True Patriot Liberal

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

Liberals travelling from Central Canada to Vancouver for the party’s convention will be pleased to discover (as I did) that the flight offers more than enough time to read Michael Ignatieff’s new book, True Patriot Land.

The book sandwiches the story of his distinguished Canadian ancestors on his mother’s side between his own reflections on nationalism in general, and Canadian nationalism in particular.

Read as a purely political document (which in fairness, it is not), the book is not just an attempt to soften his image as a lifelong expatriate by emphasizing his Canadian roots. It is also aimed at re-staking the Liberal party’s claim to be the one, true wholly Canadian party. Ignatieff tries to re-inject energy into the Liberal national brand by reviving the good old-fashioned word “patriotism” – long in disuse here in Canada.

Michael Ignatieff has spent a significant portion of his life ruminating on the meaning of ethnicity and nationality, and their cousins, nationalism and patriotism. In fact, he can claim to be one of the two or three most important interpreters of the festival of nationalist rape and murder that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

His conclusion from the Balkan conflicts, simply put, was to reject ethnic nationalism but to embrace a civic nationalism, based on a set of common civic values, the rule of law, and tolerance of different ethnic, religious and linguistic traditions. Writing now about Canada, he emphasizes the role of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, our social safety net, and our openness to diverse languages and cultures.

He also adds a vein of romanticism about the history and geography of the country – different from Jean Chrétien’s sentimental speeches about the grandeur of the Rockies mostly in its articulate expression. Finally he talks about the importance of a common hope and vision for a shared future.

Politically, it makes a lot of sense for Ignatieff to set his sights on reclaiming the Liberal Party’s role as the repository of national feeling. Having lost its grip on the West as early as 1957, and on much of Quebec way back in 1984, the Liberal Party has seen its claim on many ethnic and cultural communities slipping away as well. Far from being a “national” party, Stéphane Dion’s Liberals were truly competitive in only a little more than half the country in the 2008 election, and of course, carted away just over a quarter of the votes.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives had begun to develop an alternative nationalist vision, featuring a more robust military, a less multilateralist foreign policy, and a renewed commitment to the North among other things. For a while they seemed to be on their way to displacing the Liberals as the federalist alternative in Quebec, and they continue to chip away at the Liberals among many ethnic communities, including, notably, Jewish- and Chinese- Canadians, for example.

Michael Ignatieff’s Canadian patriotism, as he defines it in the book, is smart, modern, well-considered, and at the same time likely to evoke memories of the Liberals’ long-standing claim on Canadians’ sense of nationality.

However, that only takes us so far.

His book, like much of what he has said lately about Canada in other venues, surveys the country from such an Olympian perspective that it provides only vague clues as to what he hopes to do in government. In the book, he chews away at that hoariest of issues, interprovincial trade barriers, calls for an East-West energy grid, high-speed passenger trains in Central Canada and upgrades to the Trans-Canada Highway. All sensibly related to his Canadian “patriotism”, but well short of a program for government, or the shared vision of the future he talks about.

There is little clue in his book to his approach to the economy, beyond these infrastructure projects and a now-conventional mixture of market economics and modest government interventionism. There isn’t a word on global warming. Nor on Afghanistan – an issue about which he has apparently thought deeply, but on which his public pronouncements lately have been difficult to follow.

When Ignatieff became leader, there was a lot of talk about holding a “thinkers’ conference” to re-define Liberalism. He is, after all, a thinker himself, and his 2006 leadership campaign was awash with policy. (It was he, not Dion, for example, who resurrected the talk of a “carbon tax”, which has had toxic implications for the Liberal Party ever since Trudeau’s National Energy Policy).

But he decided — perhaps wisely from a tactical point of view — that a vigorous policy discussion among Liberals, followed by the adoption of hard policy planks, would give the Conservatives too much to shoot at. The Liberal convention this weekend in Vancouver will be practically uncontaminated with policy – unless Ignatieff brings it up.

