Category: Chairman’s Desk

That’s why so many observers were puzzled by the choice the Ontario Liberal party made last week to effectively keep the rules of the race the same as before: the provincial party decided against dropping membership fees, and more importantly, against moving away from a delegated convention in favour of one-member, one-vote.

Under a delegated convention, riding associations elect delegates, who assemble at a convention and choose the new leader through a series of successive ballots. Under a one-member, one-vote approach, which most Canadian political parties have adopted, all party members get to cast their vote, typically through an online portal. In that model, the convention functions simply as a venue to announce the results.

Even though the Liberals adopted a hybrid system in 1991, which allows party members more say in how delegates cast first ballot votes, delegated conventions have been derided as antiquated; this very newspaper called the OLP’s decision “old-style.”

Old style it may be, but there is, of course, the sheer spectacle of it all. There is a reason that American political parties have continued to opt for delegated conventions. Delegates shifting their allegiances among the candidates in real time, punctuated by rousing speeches from would-be party leaders, all makes for compelling television. And if there is something the Ontario Liberals could use right now it is some compelling television. Brutal has been the fall from government to no-party status.

In January 2013, when the party elected Kathleen Wynne at such a convention, television networks ran non-stop coverage for nearly two days. Eric Hoskins staged a theatrical floor-crossing, feigning a walk to Wynne’s rival Sandra Pupatello before marching over to Kathleen’s camp. CTV News called it a “thrilling” convention and mourned the prospect that it could be the last conducted in this way.

In 1996, when Dalton McGuinty was elected leader, it was a classic dark-horse race that didn’t end until 4 a.m. With delegated conventions, the drama comes baked in.

On the other hand, one member, one vote formats often deliver results that are expected. That’s because the format favours front-runners with large organizational and financial resources. At least that has, more often than not, been the story of the history of the Conservatives in Ontario. Think of Patrick Brown, John Tory, Tim Hudak and Ernie Eves.

The exception, of course, is Doug Ford and it may well be that concern about the emergence of an equivalent insurgent candidate had an impact on the decision the Liberals made last week.

The air was filled with an almost partylike atmosphere. The weather was glorious. Event planners from Veterans Affairs Canada efficiently checked guests off lists and issued colour-coded wrist bands. Along the route, French authorities closed roads and provided motorcycle escorts.

The French stood by the roadside and, all these years later, expressed their enduring gratitude with quiet and solemn waves. Canadian flags, along with those of our allies, flew everywhere — not just from public buildings but from homes and apartment balconies.

Friends greeted friends. They made plans for dinner. It felt peculiar, almost surreal.

As we took our seats for the start of the ceremony, that feeling didn’t change. As lovely as it was, it all felt, in many ways, no different from many other ceremonies. Bilingual. Inclusive of our Indigenous sisters and brothers. Anthems were sung. Music was played. A thoughtful speech was given by our prime minister. It was all, well, appropriately Canadian.

And then everything changed.

From the beach came 359 young Canadian and French boys, each one representing a Canadian who was killed on that day 75 years ago. And from that beach those kids kept coming and coming.

It was at that moment that I truly understood the difference between valour and courage.

These commentators will then bang on about how, left unchecked, this horrible behaviour will result in the end of the world as we know it — or at least in a mortal weakening of our cherished democracy.

Hands will be wrung over the “Americanization” of our system and of the perils of campaigns targeted at the “low-information” voter. The echo chamber of social media and so-called “attack” advertising will be blamed.

But just before we get carried away and reach for the Prozac, there are two points worth considering: one is the evidence and the second is our role in all this.

First, the evidence. Our democracy is simply not in peril. In the last federal election, and in each of the last elections in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador, voter turnout went up. That’s right, participation in each of those elections increased.

It is simply not true, on the evidence, that modern campaigns and modern campaign practices are turning voters off. Rather, the evidence suggests that Canadians respond when a clear choice is offered, when the various competitors lay out distinct differences in their visions, and when other civil society actors get involved.

The tools available to strategists have changed, to be sure. And with those changes come some problems: some structural, some transitory, and some more fairly characterized as growing pains.

But it is a mistake to simply pine for the good old days, which usually weren’t that good. Rather, it behooves us to understand the power of these new tools to level the playing field. To make it possible to reach more people and to do so in a way that is more meaningful and personal.

Barack Obama became president of the United States and leader of the free world by motivating people who had never voted before to vote for him. He accomplished this using the exact techniques that are so often vilified and condemned.

Both are searching for organic growth, and looking to broaden their total available market — of users in the first instance and voters in the second.

And, both, have lost some of their lustre in recent years with heightened public scrutiny resulting from issues of ethics and values.

So, as panellists discussed topics like, “Move Slow and Fix Things: Can big tech bring back the shine to their fallen star?” and “From Darlings to Damaged: Managing tech’s reputation in an age of heightened scrutiny,” it was perhaps no surprise to see Trudeau and his Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains announce a digital charter: Ten principles designed not only to underpin all future legislation but to guide reforms to the existing patchwork of laws that govern our digital lives as well.

Bains and Trudeau say the rationale behind the charter is a desire to restore trust in our institutions and technology, giving Canadians confidence that their privacy is protected while also bolstering a nascent domestic tech industry.

