Bullshit baffles brains.
—HAROLD BALLARD, FORMER OWNER OF THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS1
Propaganda is scary stuff. It conjures up images of mind control, of Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, of Mao and The Manchurian Candidate. We fear it the same way we fear rats: because, like their plague-carrying fleas, propaganda kills. The British unleashed one of the great propaganda campaigns of history to get the Americans to join the Allied side in World War I, then bragged about it in the decade after that war. The backlash that resulted in the United States went a long way to keeping the Americans out World War II, until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Propaganda helped depose Mussolini. The British spread a very effective rumour that, when the going got tough, Mussolini would abscond with Italy’s gold and foreign currency reserves. That’s one of the reasons Mussolini was overthrown and the Italians sued for peace as soon as Allied troops landed on the Italian mainland.
After World War II, Canadians were leery about government propaganda. The Liberals under William Lyon Mackenzie King were terrified of the monster that they had created in the fight to beat Hitler. King feared a “Canadian Goebbels” and fired John Grierson, the head of the country’s propaganda department, partly because he thought Grierson was a communist. (Grierson was replaced by Davidson Dunton, a brilliant journalist who later co-chaired the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and, at various times, headed the CBC and Carleton University).
The suspicion among the people and in the corridors of government that propaganda is the tool of totalitarian states, not liberal democracies like Canada, persisted long after the war. The Glassco Commission, which examined ways of modernizing the bureaucracy, was headed by J. Grant Glassco, a banker. In its 1962 report, the commission warned that government advertising had gone far past telling people the business hours of post offices and museums. Government promotion of its actions was “debatable,” Glassco and his fellow committee members agreed. When governments went into publicizing the “newsworthiness” of their actions, they crossed the line. “There is no fixed line between exposition and argument, between publicity and propaganda.” The role of government advertising was to be strictly factual and “to inform rather than to persuade.” The Glassco Commission came to a conclusion that, in today’s Ottawa, could be part heresy, part naïveté. The “ultimate decision on what is news and how it should be presented must be left to the media.” A distinction had to be drawn between “material which genuinely informs and that which is calculated only to impress; the latter has no place in the information activities of government.”2
In closed societies like North Korea and China, state control over information—modern and historical—makes it easy for the government to shape not only what people know, but also the way they think. Educating children in schools where blind obedience to the state is knocked into them and where they are fed a steady diet of lies and half-truth ensures everyone grows up to do exactly what’s expected. The overcurious and the skeptical learn quickly to keep their mouths shut or risk the unpleasant consequences.
In Western societies, propaganda is much more subtle and nuanced. Kids in our schools are trained to think critically and to see themselves as citizens with some obligations—at least, to vote. People might argue about the quality of education in our schools and the ideological bent of teachers, from grade schools to university, but we wouldn’t have this debate at all if we weren’t brought up in the belief that we have the right to have these conversations. In our society, personal knowledge is a sort of soup that everyone wants to add to. We get propaganda in government and corporate ads, from the Internet, from media. What is an election campaign except great waves of propaganda washing over the electorate? And why wouldn’t people apply the same kind of skepticism to election promises that they’d apply to any other obvious propaganda, especially if they had previously voted for political parties that ignored the promises they had made?
The Harper government would love to be masters of propaganda. For example, they could rewrite history, marginalize science, convince people that environmentalists are fools and screwballs, dupe voters into believing the Liberals are nothing but reckless spenders while Conservatives are sound fiscal managers—modern deficit numbers be damned—and, most important, win re-election.
Sometimes, there is subtlety to Tory messaging and propaganda. For example, as Richard Nimijean notes in a recent article, Harper’s promotion of Arctic sovereignty, and patriotism in general, is closely linked to the Tories’ promotion of the military, especially big-ticket procurement of hardware like the F-35 stealth fighter planes.3 His constant verbal attacks on Vladimir Putin and the Russians in 2014 over their takeover of the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine make much more sense when you consider that many voters in Western Canada have Ukrainian ancestry.
