service Improvement Initiative”:

The essence of the Service Improvement Initiative is that the continuous and measurable improvement of client satisfaction is the most reliable indicator of improvement in service quality and service performance: it is what quality and continuous improvement should now mean, and how they should be primarily, though not exclusively, measured. Leading-edge service organizations in the public sector, like their counterparts in the private sector, now use a results-based approach to the continuous improvement of client satisfaction, integrated with the annual business planning cycle.

What had happened to the idea of the federal government as a generator of ideas or bold national projects? It may have been the bruising constitutional dramas. It may have been the recessions of the 1980s, the big deficits and debt, and the resulting belt-tightening in the 1990s. Perhaps it was the rise of think-tanks and the voice of business in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that the best ideas for running Canada came from outside government. Or maybe it was just the aging of Canadian society, and the baby boomer demographic moving from its idealistic youth into practical, stolid middle age. Whatever the reason, and it was probably a combination of all these things, the federal government adopted a posture of service-first in the 1990s, less prone to pushing big ideas on the Canadian public and concentrating instead on government as a “service provider.” If nothing else, that would serve as an ad slogan.

Reg Whitaker, a research professor emeritus at York University, watched the Liberal government very closely, in all its ups and downs. Writing in 2001 in
Policy Options
, Whitaker lamented the descent of politics into market practices, seeing the language of business creeping into every corner in the corridors of power:

Parties are no longer about commitment, in the sense of principles, loyalty and tradition. Long ago, partisans rallied to Sir John A. Macdonald’s Tories under the slogan “the Old Man, the Old Flag, the Old Policy.” No more. A party is not a collective project. It is a “mutual fund.” Commitment has become investment, and investment demands appropriate returns. If “wasted,” it should be pulled out and put “elsewhere.” The party’s name and symbols are no longer marks of allegiance, but are merely a “brand.” Brands are corporate marketing devices for products. Brand identification is intended to promote sales. If sales falter, re-branding may be required.

Whitaker was right about the branding business. Suddenly, as the twenty-first century was getting under way, everyone across the Canadian government seemed to be swept up in the idea of “branding.”

Brand Canada

It was Tony Blair, once again, who gave a lot of countries ideas about rebranding nationhood, with what came to be known as the “Cool Britannia” campaign. “Cool Britannia,” the name, actually came from a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavour (vanilla with shortbread), launched in the United States several years before Blair came to power. Blair’s branding campaign came from a marketing agency, Demos, and two of its sharpest thinkers, Geoff Mulgan and Mark Leonard.

Leonard published a report called “Britain™: Renewing our Identity,” in which he argued for the country to position itself as more than the sum of its history or institutions. The bold proposition was that Britain would be shedding its stodgy old image to become a modern, vital presence on the world stage. Other countries had attempted similar efforts: Spain had a new logo and tourism campaign; Ireland was in the midst of becoming a “Celtic Tiger.” Leonard described the new British “brand” for Blair in his report:

The most important lesson is that the task of renewing identity goes well beyond flags and logos. The key priority is to define a shared ethos, and shared stories, to reflect the best of what Britain has become in the late 1990s. I suggest what some of these stories might be, emphasizing Britain’s place as a hub, an importer and exporter of ideas, goods and services, people and cultures; Britain’s history as a hybrid nation; our traditions of creativity and non-conformism; our role as a silent revolutionary creating new models of organization; our readiness to do business; and the ethos of fair play and voluntary commitment. These stories should be our trademarks. Together they add up to a new vision of Britain as a global island, uniquely well placed to thrive in the more interconnected world of the next century.

There was nothing new about governments using ad companies to promote tourism in the country. Dalton Camp had been benefiting from that kind of political–private crossover for decades in Canada. But here’s where that marketing distinction comes in handy again. Branding the nation, in the new context, was about moulding the country itself to suit the market, not just selling its virtues. Blair, just forty-three when he took office, with a young family, was in a good marketing position, too, to preside over this branding update. After all, he had turned the stodgy old Labour Party into “New Labour.” Why couldn’t he do the same for “New Britain”? He established a rebranding advisory group, called Panel 2000, studded with leading private-sector celebrities such as Stella McCartney, and held a reception in 1997 at Downing Street for all of Britain’s “glitterati.” But when all was said and done, the Cool Britannia campaign receded to the background as Blair’s time in office went on, and it was remembered primarily as a failed experiment, even a “fiasco,” by some. His branding of a left-wing movement, however, would linger as an example for many Canadian politicos.

