Tories need to ante up
Do you remember the precise moment when you finally lost interest in the Conservative leadership race? For me, it was late March, when leadership hopeful Peter Mackay posted his hot new social media meme: “Democracy is calling. Will you answer?” The Twitter version — which also featured the bonus catchphrase, “Answer the call. It’s your duty” — was illustrated with a black rotary telephone of the type that hasn’t been state- ofthe- art since Jean Chrétien was the fresh young thing on the Canadian political scene. When imagining the superannuated campaign staffers who presumably came up with this masterpiece, I kept thinking back to Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character on SCTV lecturing the piano player: “Give me a C, a bouncy C … da-da-da-da-dee … ah, whatever the hell else you want to put in it.”
My intention here is not to beat up on Mackay, whom I’ve met a few times, and who seems like a perfectly decent fellow — even if it’s not exactly clear why he imagines his audience to be irony- deficient octogenarians feverishly pining for a Conservative leader who’ll unleash the political sex magic of Joe Clark and David Peterson. The whole race has been a shambles, as illustrated by the fact that Mackay’s telephone tweet didn’t even pretend to focus on any substantive political issue: it was actually part of a (failed) attempt to keep the race going despite the inconvenient fact that everyone in Canada was then primarily interested in not dying of acute respiratory failure.
Since that time, we’ve witnessed equally self- destructive Tory sideshows, including public bickering over which candidate should disavow which bozo eruption. It doesn’t help that the reporters who’ve bothered to cover the race have exhibited their traditional press- gallery fixation on social conservatism, which they regard as ranking somewhere between COVID-19 and Ebola on the index of human pestilence.
But I’d like to take a wider view, because there’s an important trend at play. Over the past three decades, federal Conservatives have picked exactly one non- interim leader who proved capable of becoming prime minister. (I say “non-interim,” because Rona Ambrose would’ve won if she’d stayed on. And Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer gets honourable mention for besting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the popular vote, even if Snc-lavalin, Arabian Nights and Justin- gone- Bollywood really should have made the thing a Conservative slam dunk.)
Needless to say, the liberal twitterverse would explain the trend by repeating the slur that conservatives are all bigoted hayseeds who secretly fantasize about taking away everyone’s abortions. But a big part of the Tory problem is structural, not ideological: our election laws and political culture make it difficult for even viable candidates to mount sustained, professional campaigns.
That is not to say that Canada doesn’t have a highly professionalized political culture more generally. Trudeau’s 2015 campaign was a masterpiece of no- hit political baseball. And while his 2019 turn in the rotation yielded a lot more walks and hit batsmen, his campaign still had the cash it needed to fly two planes around the country and put up ads in all major markets ( not to mention $150,000 worth of Facebook ads in the first week of the campaign alone).
Even following the elimination of per-vote public subsidies and the reform provisions contained in Bill C-76, the federal parties combined to raise close to $ 70 million in 2019. That’s a rounding error compared with election- year fundraising in the United States — even in per capita terms. But it still permits a respectable level of polish and competence during a general election campaign.
Where the professionalism really drops off is in the area of party leadership, which features funding levels that are two decimal orders of magnitude lower. This generally hasn’t hurt the Liberals, whose back- office dynastic politics mimic the Germanic princes of the blood who’d select the Holy Roman emperor. But the Conservatives are a different story — because, like the NDP, they more closely resemble a real, ideologically variegated political party, as opposed to a disciplined Liberal- style institutional vehicle that’s purpose- built to win and retain power.
The Sturm und Drang associated with internal Conservative frictions appear closer to the surface, and therefore require more care and professionalism to curate for the benefit of general voters. Yet the four official candidates for the Conservative leadership — Mackay, Erin O’toole, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan — have raised an average of just $ 700,000 each. This, to become a major party leader vying to take the reins of a G7 country.
By way of comparison, that spending level is about a fifth of what it takes to become mayor of Miami. Given the rates charged by Canada’s few A- list campaign consultants, and the need for regional organizers and assorted apparatchiks in a bilingual country that spans six time zones, it’s easy to see how even strong candidates are going to end up relying on overworked amateurs and hangers-on whose idea of impressing the boss is to spam social media with the political meme equivalent of “dada-da-da-dee — ah, whatever the hell else you want.”
To be clear: I am not arguing here for a U. S.-style campaign finance system, whose excesses have had disastrous political consequences for that country. In fact, the formal legal limits aren’t really the main problem in Canada: even under the strictures of our laws, the meagre kitty sitting at the centre of the Tory poker table could be expanded massively if Conservatives simply anted up. O’toole, who leads the pack, has just 4,200 individual donors. Mackay has just 3,400. The rank- andfile Canadian Conservatives bemoaning the state of the current race have only themselves to blame if they can’t be bothered to find their chequebooks or click on a Paypal link.
During my recent election reporting on the Democratic presidential race in New Hampshire, I was struck by some of the real benefits that come with a well- resourced political campaign. Both Anthony Yang and Amy Klobuchar — to cite my own favourites — were long- shot candidates for the nomination.
Yet between the two of them, they raised more than US$ 90 million ($ 127 million) — a completely obscene amount by Canadian standards, but also enough to ensure that the campaign events I attended were meticulously staged and that their messages got wide airing. Yang’s ideas about income inequality and the effect of digital commerce, in particular, have generated enormous interest in U. S. policy circles. And Klobuchar made such a strong case for herself that she might become the next vice-president.
Here in Canada, we’ve done such a good job demonizing the American system that we’ve forgotten that bringing new faces into politics becomes difficult if upand- comers don’t have the means to generate name recognition or promote new ideas.
Those candidates whose pedigree doesn’t provide entree with the princes of the blood now must fall back on the ungoverned badlands of social media, with its infinite bandwidth offering a jackpot of likes and retweets for dumbed- down populist memes. Canadian journalists have staged a full-blown social panic over the alleged political misinformation being spread by these memes. But for many candidates, a reliance on free, crowdsourced support is simply the only viable option.
What would best serve Canada is a political culture that allows the adequate funding of professional campaigns without creating a U. S.- style system that transforms politicians and their staff into full- time bagmen. Political reform is Zooming you, people. Will you turn on your camera?