Category: Chairman’s Desk

Jaime Watt, who has orchestrated communication strategies behind elections across Canada, is writing a three-part series advising each of the main provincial party leaders on their best path to winning a majority government on June 7. This is Part 2.

Heading into her third election as leader, Andrea Horwath can’t seem to catch a break. After winning her party’s leadership in 2009, she led the NDP from the doldrums where it had lived since its crushing defeat in 1995.

Her steady and reasonable management approach, combined with her charisma and down-to-Earth, approachable style can be credited with much of that.

But that hasn’t been enough.

And, now, should she not at least be able to form the opposition, this election will likely be her last.

Politics is rarely fair and, to make matters worse, a series of unfortunate events have befallen the New Democrats. For a while, Horwath looked quite competitive. The Liberals were trailing in the polls and she was one of two fresh faces and arguably the more experienced one.

But Patrick Brown’s downfall has roiled the Ontario political scene. The eventful race to succeed Brown as leader of the PCs managed to capture nearly every inch of column length and minute of TV time.

To add insult to injury, Horwath’s chief of staff was the subject of allegations that he had mishandled sexual-harassment complaints in an unrelated former job. While that has since been cleared up, it created unhelpful upheaval at a time when Horwath was preparing for the election of a lifetime.

In spite of these challenges, she was uniquely positioned to be the people’s champion – the one who was most authentically positioned to fight an out-of-touch Wynne government.

Doug Ford‘s election as PC leader changed all that. Ford connects with much of Horwath’s audience in a way few can claim to do. And the polls have already begun to show the result.

This leaves Horwath little option but to advance a left-leaning approach to populism. The problem is, Premier Kathleen Wynne has been using the power of incumbency to move in on that territory. The premier’s policy announcements have been aimed squarely at winning those voters from the NDP.

Horwath can’t allow herself to be squeezed out of broader debate by the PCs and Liberals. Although positioned at different points on the political spectrum, both share the strategic advantage that comes from such a narrative.

Horwath’s coalition, itself, also presents complications: The New Democrats have always had a hard-to-reconcile coalition of urban intelligentsia, blue-collar sensibility and rural co-operation. It allowed them to win ridings such as Parkdale-High Park, Hamilton Centre and Essex at the same time.

In 2011, Horwath successfully held her own. In the 2014 election, she made gains in Southwestern Ontario but the urban core of her party fell apart: leaving only one seat in each of Toronto and Ottawa.

This time out, the party must focus on protecting its turf in rural and blue-collar Ontario, while increasing its share of seats in downtown cores. Ontarians want to hear common-sense talk from Horwath that speaks to how she will make their lives more affordable.

She has a great opportunity to run a campaign based on who she is and the experiences she has lived. A sandwich generation, career woman from a mid-size market. A single mom.

She is the perfect pitch person for an approach to government that’s not based on ideology or dogma but rather on making people’s everyday lives better.

Horwath’s decision on Monday to hold an announcement of a large policy item – a $1.2-billion public dental plan – to counteract the effects of the government’s throne speech and the PC’s unity rally was an example of how both to keep the focus on themselves and thread the needle of her coalition.

The New Democrats refused to cede the stage, and they were rewarded with considerable media coverage.

The next 80 days will be more of the same. Balancing coalitions while seizing attention. A high-wire act, for sure, but if one leader has demonstrated the ability to do it, it’s Andrea Horwath.

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

Jaime Watt, who has orchestrated communication strategies behind elections across Canada, is writing a three-part series advising each of the main provincial party leaders on their best path to winning a majority government on June 7. This is Part 1.

It would be difficult to find a single Ontarian who even casually follows politics who is not familiar with the many challenges Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party has faced in the past couple of months. The twists and turns and drama are unlike anything the province has seen before.

And the timing of this Shakespearean tragicomedy makes the stakes even higher: In just a few weeks, the PCs will have an opportunity to replace the Liberal government after 15 long years.

It has been a long time in the political wilderness for the Tories – and they are ready to re-assume the reins of government.

Party members can all but taste victory, smelling the blood in the water that comes from the Wynne government’s historically high levels of unpopularity.

