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The Ottawa Citizen published an excerpt on the weekend from Tom Flanagan’s new release, Winning Power: Canadian Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century. The excerpt focuses on political attack ads and how going negative can be an effective campaign strategy. From the excerpt:
For concrete illustrations, let’s look at how the three most prominent negative advertising campaigns in recent Canadian history have conveyed information to voters.
Let’s start with the “Hidden Agenda” campaign that the Liberals waged against Stephen Harper and the Conservatives in the 2004 and 2006 election races. Actually, the Liberals didn’t employ the term “hidden agenda” in their ads, but it was widely used to describe the portrait they were trying to create.
Their efforts began just before the writ was dropped in May 2004 and ran for about 10 days of TV, supplemented by some newspaper ads referring voters to a website entitled “Stephen Harper Said.”
Scott Reid, then prime minister Paul Martin’s director of communications, recalls that this ad campaign, though small by later standards, was controversial within the Liberal Party: “Got huge blowback from caucus, internal party types who regarded negative ads in pre-writ as a terrible act. But, of course, they worked.”
The website site was full of quotes from Harper’s days as a Reform MP, president of the National Citizens Coalition and Canadian Alliance leader. All the quotes were accurate and carefully sourced. The general impression created was that Harper’s real views, as documented in these quotations, were far more conservative than the moderate image he was now trying to convey as leader of the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada.
Was this fair game? I would say, absolutely. For the previous six months, Harper had been emphasizing that the new Conservative Party was “moderate and mainstream,” but surely voters were better off for being reminded that he had taken much more conservative positions on a wide variety of issues over the past 15 years.
Referring to a hidden agenda was a typical political exaggeration, which implied that Harper was now lying to voters. Nonetheless, it dramatized the obvious truth that many of the things he was saying now were different from what he had said not long ago. The only convincing rebuttal was for Harper to demonstrate over a substantial period of time that what he was saying now would be the basis of his policies, not what he had said in previous years when he held different jobs and represented different political parties.
The Liberal approach was sound, and it certainly helped them pull out a victory in 2004. At times, however, they tended to go over the top with it. A good example was their first television attack ad in the 2004 campaign:
(Female narrator, deliberate diction, ominous music.)
Stephen Harper would have sent our troops to Iraq.
(Stock footage of tanks and soldiers crossing the desert.)
He’d spend billions on tanks and aircraft carriers (stock footage of ship at sea), weaken our gun laws (close-up of gun pointed at camera), scrap the Kyoto accord (stock footage of industrial pollution).
He’d sacrifice Canadian-style health care for U.S.-style tax cuts.
(Close-up of oxygen mask descending onto camera, cut to doctors wheeling patient on gurney.)
He won’t protect a woman’s right to choose.
(Desperate teenage girl rocking on floor.)
And he’s prepared to work with the Bloc Québécois.
(Pan over party leader Gilles Duceppe.)
Stephen Harper says that when he’s through with Canada (zoom out on flag), we won’t recognize it.
You know what?
(Flag begins to burn and disintegrate.)
He’s right.
(Fade to black.)
The visuals made the ad powerful in terms of pathos, but the logos, persuasion by means of reasoning, was weak. No documentation of facts was provided, and some of the assertions were demonstrably false. Harper had never called for Canadian troops to be sent to Iraq, though he had criticized Jean Chrétien for not giving political support to the American invasion. And he had never opposed the legalization of abortion, though he had never supported “a woman’s right to choose” in those explicit terms.
Click here for the full excerpt
To learn more about Winning Power, click here.
For media inquiries, please contact Jacqui Davis.
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