“Harper’s team never rests,” writes Prof. Flanagan in his chapter titled, ‘The Permanent Campaign,’ in How Canadians Communicate IV: Media and Politics, edited by David Taras and Christopher Waddell. “A campaign manager reporting directly to the Conservative leader, not to a committee, is always on the job. Voter identification linked to fundraising goes on 363 days a year (Christmas and Easter excepted). With the cash flow from such aggressive fundraising the party can afford to spend millions on advertising, even years in advance of the writ, and to train candidates and workers, especially in the use of the potent Direct Voter Contact program and the Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) database.”
Prof. Flanagan, a political pundit who teaches political science at the University of Calgary, said that House of Commons-funded activities can also be used for political purposes. For example, he said, “travel to targeted ridings and ethnic communities, mailouts with a response coupon for voter identification, public opinion research to find policies that will resonate with target demographic groups.” He added: “All parties do some these things some of the time, but the Conservatives are unique in the scale on which they operate and the degree to which everything is coordinated. They have produced a campaign equivalent of Colin Powell’s doctrine of ‘overwhelming force,’ applying all possible resources to the battleground ridings where the election will be won or lost.”
Prof. Flanagan suggests the Canadian permanent campaign, “which was born of minority government with public money serving as the midwife,” will slow down in periods of majority government, but will continue because of the potent political weaponry of the pre-writ advertising, its usefulness for attracting new support, passing legislation, questioning the opposition’s policies, and undermining opposition leader’s images. “It is a political arms race in which competitors will have to adopt new generations of weaponry or fall irretrievably behind. As long as they can find the money to pay for it, parties will be forced to keep up in order to compete,” he said.
Prof. Flanagan said that pre-writ advertising has gone from only a few weeks before an expected election campaign to year-round activities, the most notable in recent years being the Conservatives’ attack ads against former Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion (Saint Laurent-Cartierville, Que.) and Michael Ignatieff.
“The last 10 years deeply affected Canadian government and political culture. After so many years of continuous campaigning, federal politicians became almost like child soldiers in a war-torn African country: all they know how to do was to fire their AK-47s. In short, we were living in a period of ‘permanent campaign,’” he wrote.
The Conservatives have perfected their campaign machine to effectively brand their own party and others’ leaders, resulting in growing support and essentially, a majority government, Prof. Flanagan said, allowing the “permanent campaign” to go “far beyond” simple pre-writ advertising.
The Conservatives rented a “state-of-the-art” building to be used as a communications centre and war room, dubbed the “fear factory” by the Liberals, almost two years before an election was called in late 2008. The Conservatives secured a deal with Air Canada to have a plane on standby immediately after the 2006 election in order to be ready to use on the national leader’s tour for when the writ dropped. And, the Conservatives became more sophisticated with direct voter contact and employ voter identification and get out the vote programs regularly.
One reason for a “permanent campaign footing” is political parties’ redefined roles, wrote Queen’s University professor Jonathan Rose in the same book. In his chapter, ‘Are Negative Ads Positive? Political Advertising and the Permanent Campaign,’ Prof. Rose wrote that the permanent campaign is possible because of structural changes to the electoral system and party financing, technology and outside factors such as various leadership campaigns.
“As a result, political parties use advertising with greater intensity than they have in the past,” he said. “Another reason for the permanent campaign: Parliament is less frequently the place where national issues are resolved and discussed.”
National Citizens Coalition director Stephen Taylor told The Hill Times last week that political debate has been taken out of Parliament and is increasingly in the public sphere using technology.
“Parties frame issues and debate all the time. We live in such an age where there’s an intense back and forth that happens much more frequently than every four years,” he told The Hill Times. “It happens every day, it happens on twitter, it happens on social media, on political panels on television, so there are many opportunities for that discussion to happen and it actually serves democracy. It’s important.”
It’s why there should not be limits to what parties can do or spend in between elections, he said. “The best test on a party’s ideas and its appeal to the electorate is a direct response from the electorate itself, whether in voting for the party’s ideas or contributing to those parties to put fuel in the tank for those ideas and that comes through donations to those parties, so the political process is served when parties engage in the public,” Mr. Taylor said. “There are issues that concern the country 365 days a year. It’s important to discuss those issues and keep the electorate engaged to help maintain a healthy democracy.”
