Category: Chairman’s Desk

The convergence of entertainment and politics moves substantive policy debate to the background and deters experienced candidates from entering the fray.

This article appeared in the Toronto Star on October 2, 2016.

‘Politics is Hollywood for the ugly,’ mused Bill Clinton strategist Paul Begala in the mid-1980s.

On July 17, 1960, in a suburb east of London, England, Mark Burnett was born. Who could know that Burnett, the son of two factory workers, would one day help flip the American political establishment on its head?

At age 17, Burnett enlisted in the British Army and became a section commander in the Parachute Regiment. In October 1982, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked in Beverly Hills as a nanny and chauffeur to the stars.

In 1995, Burnett purchased the format rights to a French adventure competition television series, the Raid Gauloises. He then brought a similar competition to America. Eco-Challenge would launch his television producing career. With his hit series Survivor, Burnett began reshaping the television landscape and institutionalizing what we now call ‘reality TV,’ an accomplishment for which he is simultaneously lauded and panned.

Burnett changed America, revitalizing what was a failing television industry while masterfully entertaining millions. Today, he is responsible for some 11 programs that span the four main U.S. networks.

But, as almost always is the case, there were unintended consequences to building this voyeuristic genre dependent on cartoonishly absurd people. And one of those consequences was the convergence of reality television and politics.

In January 2004, American’s were reintroduced to businessman Donald Trump on Burnett’s program The Apprentice, ironically billed as ‘the ultimate job interview.’ Trump went on to spend the next 14 years firing hundreds of job ‘applicants’ on prime-time television.

Last Monday, the tables were turned. Trump was no longer in his iconic boardroom lambasting and publicly humiliating contestants. Rather, he was himself being interviewed, in front of 100 million people, for the job of the presidency of the United States.

The result was nearly as absurd as the many hours of The Apprentice had been.

The convergence of entertainment and politics presents challenges for meaningful governance. It moves substantive policy debate to the background. It deters serious and experienced candidates from entering the fray. It further exacerbates the role capital plays in campaigns

On reality television, fans frequently cheer and vote for the entertaining, the vain, the crazy and the downright bizarre. In politics, we can only hope that voters do not base their ballot-box decisions on these criteria, but rather place emphasis on intelligence, experience, judgment and sound policy.

We are fortunate that in Canada, regardless of partisan affiliation, our political discourse has not stooped to this level. Rather than expending time debating the whereabouts of birth certificates or the physical stamina of candidates; Canadians have largely resisted the urge to plunge into that silliness that has gripped the political arena of our neighbours to the south.

We are lucky to live in a country where we can watch a debate among party leaders and witness thoughtful discussion about Canada’s place in the world, about diversifying our economy, and about contrasting approaches to deficit spending.

All too often, like the weather, people complain that Canadian politics is boring, dry, insignificant and uneventful; these commentators may have a point.

When a juicy story comes along, we all chase it like a shiny piece of tin foil blowing down the street. We spent two years debating a $90,000 cheque, and the F-15 procurement fiasco seems to have lingered on the front pages for a decade.

But this doesn’t even come close to reality television material. That said, we too are at risk. At a time when all media are working overtime to construct new business models and people seem to be happy to consume complicated stories in eight-second clips, it is easy to see how we could take a sharp turn into reality TV land.

While his Trump’s candidacy may seem like a harmless diversion in a world fraught with genuine, real and vexing problems, his ability to galvanize so many citizens in the United States should serve as a warning to other countries, including Canada — a warning that we have no idea where the blurring of the line between politics and entertainment will take us.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

Life on the Hill, particularly for rookie and backbench MPs, can be a lonely, tedious and thankless life away from family and home — but we owe these men and women gratitude for their commitment to Canada

This article appeared in the Toronto Star on September 25, 2016.

Three weeks ago, students across Canada begrudgingly woke up, dusted off their backpacks and headed to school, ending their summer vacations.

This week, our federal members of Parliament did the same.

As Parliament returns, there is no shortage of issues on its agenda. These include setting targets on carbon emissions, agreeing to potentially dangerous peacekeeping roles in Africa, changing Canada’s approach to marijuana, decisions on the building of pipelines and on ratification of new free trade agreements, and the fundamental altering of the way Canadians vote in elections.

Amid these important debates, it is often lost on us that we will be represented by 338 members of Parliament, each with a unique point of view, and each with his or her own careers, family and lived experience.