But at some point, this weekend, this summer, or during a future election campaign, if Ignatieff’s current political momentum is to be sustained, he will need to leave the lofty heights of philosophy, romance and history, and tell us what it all means to those of us living down here on the ground. His political goals need not be as elaborated as Dion’s “Green Shift”, which ended up strangled in its own details.

But it will have to be more than he has given us so far.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Welcome back

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

This began last September as a federal election blog – Campaign Perspectives – written by faculty and students at Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication. Now a few months later we’re back with a new name – Political Perspectives – but still written by faculty members at Carleton,  joined later in the year by some of our students. There’s one more change as well, we have a new url –  www.cusjc.ca .

We begin the revived blog with two posts from Paul Adams just before he heads off to the Liberal convention in Vancouver, where he will blogging to the site all weekend.

We welcome comments.

Christopher Waddell is associate director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and a former reporter, Ottawa bureau chief, national editor and associate editor of the Globe and Mail and a former CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief and executive producer-news specials for CBC TV News.

The 308 strategy… and why the Liberals won’t find it easy

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

Michael Ignatieff is enjoying a belated honeymoon after his anti-climactic accession to the Liberal leadership last December.

A new book. A party convention in Vancouver this week. And a warm gust of approval from the public, that has put the Liberals ahead of the Tories for the first time since last October’s election – nearly seven points ahead in the recent EKOS poll.

One striking aspect of Ignatieff’s leadership so far is that he has probably paid more attention to the internal organization of the Liberal Party than any leader since John Turner.

Recently, the committee on party renewal he appointed published a report called “The 308 Riding Strategy.” The central thesis of the report is that the Liberal Party should model itself after the successful Howard Dean/Barack Obama 50-state strategy south of the border.  By competing everywhere in the country, the party hopes to restore its image as the one true national party, stretch the resources of its opponents, and expand the areas of the country in which it can be truly competitive.

But even a cursory reading of the renewal committee’s remarkably candid report makes plain how difficult it will be for the Liberals to compete in every nook-and-cranny of the country in an election that may come as soon as this summer or fall.

We all know that the Liberals have been slow to adapt to fund-raising laws that make all parties more dependent on small donors. Well, the report lays out many of the party’s other problems in their awful splendour:

While the 2006 convention of the party agreed for the first time to have a fully-integrated single national membership system, it hasn’t happened because of “lingering, differing viewpoints among provincial and territorial associations,” as well as their differing methods of managing membership lists.

Negotiations over how to distribute revenues from membership fees since 2006 were “particularly challenging” and ended up with different agreements being struck for different parts of the country – an unsustainable pattern.

Liberal Party headquarters, which was supposed to take over the bulk of administration from provincial and territorial associations under reforms mandated in 2006, failed to do so.

As a consequence, the provincial bodies haven’t done their newly assigned job of becoming the focal point of voter outreach and organization.

These provincial and territorial bodies are still gobbling up a quarter of the money received from public party financing, even though their roles still aren’t sorted out in practice.

The Liberals aren’t even doing the little stuff right, according to the report. Tax receipts don’t go out in time, and — believe it or not from the party of bilingualism –you can’t phone up party headquarters and automatically expect to get service in French.

That’s just the internal stuff. The report also mentions that the Liberal Party, which it calls “the party of multiculturalism,” is not reaching out to ethnic communities the way it once did. (Congratulations Jason Kenney, in other words.)

One element of party organization around which the report dances more gently is the existence of party “commissions” – that is, auxiliary bodies for women, seniors, aboriginals and young people. Although these commissions consume resources that might otherwise be available to the larger party, it is not at all clear that they are consistently effective in either organizing the constituencies they purport to represent, or representing those interests to the larger party. (They do come in handy for generating delegates to leadership conventions, sometimes through so-called “paper clubs” that appear out of nowhere and then vanish just as suddenly.)

Though Ignatieff has shown impressive energy in addressing many of the party’s debilitating long-term structural issues, it would be foolish to think that the kind of reforms the report identifies can be fixed in time for an election this year.

The modernization of the Liberal Party is going to be a job for the long haul.

Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Obama’s Magic Software

Posted by cwaddell under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams
Paul Adams will be blogging the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver this week.

The Ignatieff Liberal Party is trying to capture a bit of that Obama magic.

Barack Obama said nice things about Ronald Reagan; Michael Ignatieff phones Brian Mulroney on his birthday.

Obama had a 50-state strategy; Ignatieff has a 308 riding strategy.

Obama spent inordinate amounts of time in Elko, Nevada, of all places; Ignatieff goes to Alberta, of all places.

The latest bit of magic the Ignatieff Liberals have imported is the voter contact software used by the Obama campaign. The so-called Voter Activation Network (VAN) software was developed by a company based in Massachusetts staffed by people who — judging by their bios — appear to be simultaneously political wonks and computer nerds.

The software is not, in fact, a product of the Obama campaign. VAN is almost ubiquitous in U.S. Democratic politics at all levels. So it is tried and true and tested, and the Liberals are probably wise to go out and buy it.

In an article about the software last week in the Globe and Mail, the Liberals’ president-designate, Alfred Apps, is quoted as saying: “I can tell you, we’re going to be a hell of a lot more competitive [in the next election] than we have been in the last three elections.”

But hang on.  The Liberals do seem like they will be better prepared next time round…but the software isn’t likely to play a large part, not this time, not if the election occurs as soon as many people think it will.
Software – any software – is a vessel into which you pour information.

I may be using the same word-processor as Alice Munro, but, well, judge for yourself….

The Liberals’ problem is not that they haven’t had software. It is that they have not, to date, been effective in assembling and organizing information about supporters, members and potential donors – information that needs to go into the software before it can do them any good.

The software the Liberals are purchasing is intended to connect information about voters, including demographic and political information, to the party’s membership and fund-raising lists. But it will only be as good as the data that’s input.

The Liberals’ membership lists are still a mess (see previous blog). And their direct-mail fund-raising, which is perhaps their single most crucial disadvantage compared with the Conservatives, is barely underway.

Moreover, until the Liberals mobilize their on-the-ground organizations for the next election campaign, they are unlikely to be able to collect voter data as systematically or in sufficient volume for it to be an effective political tool. Barack Obama, remember, launched his presidential campaign on December 7, 2007 – 23 months before the election.

Nearly two years of campaigning allowed Obama organizers to collect data – emails, addresses and phone numbers — at every rally, every bake sale, and on every web-contact, which could be used by on-the ground organizers to recruit workers and to raise money.

In this country, the Conservatives have been the runaway leader in this technology. They have had a software system called CIMS (Constituency Information Management System) since 2004. The critical element of CIMS, as the one-time Conservative organizer Tom Flanagan explained in his book, Harper’s Team, was that it was accessible both locally and nationally, so that a voter identified as a supporter by a Tory door-knocker in rural Saskatchewan could then be approached by direct mail for a donation, perhaps even on an issue he or she was known to feel strongly about.

Having been at this for five years, the Conservatives have been able to hone their database, in particular for fund-raising. No more letters going to people who have moved, or who have moved on politically. No more begging letters to deadbeats.

Even once the Liberals have assembled robust lists of members and supporters, they will need to be tested and culled before they will be effective for fund-raising. That requires an investment of time and money by a party that doesn’t have a lot of either. Tory organizers tell me that it took CIMS more than a year of operation before their direct-mail starting making money for them.

No reason to think that it would take anything less for the Liberals to get their software working effectively for them. By that time, most folks seem to think we will already have been through another election.
Paul Adams, a former political correspondent for the CBC and Globe and Mail, is a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty and executive director of EKOS Research Associates. He is researching a book on the Liberal Party.

Dewar coasts to easy win in Ottawa centre

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick, Sara Caverley and Bahador Zabihiyan

After a day where Canadian voters granted the Conservatives a new minority government, Ottawa Centre residents gave NDP incumbent Paul Dewar an easy second victory. Read the details in Centretown News Online.

