Month: January 2017

Chief Policy Officer of the Business Council of British Columbia

Don Newman: There are a number of factors that make British Columbia one of Canada’s many “distinct societies.” Which ones stand out for you?

Jock Finlayson: I think B.C. differs from the other parts of the country in a number of respects. We are a coastal province that looks to Asia-Pacific increasingly, towards where our future lies. Immigration, which is having a big effect on Canada as a whole, has played out in a particular way for British Columbia. We are attracting overwhelmingly newcomers from Asian countries—particularly from China, but also from the Philippines and India and some other nations in Asia. So the population is increasingly made up of people of Asian descent to a greater extent than elsewhere in Canada.

DN: And on the political climate, does the fact that one of the two main parties is very far to the left of centre cause uncertainty in the business community?
JF: It has historically. We have had quite polarized politics of left and right, all with a populist tinge. So when governments have changed in British Columbia, we have tended to see bigger swings in economic policy direction than in the rest of
Canada. I think that’s now dissipated to some extent.

Part of it is due to the fact we’ve had the same party in power now for 16 years. One quarter of the population in B.C. is now foreign born, and there has also been a lot of migration of people from elsewhere in the country. Those newcomers don’t necessarily bring with them the traditional B.C. mindset when it comes to politics.

The environmental movement is very strong in the province, and that tends to shape the political thinking of a lot of people in government and politics, whatever their stripe. First Nations issues, unresolved indigenous land claims, the fact that indigenous communities are playing a much bigger role in resource development and economic development generally—that’s quite a new phenomenon. I’d say within the last 15 or 20 years it has had a big impact on the thinking of business and on certain government priorities.

So the traditional kind of left-right cleavages which I think the rest of the country would associate with B.C., I do think they’re fading.

DN: But I think you probably touched on a big issue: Indigenous participation in the economy. You talk about First Nations’ role in resource development but some people might see it as resource non-development. They’ve been opposed to pipelines, shipping terminals and other projects.

JF: I think that is the perception outside of the province. Historically, we never had treaties in place between First Nations and the Crown. We only have a handful of those today, so the vast majority of B.C. First Nations do not have any kind of treaty arrangement in place. That has created a more complex kind of backdrop for land-based economic activity. These indigenous groups that don’t have treaties have made claims to certain portions of land and certain amounts of natural resources, all of which have to be sorted out.

It does create uncertainty and complication. But it’s not true that First Nations generally are opposed to resource development or infrastructure development, nor is it true that they all have the same perspective on these matters. There’s often quite a bit of First Nations’ support for those undertakings, and increasingly they have a direct role in resource and infrastructure development in some cases as equity partners and in other cases through economic benefit agreements.

DN: I want to ask you about foreign investment, particularly in the B.C. real estate market.

JF: The controversy we’ve seen in B.C. is focused on offshore investment flowing into the residential real estate market. We’re not seeing much concern about foreign companies investing in resource projects or hotels or any number of major office buildings in downtown Vancouver.
The focus of public attention and political attention has been squarely on the substantial inflows of offshore money into residential real estate. Has it played a role in driving up prices? There’s no question about that.
At least 10 per cent of all property purchases in the metro Vancouver area, until recently, were being made by so-called foreign purchasers. That came to well over a billion dollars a month until very recently.
It’s not the only thing pushing up prices because we’ve had low interest rates and constrained land supply and population growth for a long time in Vancouver.

DN: How important is it to British Columbia that the Trans-Pacific Partnership be ratified and go ahead?

JF: It’s certainly important to Canada and British Columbia. The province has supported Canadian participation in the TPP. We would like to see it approved by Parliament. The TPP is probably the most advanced multilateral trade agreement out there. It’s state of the art, in terms of the architecture of it.

It also would link Canada with countries that are part of the fastest growing part of the global economy —namely, the Asia-Pacific Rim economies. It would give us improved access to the Japanese market; that’s something that we don’t have at the moment. Japan’s still the third largest economy in the world and still Canada’s third largest trading partner.

If there is no TPP, I think you’ll see the government looking at bilateral options with India, China and Japan, in particular.

DN: Thank you very much, Jock.

Touted for building community and consensus, social media contributes equally to fragmentation and isolation

“Books are beginning to read people in a more careful way than people read books.”

Social media exaggerates our differences. It lets us indulge in eclectic interests we would otherwise keep private. But online, nothing is quite private. Social networks assign our personal profiles to virtual identities. The collection of these virtual identities forms the foundation for every social network. Each identity leaves a footprint. Each footprint tells a story of who we are. Each story helps social networks provide a news feed tailored to our individual interests. Each individual feed is a silo of information. Each silo displays a fragmented view of society.