On Oct. 19 of last year, a record number of rookie MPs were elected — 197 out of 338 — and they were thrown immediately into their roles. They opened offices and hired staff, got to know the media on the Hill, boned up on the issues and got down to the nation’s business.

For new MPs, the first year is an utter whirlwind. They are idealistic and enthusiastic, and the change they can affect and the opportunities in front of them seem limitless.

But soon, just as the freshness of any new government begins to wear off, new MPs face the reality that their scope and influence might not be quite what they had envisioned.

It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father who remarked, some decades ago, that backbench MPs were ‘nobodies 50 yards off the Hill.’ Harsh, perhaps, and despite efforts by Pierre Trudeau’s son to change that reality, the unfortunate truth that many MPs come to discover is that real influence and power is invested in just a few of the 338 MPs in the House of Commons.

For many, their high hopes of joining the Privy Council as a cabinet minister are dashed. Others find themselves on Opposition benches they had hoped never to occupy. Nearly all face day after gruelling day filled with meetings on issues they had never cared or thought about, or in committee meetings filled with hours of testimony on policy minutiae.

On top of that, after five days a week attending to hours and hours of parliamentary business, MPs are expected to return to their ridings every weekend to spend time with constituents, attending festivals, local meetings, and what seems like an endless march of parades and charity runs.

It’s all glamorous, until the MP finds themselves attending their seventh church strawberry social instead of watching their child’s T-ball game.

And so, just as MPs adjust to their new jobs as parliamentarians, they and their families also adjust to new and very different lives as well. When MPs move to Ottawa, they leave behind family — and often the bonds of social restraint — in the spirit of public service and personal ambition.

In Ottawa, MPs once again live like students who have just moved out of residence and into their first apartments. In middle age, they often live with roommates, eat off mismatched dinnerware, leave pictures unhung.

Their commitments, understandably, are to their own communities, not to Ottawa. And so with no families to come home to, every day becomes the same. After work, receptions and dinners fuel the makings of a toxic brew of power, exhaustion and a feeling that ‘no one else understands our world.’

The grim, but too often unspoken, reality is that many politicians end up struggling. Marriages end. Relationships fray. Families suffer. Substance abuse issues emerge.

Some MPs’ struggles make it to the front page but dozens more struggle in the loneliness of the shadows.

As Parliament returns this week, we all should remember that these 338 people are not nobodies at all. Rather, they are wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, friends and colleagues of us all.

What’s more, they are the ones we have chosen to represent us in the people’s house, the House of Commons. And agree with them or not, it is only decent of us to honour the sacrifice that they make every day to do their best for our country.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

This article appeared in the Toronto Star on September 18, 2016.

Watching the circus that is the presidential election south of our border has long been a Canadian pastime, especially since Donald Trump rode that escalator to announce his candidacy.

As a former political communicator, I have watched, with not a small amount of sympathy, as Republican operatives have tried (with limited success) to defuse scandal after scandal their candidate himself has created.

Donald Trump’s campaign careens daily, thanks to a candidate who seems more interested in building his personal brand, selling branded steaks, and stoking angry supporters than in becoming the head of state for the most important nation in the world.

While Trump’s campaign has been described as unfocused, bigoted, incendiary, juvenile and just plain mean-spirited, you will struggle to find anyone describing Trump’s campaign ‘good.’ By all accounts, it has been a disaster that has Republicans terrified of the down-ballot consequences.

And yet, after a summer of near-constant missteps and scornful media coverage, Trump’s campaign rattles forward. Polls this week have shown predictions of his campaign’s death were greatly exaggerated; that there may now be a path to an Electoral College win for him.

All of a sudden, he is now, based on polling, within striking distance of Hillary Clinton.

There are three essential reasons for this, even though the thought of it is unfathomable to many political analysts.

The first is that the political divide in the United States has grown so large that many Republicans and Democrats would tolerate nearly anyone as their party’s nominee merely because that person was not the ‘other side.’ In today’s political environment, even Mother Teresa would struggle to gain cross-partisan support.

The second is that while the United States has experienced rapid economic growth in the last several decades thanks to globalization, not everyone has benefited to the same degree. Blue collar workers across middle America have watched as manufacturers, the bedrock of economic opportunity in many small towns, fled offshore. They have seen wages stagnate, opportunities dry up and the long-term outlook grow more and more anemic.

