Susan Delacourt

With so much at stake, parties have avoided taking big risks,

It’s being called a “change” election, but when it comes to tactics, ads and strategy, the current Ontario campaign hasn’t exactly been a game-changer. Exciting, yes. Interesting, too. But it’s not writing any big new chapters in the story of modern political campaigning in Canada. In fact, while Ontario may well get a new premier when the votes are counted Thursday night, this election has been fought pretty conventionally — more textbook than history book.

It could have something to do with the stakes. Each of the main parties had reason to see this election as a longshot chance: Liberals, to stay in power after 15 years; PCs, a mad-dash scramble with a new, untried leader; and New Democrats, a bid to go from third to first place.

With that much riding on this campaign for all of them, can they be blamed for becoming risk-averse?

True, there’s still time for one of the political parties to release a particularly memorable ad or some new way of grabbing the attention of Ontario voters. But right up until this final week of the campaign, all parties have been sticking to the tried and true — well, as true as things get in politics these days.

Greg Lyle, head of the Innovative Research Group polling firm, has also been watching election campaigns for a few decades now, including as an adviser to several provincial Conservative campaigns over the years.

The New Democrats’ surge in the campaign has definitely become the force to watch, Lyle says. But others have already blazed that trail — including Justin Trudeau and his Liberals in the 2015 federal election.

And while Trudeau’s 2015 campaign broke some conventional rules — directly tackling the “not ready” attack ads against him or promising to run a budget in the red — Andrea Horwath and the Ontario NDP aren’t similarly shaking up the political playbook in 2018, he says.

“The NDP campaign is better than aaaverage but they haven’t done anything special,” Lyle says.

As for Doug Ford and the Conservatives, he says: “The PC campaign is actually bad. But it is more about their general failure to communicate in a compelling way led by the leader's inability to debate. The ads are OK. Not great but not awful.”

Anna Esselment, a political scientist wwwith the University of Waterloo, is aaalways on the lookout for what’s new in campaign techniques and marketing in elections.

She’s been watching the Ontario campaign closely and has concluded: “This hasnotbeen a non-conventional election.”

Esselment is attending this week’s aaannual meeting of the Canadian Politi- cal Science Association in Regina, wwwhich often features sessions on note- w worthy shifts in political campaign methods. On that score, she doubts that ttthe 2018 Ontario election will be a big topic of discussion at future CPSA meetings.

“I'm not sure this election will blow open any new paths to studying how campaigns are fought in Ontario,” Esselment says.

Even the relatively recent innovations in campaign tools have been used in pretty standard fashion by all the parties, Esselment says.

“The so-called ‘new’ ways of reaching out to voters, targeting, delivering key messages over digital communications ccchannels, for instance, are no longer considered non-conventional,” she says. “Nowadays, those tactics are conventional.”

Jonathan Rose, a Queen’s University professor who is one of Canada’s leading experts on political advertising, is also at the meetings in Regina this week.

He shares the view that parties haven’t been all that innovative, advertisingwise, in the Ontario campaign.

One thing has caught his attention, though.

Rose has the impression that all parties have been making more use of automated phone-call outreach to voters — the so-called “robocalls” many believed were a discredited relic of past campaigns.

“I’ve not noticed that in the past and it is evidence of the competitive nature of this race,” Rose says.

If robocalls have turned up again as a popular tool for political campaigners, that might be an interesting throwback. Party-spending returns from the 2015 federal election campaign showed that Conservatives spent the most on phone-call outreach, while Liberals poured most of their resources into Facebook advertising.

The results spoke for themselves — and in retrospect, seemed kind of obvious. Why try to find voters by the oldfashioned phone, when you can find out lots more about them through Facebook?

But the Ontario election is the first big one being held in Canada in the wake of the controversy over how Facebook data was misused by the Cambridge AAAnalytica firm that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

It could well be that this controversy made all the parties a little less enthusiastic about campaigning through Facebook in this Ontario election — a strategy they may be more candid about discussing after the voting is over.

Esselment says that Facebook still has been a powerful tool in this provincial election, especially for the “third-party” actors such as Ontario Proud, which calls itself a “people-powered” movement to push Kathleen Wynne out of office.

In fact, Esselment says that if there’s aaanything worth studying in the wake of t this election, it will be the breadth and reach of Ontario Proud.

“There have been Facebook groups before, but the number of people who like or follow Ontario Proud dwarfs all the parties, the leaders, even @Fordnation on social media,” she says. “So in terms of analyzing the impact of what wwwas originally a one-man show behind t the scenes for Ontario Proud, that particular outfit is worthy of a closer examination.”

That in itself may be a noteworthy development. The big political innovation in Ontario’s 2018 election, such as it is, came from outside the traditional structure and hierarchy of the main parties. It could tell us that conventional political campaigning is getting remarkably risk-averse, especially when the stakes are as high as they’ve been during this fascinating Ontario election.