This increased fragmentation has implications for how we communicate online. When we communicate via a digital screen, we get information without context. Offline, we rely on our senses and memories to contextualize interactions. Online, our user profiles perform a similar action—providing social networks with context. By staying logged in, we build a record of our interactions much like memories do offline. With memories always a quick search away, this means forgettable memories become unforgettable. And that’s not always a good thing—some memories should stay forgotten. Today, we walk around with a big sign above our heads. That sign tells everyone where our hometown is, what interests we have, what we like, and what we share. By relying on social data alone, we see people by the fragments they leave behind.
Today’s social platforms encourage people to celebrate their individuality. Each piece of data we provide or leave behind brings our individual fragments to the surface. By providing this data, we can coalesce in communities around our own specific interests. Social media socializes our fragments. But because we are not alone, it can also heighten apathy.And that can have profound implications for how we communicate and engage people online.

Of course, digital technology helps us reach a mass of people with hyper-targeted content. We can present information with phenomenal detail, at the individual level. To do so, we rely on massive data, which will inevitably fragment any sample. But it also makes it possible to distill a complex message in a way that motivates people to take action. And that’s why the most successful campaigns involve a digitally focused team at the outset. In these campaigns, digital isn’t a question of “if,” but “how.”

The questions digital teams ask address how we take advantage of the incredibly specific targeting options, how we leverage online communities, and how we inspire people to act on their personal preferences.

To run a successful campaign is to run a successful digital campaign. The best campaigns use the fragmented nature of the Internet to inspire individual action for a common cause. Yes, digital campaigns stress our differences. But they also let us use our shared individual interests to connect. In truth, our differences were always there. Now we can speak to them, rather than ignore them. In so doing, we can engender more passion than any broad message could. And with just the right amount of passion, we can engender action.

With shared experiences occurring on data platforms, we’re becoming characters in a book. As the communications scholar Harari writes, “books are starting to read people.” Social media “reads” us. It provides a platform for individual expression and uses our choices to serve us new content. It uses our browsing habits to display related material, wrapping us in a comfortable cocoon. From the outside, we appear fragmented by our individual cocoons. But in reality, we are far from isolated. We’re part of a broader story. Indeed, if today’s “books” are starting to read people, public affairs practitioners need to read these books.

The United States voting to install Donald Trump as president has roiled the world. Much like when it became clear the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union, you could almost hear the collective gasp of financial, political and media establishments globally.

But the surprise was perhaps unwarranted. Signs that things were not favourable for the status quo proliferated for years: Democrats had lost down-ballot on the back of the Obama presidency for years, there was an insurgent movement on the right-wing fringes, and similar movements have met with increasing success in comparable Western nations.

In spite of this, within the U.S. establishment class, few believed their fellow citizens would in the end opt for Trump. But that’s precisely the point: those who assumed the status quo would prevail in the face of a challenge were concentrated in urban areas, centres of financial power. In contrast, the power behind the Trump campaign lay in rural, economically struggling areas of the country, where less affluent, less diverse and less educated segments of the American population live.

In short, those who form the establishment couldn’t fathom the possibility of a Trump victory, because everyone they knew wanted Hillary Clinton elected.

Just months earlier, a similar story unfolded in Britain. Powerful grassroots support for Britain’s departure from the EU—dubbed Brexit—was powered by the same rural, less-diverse population, an extreme example of the fragmentation that has framed our society for the last 60 years. Establishment Britons were similarly blind to the threat.

But these developments reflect a broader shift. Urban centres have expanded as economic and governmental hubs, concentrating affluence and education, expanding the gap between rural and urban residents.

Furthermore, as globalization has taken hold, smaller groups with special interests have formed, splintering the public agenda. The advent of social media has accelerated and amplified this movement.

Over time, social media has arguably eroded the value once placed on dissenting opinion. Reasoned argument and genuine debate have increasingly been replaced by tight—often partisan—alignment. People want to have their existing views reinforced, not challenged. And there are now any number of social media platforms to ensure that like-minded people only connect with one another.

This compartmentalization has sweeping ramifications for politics, governance, finance, media and business. At Navigator, we have considered the many ways it affects how these sectors interact with one another and how they engage with stakeholders.

The conclusion? We believe that many of these challenges in fact present opportunities.

That’s why we advocate that a research-driven approach inform every strategic plan, be it crisis-response or a long-term campaign designed to shift attitudes and prompt action.

Granted, this has become more challenging as fragmentation has increased. People are less willing to participate in focus groups than they once were. Millennials have rejected landlines, making them difficult to reach for traditional surveys. Entire segments of the market are more comfortable in their mother tongue than in English.

To overcome these hurdles, Navigator’s research and digital teams have collaborated to ensure that we have the right tools to mine information from consumers and provide a complete picture to all of our clients. Innovative practices in research aid in the effort; social data allows us to gauge and understand the way consumers are speaking about products, ideas and companies, giving us key insight into how and when a crisis is developing.

This same research can also enrich business and organizational understanding of core markets, allowing for strategic targeting of resources, and messages crafted to appeal to the groups and markets of specific interest.

In 2000, Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone altered the way many think about society, and led us to believe our society was breaking down into a seething mass of individuals. In 2016, we understand that we are still bowling with others—just a highly selective number of others.

