Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (3 page)

So when politicians say that they are focused on the economy, what they often mean is that they are focused on getting Canadians to buy stuff. Jean Chrétien, campaigning to become prime minister for his first term in 1993, delivered this as a blunt, home truth. “When people go to the city and they see some cranes or construction they feel good, and they go and buy either a house, a cottage or a car,” Chrétien told CITY-TV while on the election trail. Translation: Feeling good about Canada’s economy means Canadians will get in the mood to buy big-ticket items. Or they may go to Tim Hortons, or a big-box store, or, in more recent years, they may shop online. If it is the job of Canadian politicians to keep the economy rolling, it’s the Canadian citizenry’s job to keep lining up at the cash register.

This partnership between consumerism and the citizenry has been building since the early years of the twentieth century, long before Chrétien wanted to make Canadians feel good about construction cranes or Stephen Harper wanted to make people feel warm about Tim Hortons. But if we want to understand why politicians have come looking for our votes in the shopping aisles, perhaps we should do a whirlwind tour of how citizenship became so all-consuming.

The Hudson’s Bay Company is the perfect place to start. For a couple of centuries, it operated as a series of trading posts, expanding across the vast northern wilderness, providing places for hunters and trappers to exchange fur for manufactured goods. If all those wilderness symbols of Canada speak to you, the canoes and moose and such, this version of The Bay is your kind of shopping. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, early Canadians were showing up at The Bay with money, not pelts. Canada was officially born with the 1867 Act of Confederation and in the first years of its nationhood, the era of big department stores was also beginning. The first Eaton’s store in Canada opened in Toronto in 1869, two years after Confederation, and in the next couple of decades, Hudson’s Bay department stores arrived in the cities rapidly growing across the country, especially across the West. So just as we were becoming a country, we were starting to shop at the big-time retail outlets.

And some of the identity of this new, modern nation was being defined within the pages of the department-store advertising, and especially in the glossy catalogues, which would become bibles of the new consumer nation. Millions of Canadians who came of age in the last century will remember the department-store catalogues as a cultural marker in their lives. As the
Toronto Star
’s Jack Brehl wrote in 1969, “In Scotland, the children were raised on porridge and the shorter catechism; in Canada, on cornflakes and [the] Eaton’s catalogue.” The catalogues announced the arrival of the seasons: spring/summer, fall/winter and the much-anticipated Christmas season, with pages stuffed with pictures of the newest toys. These bulky volumes, printed by the millions even in the early years of the twentieth century, could paper over rifts in the new Canada in a way that politicians and other institutions could only envy. Rural Canadians could pore over the same wares that urban citizens were seeing on display in the downtown aisles and windows of Eaton’s or Simpson’s or The Bay. A francophone child in Quebec could pine for the same dolls as her English-language counterparts in British Columbia. The catalogues’ reach far exceeded any newspaper of their time, and they painted a happy picture of life in early Canada: a consumer paradise, filled with shiny, new merchandise.

Were Canadians interested in politics in those days? Certainly global and domestic politics had an effect on their lives. Two world wars and one depression brought political events literally to their doorsteps—boys and men went off to war, many didn’t come back, and households faced daily rationing and shortages. Canadian women joined the workplace during the wars and earned, over the course of the twentieth century, the right to vote, to run for Parliament and to be appointed to the Senate. Politics mattered, with an importance driven by people’s interests in larger forces shaping the times—nationalism, communism, fascism and rapid urbanization. Voter turnout at federal elections hovered around 65 to 70 percent for the first half of the century. When the Second World War ended, politics appeared to matter even more, with election turnout climbing to almost 80 percent in the early 1960s. But Canadians were also busy setting about the serious business of shopping their way into a new future, filled with new children, new homes, new inventions and new, consumerist preoccupations.

The Canadian Dream

Two of the most beloved Christmas-movie standards were made in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and though they were Hollywood productions, they reflected a lot of the hope that ordinary people in Canada were feeling about the future too.
It’s a Wonderful Life
, released in 1946, starred James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who becomes the town hero by devoting his life to the Building and Loan Society, helping new immigrants and young families buy their first homes. In a heated argument with Mr. Potter, the cynical bank owner, Bailey elegizes home ownership as the paragon of good citizenship: “You’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it [owning a home] make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers?… Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about: they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?” A year later, the big Christmas movie of 1947 was
Miracle on 34th Street
, in which Susan, the little girl who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, gets her fondest wish—not a doll or a skipping rope, but a real, live home in the suburbs.

Canadians, like their American neighbours, were caught up in the postwar passion for home ownership and expected their governments to share that desire. A National Housing Act was forged in 1944, giving the federal government the leading role in Canada-wide housing programs. The Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation was created on January 1, 1946, to administer the new housing legislation, and to get to work building all the houses that returning war veterans, new Canadians and the baby boom generation were going to need. By the end of the 1940s, the CMHC also got in the business of building social and rental housing, recognizing that not everyone in Canada was going to vault into immediate home ownership. Urban renewal came next, with the CMHC starting to administer grants so that derelict, downtown areas could be razed and new city-project homes could be built. Regent Park in Toronto was the first such project in Canada.

How were Canadians paying for these new homes? Some, clinging to the frugality of the Depression and the war years, were paying with their own savings or with generous grants that the federal government was providing for war veterans and other deserving folks. Between 1945 and 1947, nineteen thousand loans were approved under the act and more than seventy-six thousand homes were built in 1947 alone. In 1954, borrowing money to buy homes became even easier for Canadians, when the federal government made an expansive and far-reaching change to the National Housing Act, allowing banks to give mortgage loans.