The choice of Doug Ford last weekend is high-risk and potentially high-reward.

Christine Elliott, his opponent in the leadership race, is a savvy politician who would have been a safe pair of hands running against an unpopular premier. Elliott is articulate, measured and deeply knowledgeable about the provincial government.

Ford, by contrast, is bombastic, unscripted and not particularly well-schooled in policy.

But last week demonstrated why what many perceive to be Ford‘s biggest weakness is, in fact, his strength.

Ford‘s straight-talking style is jarring. For example, when a reporter asks him a question, he answers frankly. His answers have the ring of authenticity. It’s jarring only because Ontarians have grown accustomed to politicians speaking in terms that are rendered meaningless by political correctness.

Early media reviews of Ford‘s style have been unflattering. A recent CBC interview portrayed the new leader as being “flustered” and “frustrated.”

In fact, Ford‘s interview was perfectly reasonable – and sounded so to Ontarians who are tired of the same old

rhetoric.

When pressed on where he would come up with financing for his campaign platform, Ford said he would find it in “efficiencies” in government, a notion that has long been mocked by the media.

But when the reporter tried to skewer him for it, Ford quickly turned the tables, pointing out that he had actual experience in finding efficiencies and that he was going to find “four cents on the dollar.”

To many Ontario voters, this makes a lot of sense. Ontarians listening to that widely mocked radio interview almost certainly agree that four cents of every dollar spent by the Government of Ontario is wasted.

To many in the political class and the media, that idea is heresy. They insist it simply can’t be done.

These same commentators made these same comments during Mike Harris‘s campaign. But the Harris team stayed the course, despite the concern of institutional worrywarts.

The result? The received wisdom was simply not right, and Harris was rewarded with a massive majority. Ontarians were fed up and that feeling of discontent simmers today.

So that’s Ford‘s path to victory. He must continue telling his truths in the same real way that Ontarians believe. The man has a believability about him that other politicians just can’t capture.

There will be barrels of ink spilled on his errors and his approach, complaining that he simply doesn’t understand government and the nuances of policy.

But many Ontarians feel our province is headed in the wrong direction. They might not be able to put their finger on it, but there is a deep-seated sense that the provincial government has gotten things wrong.

Doug Ford gives voice to that feeling of discontent. And regardless of what the experts say, it’s the Progressive Conservatives’ best chance to win government in a generation.

It will sometimes be tempting for political advisers to try to rein the leader in, or to make his messaging more professional and buttoned down. But that’s the exact wrong instinct.

A better instinct is to let Doug be Doug.

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

February was not a particularly kind month to the Liberal government. I can only assume that their issues management team did not have much chance to sleep.

If there is one lesson I learned during my time in politics, it’s that when it rains, it pours. Rarely did I receive one piece of bad news without a few more unpleasant surprises by the end of the day. A crisis in the health portfolio would soon be followed by a meltdown by a backbench MPP, or some other unexpected turn of events.

So it has gone with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

February was not a particularly kind month to the Liberal government. I can only assume that their issues management team did not have much chance to sleep. As soon as it had solved one challenge, it seemed that another emerged.

Of course, the most problematic was Trudeau‘s ill-fated official visit to India. The prime minister, who has proven that he is remarkably adept at demonstrating authenticity, came across as almost comically out-of-touch.

Dressed in traditional Indian garments, the entire Trudeau family spent the entire week clothed in a way that many Indians took as insulting. The parade of outfits, combined with an attempt by Trudeau to literally dance for a crowd, made for endless mocking on social media and tut-tutting in traditional media.

But more challenging still for the visit was the Indian government’s subtle, or not-so-subtle, attempts to undermine the trip and demonstrate its antipathy toward Trudeau‘s government.

Narendra Modi’s government got quite close with the former Conservative government and has not been secretive in its disapproval of several moves by the Trudeau government. It set about sabotaging the Trudeau tour as subtly as it could, as when it sent only a junior minister of agriculture to greet Trudeau (Modi usually makes a personal appearance to greet foreign dignitaries), or when it sent low-ranking bureaucrats to accompany the Trudeaus.