Not unreasonably, that segment of the population feels more than just disenfranchised; they feel they have been left behind. Fed up with the establishment politics they see as having led to the decline of the America they knew, it is impossible to underestimate the level of antipathy among these voters toward politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom they see as harbingers of America’s continued woes.

However, even considering these factors, Trump’s potent mix of intolerance and incompetence should have sunk his campaign by now. But it hasn’t. And that’s because the third factor faces not him, but his opponent.

That factor is entirely a Hillary Clinton phenomenon. While much of the attention has been focused on Trump’s unpopularity, Clinton is not far behind. The Democratic nominee is seen as untrustworthy, secretive and cynical.

Events of the last several days — the ham fisted handling of a simple medical issue — give us a glimpse into why American voters are so leery of Clinton’s trustworthiness.

After Clinton fainted at a public event, her campaign’s first instinct was to obfuscate. After that failed to quell interest, her campaign officials blamed the problem on heat overexposure.

They neglected to mention the pneumonia diagnosis she had received a few days before; a diagnosis they only admitted after intense media pressure.

A textbook example of a self-inflicted story.

Too often, politicians, business leaders and other high-profile people fall prey to their instincts and try to shut down a story and minimize damage by dissembling and hiding.

It’s a strategy that never works. Giving evasive answers, using weasel words and avoiding the issue only generate more interest and pressure from the media, who sense something is amiss. And the drip, drip, drip of negative stories only compounds the problems the candidate faces.

After years of covering Clinton, reporters are keenly aware of her instinct to try to hide the entire story from them. Journalists react by continuing to dig, ask questions and press the campaign to come clean.

Every time another of the campaign’s stories unravels, it represents another strike against Clinton’s credibility. Her trust with the American people is at an all-time low, and the fact she struggles to connect with voters is largely a self-created phenomenon.

Should Donald Trump be elected president on Nov. 8 in spite of a campaign filled with gaffes, bullying and outright bigotry, the Clinton campaign’s mismanagement of the media will be a key part of the tale.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

This article appeared in the Toronto Star On September 11, 2016.

Referendums are often called to reach a consensus on a way forward. Just as often, however, referendums seem to reinforce deeply bitter divides.

When then-premier Jacques Parizeau famously conceded defeat in Quebec’s 1995 sovereignty referendum, he declared the Yes side had lost due to money and the ethnic vote. The referendum settled the question, but only in the near-term; sovereigntists continued to win a plurality of seats in Quebec for years afterward.

When Britons voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, dozens of high-profile media and political figures lamented the ignorance of voters and argued that the referendum need not be binding after all. The voters, they argued, didn’t know what was best for them. Many cited as evidence that ‘What is the EU?’ was the most Googled question in the U.K. in the hours after the vote.

With this in mind, we turn to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise that the 2015 election would be the last election under the current, first-past-the-post electoral system. Some sort of change must be made, argued the Liberals. And so has begun a cross-country consultation to overhaul our arguably outdated electoral system.

There have been previous attempts at electoral reform in Canada, each coming to a crashing halt when subjected to the approval of the voters through referendums. Ontario’s attempt at reform in 2007 and British Columbia’s attempts in 2004 and 2009 all failed.

The Liberals, perhaps informed by the failures of previous Canadian referendums and the recent U.K. experience, have remained uncertain about committing to one this time around.

Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef recently told a House of Commons committee that ‘although I recognize that a referendum is one way of seeking clarity from Canadians, I remain to be convinced that it is the best way.’ She noted that referendums ‘do not easily lend themselves to effectively deciding complex issues.’

The argument goes like this: In previous referendums, Canadians have voted with little context about how different electoral systems around the world have worked and have opted to remain in the safe, if somewhat flawed, system we have now.

The minister is not wrong.

The federal government faces innumerable decisions every day. It both produces and receives a huge amount of information from commissions, committees and studies on topics as diverse as the environment of salmon on the West Coast to the safety of our infrastructure. It produces and consumes an amount of information impossible for an average citizen to digest.

That is why we elect members of Parliament. Every four years, Canadians decide who will best keep up with the information and the issues and then make informed decisions for us. MPs vote on hundreds of motions, resolutions and bills that require deep knowledge and understanding. And, every four years, should Canadians be unhappy with the decisions of their MPs, they can fire them.

The minister is also not wrong to suggest many Canadians would vote in a referendum on electoral reform without a nuanced understanding of the options in front of them.

