Consider a political party that’s been governing in Ottawa for a couple of years with only a parliamentary minority. Its leader is seen as a strong but aloof prime minister, occasionally harsh, and hardly a man of the people. He decides the time is right to force an election anyway, even though grim economic news has voters worried. Saddled with the leader’s image liabilities and an unsettling economic backdrop, what sort of campaign would such a party mount to leap from minority to majority?
Start by repackaging the prime minister in a way “contrived to make him seem if not folksy at least accessible,” even cast him as “a gentle father, adoring husband.” Next, provide him with a reassuringly low-key platform, nothing too dramatic, but with niche policies aimed at attracting, say, women and the “aspiring middle class.” Finally, have him “ridicule” his main adversary “mercilessly,” painting his “awkward” rival’s more daring platform as foolish, particularly given the fragile economy.
This may sound like a sketch of Stephen Harper’s position going into this election, and of the Conservative strategy for winning it. But it’s actually drawn from the late Christina McCall’s masterful account of Pierre Trudeau’s 1974 campaign, masterminded by Jim Coutts and Keith Davey, that won back a Liberal majority. All the telling descriptive words and phrases in quotation marks are drawn from McCall’s take on that election, in her 1980 essay, “Jim Coutts and the Politics of Manipulation.”
If the classic Liberal approach to manipulative politics has a home in the present contest, it seems to be in the Conservative camp. To suggest that Harper’s 2008 campaign might be consciously modelled on Trudeau’s 1974 run—with Stéphane Dion in the hapless Robert Stanfield’s role—might be a stretch. But Harper does pride himself on his knowledge of political history, routinely talks about the Liberal party’s past dominance, and once wrote that it was Trudeau who “provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion.” Is it too much to imagine that he’s now applying know-your-enemy logic, adopting techniques that kept the hated Liberals so long in power?
There’s an essential Grittiness to Harper’s campaign, a combination of a cautious platform and unrelenting focus on the votes he and his strategists have identified as essential to expanding their base. But these same core old-school Liberal elements are less evident in Dion’s strategy and tactics. In place of the platform pragmatism of, say, the 1974 vintage Trudeau or the 1993 Jean Chrétien, Dion is running on his Green Shift. It’s a creative, signature policy, more like Stanfield’s wage and price controls, or—to cite a much more successful case of a Big Idea campaign—Brian Mulroney’s 1988 free trade platform.
Figuring out precisely what blocks of voters Dion aims to win over with his conviction-driven message is also tricky. Harper’s target audiences are well-defined, notably Quebecers ready to ditch the Bloc Québécois, and suburbanites, especially in heavily ethnic ridings in Ontario and B.C. By contrast, a senior Liberal campaign official admitted Dion has been forced to fight a diffused, multi-front campaign—fending off Tories on his right, the NDP, Greens and even the Bloc on his left, all while defending urban Liberal strongholds. “The Conservatives are running a very surgical campaign,” the official said. “We don’t quite have that luxury.”
