Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control

2016/03/12 Leave a comment

Alex Marland’s book on branding and message control under the Harper government is now out (Marland also edited the wonderful Canadian Election Analysis 2015 – Ubcpress.ca, issued just a few weeks after the election).

Now that the ‘brand’ has changed, interesting to reflect on the Liberal government’s equally – if not stronger – branding, evident at both the PM, Ministerial and other levels:

A brand-centric approach to power involves the strategic unification of words and visuals. At the most basic level, a branding philosophy holds that communicating disjointed messages in a haphazard style is less likely to resonate with intended audiences. Conversely, core information repeatedly communicated in an uncomplicated, consistent, and efficient way to targeted subgroups is more likely to secure support for the sender’s agenda. Branding strategy positions the sender as unique, reassures audiences, and communicates aspirational, value-based, and credible messages. Repetitiveness and symmetry are crafted to pierce the clamour. A “less is more” approach to communication reinforces information and messages and does so in a resource-efficient manner that accentuates visual imagery.

Branding balances the information demands of the impassioned and the uninterested. It communicates cues and signals to distracted audiences while stoking emotional connections with those who are most loyal. It involves marketers maximizing their communications investments by promoting messages designed to differentiate the brand and to resonate on an emotional level with target audiences. It understates or ignores the brand’s flaws. It turns a humdrum interaction into a memorable experience. The resulting brand loyalty felt by the most ardent supporters is such that they can be impervious to missteps and to courting by competitors. An organization requires tenacious leadership to assert branding objectives over the demands and criticisms of other actors. The more fractured that media become, the more that party strategists and senior public servants seek to standardize and centralize their messages. The more that message cohesion, discipline, and centralization are practised, the more that society makes political choices based on images of politicians rather than on policy details. In politics, the brand unites everything.Th e rest of us need to look at political leaders, party politics, the media, and public administration through a branding lens to understand this.

…This book … is concerned with establishing that changes in communications technology are enabling the centre to enforce communications control and to implement branding strategy. This examination will provide both believers and disbelievers of the Savoie thesis with a basis for further assessment of whether the centre has too much power – and in particular a better understanding of the institutional conditions and processes related to political communications and elite behaviour. Brand Command argues that the causes of centralization are systemic, not individualistic. In this light, Trudeau’s pledge to empower cabinet and buck the forces of centralization seems idealistic. Branding strategy seeks to influence public impressions and to set and advance agendas. It is accompanied by an organizational willingness to exploit opportunities to penetrate a communications cyclone and a motivation to achieve resource efficiencies. In interviews conducted for this book, many respondents pontificated, unaided, along the following lines: “Disseminating a message in the clutter or bombardment of information that you get today is a huge challenge … One of the solutions to that is consistency of messaging, which probably explains to a large degree the centralized approach that government has taken to its communications.”

Brand Command UBC Press

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Big Shift or Big Return? Visible Minority Representation in the 2015 Election

2016/03/05 Leave a comment

My presentation at the Metropolis 2016, analyzing the election results and the record level of visible minority representation, 14 percent of all MPs, close to the percentage of visible minority Canadian citizens. This presentation also reviews how this representation is reflected in Cabinet, Parliamentary Secretaries, Opposition critics, and parliamentary committees.

Big Shift or Big Return? Visible Minority Representation in the 2015 Election

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Diversity in political backrooms still lacking

2016/03/03 1 Comment

My piece in The Hill Times:

The Liberal government included in its mandate letters to all ministers a “commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected in positions of leadership.”To recall, the Prime Minister appointed a Cabinet with gender parity (15 each of men and women) and almost 17 per cent visible minority ministers (four Sikh and one Afghan Canadian).

Gender parity was not attained for parliamentary secretaries (12 positions out of 35 or 34 per cent) or other leadership positions such as whips and House leaders, visible minority parliamentary secretaries are over-represented (nine positions or 24 per cent) in relation to their share of the voting population (15 per cent).

