Critics say the government’s strategy to deal with the robocalls issue is “confusing,” “inconsistent,” “not well coordinated” and, as one crisis communications expert put it, “wrong, wrong, wrong,” but some Tories say that’s also why it’s working as the controversy has yet to hurt them in the public opinion polls.“It’s difficult to generalize because there appear to have been a number of different strategies. That’s my first observation, that it’s been kind of inconsistent with a lot of twists and turns in it, many different spokesmen, not always saying the same thing,” said University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.).
Summa Strategies vice-president and Conservative pundit Tim Powers agreed. He said the story so far “is confusing” and the Conservative government’s approach is to “emulate” it and point out the confusion.
“Sometimes they get a little confused themselves in the retelling of the story. There’s so much stuff, both fact and allegations floating out there that it really is hard to keep track,” Mr. Powers said last week.
The robocalls story broke last month when the Ottawa Citizen and Postmedia News reported that Elections Canada received complaints about automated calls on May 2, election day, last year. Voters in as many as 18 ridings received phone messages, or “robocalls” from a service pretending to be calling on behalf of Elections Canada, telling them that their polling station had been moved, and misdirecting people to a new location. The calls seem to have been targeted at Liberal and NDP voters in hotly-contested ridings that the Conservatives were hoping to take from Grit incumbents. Voters have also complained about being inundated with annoying or harassing pro-Liberal or NDP calls at all hours of the day. Elections Canada is currently investigating more than 31,000 complaints.
When the story broke, during a week when the House was not sitting, both Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and Jenni Byrne, the Conservative Party’s director of political operations and the party’s campaign manager during the last election, said they did not know anything about the robocalls and that the Conservatives ran a clean campaign.
“Voter suppression is extremely serious and if anything improper occurred those responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Ms. Byrne said in a statement.
When MPs returned from their break week, the issue dominated Question Period, with Mr. Harper answering questions from party leaders, and Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro (Peterborough, Ont.), the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary secretary, answering English questions from backbench MPs. Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre (Nepean-Carleton, Ont.) handled the French questions from opposition backbenchers.
The message went from Mr. Harper saying on Feb. 27, “The Conservative Party of Canada has denied and still denies such allegations. When we become aware of such information, we pass it on to Elections Canada. I encourage the opposition to do the same if it has this sort of information” to Mr. Del Mastro saying, “The statements made by the member opposite are outrageous. I say to the member, if he has any evidence, any information at all, he should provide that information to Elections Canada and allow it to conduct an investigation into this matter. We call on members to do that without delay. I would point out to the member and to the House that almost 900,000 more Canadians voted in the 2011 election, a significant increase over the previous election.”
Michael Sona, a staffer to Conservative MP Eve Adams (Mississauga-Brampton South, Ont.) who also served as the communications director to the Conservative Guelph candidate, resigned from his position shortly after the story broke, but he was never accused of being involved with the robocalls.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.) later said it was “an isolated” incident.
By the end of the week, Mr. Del Mastro dropped the non-partisan approach and was saying the NDP was running “an unsubstantiated smear campaign” against the Conservatives and later that it was the Liberals making the calls to their own supporters from U.S. phone numbers.
Mr. Harper repeated it in Question Period, saying, “We have done some checking. We have only found that it was the Liberal Party that did source its phone calls from the United States. I wonder if the reason the honourable leader of the Liberal Party will not in fact show us his evidence is it will point out that it was the Liberal Party that made these calls.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Poilievre was turning Question Period around and asking the opposition questions instead of answering.
Mr. Del Mastro then noted that the opposition also paid millions of dollars to make hundreds of thousands of phone calls” and that the Conservatives “believe they [the opposition] are the source o these reports.”
“Before continuing these baseless smears, those members should prove that their own callers are not behind these reports,” he said.
Last week, Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, Sask.) said the whole issue could partly also be Elections Canada’s own fault for providing inaccurate voter lists.
Prof. Flanagan said rather than jumping from one narrative to another, the Conservatives should have had the same spokesperson on the issue saying the exact same lines.
A better approach, Prof. Flanagan said, would be to say, “Yeah we didn’t do anything wrong, and we are happy to cooperate with elections Canada as they investigate. Elections Canada is the proper investigative body and people who have any information should turn it over to elections Canada, and we have no information to turn over because we didn’t do anything, but when Elections Canada wants to contact us, we will cooperate entirely, 100 per cent with them because we want to get to the bottom of this too.”
One crisis communications expert, who did not want to be named, said the Conservatives are not doing a good job so far in terms of dealing with the controversy. The expert said the government should “be very careful in being adamant about the closing the door” and appearing “obstructionist” when they should be presenting an image of “concerned compliance.”
The expert agreed with Prof. Flanagan, and said, “If you’re absolutely sure you’re right, you should say [what Prof. Flanagan said].”
Warren Kinsella, a Liberal pundit and political communications expert, said the Conservatives’ strategy is “a case study in communications mismanagement.” He agreed that the Conservatives should have stuck to one line instead of changing the story everyday.
“This scandal is working because people tend to believe it already. Even before [the story] broke, voters already felt Harper was the kind of guy who would step on a little kid to eke out a vote. That’s the problem with Robocon for the Cons: it neatly confirms what lots of voters already suspected about the Harper regime.”
In addition, Mr. Kinsella said, “Listening to Tom Flanagan is always a good idea. He’s a very smart man. And he’s right: simply say it’s in the hands of the authorities and you can’t comment, because you don’t want the bad guys to get away. Say you are cooperating with the investigation. Then shut up. Now, however, they’re trapped: they started answering questions in the House, and now they will have a hard time explaining why they can’t anymore.”
NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.), who has been asking questions about the issue almost every day since the story broke, characterized the Conservatives’ strategy as an “unmitigated disaster.”
Mr. Martin said he’s never seen “anything like it,” especially because the Conservatives “used to have a communications machine” which doesn’t seem to be working for them currently.
“They’re in an almost untenable situation because it’s a lot easier to tell the truth, and that comes naturally, but if you’re trying to cover up or if you’re trying to mislead then you’re constantly playing a rear guard action. Their strategy so far has been the most complex choice they can make and it’s been handled so badly,” Mr. Martin told The Hill Times. “I can’t understand for the life of me why they leave poor Dean Del Mastro out there for so long, and so often with the same lame points. Scott Brison did it with finesse when he was apologizing for the sponsorship scandal [as former Public Works Minister in 2004]. Twelve hundred times, he’d say, ‘Let’s let Justice [John] Gomery do his job,’ and you know, we all said it along with him, and we all knew it was coming, but it was with some style and panache. Dean is doing it in a very crude way.”
But Mr. Powers said that by putting up Mr. Del Mastro and Mr. Poilievre against Mr. Martin and NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.), who have been leading players for the official opposition on this issue, is a “deliberate tactic.”
“It’s kind of, if I can say it this way, a mano-a-mano,” Mr. Powers said. “With that approach, I think they sense that there’s some sort of neutral outcome there. Pat can give it pretty well and so can Charlie and Dean and Pierre can throw it back equally well. It becomes more about the fight as opposed to what they’re fighting about.”
In addition, by having two Parliamentary secretaries answer the questions daily instead of minister or even the Prime Minister, it gives less credence to the issue. “I think the view would be if you have the Prime Minister or a minister constantly responding to it, you’re inflating the issue to a point that you don’t want it inflated to particularly given the government’s strong denunciation of its involvement in all of this,” Mr. Powers said.
Another communications expert and political insider, who also did not want to be identified, said that for the most part, the Conservatives are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
“What they’re doing is a strategy in itself, putting different people up there with different messages,” the expert said. “You put out people who are unflappable in a bad situation like that. You don’t put your best people out because they’ll just be chewed up in the rat race and forgotten about. That’s why they held [former PMO chief of staff Guy] Giorno back, and Harper will only talk about it in the House because he has to because no matter what they say, people are going to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, but, what about this, and this?’ Nobody really cares what the party has to say, or the government. What they want to know is who is Pierre Poutine and who’s responsible?”
The Conservatives’ biggest problem is that they don’t know “how to put their finger on” the issue, the insider said.
“There are too many things happening. It didn’t come from the national campaign. It just didn’t, no matter what anybody says, so they’re trying to figure out how to address this because … they’re at a little bit of a loss on how to deal with something when they don’t know where the next thing is coming from,” the insider said. “By putting people up, you counter those things. And the voter gets a little information overload and thinks, ‘Yeah there was something in Guelph, Thunder Bay, and they’re saying Elections Canada was involved, and that [Conservative MP Maurice] Vellacott guy, Pierre Poilievre, look I don’t understand what the hell’s going on, nobody called me,’ and they move on. So I think in this case, the government chose the right strategy.”
But the communications expert said this strategy is “Wrong, wrong, wrong, because it’s a very simple story of did someone try to prevent Canadians from casting a ballot? Nobody needs to understand details, and it won’t confuse people on the core subject.”
The expert said normally in a crisis, organizations will figure out what the worst-case scenario is and work back from that.
“The Conservatives have gone the other way,” the expert said. “It’s consistent with their modus operandi.”
However, the expert said, “The past is not a good predictor of how things will work out,” especially since “the abuse of public trust involving money or power or abuse of citizen for partisan reasons pushes [this situation] into a different category.”
The expert said the government should be taking the issue of voter suppression “more seriously” instead of focusing on partisan attacks, because if it turns out that the Conservative Party’s central campaign was part of an orchestrated move to prevent people from getting to the polls, it will “make it harder for them to climb down” from their “harsh partisanship” and dismissive attacks against the opposition.
Prof. Flanagan agreed, saying that by taking that approach, it doesn’t allow the story to die down either in Question Period or in the media.
“Conservatives could’ve done a better job of sticking to one message and dampening this down rather than throwing more fuel on the flames,” he said, noting, however, that he’s not praising what the opposition is doing either.
“I think the opposition are just making it up, but it seems to me that … every time you say something incendiary, like ‘Really it’s the Liberals who made the calls, or the Liberals are making the calls from the United States,’ then you just create a round of headlines and keeps the thing going. I really don’t see the point of that.”
Mr. Powers said that it’s hard to say what the best approach would be in this situation. “Because it’s been unwieldy in its dimensions that it’s been clumsier in parts than the government would like,” he said. “I think people are also uncertain about how long it will drag on, which impacts the strategy to deal with it. I think it’s hard to render a final verdict on it. I think the government is learning bits and pieces of it every day in terms of the approach the opposition is bringing forward. Any approach can always be better.”
For now, although Prof. Flanagan said he doesn’t understand the government’s strategy, so far it hasn’t done them any harm.
“I don’t see any signs that it’s hurting them in the broader court of public opinion,” he said. “I suppose you can say it’s actually helping them. It’s preventing the opposition from talking about anything serious, with the budget coming up, the opposition is totally preoccupied with this.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
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