MISTER FORWARD FOR EVERYONE
Jack Bensimon
Nearing the mid-point of the 2021 federal election, things are not unfolding as Prime Minister Trudeau had hoped. The attempt to engineer a majority government from the accolades of a job well done on the economic and healthcare responses to the pandemic has instead loosened the Liberal grip on power in unnerving ways. Pundits have accurately pointed out that opportunism absent purpose is a little too selfish even for our cynical age. The prescription seems to be, make this a fight over competing visions of the future. Make the alternative scarier. And as political strategy, there is ample precedent to suggest Trudeau can still steer his party to re-election on this basis.
But what if this election is less about policy and more about values? Less about political strategy and more about who we, the voters, have become? There’s a tendency in politics to assume leaders and parties can control the outcome. A well-executed campaign will win. A losing effort was incompetent. At least among Liberals and Conservatives, who enter every contest with an expectation of winning.
More often than not, the voters find a way of electing those who best represent themselves at a particular moment in time. And the question for Liberals is, can Trudeau still connect with Canadians as effectively as he did in 2015? Political strategists and pundits tend to focus on messages and positions. They would be well-served to focus more on our who we are and where we are at, as people and as a country, heading into an election. Context is 90% of everything. And the context for this election is an evolving set of values being challenged by a once-a-century global pandemic.
Covid has pulled back the curtain on the latent tension between the individual and the collective. Post WW2 we’ve evolved individual liberty and responsibility into primary cultural values. Perhaps as a means of justifying growing economic inequality. And as a way of aligning ourselves with the values of our influential neighbour to the south. Whatever the reasons, we now have a large segment of the population who view almost everything strictly through the lens of “how does this affect me?” Not just “people like me.” That’s a political construct, used to effect change in your favour. But the real lens is me, personally.
If there was any doubt individuality is in ascendence as a core value, the contentious issue of vaccine mandates has removed it. A miraculous medical tool designed for the collective good is broadly seen as providing either a personal benefit, or personal risk. The whole concept of public health is barely in the discussion.
Do you recall any comparable resistance to the polio vaccine? Or even other, less invasive public health debates like drinking and driving, mandatory seatbelts or second-hand smoke? People might have grumbled about individual liberties. But not with the vehemence we see today. Vaccines were invented to provide herd immunity. To protect the community. To protect others. That their core purpose is largely ignored by many Canadians illustrates how dramatically our values have shifted. Public health has been replaced by personal choice.
Decades of political strategy have seen parties fine-tune the art of building a voter coalition as the path to victory. Trudeau is no more or less a practitioner of this politics than Stephen Harper was. Election platforms are a list of policies, each designed to appeal to the interests of a specific voter segment. The strongest platforms exhibit a through-line that drives an overall narrative. This is smart, and effective. But it is worth examining whether how one speaks to those voter segments might be affected by the growing importance of individuality. In an era of personal choice, is it helpful to talk of advancing collective interests?
Trudeau never speaks to individual experience. It’s always first-time homebuyers, or the middle-class, or the people of Quebec. He defines people via their commonalities. At a time when a growing number of Canadians define themselves via their individuality. They are less attached to their religion, a union, or rooted in their community. What common interests they will acknowledge are shorter-term. After six years of being pitched according to your membership in a voter segment, perhaps we can forgive Canadians for thinking the Prime Minister sounds a little impersonal.
If this election is going to turn on the votes of Ontario’s 905 ridings, the Liberals need to exhibit a better understanding of the personal interests driving many of those voters. Voters who, for example, viewed the closing of small business tax loopholes in highly personal terms. Speaking to individual circumstances, without invoking group labels, is a critical step in reaching them.
It’s not a question of ideology. Karl Rove wrote about leaders being judged on whether they “care about people like me.” But Bill Clinton was also a master of personalizing his vision and his policies. In contrast, Trudeau speaks to the collective interests of women, environmentalists, families with children, young people, and a myriad of other identifiable groups he sees as part of his coalition. If Trudeau is to reconnect with more Canadians he will need to acknowledge the validity of individualism to many people.
Consider those who rushed to get themselves vaccinated. But who now regard vaccine passports as a slippery slope. Certainly not a majority. But enough to be a factor in both policy and politics in some major provinces. Ask yourself, in the face of mass death and illness, what compels a person to worry about slippery slopes? Perhaps it reveals a deep distrust of (I was going to say government when what I mean is) other people. Other people will restrain me in some material way if I let them restrain me in any way. Even to save lives.
Where does this fear of restraint on individual liberty come from? So many places. From cultural signals about money and success. To political behaviour that’s transparently opportunistic. To an existential fear about collective problems that are too big to solve.
Into all this comes mister “forward for everyone.” A nakedly opportunistic Trudeau, demanding more power. Promising again and again to solve every problem by making successful people pay “a little bit more”, while simultaneously disavowing any semblance of a fiscal anchor. He socialized our pandemic response - economic and medical - as most would agree, was his responsibility at the time. But it’s also evident he stands firmly against the individualist impulse. And considering how deeply embedded that impulse has become, it’s bound to make a lot of people squirrelly.
And like many of us whose values are centred more on collective well-being, Trudeau is tone deaf to this particular anxiety. Why doesn’t everyone see the necessity of being vaccinated? Of shrinking the wealth gap? Or putting a price on carbon? John Ivison’s piece about the violent and profane anti-Trudeau sentiment was itself ugly and ill-timed. But he’s not wrong that Trudeau has a hard time showing empathy for those with different values or circumstances. Most obviously, those who are primarily and unapologetically in it for themselves. It’s clear they don’t conform to Trudeau’s worldview. And he struggles to connect with them.
That connection must start with purpose. Purpose is essential to personalizing a message. Announcing something we’re going to do is impersonal. Explaining why we must do it makes it personal by focusing on the need and the benefit.
Maybe it’s the political communications imperatives of our time; that a message can’t be simultaneously clear, and explanatory. Maybe that’s why pandemic communications has focused on the ‘what’ far more than the ‘why.’ But without explaining the why, the purpose of anything is hard to discern. Not knowing why we’re having this election. Not knowing why it matters who’s in government. And not trusting that the guy who called it is really thinking about me.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jack Bensimon - Jack Bensimon is Founding Partner and Board Chair of advertising agencies Bensimon Byrne and OneMethod, and public relations agency Narrative. In addition to a career spent building consumer brands in categories like financial services, retail and packaged goods, Jack and his team have also served as the advertising agency for the Ontario Liberal Party and the Liberal Party of Canada in seven elections (winning five, losing two).
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.