From a long column on Barack Obama, which for our purposes you can mostly ignore:
“He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I’d ever seen at a campaign event.”
We were talking about this thing only this morning at the sprawling Maclean’s Ottawa bureau nerve centre: Why are there never big rallies in Canadian campaigns?
This question was actually put to me by a German diplomat a few weeks ago, while we were having lunch and chatting about the super-top-secret Canada-EU trade negotiations that nobody ever writes about. Buddy said to me, “Why are there no big rallies in Canadian campaigns?” I have to admit the thought hadn’t occurred, but it’s an obvious question once it’s raised. Almost every day this month, McCain and Obama and Biden and sometimes Palin are in different cities, addressing crowds of 10,000 or 15,000 on a slow day, and 75,000 or more on big days. In Paris, it was common to see handbills posted around town inviting everyone to see Sarkozy or Royal or one of the lesser presidential candidates on a few days’ notice, in venues that would look culpably empty if 5,000 people didn’t turn out. Germany, apparently the same thing.
Of course, Canadian politics isn’t utterly devoid of large rallies. There was one at Place du Canada before the 1995 referendum, which you may have heard about. There were a few thunderstick affairs during the recent unpleasantness that featured Dion or Harper addressing perhaps 1,000 people. But by the standards of some countries whose politics is in other respects quite similar to Canada’s, 1,000 people at a rally is a joke.
I’ve heard a few possible explanations for the decline of the big rally in Canadian politics. In the 1997 campaign, an old Liberal hand told me these sorts of big rallies were no longer useful to Canadian campaigns, for two reasons. One, they’re essentially parlour tricks: any half-decent organizer, given two weeks to get his act together, can get 40 busloads of supporters into any hall anywhere. They don’t show real support. Two, these rallies usually happen in the evening, at the end of a day’s news cycle, and so they don’t do much to advance a party’s message-of-the-day. Not worth the hassle.
But surely all that would be true in Little Rock or Nashua or wherever Barack Obama will meet his next 40,000 supporters/ spectators tomorrow, as well as in Lyon and Munich and Leeds and any number of other places where mass demonstrations of support for a leader are still, today, seen as a basic element of election campaigning. So why there, but not here? One of life’s little mysteries.
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Canadians don’t have quite the same relationship with our PM as Americans do with their President. Although they are ostensibly a democracy, their President, as head of state, is given immense powers and immense loyalty. I lived in Vermont for a year in high school, during the 80s, and it frightened me how loyal the student body were to Reagan. The idea of not agreeing with him seemed to frighten some of them, because it might be seen as un-American. Say what you will about us, you’re not likely to be called un-Canadian for expressing a belief which is contrary to that of the PM, or even for saying that you think the PM is an idiot. I’ll live without the rallies, thanks, and settle for sober reflection.
You only rally when your vote makes a difference…
my vote in Manitoba HAS NEVER been counted/effective for the 30 years I’ve been voting.
It’s decided by Ontario and Quebec…I no longer vote.
No point.
Weather? Canadians prefer politicians to leave them alone during the pleasant Summer months, so elections take place during months when it’s quite possible that large outdoor gatherings will be unpleasantly cold or wet. Imagine organising an event and finding that hardly any of your supporters show up because the weather’s miserable.
What time of year were Canadian elections held back in the days when we did have outdoor rallies?