NDP MP Joe Comartin (Windsor-Tecumseh, Ont.) said, however, that Canada’s political financing regime is something to be proud of and it will be undermined if political activity in pre-writ periods are not regulated. “There is a correlation between the financial support they get and how they use that financial support, that’s not to say it’s right or should be permissible without limit,” he told The Hill Times, noting the abuse that goes on in the United States with lax rules on third-party advertisers and election financing. “I think there’s need for improvement here.”
Abacus Data pollster David Colletto said last week that Canada’s election financing system prevents the kind of abuse Mr. Comartin is referring to. There’s nothing wrong with political parties communicating with Canadians in between elections, he said, but because of the low donation limits, Canadians know that the political advertisements they see are from a broader cross section of supporters than potentially U.S. ones where a billionaire could perhaps single-handedly fund a campaign.
“Whether those ads are good, or wrong, that’s a different story, but the very idea that parties themselves should be able to advertise between elections I think is certainly something we want in a democracy and from the party’s perspective it becomes, how do you pay for them?” he said. “We know the ads we’re seeing are paid for by the parties and therefore I think it’s okay.”
Mr. Comartin said there should not be an outright ban on political advertising between elections but that there should be limits. He said an annual cap on pre-writ advertising should be instituted for political parties. MPs should look at the issue of third-party advertising in the pre-writ period as well, he said. “That one is much more complex and I’m not sure it’s possible to control that,” he said. “At the very least I think we should be studying whether we could also put some limits, some parameters on how much you can spend in terms of third-party advertising, again on an annual basis.”
One solution, Mr. Comartin said, could be that third-party advertisers should not be allowed to attack a political party, candidate or sitting MP and stick to only promoting a public policy. “That’s where the problem area really lies—how do you control that third-party advertising without interfering unduly with the ability of people to get their message out to the general public?”
Prof. Flanagan said regulating political activities in between elections is not the correct way to go. “I suspect that the permanent campaign, including pre-writ advertising is here to stay at some level, even though many observers profess not to like it. Regardless of likes and dislikes, legislative remedies seem politically difficult to enact and may be loaded with unintended consequences worse than the alleged evil they are supposed to ameliorate,” he wrote in the book.
Mr. Colletto, who’s also an expert on political financing, said the permanent campaign is “still up in the air” because of the changes to the election financing system. The Conservatives eliminated public per-vote subsidies to political parties in its 2011 budget which will affect how parties spend their money, he said. One of the major reasons parties, the Conservatives in particular, were able to advertise between elections is because they had the money to do it from receiving the quarterly allowances from Elections Canada, he said.
Per-vote subsidies were instituted to replace lost revenues from the cap on corporate, union and individual donations. The subsidy, which currently sits at $1.53, is decreasing by 51 cents each year until 2015 when it will be completely eliminated.
“The question is as they ramp down the public funding and they don’t increase limits or sources of revenues, the parties will now have to replace the millions of dollars they were getting with private money from limited donors. If they can’t replace it, then the permanent campaign becomes more difficult in terms of formal advertising and targeted voter ID and targeted direct mail, and those sorts of things,” Mr. Colletto said. “The focus of party mechanics moves away from simply persuading voters to generating donations. That’s a different pitch. You’re speaking more likely to people who agree with you than those who may agree with you. That might change the permanent campaign which I think it’s still early to tell what the actual impact of that law change is going to be.”
Minister of State for Democratic Reform Tim Uppal (Edmonton-Sherwood Park, Alta.) was unavailable for an interview last week, but his communications director Kate Davis said that the Conservative government has no plans to change existing rules in the near future. “Canadian families want their government to focus on jobs, growth and long-term prosperity while keeping taxes low. This is exactly what our government will continue to do this fall,” Ms. Davis told The Hill Times in an email. “That said, our government believes in stringent regulation of money in politics. We are focused on making sure that candidates and parties are not be beholden to big unions, corporations, and wealthy individuals with deep pockets. That is why we banned corporate and union donations in 2006 and why we introduced the Political Loans Accountability Act to ban corporate and union political loans.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Bea Vongdouangchanh
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