Bernard Gauthier

I got to appear on Mike Duffy Live this week to talk about the latest series of attack ads from the Conservative Party of Canada. I hope I didn’t sound too much like a broken record because I said things about this latest campaign that I’m pretty sure I’ve said before. The ads, I have to admit, are entirely strategic. The Liberals have been musing about a carbon tax or carbon shift or some such policy for a few weeks. The details were impossible to come by so the Conservatives stepped up and defined a policy in desparate need of being defined. In a nutshell: “It’s a tax, stupid.” So the campaign is strategic, but does that make it right?

I admit, deciding whether an ad campaign is “right” or not is a tricky thing. I’m hardly one to single-handedly judge the moral merits of any communications campaign but this campaign failed for me on many fronts.

1. First and foremost, its visual rhetoric or appeal draws on an old picture of Dion that is unflattering and, frankly, ridicules the man. This style is, I suppose, suitable for a high school stunt but frankly is insulting to all Canadian voters. The trouble is, of course, that images often speak louder than words and certainly register their effect a whole lot faster.
2. Second, this campaign fails because it takes a complex subject and simplifies it to the point of taking voters for fools. I can’t even begin to sum up the debate, though this carbon tax feature on the CTV.ca site does a nice job of introducing the topic. The Conservative campaign ignores the debate and stoops to personal attacks. Modern democracy simply demands more.
3. Third, this campaign fails because it resorts to the tried, true and lamentable use of fear to get attention. The ads and accompanying website promise nothing less than higher prices for “everything,” lost jobs and lost competitive advantage in the face of emerging economies. Yet, somehow, policymakers and legislators in Europe, Quebec and B.C. have already implemented similar taxes and, gasp, people there are still standing.

I began by stating that the campaign is “strategic” in the sense that it fills a void created (so far) by the Liberals and helps to define a policy that needs to be defined. I close by suggesting that, some 18 months of Dion-bashing later, the Tories are still roughly stuck in the polls where they were the night of the last election. A year and half later, they’re using the same photos of Dion, making the same scary claims, and going nowehere. Being strategic means paying constant attention to what works and what doesn’t and changing your approach when you’re not moving forward. Here’s hoping they do change strategy soon and that the new approach is inspiring, intelligent and worthy of a modern democracy. 

While I’m at it, here’s hoping the Liberal Party soon recognizes that its strategy of hinting and delaying is not in the best interest of informed debate and persuasion either. If you’re serious about a carbon tax, if you’re convinced of its merits, do voters a favour and talk about it.