Sarah Hartwick, Sara Caverley and Bahador Zabihiyan are students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Young love

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Matthew Pearson

Nepean-Carleton

Voters in Nepean-Carleton are sending Conservative Pierre Poilievre back to the House of Commons for the third time before his 30^th birthday.

Poilievre, dressed in a sharp navy blue pin-stripe suit, marched into a victory party at a Barrhaven country club behind a bag-pipe player. His 120 or so supporters chanted “Pierre, Pierre” as the 29-year-old meandered his way to the front of the room with his girlfriend, Jenni Byrne, at his side. Read more…

Love’m or hate’m

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Monique Muise

Ottawa West-Nepean

Whether they love him or hate him, Canadians are likely in for a lot more interesting sound bites from the House of Commons courtesy of outspoken Conservative MP John Baird.

The environment minister and former President of the Treasury Board claimed the hotly-contested riding of Ottawa West-Nepean last night by a significant margin over Liberal candidate David Pratt – a one-time Liberal cabinet minister. With 200 of 254 polls reporting a little before 12:30 a.m., Baird had 17,607 votes to Pratt’s 14,696. Read more…

Naked politics

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Amanda Truscott

Saanich-Gulf Islands, British Columbia

A tight race in Saanich-Gulf Islands ended with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn holding onto his seat by 2,621 votes, fewer than the number won by  a candidate who had dropped out of the campaign.

NDP candidate Julian West’s resignation came too late for his name to be removed from the ballot, and he received 3, 667 votes. Conservative incumbent Lunn got 27,988 votes, and Liberal Briony Penn got 25, 367. Green candidate Andrew Lewis received 6, 732 votes.

Read more…

Get out and vote!–even if you are a journalist

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

I just went and voted and am happy to report that there was a line-up: not because people forgot their ID, but just because plenty of folks in my neighbourhood seem keen to get in and vote as soon as they can.

There has been a debate in the past among journalists about whether they should vote at all. To my knowledge the most prominent journalist to say in public that he does not vote as a matter of journalistic practice is CBC-TV’s Don Newman. The idea is that a journalist should be above party and that no clearer statement could be made of his or her refusal to takes sides in the political debate than to decline the ballot.

I have a lot of respect for Don, who recently won the Gordon Sinclair award for his contribution to Canadian journalism — to be awarded at the Geminis in a few days. He richly deserves the honour.

But I will respectfully disagree with him on this point. Journalists, especially political journalists, are privileged to be among the most informed potential voters in the country. While we should take care in our journalistic work to separate our personal views from our coverage, it would be far-fetched to suppose that we don’t develop views on specific policies, parties and leaders. A journalist insufficiently engaged in the debates of the hour probably wouldn’t be much of a journalist to be truthful. But what journalists need is the humility to be the vehicle for many different voices to express themselves and be heard, even if they differ from our own views.

In my experience. some people can be very opinionated without ever voting; and others can be a model of journalistic probity and balance while conscientiously voting in every election.

I don’t think that journalists should reveal how they vote, any more than they should make a big deal about their religious beliefs, for example. Personally, I am proud to say that while I have voted in every election I could since becoming a journalist, but I have never revealed how I voted (except one or twice to my wife). When friends or colleagues have guessed at how I voted, they have, I am happy to say, been more often wrong than right. I honestly believe that most people could not discern how I would vote from reading my copy or watching my news reports, and that’s the way I like it.

There was a time in this country when judges were not allowed to vote and public servants were severely restricted in their expression of political views away from the workplace. That has changed, as it should. We are all citizens, and citizenship brings responsibilities as well as privileges

I have been lucky enough to watch people in other countries vote for the first time in democratic elections, and was inspired by how seriously they counted this privilege. I have often felt disappointed at the degree to which Canadians take this privilege for granted. 

We don’t cease to be citizens when we become journalists. We do take on a professional duty to be circumspect in the expression of our views. 

So get out and vote –even if you are a journalist!

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Green project seeks to engage youth

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sara Caverley

Colourful chalk messages are popping up all over the Ottawa Centre riding to recognize homes and businesses that are taking measures to promote a healthy environment. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

Centretown News and Centretown News Online are publications of the students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.