Bernard Gauthier

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think elections in this country are increasingly about the image conveyed by party leaders than they are about the differences in the policies they propose. No surprise there, I know, but this election set a new standard for focus on image. This was the case for at least three interesting reasons.

First. the focus on image began long before the election was called when the Conservatives launched their attack on Stephane Dion. True, some of the ads masqueraded as policy ads (the green shift is a tax…) but the underlying message of the entire campaign and the election campaign that followed is that we shouldn’t vote for a guy who has a voice, an accent, a head of hair, a pair of glasses and a body that doesn’t quite fit the ideal that we have for something called a “leader.” Sure the narrator used words that sounded like they might be about policy but, let’s be clear, our attention was really on the grainy images, the awkward soundbites and the strange poses of Dion. Images like these grab our attention and leave a lasting impression. The near-comic efforts by the Liberals to reposition their leader as an outdoorsman were far too little and months too late.

Second, the focus on image was deepened, paradoxically, by the financial meltdown and market crash. Here was a genuine political issue if ever there was one. Surely now we would shift our attention from accents and body type. We didn’t, sadly, because the issue of the global economy is so complex that no party in this country was able to muster anything like a coherent, confident policy on how best to set things right. We could hardly compare the economic policies of different parties when none of them really had one that was near equal to the severity of the situation. So we resorted to image: who looked like they might be the kind of person who could be trusted to handle the situation.

The closest we came to a discussion on policy in this election was the debate (largely confined to Quebec) on the government’s cuts to certain cultural programs. Even this, I would argue, was really a debate about image more than about policy. I doubt whether many people actually understood the policy decision at issue: what program was cut, how big a part of the overall culture budget does $45 million represent? What will the impact be of the elimination of the program? None of that really mattered.

Instead, the criticisms of the cuts (propelled by the brilliant video featuring Michel Rivard) were an attack on - you guessed it - the image of Stephen Harper. Here was the proof the the opposition needed that Harper was out of touch with Quebecers. The policy at issue quickly faded to the background as the carefully constructed image of Harper as a piano playing, sweater vested dad gave way to an image of  an Anglophone bureaucrat who knows nothing of the Québecois cultural industry. Harper’s ill-timed comments about artists at lavish galas (not, by the way, a comment about cultural policy) completed the image makeover and sealed the fate of the party in Quebec.

So now the Liberals try to regroup and find a new leader whose voice, accent, hair, glasses and body more closely match the images in our head of what a political leader should look like. Given the continued success of Conservative fundraising efforts, that new leader can expect just as rapid, extensive and harsh an image attack as Dion suffered through. We can only hope that, through it all, some intelligent debate about the many issues we face will emerge.