Bernard Gauthier

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m out of touch, too busy with work and school and family to notice. It just seems to me that nobody is paying much attention to this federal election. Trouble is, we’re awash in fundamentally important issues in 2008 and none of them seems to have captured the attention of voters for more than a few hours. Are we just whistling through the graveyard here? If so, why?After all, the economy in the U.S. is in deep trouble and when the economic wagon we’ve hitched ourselves to is sinking, we sink too. We have soldiers in Afghanistan and, so far as I can tell, no credible plan to bring them home with honour and without throwing in the towel. Meanwhile, many of us still can’t find a family doctor and we still wait too long to see many specialists out there. After a promising apology in the House of Commons, we still have a long list of aboriginal issues to face up to and resolve. Oh, and that climate change issue we were all so concerned about a year or two ago? It’s gotten worse, not better. I could go on. The point is simply that we do have compelling, important issues to discuss. What’s more, they’re often issues on which different parties have very different positions. And yet, nothing seems to stick. I can think of a few reasons why.

One reason may be the new shape of politics at a time when audiences are splintering into smaller and smaller groups. In a 1999 article in Political Communication, Jay Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh call it the “Third Age of Political Communication” and argue that the abundance of narrower and narrower media channels available to us is leading to “centrifugal diversification.” Politicians can reach out to smaller segments of the population and, as a result, no single issue can come to dominate an election the way it might have back when we could all choose between two or three main networks. That may help explain how the issue of funding for the arts gathered as much as steam as it did in Quebec, without ever leaving the station elsewhere in the country.

Another reason might be the early appearance and abundance of negative advertising in this campaign — heck, the Conservatives got the ball rolling months before the election was even called. In their book “Going Negative: How attack ads shrink and polarize the electorate,” Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar argue convincingly that all the negative ads out there are alienating more and more voters, “…  increasingly peeling off a band of citizens who turn from independence to apathy, even antipathy, toward our political institutions.” Apathy indeed.

Reason three is simply the sheer amount of impossible to ignore competition for attention out there. The economic meltdown is grabbing plenty of ink and airtime. Major hurricanes seem to be a weekly affair and some are making it as far north as Atlantic Canada. A politician at a podium just can’t compete with a CNN reporter in a red raincoat being pounded by a hurricane. And, of course, the U.S. election is historic, dramatic and features some compelling orators. Not so much up here.

There may indeed be compelling issues for us to consider but I’m not certain that any of the parties and their leaders are up to the task of getting and holding our attention long enough to gather a critical mass of voters around that issue. Getting us to cringe at an unflattering photo of the opponent for 30 seconds seems to be the best they can muster this time out.

So take your pick. We’re pulling apart into smaller and smaller niches. Negative ads are making us more apathetic. Too much competition for our attention. The limited communications skills of our political parties simply aren’t allowing them to get through in any compelling way. Or, heck, maybe it’s a unique blend of all of these.

Either way, I’m hoping something other than a gaffe-and-fired-candidate-of-the-week comes along soon to get us all to pay a little more attention to what our kids might look back upon as one of this country’s most important elections of the 21st century. Bring on the debates!