It is with this in mind that in this issue of Perspectives we explore the subject of fragmentation, what it means today and what it will mean tomorrow.

French author Marcel Proust is famous for his gentle remembrance of things past, his eponymous character-revealing questionnaire… and his love of madeleine cookies.

It’s hard to imagine that the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson has time for reflection—let alone madeleines dipped in tea. Following a distinguished career in broadcasting and journalism, she became Canada’s 26th Governor General in 1999. She is a passionate advocate for the Canadian North and during her tenure she established the Governor General’s Northern Medal. Among many other accomplishments, she is a champion of Aboriginal issues and a co-founder of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Travelling in Italy with John.

What is your greatest fear?
To be cast into outer darkness.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Irritability.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of a moral centre.

Which living person do you admire most?
The Aga Khan.

What is your greatest extravagance?
800 thread-count Italian bed linen.

What is your current state of mind?
Happy—but not complacent.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Frugality.

On what occasion do you lie?
To not hurt someone’s feelings.

What is the quality you most like in a person?
Humour.

When and where were you happiest?
When my daughter Kyra was born.

Which talent would you most like to have?
To sing like Maria Callas or Willie Nelson.

Who are your favourite writers?
Alice Munro, Tolstoy, Lee Child

Who is your hero of fiction?
Jack Reacher, who travels with a toothbrush, is respectful of women, speaks French, and can head-butt anyone.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Father Joe Maier, the Redemptorist priest who has worked in the Klong Toey slum of Bangkok for 40 years.
Mary Jo Leddy, director of Romero House, who looks after refugees in Toronto.
Leonard Cohen.

What is your motto?
I am human, nothing human is alien to me. (Terence, a former slave who became a playwright in Rome around 170 B.C.)

In the aftermath of the U.S. election, pollsters are facing some tough scrutiny about their relevance. But not all polls are created equal, notes Anne Kilpatrick.

One of many unexpected outcomes of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was the failure of most research polls to accurately predict the election of Donald Trump.

This was all the more striking because, in an intensely emotional political race characterized by a deliberate disregard for truth, polls offered a familiar reference point. In the face of chaos, the enduring ability to measure, analyze and process data was one of the few ways to superimpose order.

Furthermore, in a frantic scrabble to meet a rapacious demand for new information about the campaign, media put forward any and all polls.

But not all polls are created equal.

We know that the voter population has become increasingly fragmented, and, in the aftermath of the U.S. election, critics point to the inability of pollsters to address this issue as a driver of their seeming inability to get it right. The criticisms focus on non-representative sampling of potential voters —noting that the voter population is more diverse culturally and that pollsters are under-representing or over-representing certain ethnic or racial groups in their polling, or that the more diverse set of channels by which pollsters need to reach voters (landline telephones, cellular phones and online) is presenting challenges in reaching a representative sample of voters. These challenges can be generalized to any election or referendum polling, and a lack of rigour in addressing these issues may indeed be a factor in determining why some pollsters just aren’t getting it right.

Those pollsters who were able to project a Trump victory did not rely solely on traditional questions about voting intentions or previous voting behaviour, and on demographic characteristics to project outcomes (e.g., likely voting intention if an election were held today; favourability ratings of a candidate; previous voting behaviour, gender, income, education, religion and race). While these questions and demographic characteristics often point to a potential outcome, they do not capture the ultimate insight—voter sentiment. And sentiment is the key word here.

The polls that appear to have been closer to the mark delved into voter sentiment by examining engagement with candidates and how that affected voters’ likelihood to turn out at the ballot box. These pollsters actively sought to measure the impact of the “undecideds”—the almost 15 per cent of voters who likely determined the outcome of the election. These voters helped make voter turnout patterns unpredictable, including the greater than expected turnout of Trump supporters in swing states, and lower than expected turnout among groups that were expected to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Who were these “undecideds”?

We now know they included people who:
• rode an emotional roller coaster during the campaign and were affected by the many twists and turns;
• were ambivalent, did not see themselves reflected in either candidate and were more likely to stay at home than cast their ballot;
• were engaged in the election, but were having difficulty assessing how the candidates would address their more personal concerns; and
• were affected by social desirability bias, the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favourably.

Successful pollsters are those who tap into the significant ambivalence or conflicted feelings that some voter segments face by introducing non-traditional survey questions and survey methodologies. One such poll, the USC Dornsife/LA Times Presidential Election “Daybreak” poll, engaged a longitudinal panel of voters and asked them a different set of questions than other surveys. It asked voters to estimate, on a scale of 0 to 100, how likely they were to vote for each of the two major candidates or for some other candidate. Rather than forcing respondents into an either/or vote position, they were able to obtain a more nuanced view of the undecideds (and the “decideds”) by measuring the level of engagement each voter had with the candidates. This approach has served USC Dornsife well in the past two U.S. elections, accurately predicting both outcomes.

The lesson for pollsters is that their models and approaches must evolve to meet the new challenges of political polling in the 21st century. And they also need a crash course in managing expectations.