In Canada, nation-branding was initially seen as a way to tackle some old debates with modern tools of the market—but also to improve Canada’s image abroad and self-image at home. Identity discussions had been part of the Canadian fabric virtually since the country was born in the nineteenth century, and right up to the sovereignty debates of the latter half of the twentieth century. It was almost an industry in itself: What is a Canadian? How do we separate the Canadian identity from that of the Americans, our British colonial masters or even the separatists in Quebec?

The Chrétien government got caught up in the idea of “branding” itself around 2000, when Brian Tobin, a man with a flair for marketing and politics, was Minister of Industry. The former broadcaster, who had been part of the Liberal “Rat Pack” in the 1980s, had left federal politics to become Newfoundland premier in the 1990s. But he had returned to federal politics after a brand makeover of his own. He had transformed into a more business-friendly style of Liberal politician, with his eyes on being prime minister someday. Under Tobin’s watch, the federal government launched a “Brand Canada” initiative. It was in part an advertising campaign to raise awareness of Canada outside the borders, but a side benefit would be to get Canadians thinking in more modern fashion about their country, too—that we were more than rocks and trees and water, as the old Arrogant Worms song said. High-profile Canadian expatriates, mainly businesspeople, would be tasked as “brand ambassadors” for Canada in their travels abroad, particularly in the United States and Europe. Their job would be to talk up Canada as a site of potential investment, as well as tourism.

“There are some things we can learn from the Americans… In the United States, you’re never confused about what somebody wants,’’ Tobin said in an interview with Canadian Press in 2001. “We Canadians—we’re subtle, we’re more discreet, we’re more reserved, we’re less likely to pound the table and to sing our own song of celebration… Maybe we have to be a little less reserved and a little more forward, a little more in-your-face.’’ It was a plan that fit neatly with the belief that while the government shouldn’t be running businesses, perhaps it should be using the tools of business to do its governing. Where once Canada used teaching or preaching to get citizens thinking more patriotically about the country, now we were talking of “branding” and labelling.

Another big proponent of the “Brand Canada” idea was a real, honest-to-goodness expert in branding and marketing—Paul Lavoie of the wildly successful Canadian ad firm Taxi. Lavoie saw branding as a way to unite the country, an updated constitutional discussion, if you will, free from the tedium of first ministers’ conferences or complex power struggles. “We have not managed our brand carefully, or with a shared purpose,” Lavoie told
Marketing
magazine. “We’ve allowed our diversity to to define us in broken fragments according to short-term tactics, not long-term goals.”

Officially, the Brand Canada program may have started out as a big marketing idea for the country, but in its implementation, it fizzled into a mere funding program for international trade shows. There were several reasons it became sidelined. First, and most important, were the terrorist strikes in the United States on September 11, 2001. As Tobin and others were fond of observing in the aftermath, this was a time when people felt they needed their governments. Polls in the United States showed a massive increase in people’s trust in government, to levels that hadn’t been seen since the 1960s. If only briefly, it seemed that Americans—and Canadians—were shaken back to some older ideas, about government being a force for good in people’s lives.

Tobin, in the days and weeks after the attacks, would repeatedly urge Canadians to keep shopping, just as President George W. Bush was telling Americans to keep the economy rolling. “What we’re seeing now is a very important part of the economy in retreat and that’s consumers,” Tobin said in a speech in Strathroy, Ontario, about a month after the 9/11 attacks. “Two-thirds of Canada’s economy is driven by consumption… what can stop us [our economy] is a response and reaction by citizens, while understandable initially, to fright, to cocooning, to huddling away.”

Then Tobin himself stood down from federal politics, bowing out of his candidacy for the Liberal leadership at the same time. Any energy or enthusiasm he contributed to the Brand Canada campaign left with him. The program was officially terminated in 2005. It would seem that Canada, like Britain, would realize that branding had its limits as a tool of government. Private-sector companies who were having better luck with branding—right into the realms of patriotism and nationhood. Some brands, such as Tim Hortons, would have a lot more success turning into nations of their own.