In the last few decades, an entire media manipulation industry has been created in Canada, with links between political parties, government departments, pollsters, lobbyists, ad agencies and, sometimes, academics. The lobbying industry has grown into a monster, and the Tories are not fully to blame. Jean Chrétien’s Ottawa was a lobbyist’s heaven. Sometimes, the government and its friends even share the same lobbyists. When the many problems plaguing the F-35 fighter plane became known to the public, mainly through the work of congressional committees in Washington, the builders of the plane, Lockheed Martin, as well as the Department of National Defence, the Ministry of Public Works and Government Services, and Industry Canada all used the same public relations firm, Thornley Fallis, to calm the public’s fears. The three federal departments paid the company $700,000 between 2007 and 2012, mainly to say “no comment.”4
THE TORIES STARTED their time in government with a rebranding. They would be “Canada’s New Government” in everything that was sent out in the first twenty months of Harper’s premiership, when the Tories had just a minority government. It was inscribed in every item that went out in print and over the airwaves. Every public servant was required to use those words to describe the federal government in anything that was released to the public. On September 5, 2005, Andrew Okulitch received an email from senior managers at Natural Resources Canada saying everyone who worked there had to use “Canada’s New Government,” with all of the words capitalized. Dr. Okulitch, a scientist under contract to the Geological Survey of Canada, answered that email with an undiplomatic rejection of the request, and, very quickly, found himself jobless (or at least officeless, since he was an emeritus scientist, meaning he worked without pay in a space provided by the government). Within an hour, he had this reply from Dr. Irwin Itzkovich, a special adviser to the deputy minister of natural resources: “Given your strong though misdirected views of the role and authority of the Government as elected by the people, and your duty to reflect their decisions, I accept that you are immediately removing yourself from the Emeritus Program. I wish you every success in your future.” Cassie Doyle, the deputy minister of the department, called Okulitch at his home on Saltspring Island, B.C., to confirm the bad news. Within two weeks—after Okulitch’s firing hit the media—the scientist got another call saying he could come back to work.5
In 2009, “Canada’s New Government” morphed into the “Harper Government.” During his years in power, the federal government, staffed by almost 200,000 public servants who are expected to be professional and non-partisan, has, at least in its self-description, belonged to the Tories and to Stephen Harper, rather than to the people of Canada.
Simplicity, whether it’s slogans like “Canada’s New Government,” oversized blue cheques for bridges and roads handed out at staged photo ops, or short attack ads on TV and radio between elections, is important to getting the Harper message out. Dumbing things down has become an important part of their strategy. That’s why talking points are so important in Harper’s Ottawa. The message, whatever it is, must be crafted in the most simple language and terms and be implanted directly into the various media, whether those media are real or government-controlled: “It is hard to escape the conclusion that, at the federal level at least, a government hopelessly enamored with ‘talking points’ as the anodyne response to every question really isn’t interested in talking at all, in the hope that government will neither be talked to nor talked about. This poses its own risk for the future,” Christopher Waddell, the chair of Carleton University’s journalism school, said in a recent article.6
The sloganeering that generated “Canada’s New Government” gave us a slew of new laws with catchy titles: the Federal Accountability Act; Tackling Violent Crime Act; Cracking Down on Tobacco Marketing Aimed at Youth Act; Fairness for the Self-Employed Act; Truth in Sentencing Act; Balanced Refugee Reform Act; Celebrating Canada’s Seniors Act; Eliminating Entitlements for Prisoners Act; Fairness for Military Families (Employment Insurance) Act; Protecting Victims from Sex Offenders Act; Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act; Fair and Efficient Criminal Trials Act; Keeping Canada’s Economy and Jobs Growing Act; Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act; Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act; Citizen’s Arrest and Self-defence Act; Helping Families in Need Act; Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act; Safe Food for Canadians Act; Safe Streets and Communities Act; Safer Witnesses Act; Not Criminally Responsible Reform Act; Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (banning street prostitution); and Fair Elections Act.
