Epic election campaign raised our voter IQ
Canadians get to celebrate Thanksgiving twice this year — once last week, and again this weekend, giving thanks that the extra-long election is finally drawing to a close.
That said, I am one of the people, maybe one of the few in this country, who will miss the election once it’s over on Monday.
Whatever else might happen with Stephen Harper after the votes are counted, the Conservative leader may be owed some thanks, too, for calling an election that was long enough to give us a sustained and serious look into our politics.
Lately, it has struck me that when voters walk into the polling station in this election, they might well cast their ballots based on which leader has made them feel smart during this extended exercise in Canadian democracy. Voter IQ may be just as important as voter ID.
A cardinal rule in politics is that you can insult the intelligence of your opponent, but not the voters. Never assume the public is stupid.
It’s this rule, above all else, that has made Harper a polarizing figure in this election campaign.
Some voters — we’ll see how many on Monday — firmly believe Harper is the only leader who respects their views and sees them as smart. These are often the people who feel that the “elites,” whether in politics, business or the media, have been talking down to them for years. Even though Harper has nothing in common with former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his brother, Doug Ford, this is the constituency they share — anti-elites who are tired of being told to smarten up or shut up with their controversial views. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised, then, to find Harper and the Fords together in the last week of the campaign.
I have found myself thinking a lot in the past week about a conversation I had with Harper many years ago, when he was deciding whether to come back to politics and run for leader of the Canadian Alliance party. I pointed out to him, only half-jokingly, that to be a political leader you actually had to like being around people.
His reply was funny, and telling: “Oh, I like people,” he said. “I just don’t like the people you like.”
Put that comment beside this one, taken from John Ibbitson’s recently released biography of Harper: “There has never been a prime minister as utterly contemptuous of people outside his voting coalition as Stephen Harper. And the more they rage, the less he cares.”
That one line from the book, which contains lots of praise for Harper, explains why he will only continue to be prime minister if he wins a majority on Monday night. In a first for a Canadian election campaign, at least as far as I can tell, every other national political leader has preemptively ruled out co-operating with the Conservative leader in a minority government.
It comes down to what Ibbitson has described in his book: contempt for non-supporters. Or, put another way, Harper treats his supporters as smart and non-supporters as stupid.
This may also explain why Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was able to get past the Conservative attacks on him in a way that other leaders before him — Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff — could not.
Dion and Ignatieff came to politics after previous lives as university professors. Conservative ads were aimed at knocking them down a few pegs, casting them as elite intellectuals. But they didn’t portray either man as lacking in intelligence; rather, they suggested they may have been too book-smart.
The Trudeau ads, on the other hand, cast him as an intellectual lightweight.
It may well be that while the ads worked for a while, with people robotically repeating “just not ready,” voters slowly starting bristling at the idea of seeing opponents as stupid. The ads may have reminded people of Harper’s dismissive attitude toward all those who don’t support him, not just the leaders of rival parties.
If the Conservatives have erred in their strategy in this election campaign, it was repeatedly in the realm of underestimating the smarts of their audience.
Straight-faced, a spokesman told reporters this week that Conservative events were thinly attended because volunteers had been told to stay away and knock on doors instead. It didn’t take much sleuthing to find the opposite — emailed invitations to attend Conservative rallies later in the week, including a planned one with the Ford brothers in Toronto.
So even if many people will be thankful this weekend that the campaign is drawing to a close, this epic-length election has given us a chance to learn more about our politicians and what’s on voters’ minds.
And, of course, we’ll all be a lot smarter when we know the results on Monday night. sdelacourt@bell.net