While those were minor frustrations, they received minimal attention at home. The trip officially went from bad to worse when Jaspal Atwal turned up at a reception hosted by the Canadian government to celebrate our bilateral relationship with India. Atwal is a persona non grata with the Indian government, having attempted to murder an Indian cabinet minister visiting Vancouver in 1986.

His presence, for good reason, caused a major scandal among the Indian government, and afforded them the opportunity to once again accuse the Liberals of running a government that is weak on the issue of Sikh extremism.

The issue unsettled Liberal MPs, but the federal budget promised to turn the page on Feb. 27. The problem was that the budget was a wholly unremarkable document, and one that did little to refocus the media onto the positive work done by the government.

The last week has been no more kind to the government. U.S. President Donald Trump‘s haphazard and aggressive announcements that he would be imposing trade tariffs on steel in allied nations came as unwelcome news. The fact that he wrote specifically about Canada was an even more unwelcome development.

The government, to its enormous credit, successfully pushed back on the imposition of tariffs, offering Canada a temporary reprieve. But the potential imposition of such damaging tariffs will now be used as a sword of Damocles, an implicit threat dangling over the head of Canada as our government attempts to negotiate NAFTA.

And to cap off several weeks of unpleasantness, several polls emerged that showed the Liberals trailing the Tories for the first time in years.

Now, let it be known that polls taken this far away from an election are minimally important in understanding what will actually happen in the 2019 election.

What those polls, and the successive bad news, can actually do is unnerve the Liberal MPs. While people dismiss the power of MPs on the agenda of the government, they actually have remarkable power to shape its priorities. An agitated and restless caucus can spell major issues for a government.

While we haven’t yet approached that moment, the disquiet among the Liberal backbench is evident – both based on their faces during question period, and in murmurs around the Hill.

To remedy that discontent, Trudeau needs to reclaim the narrative. The question is how he goes about accomplishing that.

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

Politicians and political staff start off with good intentions, but when put in high pressure situations, don’t always make the right decisions. Hiding what happened after the fact, however, is always the wrong decision.

In my day job, I work as a high-stakes public affairs practitioner, which involves helping clients to manage challenging situations; ones they never imagined they would face.

These challenges come fraught with both media scrutiny and internal pressure, and are highly complex.

As a result, people are left facing some of the biggest challenges of their lives, facing legal risk, reputational damage and, inevitably, with more questions than answers. And when they look to me for my thoughts on how to approach a situation, the single best piece of advice I can offer is this: you always get it right when you do the right thing.

It may be trite, but it’s true.

In the short term, there will always be negative coverage, and there will always be people who challenge what you choose to do.

It may even be the more difficult decision, but I can promise that if you try to hide something you shouldn’t, or if you try to cut corners, or if you take an action that you wouldn’t want your mother to read about in the newspaper, it will eventually be in the newspaper.

It’s a lesson that Patrick Brown and his staff should have learned before attempting to run Canada’s largest province. Politics is a heady brew of ambitious and driven politicians, who are in turn supported by ambitious and driven staff.

This is not to suggest those politicians and the staff supporting them enter politics for nefarious reasons. On the contrary, they enter with the best of intentions. But ambition can trump intention, especially in the cut and thrust of daily political exchange.

To compound the challenge, not only do difficult political situations bring with them questions laden with moral dilemmas, public safety, fairness and equity, they bring media attention and the intense scrutiny of the opposition.

I know how challenging it can be – I have sat in those rooms and been forced to help make decisions in short periods of time without complete information and with tons of pressure bearing down upon all involved.

It’s not easy. That’s why it is easy to understand why this week we saw two examples of how that high-stakes political decision-making process can lead to profoundly negative results. And we saw it happen on two sides of the aisle.

On Wednesday, David Livingston, Liberal former chief of staff to Dalton McGuinty, spoke at his pre-sentence hearing for his role in destroying computer records of the government. Livingston, who will be sentenced on April 11, apologized to his friends and family for his behaviour and acknowledged that knowing what he knows today he would have “acted differently.”

On Monday, Brown, former leader of the Progressive Conservatives, ended his leadership of the party after this paper reported that Hamilton police announced they would be investigating the involvement of several individuals from the PC party in a nomination that has become the subject of alleged fraud and forgery.