Harper went to Edmonton in May 2014 for a photo op with his wife, Laureen, Tory MPs and police dog trainer Matt Williamson to announce the Justice for Animals in Service Act (Quanto’s Law) in honour of Quanto, an Edmonton police service dog that was stabbed to death by Paul Joseph Vukmanich in October 2013. The dog-slayer was high on drugs and running from the police, who let Quanto loose. Under Quanto’s Law, anyone who kills a police or military dog, or a dog used by a person with disabilities, will serve at least six months in jail and could be imprisoned for four years. But there was already a law against animal cruelty that protected Quanto and other police dogs, and the man who had killed Quanto was jailed for eighteen months for his crime (and eight months from fleeing from police).7
Harper’s government didn’t invent the use of cute phrases for naming laws. It started in the United States during Newt Gingrich’s term as Speaker of the House of Representatives and was mimicked in Ontario by Mike Harris’s Progressive Conservative government, which passed gems like the Fewer Municipal Politicians Act.
In the months before Harper won power, he got a lot of mileage criticizing the vast amount of money that the governing Liberals had spent on advertising (real ads, not just the fake billings in the sponsorship kickback scheme). Once elected, Harper started to spend liberally to get the Tory message out. For example, the government paid more than $200,000 to buy a full-page ad on the inside back page of the April 14, 2014, issue of The New Yorker magazine. The ad showed what looks like a lovely, clean river in Canada’s wilderness. It not designed, however, to tempt The New Yorker’s affluent readers to visit Canada, though the tourism business certainly could use the boost. Instead, it was a pitch for the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Globe and Mail columnist Eric Reguly called the ad’s text “slick pieces of propaganda—misleading without being outright lies.” The word “Keystone” didn’t appear in the ad at all. And there were a lot of false comparisons. Reguly noticed the government’s claim that Canada and United States have the same greenhouse gas emissions targets, which is true, but that’s no big deal, since neither country is now a signatory to the Kyoto accord. And just because Canada has a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent between 2005 and 2020, that doesn’t mean we’ll actually meet it. In fact, Canada probably won’t. And there’s no penalty for failure. The ad talks a lot about Canada’s stringent “regulatory environment,” but don’t confuse those words with “environmental regulations” because the regulations the ad talks about cover everything from construction boots to water pollution standards. The ad skirts around the fact that, unless there is some radical technological change to the way oil is extracted from the Athabaska sands, greenhouse gas emissions will rise as the oilsands development increases production. And expanding the oilsands production is the point of building Keystone.8
For years, Canadians were bombarded with ads for Canada’s Economic Action Plan, the infrastructure program that the Harper government created—under duress from the opposition parties, after first denying there was a problem with the economy—after the 2008 financial meltdown. From 2009 to 2014, the government spent more than $100 million on the Economic Action Plan ads, expanding the use of the phrase over the years to cover almost all of its spending. From then on, the government sent out a confusing message: Canada had escaped the worst of the global downturn, and the government was spending billions on infrastructure to bring the country back to prosperity. The ads used the Tory party’s blue colours and election-style imagery.
That’s nothing new to Canadian government advertising—the Ontario Progressive Conservatives probably won the prize for that in their 1980s recession ads with the tagline “Life is Good Ontario. Preserve it. Conserve it”—but they were enough to stimulate David McGuinty. The Liberal MP from Ottawa (and brother of former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty) introduced a private member’s bill to ban ads that use the same colours and imagery as a political party. His brother had brought in a similar law that required Ontario government advertising to be vetted by the provincial auditor general. “He’s taking public dollars and he’s using public infrastructure—IT services, computers, cameras, office space—and he’s running a political action campaign ad every Thursday night involving Mr. Harper and this is all about trying to shore up his support,” David McGuinty told Globe and Mail reporter Bill Curry. “When he takes Canadian taxpayers’ money to do this kind of thing, he’s cheating.”9
In the 2013–2014 fiscal year, Harper’s team even spent $2.5 million to promote a job-creation grant called “Better Jobs” that didn’t even exist. The government spent $3.1 million to explain its cuts to old age security.10 Another $8.2 million went for ads designed to convince Canadians that the extraction of the country’s natural resources is the key to the country’s economic future.11
And the self-promotion of the Economic Action Plan advertising campaign is just part of what Harper’s government spends on government ads. Overall, they had spent $69 million during the 2012–2013 fiscal year. There’s been a big drop since 2009–2010, when the Tories only had a minority government. Then, cash was cascading out the door to Canada’s ad agencies; the government spent $136 million that year. Most of that money was spent on television ads,12 particularly on ads on sports shows.