The reality is that it will be impossible to pass meaningful legislation before the House rises in a couple of weeks.

Not that it bothers Team Trudeau. More than a real plan for regulation, the document is a statement of principles, a glimpse of a future Liberal campaign plank.

It is not hard to imagine Trudeau campaigning on this issue — he is young enough to be conversant in online issues. Remember the praise and adulation in 2016, when he stood in front of a chalkboard covered in math equations and handily explained quantum computing to an adoring media?

But he is not alone. His NDP counterpart Jagmeet Singh, who is himself a savvy user of Snapchat, could out flank him by calling for the immediate regulation of tech giants, like Facebook or Amazon.

Across the Western world, leftist political parties are following the lead of the Europeans in regulating tech companies, riding a public “techlash” driven by scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and an endless parade of hacks and data breaches.

In the United States, Democrats jostling for the 2020 presidential nomination are racing to out-do each other in their plans to trust-bust Facebook, the same way Teddy Roosevelt did Standard Oil or Clinton did Microsoft.

There is an audience for all of this because the public believes when it comes to privacy-protecting regulations, government is chronically running three steps behind the biggest, most advanced tech companies.

Consequently, governments now face the same challenge they did in regulating Bay Street. Those who really have the know-how and technical understanding to draft regulations find it much more enticing to work for industry than for government.

In his speech announcing the digital charter, Trudeau referred to the digital sphere as a “Wild West,” a fitting descriptor both because it can be a dangerous place — Trudeau’s remarks were delivered at a conference devoted to combating hate speech online — but also because there exists enormous financial opportunity.

The challenge with the digital charter is thus to strike the right balance between preserving the nascent but lucrative technology ecosystem (a $100 billion industry in Canada) and addressing the public’s sudden concerns.

To do so, the charter includes a number of principles about consumer protections. In addition to obvious privacy and safety rights, users should have control over what data to share, and the ability to transfer it from one company to another without “undue burden.”

This last idea, known as “data portability,” will be a boon to both users, and to startups, by making it easier to transfer personal information away from legacy companies.

The fact of the matter is most companies, operating in a sphere without strict borders, already comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and realize more stringent regulation is on the horizon.

The digital charter is simply the opening salvo in a long war to come over the governance of technology in Canada.

As we head into what may well be one of the closest and most unpredictable election campaigns in recent years, his words that night could not be more prescient. This is Canada — and, especially in an election year, Canadians will be looking for something better from their politics.

Four years ago, polling showed that two-thirds of Canadians wanted a change in government. And it was that longing for something new, not just in policy but in style and approach, which Trudeau’s team so effectively harnessed and rode to their majority.

Their “Real Change” platform explicitly laid out the stark contrast between Tory present and Liberal future. Stephen Harper on the other hand concluded his foreword to the Conservative platform by claiming his Economic Action Plan was a success. “It’s working,” he said. “Let’s continue on with what we know works.”

In attack ads and campaign messaging, the Tories characterized Trudeau’s “celebrity” appearance — and especially his hair — as proof of style over substance. On social media, the Liberals responded by claiming that he had both and did so in a way that was charming, pithy and most importantly, viral.

From the new-found power of Instagram to the traditionally influential pages of Vogue, the prime minister managed to capture the attention of the digital age in a way few politicians, Canadian or otherwise, had.

And it worked. Trudeau came to be deemed Obama’s successor as the leader of the world’s progressives.

But what was clearly Trudeau’s greatest asset in 2015 may well be his undoing in 2019.

The problem with a campaign built on self-image and the optics of virtue is that people, inconveniently, expect it to be true. And what is fairly easy to execute in a campaign setting becomes near impossible to implement when governing.

What’s more, the gift social media gives, it also takes away. Unlike campaign advertising or stump speeches — which Canadians know is contrived — the power of social media lies in the sense that what you are seeing is, at least to some extent, genuine.

And so, when Canadians see their PM beaming with pride over his gender-balanced Cabinet or taking a selfie with a young couple while out for a jog, style becomes conflated with substance.

And now, after four years of governing, that conflation has become a collision. The chickens have come home to roost. In short, Trudeau is paying the price of the expectations he set when he promised to be a new and different kind of leader and began to practice the politics of political celebrity.

By dubbing himself the “feminist Prime Minister,” Trudeau opened himself up to the attacks that inevitably followed his expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from his caucus.

In trumpeting his commitment to Indigenous communities — not least of which being a visit to a teepee set up by activists on Parliament Hill — Trudeau set himself up to be pilloried not only for his slow progress on Indigenous files but for tone-deaf responses to Indigenous protestors.

And by claiming the mantle of Canada’s traditionally welcoming stance on immigration as his own, he has made himself vulnerable to the attacks of challengers who want to paint him as responsible for what they characterize as an unsustainable influx of irregular border crossers.

Many believe governments are not defeated, but rather that they defeat themselves. On the whole, I disagree. I think, in most cases, governments are elected to do a particular job, and when that job is done, another party is called up to bat.

For Trudeau, the job he was hired to do was to bring, in his own words, sunny ways to government.

Now that is done, Trudeau’s challenge is to rewrite his job description in a way that convinces Canadians he still has work to do and is still the best leader for the job.