Given this commitment and action, is the Liberal government also applying diversity and inclusion to its hiring of political staff? What about the official opposition?

To assess this, I looked at the Prime Minister’s Office (59 total positions and 12 senior staffers), the Leader of the Official Opposition’s office (OLO, 23 positions), and ministerial offices (senior staff defined as chief of staff, directors of communications, policy, issues and parliamentary affairs, along with press Secretaries, total number of 101 positions filled at time of writing).

Sources for the data include the regular ‘Hill Climbers’ updates in The Hill Times, other relevant press articles, and the imperfect Government Electronic Directory Services (GEDS). Gender and visible minority status were identified through names, LinkedIn profiles, biographies and photos where available.

From a gender perspective, women are under-represented at the senior level in PMO (one-third), but close to 40 per cent for all 59 PMO staffers. OLO has slightly lower representation of women (30 per cent). For minister’s offices, the percentage of chiefs of staff is slightly less than the overall per cent of close to 40 per cent who are women.

Visible minorities are consistently under-represented, save for the overall numbers in PMO (15 per cent). OLO and senior ministerial office staff all range between four to seven per cent, less than half of the percentage of visible minority Canadian citizens, with chief of staff visible minority representation slightly higher at 10 per cent.

While I have focused on gender and visible minority status, diversity includes of course other dimensions such as regional diversity (many, if not most Liberal staffers come from, or have worked in, Ontario and Toronto), sexual orientation, religion, education etc. R. Paul Wilson’s A Profile of Ministerial Policy Staff in the Government of Canada provides the best most recent analysis of the different aspects of diversity among staffers under the Conservative government October 2012 to June 2013.

Does this matter? In many ways, it does not. Gender parity in Cabinet and relatively strong Parliamentary Secretary representation set the tone for the government and Parliament.

Being a political staffer may not necessarily lead to a direct path to becoming a future MP. Staffer experience is not necessarily perceived as an asset in local riding associations or to the broader public. Staffers may be asked by the party to be its flag-bearer in unwinnable ridings. The most famous example of a staffer becoming an MP is, of course, former Prime Minister Harper, who was a staffer to Reform Party leader Preston Manning among other positions.

All three major parties were able to recruit an impressive number of visible minority candidates (women less so).

However, staffers play an important role in government (and opposition) decision-making. Having a diversity of backgrounds and experience generally helps inform decision-making.

The Liberal government’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, so well executed at the public level for both women and visible minorities, is lacking in the backrooms, particularly for visible minorities. Given the role that staffers play in preparing ministers for debates and discussions, this may impact on the degree to which the overall diversity and inclusion agenda is implemented.

http://www.hilltimes.com/opinion-piece/2016/03/02/diversity-in-political-backrooms-still-lacking/45495 

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Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? Neil Macdonald

2016/01/26 Leave a comment

Interesting if uncomfortable parallel Neil Macdonald makes between the religious extremists in the Iranian revolution and the US evangelicals:

In fact, Palin’s speech reminded me of another one I attended, years ago, in Tehran during my time as CBC’s Middle East correspondent.

Mohammed Khatami, the reformer, had been elected president of Iran, and you could taste the craving for change in the city’s mountain air.

On a whim, I decided to attend a Friday sermon by Ayatollah Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, probably the most hardline cleric in the theocracy.

He scorned the reformers and called down divine judgment on them, and exhorted the crowd to go and impose the will of the people.

It was a speech filled with hatred and religious bigotry and nativism, and the crowd absorbed it with the same sort of ecstasy U.S. conservatives evidently experience at Republican rallies nowadays.

I spoke to several people as they exited the sermon; most were rural, uneducated, and were bused in for the event. In cosmopolitan Tehran, Yazdi wouldn’t likely have been able to fill a big classroom, let alone pack in thousands of panting zealots.

