Leaders struggle to capture voters’ fancy,
If an election campaign is a contest of ideas, a short 36-day race — amid all the distractions of a pandemic — might be expected to be a mad dash on steroids, or at least a focused and energetic debate.
And yet the first five days of Canada’s 44th federal election campaign have been anything but.
The Liberal campaign has been tightly scripted, and not nimble. Justin Trudeau’s daily planned messages — on affordability, the pandemic, climate change and other issues the Liberal leader wants to be talking about — must often detour to address chaos in Afghanistan. And although the party was surprised by how early the Conservatives released a platform, it’s sticking to plans to wait until just before the leaders’ debate to release its own. It was only on Thursday that the Liberals finally released their campaign’s contact information.
On the other hand, the Conservative campaign — after an initial stumble with an amateurish “Willy Wonka” attack ad — had a polished platform launch. It seemed ready but at the same time sterile, staged with an abundance of caution. Erin O’Toole has moved between online town-hall meetings and hotel ballrooms in Ottawa, Quebec City and Toronto. Asked about why he’s in a bubble, not out meeting voters, O’Toole said he’s following “the strictest of health, sanitation and distancing rules for an election that Mr. Trudeau called in the midst of British Columbia on fire, amidst a fourth wave, and the deterioration and chaos in Afghanistan.”
The New Democrats are playing to what they see as leader’s strength: Jagmeet Singh’s likability and appeal to ordinary Canadians. Each day he has campaigned outdoors across the country, a happy warrior casually shrugging off protesters and shooting TikTok videos with his wife on airport tarmacs. But Singh has forgone details in answering questions about policies, preferring generalities like talk of making the ultra-rich pay more taxes.
Under the radar, the political parties — especially the Liberals — are spending money to penetrate whatever summer doldrums Canadians might be in. Facebook’s ad library shows that in the past seven days, the Liberal party of Canada spent $161,134 and Trudeau spent $148,145 on ads, far outstripping the Conservative party’s spending of $55,790. The New Democrats spent $28,117 along with Singh’s $12,304.
And yet the latest tracking of public opinion polls by Vox Pop Labs and the Star shows a race that has narrowed, with no party or leader capturing the enthusiasm of voters.
“I don’t think that the first week has been any sort of communication success” for any party, said Éric Blais, president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto.
Between Afghanistan and Haiti’s earthquake, he said, “I think their messaging has had a hard time getting through, and in fact has been somewhat derailed because they have to react, whether it’s the incumbent or the opposition, to these tragedies.”
Alex Marland, a political science professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, says the leaders are all “just still in the early framing of the image of the leaders and trying to position things.”
And the task is tougher for Trudeau.
“My sense so far is that it’s actually very hard for Trudeau to try to recapture that image of positivity that he had in 2015,” when he campaigned on representing real change, said Marland.
Trudeau’s Liberals are “running on their record for the most part, and frankly, in the advertising I saw, it was kind of … safe and boring, and not inspiring at all,” he said.
“Whereas both of the opposition leaders, their ads are exciting. They’re uplifting. It kind of maybe starts stirring in your mind — is this driving an appetite for change?”