Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (45 page)

Robin Sears, Geoff Norquay and Yaroslav Baran at Earnscliffe Strategy Group are friends who are also hugely knowledgeable about politics and marketing. Robin, who has deep roots in a number of political parties, did a very valuable read of the manuscript before it was done and caught some things I’d missed. So did my great friend Shaun Poulter at CBC, one of the brightest guys I know. Greg MacEachern at Environics is a friend who is also family, and also a sounding board over many years for many of the ideas presented here in this book.

Ann Lawson-Brehl, who’s been my friend for more than two-thirds of my life, is a large part of this book because she’s also a large part of who I am. Susan Harada, who’s been my treasured friend for the past two decades, has helped me more with this book than she knows.

My parents, Vera and John, and my brother John and his wife Andrea Stewart, are powerful motivation to make the world a better place, because that’s what they have always done for me. My stepson Jean-Michel, and his partner Andrea, are the kind of young people who give you hope about the future, too. My dad worked for an automobile giant and my mom owned a retail store in Milton, Ontario. In a way, this book connects the dots of my growing-up past to the political world where I chose to spend my career.

But the person to whom this book is dedicated is the man who makes everything possible for me: my beloved spouse, Don Lenihan. I could not have done this without Don’s help, his brilliant mind and, most importantly, his love.

NOTES, LINKS AND FURTHER READING

Introduction: Tim Hortons Voters

For the full video of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2009 appearance at Tim Hortons, see the PMO video vault at:
http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media_gallery.asp?featureId=0&media_category_id=20&media_category_typ_id=1&media_id=3788
.

Eric Grénier, online blogger for the
Globe and Mail
and
ThreeHundredEight.com
, has been keeping track of the Tim Hortons per riding count and kindly updated his figures after the 2011 election upon request by the author. According to the full tally, Conservatives had 10 Tim Hortons outlets on average per riding they held, while Liberals had 9.8 outlets on average. The New Democrats had 7.6 Tim’s shops per riding. But this lower figure was a result of the NDP’s surge in Quebec, where there are fewer Tim Hortons locations overall. If you remove Quebec from the equation, Grenier says, you get 11.1 Tim Hortons per NDP riding, 10.3 for the Liberals and 10.2 for the Conservatives. Grénier also measured party strength in the thirty ridings with the most Tim Hortons outlets in Canada. Of those thirty Tim’s-heavy ridings, Conservatives had eighteen, New Democrats held eight and the Liberals held only five.

Rob Ford’s first day as Toronto mayor is described in Joe Warmington’s column, October 27, 2010:
www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/joe_warmington/2010/10/27/15857276.html
.

On matters related to the decline of political parties and political participation in the Canadian context, the Institute for Research in Public Policy put out an issue of
Choices
in 2006 (vol. 12, no. 4, June 2006) with several essays on the subject. The issue can be accessed at
archive.irpp.org/choices/archive/vol12no4.pdf
.
Elections Canada also keeps tallies on voter-turnout declines at
www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=ele&dir=turn&document=index&lang=e
.

Full text of the citizen-versus-consumer commentary: Reid, Gilbert. “Are We Citizens or Consumers?”
The Mark
,
(link no longer available).

Chapter 1: Let’s Get Canada Shopping

Canada’s early department-store culture, including Jack Brehl’s observation on Eaton’s catalogues, is described in Belisle, Donica.
Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada
. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

The Bank of Canada’s Currency Museum displayed the country’s credit-card history in a 2012 exhibit:
www.currencymuseum.ca/2011/12/13/14238/carte-give-credit-where-due/
.

For more on the rise of the suburbs in Canada, see: Harris, Richard.
“Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960.”
Themes in Canadian History
7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., as part of its People’s History Project, assembled early coverage of the birth of the suburbs, available online:
www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP15CH3PA3LE.html
.

Valerie Joyce Korinek has also documented Canada’s suburban pop culture in “Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties.”
Studies in Gender and History
16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

The Consumers’ Association of Canada has compiled a chronicle of its history and achievements at:
www.consumer.ca/1482
.

An overview of Canada’s rich advertising history is found in Russell Johnston’s book:
Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising
. Toronto; Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

The Massey Commission, as it was popularly known, issued its findings in the
Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–1951
. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951.

For more on how psychology influenced postwar Canadian culture, see: Gleason, Mona.
Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada
. Studies in Gender and History Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

To read more on Sigmund Freud’s nephew and his influence on public relations, see: Bernays, Edward L. and Mark Crispin Miller.
Propaganda
. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2005. More on Freud, Bernays and their influence on political-consumerist culture can also be learned from an extensive BBC documentary: Curtis, Adam.
Century of the Self
, British Broadcasting Corp., 240 minutes. United Kingdom, 2002. Various segments of the documentary are availabl
e for viewing through Google videos:
www.google.ca/videohp
.