‘You’re fired’

Sarah Palin, likewise, feels most comfortable outside America’s big cities, talking to the white evangelical Christians she calls “real Americans,” as opposed to the ethnic stew of the more permissive, homosexual-tolerating, non-God-fearing souls who populate the coastal population centres.

…Watching Palin and Trump, it was impossible not to wonder, once again, how America, a country that has achieved such excellence, and has so often shown the world a better way, descended into a political discourse that demonizes enlightened thought and glamorizes mean-spirited, lowbrow crudeness.

And something else occurred, a notion I’ve always shied away from because I find jingoism distasteful: None of this stuff would go anywhere in Canada. It would draw snickers and derision, not cheers.

The only reason I can cite for this difference in national attitudes is religion. Not the quiet, old-line religiosity whose adherents believe worship is a private matter, best practised in church.

I’m referring to the messianic, aggressive religion of certain evangelical Christian sects, which believe that even other streams of Christianity, never mind other faiths, are false, and that their job is not just to spread the word of God but to impose it, and that the best way to do that is to run the government.

That sort of religion happily ignores inconvenient facts and contradictions, and has always been ripe for the con job pulled by the Republican elite: promise to end atheistic permissiveness, then get into office and implement an economic agenda most friendly to Manhattan billionaires like Trump and multi-millionaires like Palin. (She recently put her 8,000 square-foot Arizona compound up for sale for $2.5 million.)

To be fair, this loopy form of religio-political fantasy is particular to the Republicans, and lots of religious Americans find it offensive to rational thought.

But it should not be dismissed, as clownish as its heroes can seem.

Think about Iran: Yazdi and his fellow hardliners triumphed. The reformers were shut down and jailed. The urban elites were cowed. It can happen.

Source: Can America’s political discourse get any cruder? – World – CBC News

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The angry, radical right: Martin Patriquin

2016/01/22 Leave a comment

Just as many pundits noted “Harper derangement syndrome” on the left, we now have “Trudeau (the younger) derangement syndrome” on the right following the election.

Ironic, given that the Conservative Party, now in opposition, has been running away from some of the policies and practices it implemented (e.g., cancellation of the Census, refusal to have an enquiry on murdered aboriginal women, the sale of LAVs to Saudi Arabia).

There will always be fringes on both sides of the political spectrum and the question is whether this will remain on the fringes or be picked up in some form by mainstream political parties (as arguably happened with the Conservatives’ use of identity politics with respect to Canadian Muslims during the election):

The RCMP, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in threats against Trudeau, according to police sources. “It’s somewhat expected, because Trudeau is anathema to right-wing extremists, and right-wing extremists tend to be the most explicit and reckless of those who make these kinds of threats,” says a former member of the RCMP’s threat-assessment group, a national security unit that safeguards domestic and visiting political leaders, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he remains a member of the RCMP.

Much of the rhetoric comes from a range of online groups whose ideologies vary as much as their popularity. Pegida Canada and Canadian Defence League, for example, are offshoots of European anti-Islamic groups. Others, including Separation of Alberta from the Liberal East, have specific Canadian political goals. Others still are Zionist in nature, including the Jewish Defence League and Christians United For Israel. With its 25,000 followers, Never Again Canada looms large.

The Never Again Canada Facebook page first appeared in mid-2014. The group, such as it is, bills itself as an “organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, propaganda, terror and Jew hatred in Canada . . . Hatred is like cancer, the more you don’t treat it and ignore it, the worse it gets.” Its page, often updated several times an hour, is almost uniquely dedicated to criticism of Justin Trudeau—sometimes referred to as “Justine”—and Islam. (“Never Again” is an apparent reference to the slogan of the Jewish Defence League, the U.S.-based militant Zionist organization, which has a chapter in Canada.)

The commentators on Never Again are a hodgepodge of Zionists, former and current military, Christian militants, the occasional white nationalist—an irony, given that the white nationalist movement isn’t typically very charitable toward Jews—and many anti-Muslim types like Witko and Larry Langenauer. A 67-year-old small business owner, Langenauer says he began posting on Never Again’s Facebook page four months ago.

