Campaign Artistry
Uncertainty hung in the morning autumn air around Parliament Hill. Converging toward the Gothic Revival splendour of the West Block, 210 members of Parliament, most elected for the first time, some forty of them now Cabinet ministers, gathered in the cavernous Room 200.
Seeming confident and unsure in about equal measure, they introduced themselves to each other, all the while glancing around, looking for someone more important. The rising din of nervous chatter added to the morning’s heady excitement, reminding some of a first day back at school. When they heard cheers erupting from the long entrance corridor, the MPs began crowding into the rows of green leather chairs, keen as theatre-goers to get the best available seat, straining for a sightline to witness the arrival of the most famous of them all, the 211th member of Canada’s Thirty-Third Parliament, the first among equals, the new prime minister.
Exuding smooth confidence, Brian Mulroney made his ceremonial entrance, floating into Parliament Hill’s largest meeting room upon a cushion of sustained clapping and cheers. He relished his slow progression up the centre aisle amidst his caucus multitude, shaking this hand, touching that elbow, pointing with acknowledging smile to someone, whether real or virtual, further away. Mulroney rode the unrelenting tide of lusty emotion. Cheers morphed into a mantra-like rhythmic chant: “Bri-an! Bri-an! Bri-an!”
The MPs were replicating what they’d witnessed only weeks before in their far-flung ridings, when thronging supporters had transformed the leader’s campaign visit into a ritual of celebrity adulation. Although this morning’s jubilation was spontaneous, it was equally a manifestation of an artful campaigner’s shrewd calibration. In achieving this feisty spirit, Mulroney was melding even this huge and diverse Tory caucus into single-minded group, and extracting from it a unified emotional response.
Other leaders might have arrived on time, walked to their place, merely smiling, or waving, or nodding a brief acknowledgement before taking their seat to conclude the standing ovation. Not this prime minister. A master at milking maximum effect from an anticipated appearance, Mulroney stood, soaking it all in, before finally taking his place at the front table, flanked by a half-dozen prominent Progressive Conservative personalities who’d been waiting, despite their venerable seniority, like primed altar boys. He continued standing, prolonging the ovation, pointing to individuals, smiling and waving, radiating companionable warmth.
At last, with his signal nod, everyone sat down. A chairman began speaking. Some MPs fumbled to plug in unfamiliar earpieces for simultaneous translation. Most just drank in the raw immediacy of a scene they still could not believe themselves part of. The chamber’s high, vaulted ceiling and its walls bearing oversized foggy mirrors only heightened their dreamy sense of occupying a front-row seat for history in the making.
Like at an orchestrated stadium concert, several performers had warm-up roles, to pump the atmosphere before the star himself would rock them all. One of those was Norman Atkins. Heavy-set, like a cop, with brown hair cut trim and brown shoes polished to glistening, he seemed strangely shy. The man’s awkwardness appeared to telegraph a thought that, perhaps, he should not even be taking this role in these Parliament Hill proceedings.
As he reached the podium, Atkins pulled nervously at the microphone. It emitted a loud scrunching noise that required no translation. The little smile he managed, while making a hasty glance at the wall-to-wall assembly of MPs and senators, hinted that perhaps feelings of pride were beginning to overpower his nervousness, that he was even enjoying an adrenalin rush from this energy-emitting assembly.
“I’m here to tell you that we are all very lucky people,” he began.
For many caucus members who’d never heard or even seen the Progressive Conservative Party’s national campaign chairman before, the man’s voice seemed strange — thinner and higher than expected, given Atkins’s stolid appearance.
After a further look across the now hushed assembly, he elaborated, “We’re lucky because we have Canada’s most exceptional leader at the head of our party.”
Cheering erupted.
As Atkins continued, it became clear the man who’d assiduously built and painstakingly operated a state-of-the-art political “machine” for the 1984 election had a unique role at this first caucus meeting of the largest group of a party’s MPs ever elected in Canada.
Norman transformed the vast space of Room 200 into a hybrid venue, somewhere between a religious confessional, where closer truth is revealed, and a military debriefing room, where accounts are rendered after a tumultuous battlefield engagement. With quiet voice and matter-of-fact manner, he shifted the mood from sensational to secretive.
In the palpable silence, the Tory organizer selectively shared what had transpired in the election headquarters’ secret inner sanctum, “the war room” as insiders called it. He spoke in the flat tone of a sincere man spilling secrets. To this audience of zealous believers, Atkins imparted no mere report on campaign details but, rather, a revelation of true character.
“You all need to know,” he said, “just how strenuous were the demands I, as national campaign chairman, and others on the team placed, day after day, week after week, on this man who’s now been overwhelmingly elected prime minister of Canada. I’ve been in this business a long time, a very long time, and I’ve never seen anyone come close to his level of dedication, energy, and leadership performance.”
All eyes turned to drink in a new view of Brian Mulroney, sitting neat and erect. The communion was complete as he humbly soaked up the homage, looking down at his hands.
Atkins had artfully turned the spotlight onto the star himself, and the prime minister innately knew how to bathe in such illumination.
Building from this solemn moment of respect and insight, the campaign chairman described how the leader delivered flawlessly, and without cessation, throughout the unrelenting schedule of an intense campaign — whether addressing pulsating crowds, answering hostile journalists, or making a stream of flawless television commercials in French and in English.
“Did he need a break? No, Brian Mulroney just kept going. He was focused, determined, and inexhaustible.”