She is right to say that referendums are often divisive and that they lack the opportunity for complex debate most issues deserve.

That’s why MPs should be trusted to make decisions on almost every issue that confronts us. They are deeply versed in the issues the country faces. In fact, this forms part of the basis for parliamentary democracy.

However, there is no way MPs can fairly assess whether the method by which they are elected should change. That is because they would be hard pressed to ignore how any change would affect their own electoral situation – in effect, their own, personal job prospects.

Different electoral systems favour different parties and different MPs within those parties. When voting on any changes, some MPs could, depending on the system, be voting themselves out of a job, or into a cushy seat that they would likely never lose.

So that’s why a referendum, with all its many flaws and challenges, is the only way the Canadian electoral system should be changed. To have MPs choose the way they are elected is, to use a shopworn clich’, akin to having the fox guard the henhouse.

Jaime Watt is the executive chairman of Navigator Ltd. and a Conservative strategist.

The article appeared in the Toronto Star on Sunday, July 3, 2016.

Britons have been deeply skeptical of the European project for decades. Wary of the undemocratic components of the European Union, skittish about the lack of control over immigration, and overwhelmed by strict regulations handed down from Brussels, many felt the negatives of the EU far outweighed the positives.

It’s not difficult to see how the disconnect between the Remain and Leave forces developed: the unemployed 50-year-old woman in Birmingham had certainly not seen her fortunes increase the way the lawyer in London had. The prosperity the elites toasted seemed a far cry from the struggle of the working class in Cardiff.

Last week, the people of the United Kingdom were given the opportunity to say yes or no to the EU. The vote followed two months of dire warnings from Britain’s institutions: the pound would collapse, the economy would sink into recession and the government would be forced to enact strict cuts.

All three major political parties, the Bank of England, countless businesses, foreign leaders and celebrities cajoled, scolded and threatened voters — only for their words to go unheeded, with 52 per cent of Britons voting to leave the EU.

But this is not an isolated incident.

The lack of confidence Britons just exhibited in their institutions should resonate across the Western world.

This spring, we saw the unthinkable: Donald Trump, a brash man prone to racist and misogynistic outbursts, took the Republican Party by surprise. At first dismissed as a blip, the Trump train quickly gained traction to the horror of the Republican establishment.

The more the media, leading Republican politicians and business leaders insulted and attacked Trump, the more traction he gained. His lack of support among the institutional base was the primary reason for his victory, rather than the weakness many assumed it would be.

These are not coincidences.

Globalization and liberalized trade have benefited many in the Western world. Those with post-secondary qualifications and who live in urban centres are enjoying an unprecedented quality of life.

The untold story is that entire swaths of our populations in Western countries have been left behind. Those without the privilege of higher education or access to a fluid employment market are struggling. It remains exceptionally challenging to find steady employment and, for many, the future remains unclear.

The institutions that have benefited so many have disappointed so many others.

For this reason many turn away from institutions they believe have guided them down this path. It is why when a chairperson of a major bank insists they vote one way, they instinctively vote another.

They see no reason to trust that these institutions have their best interests at heart. More problematic still is that it is hard to blame them.

The Brexit referendum was proof. The richer an area, the more likely it was to vote to remain. Fewer than average post-secondary degrees? Almost certainly in favour of leave. High unemployment? Out of the EU, please.

The foundation of Trump’s success is no different.

We must be aware in Canada that we also struggle. We have seen economic devastation in many rural areas that goes unacknowledged in our urban centres and in the media.

A 2013 Statistics Canada study found that only 40 per cent of Canadians expressed confidence in the media, with only 38 per cent trusting our Parliament and a paltry 30 per cent trusting major corporations.

Similar to the case in the U.K. and the U.S., the survey found that poorer and whiter families had the lowest confidence in our economic and governmental institutions of all.

We, and other Western nations, are experiencing a true-to-life Tale of Two Cities. The urban, wealthy class lives a lifestyle that stands in contrast to the economic devastation only a short distance away.

The media, political elites and business leaders have criticized the recent U.S. and U.K. electoral results as racist and ill-informed. By doing so, they are playing into a narrative that they themselves created.

By attacking people who are deeply concerned about their own futures and who mistrust institutions, they will exacerbate tensions.

As nations, we must do better. We must remember those who have been left behind in our incredible success and growth. And we must take steps to rectify the disconnect.