Advertising Standards Canada has an online history of mileposts and achievements at:
www.adstandards.com/en/AboutASC/ourHistory.aspx
.

Chapter 2: Sold Like Soap

To read more about soap and political salesmanship, see: Marland, A. “Marketing Political Soap: A Political Marketing View of Selling Candidates Like Soap, of Electioneering as a Ritual, and of Electoral Military Analogies.”
Journal of Public Affairs
. 3 (2003): 103–15.

Dalton Camp’s life in advertising and politics is chronicled in many books and newspaper articles, but most of the tales cited here are from four major sources, including Camp’s own book,
Gentlemen, Players and Politicians
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970, as well as: Stevens, Geoffrey.
The Player: The Life & Times of Dalton Camp
. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2003; Duffy, John.
Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership and the Making of Canada
. 1st ed. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002; and Camp’s many columns in the
Toronto Star
through the 1980s and 1990s.

Keith Davey, the legendary “Rainmaker” of the federal Liberal party, donated all his files and papers to the E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria College, University of Toronto. Many of the stories of the MacLaren ad campaigns and Lou Harris’s research are drawn from Davey’s papers, with much thanks to the family and the library for the several days of viewings. Also vital to this research was Christina McCall’s signature work,
Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party
. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982, and Davey’s own book:
The Rainmaker: A Passion for Politics
. Toronto: Stoddart, 1986.

The National Citizens Coalition has documented its origins, complete with reproductions of the first ads and memories of Colin Brown’s son, at:
http://nationalcitizens.ca/early_years.html
.

Journalist and author Jonathan Manthorpe is given credit for naming Ontario’s Conservative operation “The Big Blue Machine,” and tales of its early success can be found in: Manthorpe, Jonathan.
The Power & the Tories: Ontario Politics, 1943 to the Present
. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974.

The Vickers and Benson ad firm is long gone now, but some of the creative minds who used to work there have posted recollections online at:
http://vickersandbensonmemories.ca
.

In addition, a treasure trove of Terry O’Malley’s advertising files, complete with rough drafts of ad campaigns and his famous lists of proposed slogans, is held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. The author is enormously grateful to O’Malley and Brock’s library archivist, David Sharron, for the opportunity to pore over these files and learn more about those “Mad Men” years in Canadian politics.

Chapter 3: Scientific Shopping

Philip Spencer’s multi-part series on “political consumer” surveys appeared over several issues in
Canadian Forum
magazine from October 1940 to April 1941 and originals were consulted in Carleton University’s periodicals archives. Spencer’s articles are also cited in Daniel J. Robinson’s
The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930–1945
. Toronto. University of Toronto Press, 1999.

For more on Davey and the sources for his tales in this chapter, see notes for Chapter 2.

Martin Goldfarb was kind enough to sit down with the author to discuss his anthropological approach to politics and consumerism. As well, he has laid out much of his thinking in pieces written for the
Toronto Star
over the years and books he has co-written, including
Affinity: Beyond Branding
. Toronto: McArthur, 2010 (with Howard Aster) and
Marching to a Different Drummer: An Essay on the Liberals and Conservatives in Convention
. Toronto: Stoddart, 1988 (with Tom Axworthy).

For a blow-by-blow account of Pierre Trudeau’s often-stormy dealings with the media and the public relations business, see: Gossage, Patrick.
Close to the Charisma: My Years between the Press and Pierre Elliott Trudeau
. Halifax: Goodread Biographies, 1986.

Allan Gregg shared memories and insights in repeated interviews for this book, for which the author is grateful. Those conversations were further informed by reading multiple newspaper accounts of those years and books such as Hoy, Claire.
Margin of Error: Pollsters and the Manipulation of Canadian Politics
. Toronto: Key Porter, 1989, and Fraser, Graham.
Playing for Keeps: The Making of the Prime Minister, 1988
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989.

Chapter 4: Market-Tested

Margaret Thatcher’s methods are laid out in detail in Margaret Scammell’s groundbreaking book on political marketing:
Designer Politics: How Elections Are Won
. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1994. To further that pivotal work, Jennifer Lees-Marshment has continued to add important insights to this relatively new field in political science. See her books:
The Political Marketing Revolution: Transforming the Government of the UK
. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2004;
Routledge Handbook of Political Marketing
. Routledge Handbooks. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012.