The lion still roars

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

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

No Liberal leader since John Turner has been as interested in the mechanics of the Liberal Party as Michael Ignatieff. Both leaders were confronted with the challenge of rebuilding a badly beaten party, and followed predecessors who cared little and did less about invigorating the party.

As it happens, some of what Ignatieff is trying to do this weekend is undo, to a degree, the decentralized, highly federated structure Turner put in place. However appropriate to the 1980s, the strong provincial and territorial arms of the party have been chewing through the party’s precious resources, impeded the assembly of national lists of members and supporters, and complicated both fund-raising and the financial reporting required by law (all issues clearly, if gently, alluded to in the party’s recent report on the new 308 riding strategy).

Still, today when the media were invited in to listen to speeches from John Turner and Michael Ignatieff to the party’s Council of Presidents, it did not promise to be a scintillating event.

Turner, who turns 80 in a few weeks, does not look entirely well, and I, for one, expected anodyne remarks, followed by applause, and much the same from Ignatieff.

Instead, Turner apparently had been thinking about a few things, and decided to get them off his mind in a brief but pungent speech.

“This party has to be re-built again from the bottom up,” he began — an unremarkable enough sentiment, but then he got into specifics.

The leader shouldn’t go around appointing candidates, he said. The party-members in the riding should have the exclusive right to do that.

Now, remember that every leader since Turner has used the prerogative to appoint candidates, either to enlist “stars”, or, more recently, to increase representation by women.

That wasn’t all. Turner had a few things to say about why young people don’t get into politics these days, namely:

• they don’t want to make the financial sacrifices
• they are concerned (legitimately, he noted) about the effect on their families
• the diminishing role of the MPS
• and media intrusion into politicians’ lives.

Digital Mondays

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary

Christopher Waddell

The easy response to the National Post’s announcement today that it won’t print papers on Mondays for July and August is to say that it’s the first step in the paper’s demise. That’s been a  frequent prediction that so far hasn’t turned out to be true. In the interim though, the Post is trying an interesting experiment that deserves to be watched closely as it could help answer some questions about the future of newspapers.

On Mondays this summer the paper will appear just on the web. In the past the Post has not published a print edition on holidays Mondays but you could read a digital version if you were a print subscriber.

Newspapers in the United States are trying various models of print and web publication and it is encouraging to see more of that experimentation come to Canada. (CanWest already does digital editions of its metropolitan papers but not in place of a print edition.) So far Canadians have proven more loyal to newspapers and we also have greater broadband access than in the U.S.  So the results of newspaper web experiments in the U.S. can’t be directly transposed to Canada.

What might the Post’s experiment reveal – quite a lot.

Start with will web site visits rise on Mondays when there is no paper and how much will they go up?  How easily will subscribers adapt to reading a paper online and if they can be persuaded to switch to online on Mondays, what about the rest of the week?

The big question though is how much advertising does a newspaper have to sell to be profitable if it reduces capital investment and daily costs of newsprint, printing and distribution? Is there a new balance that could emerge between print and online in the way the Christian Science Monitor in the United States has eliminated print editions during the week but kept a weekend print version of the paper?

I hope the Post will share with its readers in September what worked and what didn’t on digital Mondays.

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.

Liberal dreams of majority…not so fast

Posted by padams under All, Political Strategy

Paul Adams

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

Today’s LaPresse/CROP poll is a wonderful gift to Michael Ignatieff as he arrives for this weekend’s party convention in Vancouver. It shows the federal Liberals in Quebec at 37%, six percentage points ahead of the Bloc Québécois, and an amazing 22 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives.

It isn’t Christmas, but it will set sugar-plums dancing in the heads of Liberals. More specifically, it will get them thinking about the days of Liberal majorities past.

But hang on. As impressive as the Liberal surge in Quebec is, it would likely mean fewer than 30 seats for the party in the province, still behind the BQ, because of the way in which Liberal votes are concentrated geographically.

If you look at national seat projections based on recent polls prior to the release of these new CROP numbers for Quebec, they range from a two-seat edge for the Liberals over the Tories suggested by the Laurier Institute for Public Opinion, to a roughly twenty seat margin projected by tcnorris based on two recent polls, to a high of about thirty seats ahead of the Tories projected by EKOS Research Associates (with whom I am associated) whose recent national poll is the outlier on the high side for the Liberals.

If you substituted these most recent CROP numbers for Quebec into these seat projections, you’d still see the Liberals failing to get into majority territory. Doing a back of the envelope calculation, we are looking at a range of between, say, 112 and 136 seats for the Liberals nationally — well short of the 155 you need for a majority.

For the Liberals to be seriously thinking of a majority, they would need to increase their existing, already substantial, lead over the Conservatives in Ontario, or start expanding their base elsewhere.

It is possible that the Liberals will get a lift elsewhere in the country, particularly if they are perceived to be more competitive in Quebec than they were in the 2008 election. It is also possible that we are seeing a delayed “honeymoon” for Michael Ignatieff — delayed because his accession to the leadership came as such an anti-climax last December after the election and the “coalition crisis” that ensued. And honeymoons don’t last forever.

The arithmetic of majority is extremely difficult in the current four- or five-party configuration of Canadian politics. Liberals can always dream, but if they are serious about governing again they should also be thinking seriously about how to govern with a minority, which remains a much more realistic prospect — and still a very uncertain one at that.

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.

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.