THE THIRTY-SECOND Canada Action Plan TV spots ran in the fall of 2012 and from February to April of 2013. They showed happy tradespeople building a plane, a car and a ship. A silken-voiced narrator talked about federal money for apprenticeship grants, student loans and technology research. A poll done in the winter of 2013 showed some outright hostility to the ads, with people saying they were “propaganda” and a “waste of money.” A survey taken a few months later found the ads didn’t do what they claimed to do: tell people how to get more information about the government’s recession-fighting programs. There was a solid way to see if the ads were effective ways of getting this information out. All of them told viewers to visit actionplan.gc.ca, a website created in 2009, to learn more about Canada’s Economic Action Plan. A survey of 2,003 adult Canadians completed in April 2013, not long after the new federal budget was tabled, found just three people in the survey sample who actually visited the website. (The poll, which cost $29,000, was said to have a margin of error at plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
The Harris/Decima poll, one of nine surveys commissioned by the federal Finance Department since 2009, showed only 6 per cent of those who said they recalled the TV ads reported being stimulated to do anything as a result. That compared to 25 per cent of the people who had remembered seeing TV ads in 2009, and went on to check out Ottawa’s home renovation program. (This program had been wound down by the time the 2013 survey was taken.) The government was forced by its own laws to run the survey to test whether the ads were effective. The results were embarrassing: the TV ads flashed a toll-free phone number, 1-800-O-Canada, that offered more information. Not one of the 2,003 people polled had bothered to call it. A spokesperson for the Finance Department, Jack Aubry (who, in a previous career had covered the Senate for the Canwest chain), claimed that the various ad campaigns raised public awareness of Canada’s Economic Action Plan. Some 62 per cent of Canadians knew about it, up from just 20 per cent in 2009. He also said visits to the action plan website had risen to 12,000 a day from 2,300.13
So, if, as polls suggested and critics said, the ads were so useless, why bother with them? Canadian Press reporter Dean Beeby dug around to find out. He learned that, since 2006, Library and Archives Canada has operated a website where “final reports of all public opinion research for which a contract was awarded” are posted within about six months of their creation. If, however, the government did its own, in-house surveys, the results would not be posted online. And those internal surveys found that the ads did, indeed, pay off. Maybe people weren’t thronging to websites or overwhelming the operators at 1-800-O-Canada, but they did make people feel better about the government. Of the people surveyed, 42 per cent of the people who had not seen the ads approved of the overall performance of the government. But that number jumped a full five percentage points, to 47 per cent, of people who had seen the ads. So maybe people weren’t stimulated to learn more about the government’s recession-fighting, but a hefty percentage of them—the kind of numbers that could make a serious difference in a federal election—got a tingle inside for the Tories.14
In an editorial, The Globe and Mail said the ads were a waste of money, other than to the Conservatives. Rather than tell people something useful, like, say, where to get an application form for a home renovation grant, the ads were full of pretty pictures, soft music and smooth, empty talk. “It is nothing novel to see a government pump its own tires, or project an aura of progress in a tough economy,” the newspaper said. “But the polished and cheery ads—which have cost at least $113-million since 2009 and have become fixtures on television—are often replete with broad allusions to ‘better infrastructure to make us more competitive’ or ‘more efficient government to keep taxes low.’ No wonder most people tune them out … Where public dollars are paying for air time, ads should make clear what is on offer, and spare Canadians the rosy platitudes about prosperity.”15
The government has spent millions on ads pushing oil pipelines and delegitimizing critics of exploitation of the oilsands. They’ve also had lots of free publicity and support from Canada’s oil and gas sector and from pressure groups like Ethical Oil. These campaigns all tried to mask the Harper government’s dismal record on the environment. At the same time that Harper’s government put out a five-page press release boasting about a new conservation program to protect national parks and connect Canadians to nature, the federal cabinet allowed the expansion of truck routes through the Northwest Territories’ Nááts’ihch’oh National Park Reserve near the Yukon border to move 25,000 tons of ore a day from a zinc mine owned by Chinese investors. Harper announced the creation of the park reserve on his August 2012 northern tour, saying it would protect the watershed of the South Nahanni River, along with the habitat of grizzly bears and caribou. Environmental groups, however, said the boundaries of the park had been drawn to set aside large swaths of pristine land for mining leases.
