“It’s not just a matter of capturing a headline for a day, but it’s making a financial promise that people will remember,” former top campaign adviser Tom Flanagan told The Hill Times last week.
Mr. Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, said Mr. Harper’s approach so far has been aimed at presenting undecided voters, young families with children and “pocketbook” voters with options that he thinks will “punch through” the news cycle.
So far these include announcements to raise the amount that first-time homebuyers can withdraw from their RRSPs to buy a house from $25,000 to $35,000; pledging to study the impact of foreign ownership on housing prices in urban markets such as Toronto and Vancouver; and promising to help resettle more refugees from the Middle East.
Mr. Harper’s campaign team would have done an analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Wright’s testimony overlapping with the campaign and decided it was worth the risk before calling the election when they did, Mr. Flanagan said.
At this point, the Conservatives are likely just waiting out this phase of the trial, likely to be completed this week, and hoping the Conservatives don’t suffer any additional damage from the story so that it will be a distant memory by the time voters cast their ballots, while the tax breaks they want will still be top of mind.
“It’s not just news, it’s a tangible promise,” Mr. Flanagan said of the Conservatives’ campaign commitments. “And no other party is promising that, so if you want this, you’re going to have to vote Conservative to get it. That’s the logic of it.”
Chris Froggatt, a former Conservative staffer and now a managing partner at National Public Relations, said the strategy so far is working. Mr. Harper coming out early in the day has forced NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to spend time during their daily announcements responding to Mr. Harper.
It’s similar to what worked for Mr. Harper during the 2011 campaign, but the added challenge this time is figuring out how to pace themselves during this extra-long campaign period, he said.
“I think he’s done well at seizing the agenda. I think keeping that up through an 11-week campaign is going to be a challenge,” Mr. Froggatt said, adding that early interest during the campaign’s first week could also wane.
Mr. Flanagan agreed it would be a new challenge for the Conservatives to stretch their approach over the long campaign. It’s also harder, as the government, to announce completely new things that weren’t in the budget for risk of looking “opportunistic and expensive,” he said.
Instead, they can add “some minor, specific things like the home renovation tax credit, or making announcements that really serve to repackage existing policy… that don’t cost a lot of money off the top.”
An example of this technique was Mr. Harper’s Aug. 9 announcement in Ottawa that, if re-elected, the Conservatives would make it a crime for Canadians to travel to countries categorized as banned foreign travel zones where terrorist groups are active.
What Mr. Flanagan considered “most striking” about Mr. Harper’s approach so far has been the way he is playing off Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, going out of his way to find conflict with them. He said he thinks Mr. Harper is doing it to “dramatize Conservative positions.”
While on a campaign stop last week in Conservative candidate Bob Saroya’s Markham-Unionville, Ont. riding, after taking a series of questions from the media, none of which were related to Ms. Wynne’s Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, Mr. Harper volunteered that he was “delighted to see, quite frankly, that our refusal to co-operate with the imposition of this tax is making it more difficult for the Ontario government to proceed,” referring to the pension plan as an “enormous tax increase.”
On Aug. 12, while in incumbent NDP candidate Linda Duncan’s Edmonton-Strathcona, Alta. riding, Mr. Harper took a shot at the province’s new NDP government, warning it would be a “gamble” for voters to vote NDP again in October.
“We don’t know what surprises are in store, but we know the NDP has already started raising taxes, because raising taxes is in the DNA of the NDP,” Mr. Harper said, according to an Edmonton Journal report.
Mr. Flanagan said Mr. Harper is using these provincial examples to further contrast the differences between the Conservatives and the federal NDP and Liberal through their provincial counterparts. He said it was “obviously a carefully selected strategic manoeuvre” and that it would be interesting to see how effective it is.
The other factor being taken into consideration with the long campaign is the likelihood of an international issue arising, such as the devaluation of the Chinese currency, which has the potential to shift the narrative. Mr. Flanagan said these types of outside issues provide the opposition parties with the best chance of breaking into Mr. Harper’s cycle of announcements and forcing him to respond instead.
“Over 11 weeks you can almost guarantee that there will be some unexpected things happening that will have an impact on Canada… and so sometimes these external things are bigger than anything you plan in your campaign plan,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: Rachel Aiello
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