On Dec. 10 Langenauer wrote that “the most convincing non-confidence statement” against Trudeau would be to shoot him. He has made similar threats about the Saudi-born Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, who was recently appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs. (In Canada, uttering threats is an offence punishable by up to five years in jail. Committing hate speech is punishable by up to two years in jail.)

“I guess anyone that feels that way is probably thinking that [Trudeau] is the man who almost single-handedly, with the people in office with him, has enabled violent immigrants,” Langenauer said in a recent telephone interview from his Montreal home. “It’s their responsibility. Why would Canada be exempt from this type of behaviour by the radical Islamic immigrants? They say they’re refugees, they’re not really refugees. People are going to resent it, and eventually they will act upon it toward the people whom they feel are responsible.”

Source: The angry, radical right – Macleans.ca

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#MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Some real ugliness here in the comments by conservative pundits and individuals, but captures the current atmosphere in the Republican party:

In some ways, Haley seems to face the same conundrum former Louisiana Gov. and failed Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal did — not seeming “brown enough” for some voters of color, while being “too brown” for others. (We won’t bore you with the details, or subject you to some of the graphic tweets, but just take a look at the #JindalSoWhite hashtag to see what we’re talking about.)

Of course, Twitter is not exactly or entirely representative of the real world, and even thousands of tweets for or against Nikki Haley might not accurately depict actual support or disapproval of her.

A September 2015 Winthrop poll found Haley’s approval rating among South Carolina voters was 55 percent. That number was similar before Haley gained praise for helping bring down the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of a Charleston church shooting that killed nine black parishioners. But she did drop 10 points with Republicans. (By December, she was back up to 81 percent with Republicans.)

Giridharadas in his New York Times article wasn’t just critical of Haley; he said it was “thrilling” to see Haley attempt to “create a broader, two-party consensus on the simple, exceptional idea that an American is defined by shared hope, not shared blood.”

But wherever you stand on Haley, her story speaks to a certain truth in politics: race is tricky — and there’s always going to be someone unhappy with how you talk about it.

With Haley, we see a multi-dimensional (and, in fact, multicultural) tilt to America’s ongoing struggle with race. A dichotomy of justblack and white isn’t big enough to comprehend or explain a Sikh Indian-American daughter of immigrants, who helped bring down what is, for many, a longstanding symbol of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America.

Haley’s story has layers. It is nuanced. It is not simple. And maybe that’s how it should be.

Source: #MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

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How fear became the politician’s weapon of choice

2015/12/08 Leave a comment

Ian Buruma on the politics of fear:

As long as France’s state of emergency lasts, police may arrest people without warrants, break down the doors of private residences in the middle of the night, take over restaurants and other public places with armed force, and generally behave like agents in a police state. Most French citizens are now so frightened of Islamist attacks that such measures are widely supported. But they are almost certainly counterproductive.

A national leader can declare war on a state, not on a network of revolutionaries. Islamic State, despite its claims, is not a state, and Mr. Hollande should not treat it as one. Besides, even if bombing IS strongholds in Iraq or Syria makes military sense, it won’t break the spell of Islamist revolution for frustrated, bored and marginalized young people in French slums.

On the contrary: The canny leaders of IS also rely on an apocalyptic “us or them” view of the world. Most Muslims are not violent revolutionaries who condone, let alone admire, mass violence. IS seeks to broaden its support, especially among young Muslims, by convincing them that true Muslims are in an existential war with the West – that the infidels are their mortal enemies. For them no less than for Mr. Trump, fear is the most powerful weapon.

So the more a Western government allows its policemen to humiliate and bully Muslims in the name of security, the more IS is likely to win European recruits. The only way to combat revolutionary Islamist violence is to gain the trust of law-abiding Muslims in the West. This will not be easy, but arbitrary arrests are surely the wrong way to go about it.

