OIL AND WATER

Pipeline fight highlights political divisions — within the same party.

Political parties stopped describing themselves as happy families a long time ago — around the same time they started to see themselves as “brands.”

But current events and the next couple of months are going to be testing times for this whole idea of parties as recognizable, consistent, coherent brands across Canada.

They’re not just dysfunctional families, but brands plagued with conflict and contradiction. The bigger question: Do party labels really mean anything anymore?

The prime example, of course, is the standoff between two New Democratic Party provincial governments — British Columbia and Alberta, on directly opposite sides over Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain pipeline.

Frustrated with ongoing resistance from the B.C. NDP government, Kinder Morgan announced last Sunday night it was suspending non-essential spending on the pipeline and setting a May 31 deadline to determine whether the whole project should go ahead.

Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley, leaped into crisis mode immediately, talking of retaliation against a fellow NDP government.

It all put the federal NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, in an awkward spot, forced to choose which provincial ally to back. He chose neither, opting to slam the federal Liberals and ask for the matter to be sorted out by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Political parties should embrace diversity, but is the NDP brand big enough to encompass the entire spectrum of opinion on pipelines — from aye to nay?

At the moment, Alberta’s NDP has more in common with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government (pro-Trans Mountain) than it does with the B.C. NDP.

Trudeau’s Liberals, meanwhile, have been pretty tight with their Liberal cousins in Kathleen Wynne’s government — borrowing plenty of staff and even an occasional cabinet minister to do big studies on pharmacare.

But the coming Ontario election will challenge how closely Trudeau’s Liberals want to be seen with the deeply unpopular Wynne Liberals — how much active support will the PM give to his friends at Queen’s Park before the June 7 vote? Or is it better, for both of them, to be seen as two different brands of Liberals?

Those same questions will be asked within other partisan circles, too. Can federal Conservatives embrace a politician such as Doug Ford? Singh has just recently come to Ottawa from Queen’s Park, where he was deputy leader to provincial NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, but can federal and Ontario New Democrats stay on the same page throughout the election campaign?

Political parties used to like to see themselves as families because that’s often how people voted — if their parents voted for one party, so did the kids when they reached voting age. Once those old loyalties started to fray in the last century, though, parties started to talk about themselves in marketing and consumer terms, as familiar brands on the political store shelf.

A brand is “a name and logo used to identify a manufacturer or service provider that is instantly recognizable in the marketplace,” says the definition in a well-worn textbook on political communication I keep on my desk.

“In politics, branding involves repetition of spoken, written and visual messages that are determined by the strategists at the apex of the organization,” says the glossary in yet another book I also keep handy — Brand Command, by Memorial University’s Alex Marland.

It’s not clear to me if the current party brands in Canada fit well with those definitions — they are masses of contradictions and, with regard to New Democrats in B.C. and Alberta at the moment, almost irreconcilable conflicts.

So if political parties aren’t families anymore or recognizable brands with consistent messages and packaging, what exactly are they? They certainly aren’t a good predictor of policy or allegiance at the moment — perhaps the reason that so few Canadians actually belong to parties in 2018.

Susan Delacourt is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Ottawa. Follow her on Twitter: @SusanDelacourt