AS EYES SHIFT from TVs and newspapers to computer screens, so have Tory propaganda campaigns. The Conservatives literally applied a blue tint to the Government of Canada’s websites in the run-up to the 2015 election. The government’s website name was changed from gc.ca into canada.ca (canada.com had been snapped up by Izzy Asper’s Canwest media company and is now used by Postmedia). Along with the new tint of the pages, the government’s website was rejigged to make it easy to find information that most people might need. The redesign also made it much more difficult for policy wonks and journalists to find information on how the government operates and the ways it spends its money. The new pages carry government boilerplate about its achievements. There’s lots of talk about the Economic Action Plan and, in the early spring of 2014, Environment Canada’s local weather page carried blurbs for the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Awards and the Korea free trade agreement. The Tories defended the new blue look with talking points saying blue was easy on the eyes and had tested well with focus groups.16
Someone in the bureaucracy leaked Harper’s “web presence renewal strategy” in the spring of 2013. The strategy was initiated by Harper himself, who wrote a letter to Treasury Board president and Muskoka gazebo builder Tony Clement telling him to make it so. The plan calls for a big cut to the number of government websites. Material considered “unpopular” will be stripped from the sites that survive. And, of course, the Centre will carefully supervise the posting of all information on government websites and on social media. Ministry websites will be replaced with sites reflecting “user needs,” providing simple information on services but not a lot of facts. Things that aren’t all that popular and receive few hits, like hard-to-read science reports, won’t make the cut, except, maybe, on difficult-to-find archive pages. All of these changes were supposed to be made by the spring of 2014.17
The Harper government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on sponsored tweets. Most of that money was spent by Harper’s Privy Council Office. Between 2012 and 2014, the entire federal government spent $456,324. Veterans Affairs spent $103,694 on promoted tweets during fiscal 2013–2014 year, mostly to remind people about Remembrance Day. News of the department’s Twitter spending incited fury among vets, who took to Parliament Hill to protest. Veterans Affairs spent an extra $4 million that winter, leading Liberal critic Frank Valeriote to say to Julian Fantino, the minister in charge of veterans affairs, “I’m wondering how you can justify for us your department spending more on advertising—a $4 million increase in advertising—and less on the actual programs themselves.” A few minutes after that confrontation, Jenny Migneault, the spouse of a veteran suffering from PTSD, shouted at the minister “Mr. Fantino, I’m just a vet’s spouse. You’re forgetting us, once more. We’re nothing to you.”18
Canadian Heritage spent $20,000 on tweets that year. The CBC wrote cheques to Twitter for $77,291 to pay for promoted tweets and a promoted account on Twitter in 2013–2014. Business Development Bank of Canada spent $167,189 on tweets between 2012 and 2014, while the Canadian Institutes of Health Research spent $10,172 and Public Safety Canada spent $51,000. The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces spent $10,000 on promoted tweets in 2013–2014 as part of the “priority occupations” marketing campaign to showcase the Forces “as an employer of choice.”19
But the best propaganda is always free. And the very best looks like journalism and commentary from public-spirited citizens who just happen to support everything the government says or does.
In 2006, the Tories came up with an innovation. They would forge links with the right-wing blogosphere, something that had already been done years before in the United States where the extreme Right of the Republican Party had mouthpieces like Free Republic and, before about 2007, Little Green Footballs. In 2005, Adam Daifallah met Tom Flanagan at a Civitas meeting and told him about the Blogging Tories, a group of conservative bloggers who had set up a system of linking to each other, knowing such a group would have influence greater than the sum of its parts.