Likewise, when it comes to civil wars in the Middle East, Western restraint is usually a better strategy than hasty military intervention driven by domestic fear. Republican candidates in the United States are already using the recent murder spree in Paris to blame President Barack Obama, and by extension any future Democratic candidate, for being weak. Mr. Trump has promised to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”

This bellicosity has had the effect of pushing Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, into distancing herself from Mr. Obama. As with Mr. Hollande, she has to assuage public fear by talking tough and promising more military action.

Mr. Obama has consistently resisted the temptation to unleash more wars. His policies have sometimes been inconsistent and irresolute. But in his refusal to give in to panic and act rashly, he has been far braver than all the big talkers who accuse him of being a wimp.

Source: How fear became the politician’s weapon of choice – The Globe and Mail

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The Conservatives’ veiled pitch for the anti-Muslim vote: Delacourt

2015/09/18 Leave a comment

Delacourt has it right, both in terms of substance and politics:

What we have here is a textbook case of saying one thing and doing another in politics. The ‘saying’ part is for all the wrong reasons — the ‘doing’ part is for the right ones.

I suspect the Conservative government realized several years ago that it was legally impossible to ban veiled voting. Two attempts were made between 2007 and 2011. Both quietly died on the order paper.

Here’s why: It would amount to singling out certain members of the population for restricted rights. We do allow people to vote in Canada without showing their face at the ballot box — through proxies, or mail-in special ballots. How do you write a law that says some people don’t need to show their faces, but others do?

Moreover, a special law to prohibit the niqab would stomp all over Canadians’ rights to religious expression. That’s probably why the Justice Department lawyer felt he had to point out the non-mandatory aspect of the legislation in Federal Court.

Rather than explain this to Canadians, though, the Conservatives took the path of blustering about niqabs and sending dog-whistle signals to people uncomfortable or fearful about Muslims. Bad statesmanship. Easy politics, though.

We saw that earlier this year, as well, when the Conservatives sent out a fundraising email asking supporters to sign up if they agreed that it was “offensive” to wear a niqab or a hijab at citizenship ceremonies. The email left little doubt that the Conservatives were whipping up these sentiments for reasons of purest electoral politics.

The note was signed by Immigration Minister Chris Alexander and stirred up some controversy with his interchangeable use of ‘niqab’ and ‘hijab’; one is generally associated with full-face coverings, while the other, the hijab, is commonly used to describe a head covering.

To make things even more confusing, not all Conservatives have been using the word “offensive” when it comes to garments of religious expression. Kenney, for instance, said on Twitter in 2013: “A child is no less Canadian because she or he wears a kippa, turban, cross, or hijab to school.” Kenney sent out that missive in the midst of the Quebec debate over the wearing of religious symbols in public.

There’s still a month left in this election and it’s entirely possible that one of the eleventh-hour Conservative campaign promises will revolve around banning veiled voting — again. It would fit well with this week’s bluster on citizenship ceremonies.

This time we might ask them: Why did the last two attempts quietly die? Are they serious this time, or is this just another attempt to whip up some good old-fashioned intolerance?

What’s really being veiled here by all this talk about the niqab?

Source: The Conservatives’ veiled pitch for the anti-Muslim vote

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What do voters hear in Conservatives’ message on refugees?

2015/09/16 Leave a comment

Good piece on some of the implicit messaging behind reasons invoked:

The further subdividing of Syrian refugees to prioritize “persecuted ethnic and religious minorities” can only make an already slow and burdensome process all the more so.

“Our focus is on the most vulnerable refugees who are often in a more difficult spot and harder to reach,” Conservative Jason Kenney conceded this weekend on CBC Radio’s The House.

But those are just rational arguments.

“The key is to craft messages that trigger fears but are not themselves explicit about the sorts of fears they are trying to trigger,” is the way [Ian] Haney-Lopez explains this type of messaging.