The new “baby bonus” cheques, rolled out in 1945, also helped with postwar Canadian household finances. This program was no small step in the evolution of the Canadian consumer state. It was, in effect, a product in itself, which arrived as a gift on the doorsteps of every Canadian parent just like the department-store catalogues. It was Canada’s first universal social program. It established a direct connection between the government and its consumer citizens—a monthly, tangible assurance that the state was as interested in their material circumstances as they were. For Prime Minister Mackenzie King, it was a micro-targeted program to accomplish macroeconomic and political goals. It would keep Canadians purchasing things after the war, it would encourage people to have children and it would fend off threats to the Liberals coming from the rising strength of the left wing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and from within Quebec. Baby bonuses united all Canadians, regardless of politics or language, as consumers in the modern, postwar state.

In the first wave of this program, parents received five dollars a month for each child aged five and under, six dollars a month for kids aged six to nine, seven dollars for children aged ten to twelve, and eight dollars for early teens, aged thirteen to fifteen. Those cheques could prove handy, in a time when Baby’s Own Tablets (for teething, digestive problems and “fretfulness”) cost a quarter and a frilly Easter blouse for a young girl could be had for $1.98 at Clayton’s in Toronto. The total annual cost to the treasury for the initial program was estimated at between $200 million and $250 million.

In May 1945, a Gallup poll on the new baby bonus found that a whopping 95 percent of respondents were aware of the program and, in the main, of the view that the money would be spent wisely—not wasted on beer and popcorn, for example. Gallup asked, “In your opinion, are a large number of Canadians likely to use this money for other purposes, or are only a few likely to use it improperly?” Of the 95 percent who said they were aware of the baby bonus, fifty-six percent said the money would be spent on food and clothing and other necessities for child-rearing. Another 30 percent, though, said the money might be squandered elsewhere. About 9 percent were undecided.

In their emergence as consumer citizens, Canadians began to make more demands—not just for goods, but for rules and standards over how they were getting them. In 1947, still in the shadow of the Second World War, the Consumers’ Association of Canada was launched—by hundreds, then thousands of Canadian women. The association’s first motto was “in unity, there is strength,” and it boasted 250,000 members by 1948.

The association’s first big battle was a fight over margarine. Yes, margarine. Thanks largely to pressure from dairy farmers, margarine had been banned in Canada since 1886. The ban had been lifted during the First World War when butter was scarce, but the prohibition was still active at the end of the Second World War. In 1948, thanks in part to the advocacy of the new consumers’ group, Canada’s Supreme Court lifted the ban. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Consumers’ Association would go on to fight for information labelling on clothing, safety and moving guidelines for refrigerators, disclosure of charges on consumer loans and an end to deceptive “red-stripe labelling” being used to sell fatty bacon to unsuspecting shoppers. The red stripes on the see-through plastic packaging made it look like the bacon inside had more meat than was the actual content. In the grocery stores, Canadian shoppers drew the line in the 1950s when it came to promising meat and delivering fat.

At the same time, feeling their power, Canadian consumer citizens were also starting to look to government to provide them with more goods and services. First came the baby bonuses, then the new houses, and then a rising demand for a national health care program and old-age pensions for everyone. Medicare was introduced in Canada in 1957, thanks to the success of the first public hospital insurance program in Tommy Douglas’s Saskatchewan. The Canada Pension Plan, meanwhile, came along in 1965 as a compulsory universal retirement-savings system.

In the new and emerging Canada of the postwar era, the dream was of an ever-expanding middle class, secure in its access to the basics and striving, shopping, for more. And the government was happy to be seen as the agent of dream fulfillment, delivering cheques to the doorsteps of the houses it was helping Canadians to buy—on credit, more and more.

Charging Ahead

The word “consumerism” actually only came into common usage in the years after the Second World War, along with the idea that it was a cause to be championed. Though shopping was seen as mostly a female preoccupation in the early days, an interesting thing happened to the Consumers’ Association of Canada by the 1960s—it had transformed itself from a women’s-only organization into one that welcomed men as well. Almost simultaneously, the group began a six-year mission to establish a Consumer Affairs ministry within the federal government. That goal was achieved in 1967, and its first minister was the up-and-coming politician John Turner. The mission of this new ministry was “to promote the integrity and viability of the market system in Canada,” through vigilance on orderly, efficient, healthy competition and movement of capital between business and citizens.

Into this mix came another important consumer tool—credit cards. Individual department stores and gas stations had been extending credit accounts to individual customers before the 1950s, but it was the Diners Club that first paved the way for the ubiquitous credit cards stuffing Canadian wallets today. In 1950, Hamilton Credit Corporation head Frank McNamara went out for dinner with some friends (including one of the Bloomingdales, of New York department store fame). At this dinner, McNamara and his friends were talking about how some clients were getting themselves into trouble by lending their credit accounts to neighbours in trouble and then finding themselves unable to pay. At the end of dinner, ironically, McNamara realized he’d forgotten his wallet. Embarrassed, he called his wife to bring him some money, and as legend has it, he vowed that it would never happen again. The Diners Club card was born—the first card that could be used in multiple locations. It started out small: just a flimsy piece of cardboard with about a dozen accepting locations written on one side. And it took a few years to catch on. But by 1958, Diners Club had some competition, from the newly formed American Express Company and BankAmericards, which then rapidly started expanding the credit-card market in the United States.