Winding up his cameo performance, Atkins made the essential connection: the leader had campaigned with such stamina, skill, and polish that the result was the largest landslide victory in Canada, ever.
Cheering and applause enwrapped self-effacing Norman Kempton Atkins, chief engineer of the big blue machine, as he quietly resumed his seat, looking relieved. The astute backroom organizer had directed everyone’s attention away from his campaign machinery to the leader.
Others of power and influence came to the microphone for brief performances at this opening caucus concert, which culminated at last in a galvanizing, humorous, and moving performance by the prime minister himself, Brian Mulroney addressing the most receptive audience of his entire life.
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Everyone in this triumphant Progressive Conservative caucus understood that a new chapter in the country’s political history was beginning.
Some recent recruits, especially those from Quebec, last-minute candidates stunned to find themselves in Ottawa as MPs, were wide-eyed learners. Surrounding and amongst them were legendary Canadian political figures, prominent characters from prior chapters of national public affairs. Here was George Hees, there Flora MacDonald and Erik Nielsen, and over there, Marcel Masse, Jacques Flynn, and even Joe Clark.
“Who is George Hees?” one puzzled newcomer asked an MP beside her, after his name had been mentioned. Venerable party personalities were strangers to many of these fresh, young Tory MPs, as, indeed, was the history of the PC Party itself, the brand under which they’d come to public office. If neophytes seemed perplexed, others in Room 200, long-time Tories who knew all too well the personalities and plights of their party’s past, felt triumphal vindication. They’d soldiered on for years — for many, most of their lifetimes — through bitter campaigns and dismal defeats to finally reach this pinnacle in triumph.
A quarter-century had passed since the previous record high in Canadian electoral politics, now exceeded, had been set in 1958, when the Progressive Conservatives led by John Diefenbaker claimed the greatest number of seats ever in the Commons. For that campaign, Norman Atkins’s brother-in-law, Dalton Camp, had worked harmoniously with Diefenbaker to fashion a stunning campaign that ousted the deeply entrenched Liberals. Both record-setting victories displayed an uncommon degree of campaign innovation, professionalism, and wily determination.
The landmark victories of 1958 and 1984 also shared, thanks to a behind-the-scenes connection linking Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins, if not a common paternity, certainly a lot of the same political DNA.
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Seven months later, Saturday Night magazine sought to make sense of the political tornado that had swept through Canada’s landscape and turned Ottawa upside down because, for many Canadians, having Tories in office running the country was an aberration. A front-cover feature by Ron Graham told about the campaign organization that brought these Progressive Conservatives to power, the so-called big blue machine, and profiled its chief engineer, Norman Atkins. When describing this powerhouse campaign organization and its greatest achievement, the long-running Progressive Conservative government in Ontario, by then in power for over four decades, Graham called the whole enterprise “the most successful democratic institution in the Western world.”
The claim struck humble Canadians as outlandish. Surely Graham didn’t mean the whole Western world, did he? Prideful Liberals recoiled from the notion anyone but their own beloved “Rainmaker,” Senator Keith Davey, could be Canada’s master campaign organizer. Brian Mulroney took umbrage over the magazine giving Atkins unfiltered accolades for his massive election victory. Readers would get the impression the PM’s success was the product of political puppetry, that he was on strings pulled by others. Emphasis on Norman diminished Brian’s own prowess as an accomplished campaign organizer — especially in Quebec, which had been key to the big win and where Mulroney himself, certainly not Atkins, made all the difference.
Mulroney had been around political backrooms himself and organized enough campaigns to know credit for victory goes to a team and never the leader alone. But the man’s instincts also made him want the backrooms of politics to stay that way — in the back and out of sight. Yes, he’d asked Atkins to be national campaign chairman, partly on the urging of Ontario’s powerful premier, Bill Davis, on whose support Mulroney depended in the seat-rich province, partly knowing himself the talented team that Norman had helped assemble across Canada when Robert Stanfield led the party and Dalton Camp was national PC president. If public credit was to go to backroom organizers at all, the PM felt it should be shared with the veteran campaigners who’d been with him through two leadership races and the Quebec section of the 1984 election. And beside these stalwart loyalists in his personal political base, Mulroney was also fully aware of his debt to the provincial Liberal organization of his friend Premier Robert Bourassa, which had given such a huge boost and helped him to win a majority of Quebec’s seats. Atkins could take no credit for that either. The national PC campaign that Norman organized in 1984 was more decentralized, at least in Quebec, than Ron Graham publicly credited.
These sentiments of modest Canadians, proud Liberals, and a sensitive prime minister were really beside the point, however, as were the unbelievable bungles of the Liberal campaign under John Turner that helped the Tories win. Even the brutal determinism of Canada’s outdated voting system, which translated the Progressive Conservative’s 50 percent support in popular vote nationwide into 75 percent of the Commons’ 282 seats, though significant, was not the main story.
What counted, and what political observer Ron Graham’s article, “The Unlikely Godfather,” about quiet Norman Atkins and the big blue machine sought to show, was the deeper story about Canadian elections: the importance of backroom strategy in setting the context for the public show, and the increasing primacy of those whose names did not appear on any ballots.
The big blue machine, a constantly evolving campaign juggernaut pioneered by Dalton Camp and continued by Norman Atkins, both of them assisted by many well-chosen allies across Canada for over four decades, had become so interwoven with the Progressive Conservative Party that it was often impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.