That news was only the latest volley of malfeasance lobbed at Brown and some members of his office – but it was by far the most damning, complete with emails that many would have preferred to not be splashed across a major national newspaper.

I can all but guarantee you that none of those people entered politics with the intention of having their names associated with such acts. All entered with the intention to make our province a brighter and better place, and in the midst of all of the pressures that they faced during the normal course of their work, made decisions that have permanently affected their reputations.

I am not pretending that I am a saint by any means.

I have struggled with similar decisions in the past, as we all have.

But this week has served as an excellent reminder to all who enter the realm of public service and face monumentally difficult decisions: you always get it right when you do the right thing.

After all, doing the wrong thing can define you for years to come.

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

Had the former PC leader simply kept his head down, rallied his supporters in Simcoe North, secured his riding nomination, stayed neutral in the leadership race and defended his name through appropriate channels he likely would have found himself in very different circumstances.

Often the right decisions are the most difficult to make.

The decision by the Ontario Progressive Conservative party to let Patrick Brown enter the leadership contest was the right one.

The decision preserved the democratic legitimacy of the race. At the same time, however, it may have jeopardized the party’s future and its electoral viability.

Patrick Brown, whether we like it or not, is entitled to run.

If he had been prevented from running, he would have had what the lawyers call “a triable case” against the party; one that would have resulted in an unmitigated disaster. It would have delayed the leadership vote, enraged active Brown supporters and been, overall, a huge distraction.

But in the end, it really doesn’t matter. The decision doesn’t vindicate Brown. It doesn’t clear his tarnished name.

In fact, it exposes Brown to irreversible reputational damage. This time, if he loses, he won’t be able to blame the party elite or CTV News. His own party members will be the authors of his fall.

And a hard fall it will be.

After the initial shock of the news began to fade, many people seemed to feel the party and the media had mistreated Brown. Many believed he had not been afforded due process and this was unfair; that too many had run too quickly to the exits.

As a result, many believed he should be given a chance to clear his name.

However, clearing his name does not involve running to lead his party and the province.

As a consequence, many people who were once sympathetic do not feel the same way today. Attacks on Brown have only strengthened since he made the strategically poor decision to enter the leadership race. Now, in addition to allegations of sexual misconduct, you can add allegations of fraud and bribery to the list of potential improprieties.

To make matters worse, on Thursday it was reported by this newspaper that the independent watchdog that oversees MPP finances is now investigating why Brown has not declared rental income on his home in Shanty Bay.

People are starting to see that perhaps the party and CTV News had it right after all.

Strategically, Brown’s decision to run for leader is lose-lose. Win the leadership and likely get pummeled by the Liberals. Lose the leadership and say goodbye to politics forever.

The vindication story could have gone very differently.

It started well. First, Brown’s repudiation of the CTV News allegations in the National Post and on his personal social-media channels was a public-relations success. It highlighted discrepancies and weaknesses in the reporting, as well as conflicts of interest. It highlighted the risks of the lack of due process.

The result? Fellow leadership contenders publicly stated that if Brown were to clear his name, presumably in a court of law, they would allow him to run in his Barrie riding under the party banner in the coming election.

All this changed after his leadership announcement.

Had Brown simply kept his head down, rallied his supporters, secured his riding nomination, stayed neutral in the leadership race and defended his name through appropriate channels, he likely would have found himself in very different circumstances.

Brown is well-liked in Barrie. Re-election and a cleared name would have turbocharged his way to a recovered reputation.

Unfortunately, it seems ego got the better of him.

If he doesn’t win the leadership, which he most likely will not, the eventual leader of the party will owe him nothing and offers to let him run under the party banner will likely vanish.

In short, he will have squandered not only his second chance but his last chance.

Brown is a career politician. In Canada, politicians – especially provincial politicians – have a notoriously difficult time finding work after holding public office. Brown’s tarnished reputation won’t make things easier.

Brown’s entrance into the PC leadership race is not a strategy for vindication. Rather, it is a one-way ticket into the purgatory of reputational damage; a purgatory where once in, there is no way out.

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