FIGURES OF SPEECH

An Alberta researcher has gathered all the prime minister’s speeches in a database. What they do and don’t say is revealing

What you can tell about Stephen Harper from his public addresses.

Political culture, like everything else, has been transformed by the communications revolution of the past few decades. Still, one relic remains as a political communications staple — The Speech.

Press releases have been reformatted as “infographics.” Petitions gather names electronically. Political newsletters come as Facebook posts. MPs talk to their constituents through Twitter or email.

But The Speech endures, pretty much in the same form it has taken for centuries: one person, speaking from the podium.

Even Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, the youngest and newest of the major party leaders, is in the midst of trying to get his game back with the tried-and-true technique of The Policy Speech.

Can we measure a politician by his or her speeches, though? Well, turns out someone is trying to do just that.

Peter Malachy Ryan, an instructional designer at the eLearning Office of MacEwan University in Alberta, is assembling prime ministerial speeches into a searchable database and mining the contents to see what we can learn from the thousands and thousands of words uttered at the PM’s podium over the years.

So far, Ryan has distilled all the speeches (up to June this year) of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his predecessor, Paul Martin, into some early findings, which he shared in a draft paper presented to this year’s gathering of the Canadian Political Science Association. Among the results to date: While it is difficult to compare Martin’s 18 months in office to Harper’s nearly decade in power, Ryan has noted that Harper gave more speeches in the first session of his first minority government (2006-07) than Martin did in his whole time as PM. Martin made 54 official speeches, containing 113,714 words, during his tenure, compared to Harper’s 135 speeches, totalling 152,462 words, from February 2006 to September 2007. Ryan calls these 19 months a time of “peak output” for this prime minister, which he never again matched. Since then, in fact, Harper has given only about 200 more speeches, clocking in around 220,000 words in total.

Ryan has also tracked the major topics of the prime ministerial speeches, and here we see a notable shift in Harper’s attention as he gains experience in the top job. In his early years in office, most of his speeches were about the military — 22 in total during his first mandate. Since being re-elected in 2011, how- ever, the vast majority of Harper’s speeches have dealt with international relations: more than 110 up to early June. The military has sunk to fourth or fifth place in terms of speech topics, kicked down below issues such as the economy, tributes and, yes, even “culture.”

One of Ryan’s findings we know already, but it’s interesting to see it in a quantifiable form. When it comes to political scandal and con- troversy, Martin was far more talkative in speeches than Harper. In four different speeches in 2004 and 2005, Martin mentioned the Liberal sponsorship scandal and he made 12 different references over that period to the auditor general’s report that uncovered the abuse of government money.

In contrast, “Harper has never once mentioned the Senate scandal in any of speeches,” Ryan writes in the draft paper for the political science association. “He did not mention any of the key PMO staff or senators in question.” Ryan adds, incidentally: “He has never mentioned (former Toronto mayor) Rob Ford’s name either.”

Ryan also pursued an inquiry down a potentially interesting path: why not also track the names of private companies mentioned in prime ministerial speeches and check them against the lobbyists register? One finding is surprising. While Harper mentioned 44 brandname companies in just the first session of his majority government, from 2011 to 2013, Martin’s prime ministerial speeches in total contain no corporate mentions — zero.

All of the companies named by Harper — Premier Tech Ltd., with three mentions, for instance, or Ford Canada, CO2 Solutions and IMAX, with two mentions each, are also in the lobbyist registry. This tells Ryan that “lobbyists are doing their job registering.” But he urges data journalists to perhaps look further beyond this initial result, which says only that “Harper was more prone to mentioning corporate connections than Martin in his speeches.”

In the past 25 or so years of covering politics, I have become convinced that political speeches are designed more now to be read than to be heard. Chances are, for example, that very few Canadians actually listened to any of the speeches in Ryan’s database.

But when prime ministerial speeches can be turned into a 21stcentury database, we can do more than just read or listen — we can measure as well. Maybe one day we’ll figure out why politicians are still using The Speech when they want us to pay attention. sdelacourt@bell.net

TOM HANSON/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO MILITARY In his first term in office, Stephen Harper loved to talk about the troops. But they’ve since slipped far down on his list of speech topics.

ADRIAN WYLD/THE CANADIAN PRESS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Since his re-election in 2011, the vast majority of Harper’s speeches have dealt with foreign affairs.