Flanagan recruited Stephen Taylor, who operated as Conservative Party of Canada Pundit (and later went on to take Harper’s old job as head of National Citizens Coalition), to coordinate the blog network. Taylor’s blog, stephentaylor.ca, was among the most popular in Canada (along with Small Dead Animals and Steve Janke’s Angry in the Great White North) and had no serious Liberal challengers. Tory campaign leader Doug Finley put some of his staff to work monitoring the blogs and getting out stories that, as Flanagan later wrote, “were not quite ready for the mainstream media.”20
In fact, the Tories have used blogs to float trial balloons of some of their more controversial ideas. They also use the bloggers to handle “low-road” attacks on political opponents, media critics, non-governmental organizations, environmentalists, First Nations leaders and anyone else who gets in the way. The Tory bloggers can say anything they like while giving Harper and his government arm’s-length deniability. Sometimes, the bloggers are threatened with lawsuits by people hit with smears, and, in at least one case, involving Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman and the owners of Free Dominion, they’ve been saddled with serious damages and costs.
Still, the bloggers can undermine the credibility of their targets. It was conservative bloggers who led the attack on Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence when she went on a hunger strike in Ottawa in late 2012 to early 2013 that was heavily publicized in the mainstream media. Conservative bloggers have been able to push the reach of Sun News by posting links to its website and by featuring its videos. Some conservative bloggers have also hyped Harper’s 24 Seven video posts. And they’ve launched some very nasty personal attacks against journalists.
Commenters on these blogs can post material that’s even nastier than the blog posts themselves, although the court’s decision in Warman’s case against Free Dominion has probably curbed the worst of it. (The libels in that case were, for the most part, in comments posted about Warman by anonymous writers.) These “ordinary Canadians” can seem to have far more credibility than actors in government ads. They seem especially real when they’re voices coming over the radio. Harper’s operatives prepared questions for grassroots supporters who called into open-line shows, some of which, like The Lowell Green Show in Ottawa, are among the highest-rated programs on local radio. All people who were willing to shill for the Tories needed to do was go to the party website and type in their postal code. They would get a list of talk shows and advice on what to say on given topics.21
For those who like to see who’s talking—especially when it’s the prime minister—the Harper team has developed a strategy of making sure the image of the leader is carefully crafted and easily accessible. And they need their man to look good. Harper has hired, at public expense, a manager of visual communications and a manager of new media and marketing. He also has an image consultant who picks out his clothes, styles his hair and does his makeup.22
IN MAY 2009, Governor General Michaëlle Jean made a well-publicized tour of the Canadian Arctic. At one Inuit village, the local people served up a feast of northern delicacies including raw seal heart. Most people would be squeamish, but Jean not only ate the seal heart but also even seemed to enjoy it. (The author, having eaten seal meat with far less pleasure, gives Her Excellency a tip of the hat.) Four months later, Harper and several of his cabinet ministers did their own tour. And, again, seal was on the menu (seal meat this time, not heart). Jean had eaten her seal with newspaper photographers and videographers in tow, but Harper’s handlers barred all media. The Prime Minister’s Office distributed a photograph showing Harper and the ministers holding toothpicks. No reporters or photographers actually watched them eat the seal. No one could really be sure they did it, or if they (like the author) found seal to taste wretched to the untrained palate. The Canadian Press wire service filed an official complaint, and, a few months later, the Canadian Association of Journalists expressed its concern in a letter to Harper: “It’s getting tougher to find an independent eye recording history, a witness seeing things how they really happened—not how politicians wish they’d happened.”23
The Tories had already learned the hard way that pictures can be politically lethal. There’s always the old story of Robert Stanfield, then Progressive Conservative leader, who playfully played catch with reporters in 1974 while cameras clicked. Stanfield was an intelligent and athletic man, and he caught and threw the football well, but the one picture that made the front page of newspapers was the shot of Stanfield fumbling the ball, with devastating consequences to a campaign that the Tories had been winning. There were the Harper in dude-ranch clothes shot from the Calgary Stampede and the Harper man-boobs shot that inspired Harper to never be photographed without a suit jacket. And, at the height of the KAIROS scandal, the Bev Oda as Roy Orbison shot, taken while the minister in charge of CIDA was having a smoke outside the Parliament Building.
