Campaign lessons from a heckler
Whistle-stops reaching fewer in this digital age
It's only 8 a.m. but the sun is already beating down on a half-built subdivision on the outskirts of the city. A smattering of journalists, Liberal staff and party supporters are sweating spinal fluid waiting for the arrival of the party leader and his entourage for an announcement on housing policy that has already been leaked to the Toronto Star.
When he finally arrives, Justin Trudeau is greeted by local candidates, including the incumbent member of Parliament for Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, Filomena Tassi, and a couple of young prospective homebuyers who have been persuaded to take part in the photo op.
They all take up their assigned positions flanking the Liberal leader like potted plants, in front of a half-constructed family home that will soon retail for close to $1 million. It is the classic campaign announcement backdrop, an age-old tradition in this bidding war for the affection of the electorate.
Reporters are grumpy because the story is already out but that turns out to be the least of Trudeau's worries. As he launches into his sales pitch for his new housing plan, he is heckled aggressively by a young man in a red T-shirt. “You had six years to do something. You've done nothing,” the protester bellowed, knocking the Liberal leader off-stride with his boisterousness. “These houses are worth $1.5 million. Are you going to help us pay $1.5 million? Are you, buddy?”
The man was surrounded by Liberal supporters and eventually persuaded to leave by the cops, his point made and that of the press conference forgotten momentarily.
The incident was noteworthy from several angles.
It's all well and good for Trudeau to say that the housing market has been afflicted by instability and uncertainty, and that “it's time for things to change.” But the statute of limitations on blaming the Harper Conservatives for soaring house prices when you have been running the country for the past six years appears to be running out. Demand has exceeded supply for years, with very little response from Ottawa.
As with Monday's announcement on health care, there is a strong sense of déjà vu about the new proposals.
The national housing strategy was introduced in 2017 and intended to “change the face of housing in Canada forever.”
The Liberal leader was asked if the new measures being announced were an acknowledgment that strategy has not delivered. On the contrary, Trudeau blustered, hundreds of thousands of people have found new homes in recent years. Any shortcomings are “because for the previous 10 years, a Conservative government decided the federal government had no role to play in housing.”
There are some interesting ideas in the new suite of proposals — a first-home savings account that would allow the under-40s to save money for a house tax-free; reduced mortgage insurance rates; the building and repair of 1.4 million houses, and a ban on “blind-buying.”
But the lessons from six years of Trudeau in power is that the implementation is so very often less impressive than the ideas announced.
The other point of note from the heckling incident was how dated the traditional leader's tour is starting to look and feel. Trudeau has spent the past three days at whistlestop campaign events in four provinces, attended by fewer people than might pack into one old-style partisan rally.
Conservative Leader, Erin O'Toole, meanwhile, is spending the first half of this week in studio space the party built in a ballroom in Ottawa's Westin Hotel.
My visually astute photographer colleague said he prefers the “super-clean, nicely lit” images of O'Toole to the pictures of Trudeau on the hustings in the rain in St. John's or the blazing sun in Hamilton. “Those pictures don't say anything,” said my colleague. For a leader and a party that has been obsessed by brand management and message control, being challenged on the image manipulation front is a serious business.
Necessity was the midwife of invention for the Conservatives — they wanted a safe fallback that would allow them to keep campaigning, if COVID resurged.
I was skeptical about a sterile virtual campaign for a leader who needs to improve his public image in short order. But O'Toole's tele-town halls are likely being viewed by many more people than we are seeing at events on the traditional tour.
The studio setting not only allows the Conservatives the flexibility of filming videos for social media, it frees up resources to do other things.
“Every day you're not flying a plane with 50 staff around the country, you're saving a lot of cash,” said the party's communications director, Cory Hann. “It's not without risk to do this campaign differently but so far we're pretty satisfied.”
Even before COVID, the effectiveness of the traditional tour was being questioned. It's the secondlargest budget item for parties, after advertising, and it's not clear that it delivers results. In 2019, the final cross-country sprint by Trudeau did appear to be a factor in winning two new seats and saving three more that were won by a few hundred votes. But, of the 39 ridings the Liberal leader visited in the final 12 days of the campaign, his party won just 13. Andrew Scheer's track record was worse. Of the 30 ridings he visited after the French language debate, the Conservatives won just six.
If O'Toole's campaign experiment proves a winner, we may well have seen the last of the environmentally unfriendly travelling circus, the hokey campaign shots and the choleric hecklers.
EVEN BEFORE COVID, THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE TRADITIONAL TOUR WAS BEING QUESTIONED.