[Lynton] Crosby phrases it slightly differently: “You can have a rational argument, you can have a rational position, but unless you make an emotional connection, you will rarely succeed,” he says in the 2013 video.

Last March, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau accused the Conservatives of “using dog-whistle politics,” to stir up anti-Muslim sentiments in the debate over anti-terrorism legislation.

However, when asked on Friday if Crosby’s arrival on the scene could mean an increased use of the technique, Trudeau side-stepped.

“I’m not going to comment on my opponent’s campaign and approach,” he told reporters.

Haney-Lopez suggests that’s the wrong answer.

“People don’t realize they are being manipulated, they don’t realize their basest instincts are being appealed to,” he says. “Staying silent and not addressing that is an absolute failure.”

Of course, calling out a dog whistle doesn’t necessarily negate its effect.

As Crosby himself teaches, in the battle of reason over emotion in voters’ minds, reason barely stands a fighting chance.

Source: What do voters hear in Conservatives’ message on refugees? – Politics – CBC News

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Débat dans Mont-Royal: Israël au coeur des échanges

2015/09/04 Leave a comment

Diaspora politics in action (Mont-Royal is 30.7 percent Canadian Jews):

Les personnes portant la kippa se comptaient par centaines dans la salle remplie à craquer d’une synagogue de Côte-des-Neiges hier soir où elles étaient venues entendre les candidats des trois principaux partis débattre d’économie, de langue et d’Israël.

C’est dans cette circonscription où le scrutin s’est révélé très serré en 2011 que Stephen Harper avait lancé sa campagne il y a un mois, dans l’espoir de conquérir le fief libéral longtemps détenu par le libéral Irwin Cutler.

À tour de rôle, les candidats du Parti libéral et du Parti conservateur, qui portaient tous les deux la kippa, ont croisé le fer sur la question israélienne.

«Je suis fier d’être Juif. Mon entreprise a des bureaux en Israël, j’y suis allé souvent. Je vais me battre pour Israël !», a lancé Anthony Housefather, le candidat libéral et actuel maire de Côte-Saint-Luc.

Sans s’en prendre à son adversaire libéral, le candidat conservateur a concentré ses attaques sur le chef Justin Trudeau, dont la «boussole morale varie avec le vent».

«Israël est certainement devenu un sujet important de cette élection, il n’y a aucun doute. Mais de dire que la position du Parti libéral sur Israël est la même que celle du Parti conservateur de Stephen Harper est vraiment tiré par les cheveux», a-t-il déclaré.

Le candidat conservateur a remis en question l’approche plus nuancée prônée par Justin Trudeau au sujet de la politique étrangère canadienne.

«Qu’est-ce que “nuance” signifie? Est-ce que ça veut dire que le Canada devrait diminuer son soutien à Israël? Est-ce que c’est ça que Justin Trudeau veut?», a-t-il lancé sous les applaudissements.

«L’appui du Parti libéral à l’endroit d’Israël est sans équivoque. Il n’y a aucune hésitation», a répété son vis-à-vis libéral.

Robert Libman a été chaudement applaudi par la foule lorsqu’il a ardemment critiqué l’accord sur le nucléaire de l’Iran, « pays qui veut détruire Israël».

Devant les attaques incessantes contre son chef, le candidat libéral s’est même senti obligé de préciser que le Parti libéral «ne support[ait] pas le régime en Iran».

«L’Iran est la plus grande menace du monde, je vais tout faire pour éviter que l’Iran n’obtienne la bombe nucléaire», s’est-il exclamé, également applaudi par une bonne partie des quelque 500 électeurs.

Le candidat du Nouveau parti démocratique (NPD) Mario Jacinto Rimbao, un membre bien en vue de l’importante communauté philippine de la circonscription s’est toutefois fait chahuter en évoquant la position néodémocrate sur l’accord iranien.

Source: Débat dans Mont-Royal: Israël au coeur des échanges | Louis-Samuel Perron | Élections fédérales

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