The Tories began serious planning of their photo handout strategy after the 2004 election when party strategists realized visuals appeal to swing voters who don’t spend much time following politics and make up their minds about candidates based on the way they present themselves. Tory strategists, according to a party expert quoted anonymously by political scientist Alex Marland, became “obsessed” with the details of “photo backdrops, stage positioning, colors schemes and the leader’s clothing.” They picked out business suits that hid Harper’s waistline (which has fluctuated though the prime minister’s political career). They chose backdrops of Parliament, especially the big wooden doors in the foyer of the House of Commons. Canadian flags were brought into places where they’re normally not seen to generate a bit of national pride and to remind people that Harper leads the country.
There is a split between larger media, which rarely, if ever, uses Tory handouts (although in 2014 the Toronto Star did use a Liberal handout photograph on its front page of Justin Trudeau having coffee with Adam Vaughn before Vaughn announced he was running for the Liberals in a by-election to replace outgoing MP Olivia Chow). Some editors of small newspapers told Marland that they used the pictures because they are free, and they cannot afford pictures from Ottawa that come from news services that charge for pictures.24 In general, Marland found, Canadian media were more likely than their colleagues in Britain and the United States to use handouts (even though photographs and videos issued by heads of governments in larger countries tend to be better than the material made by the Harper Prime Minister’s Office). It will be interesting to see whether, as large media companies continue to face tough times, they will be more tempted by the free images.
But even if they aren’t, Marland notes in his study of the issue, the images still have some effect. Editors who see them, even for a moment, are part of the target audience. After seeing hundreds or thousands of the free photographs cross their desk or screen, the image of Harper in the minds of photo editors may be shaped by this propaganda. They may buy into the framing of Harper as a serious leader in a suit who plays guitar and piano and likes kittens. Eventually, they may expect their own photographers to deliver pictures of Harper that resemble the visual image that Harper’s team ties to create.
The photographs are also used on government web pages. Tory operatives make sure that government websites have plenty of pictures of the prime minister. One former government communications staffer tells a story of being called late at night by senior staff in the Prime Minister’s Office and ordered to remove pictures of hungry Haitian children on a Department of Foreign Affairs web page and replace them with photographs of Harper.
Internet video is likely the next frontier. Badly staged photo ops, like those of 24 Seven and Sun TV’s fake swearing-in of new Canadians (using employees of the citizenship ministry) don’t get much traction with the public: they’re obviously fake and they’re not quite bad enough to be funny. So far, only true believers and a few reporters spend much time watching the stuff. But, once they get better at it, the Tories hope to use their video propaganda campaign to link up with more potential donors and campaign foot soldiers.
Anyone who wanted to watch a live-stream video of the Aga Khan’s speech to Parliament had to fill out an online form that asked for their email address. Days before the respected religious leader addressed the House of Commons and a rally at Massey Hall in Toronto in March 2014, thousands of people received an email from Employment Minister Jason Kenney—who had done so much to build the party’s ethnic support when he was immigration minister—telling them that the Aga Khan’s speech would be broadcast on the Conservative-owned website stephenharper.ca.
A few days after the speech, everyone who had signed up to watch the Aga Khan got an email from the Conservatives asking the primarily Ismaili Muslim viewers for a donation. Immigration Minister Chris Alexander reminded the Aga Khan followers and fans that the speech was “a truly meaningful and unforgettable occasion.” Then came the pitch, which asked the email recipients to go back to the website to watch a Tory campaign-style video showing Harper and the Aga Khan talking together. “I encourage you to watch it and be moved by the important words of two great world leaders, Please feel free to share this opportunity with your friends and family, as well.”25
Those people can expect to hear back from the Harper team, who will want their donations, their vote, and a spot on the lawn for a sign. Propaganda and information-gathering is an essential part of modern retail politics. So is poisoning the wells of your enemies and, if need be, making sure their supporters stay away from the polls.