The fakery lurking behind a modern election campaign
At one of the late rallies in last year’s Ontario election campaign, Tim Hudak, then the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, had a rally in a big room at the Nepean Sportsplex. They used drapes to cut the space down to about onethird its actual size so people would be lined up out the door.
The Tories were obeying a basic rule of political stagecraft as best they could under the circumstances: however many people you’re expecting, book a room that’s slightly too small. You want to look as though you’re totally taken aback by how many people your bandwagon is picking up.
When Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne first hit Ottawa on that campaign, she spoke in a storefront campaign office that forced more people than fit in the building to strain to hear from outside. You might have had room for a bookclub meeting inside.
When you see the federal leaders or local candidates on TV over the next 11 weeks, they’re not speaking at huge rallies that you get to see as well — they’re speaking at events designed for you, in which the real live people with them are props. We know this, but it’s easy to forget: The “campaign” is in the coverage, not in the events themselves, and now more than ever.
At his first Toronto-area event of the current campaign in Ajax, Ont., Conservative Leader Stephen Harper spoke with multiple rows of supporters behind him. Politicians do this a lot: it gives them a mobile, active backdrop and gives the impression on television that the room is so crowded they’ve had to seat people on the stage.
Harper has had better and better success as a campaigner the more tightly he has controlled his audiences and appearances, and in this campaign the Conservatives have turned their rallies into ticketed events. You can’t just hear that the Tory leader’s in town and go see what he has to say and whether he’s convincing.
“Friends,” he begins many of his sentences, and it’s not just a figure of speech. You need to be a loyalist just to get in the door, to limit even the possibility of heckling or other nasty surprises.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, kind of likes surprises because he handles them deftly. They create the kinds of moments you can’t fake, for better or for worse. He wants to look like he’s at the head of an irresistible movement, like his father in 1968 or Barack Obama in 2008.
When Trudeau hit Mississauga, Ont., on Tuesday, he attracted a remarkable number of people to an outdoor rally before 8 a.m. after a long weekend. Sure looked good. Yet a remarkable number of those people are on Liberal payrolls. People such as Wynne’s press secretary and MPP Yasir Naqvi’s communications director at Queen’s Park.
They’re citizens like anybody else and they can do whatever they want before work. But they also owe the man a favour, what with his lending his efforts to Wynne’s 2014 re-election campaign even when winning wasn’t at all a sure thing (partly to draw people to rallies that looked great on television and in photos). He helped them keep their jobs, and getting up earlyto bulk up Trudeau’s numbers is small payback.
At least they’re real Liberal supporters. Some politicians have been known to hire crowds for these things.
Tom Mulcair, leader of the New Democrats. is taking a different tack, striving to appear not like a popular party leader but like someone who’s already prime minister.
First he welcomed the beginning of the campaign before a microphone at the Museum of History, the grandest perspective of Parliament behind him.
His next appearance was on Mount Royal, backed by New Democrat candidates, again speaking directly to the people of Canada, not to anyone physically in front of him.
He’d promised an announcement but there wasn’t one, beyond a summary of the things the NDP stands for, an invocation of Jack Layton and a lot of talk about what “our government” will do. Just as if he were already running the place.