After months of election planning, we were all set to go—when Paul Martin visited Governor General Adrienne Clarkson on May 23, 2004, to ask that Parliament be dissolved for a June 28 election. Or at least we thought we were ready to go.
War room director Brian Topp, heading up the rapid response and media unit, had arrived about a week earlier to join the rest of the team. Topp, who had served in the same capacity during the 1997 campaign and worked on other provincial and municipal campaigns as well, brought bench strength to the campaign headquarters in Ottawa. Most of us in senior positions had never run a federal campaign, and Jack was about to head out on the hustings for the first time as ndp leader.
Jack had cold-called Topp a few months earlier after seeing him in a documentary about David Miller’s successful campaign for mayor of Toronto in November 2003. Topp, executive director of the Toronto branch of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists at the time, had served as one of Miller’s campaign advisors. Topp had spent from 1993 to 2000 in Saskatchewan, much of the time as ndp premier Roy Romanow’s deputy chief of staff. He had initially supported Bill Blaikie for ndp leader but switched to Jack after a call from Romanow caused him to reconsider. “I think you’re backing the wrong guy,” Romanow had told him. “The mayors in Saskatchewan are lining up behind this Layton guy.”
When Topp arrived in Ottawa, he was direct about his approach. His clarity of purpose represented a clean break with the past, and people appreciated it.
“Here’s how these days are going to unfold. We’re going to work hard. We’re going to hit them where it hurts. We’re going to support our own team. And we’re going to have a lot of fun. We’ll start our days at 6 am. Take fifteen minutes to review the papers and then pitch your best ideas for the day. The nightly news will be on at 11 pm. I’ll be watching it, and I expect not to be alone,” Topp told his rapid response team, a smart group that specialized in opposition research, an area beefed up under Jack’s leadership.
Next, Topp did the rounds with members of the senior campaign team, asking each of us a key question. He knew that the first question any effective campaign must be able to answer convincingly is: “What is this election all about?” You could tell a lot about how ready a team was by how sharp and consistent their answers to this question were.
Under campaign director Bruce Cox, our senior team had been meeting regularly for nearly a year. Sue Milling, from United Steelworkers, was our deputy campaign director. Her job was logistics, to make sure the trains ran on time. Chris Watson, ndp federal secretary (a position now known as national director), was in charge of assisting candidates with Elections Act compliance, and assistant federal secretary Éric Hébert-Daly handled the money. Heather Fraser was director of organization, overseeing the ground operations and candidate recruitment. My job was director of communications, which meant I was in charge of all printed materials, such as leaflets, lawn signs and buttons, as well as all websites and online campaign efforts. I was also in charge of managing the relationship with our ad and polling agencies. David Mackenzie, Jack’s interim chief of staff after he lost Rick Smith, was assigned to the campaign plane as the lead political advisor. Jamey Heath, also set to go out on tour, would be the key communications advisor there. Donne Flanagan, Gary Doer’s former director of communications who replaced Mackenzie as chief of staff, served in the war room and wrote speeches for Jack.
None of us could answer Topp’s vital question. We didn’t agree on what the campaign was about or who our main opponent was. Topp turned to Cox. “We have a fundamental problem here,” he said.
In the months leading up to the election call, the campaign working group had spent its time getting the logistics of the campaign in place and putting together a list of campaign commitments. Now, with the writ set to be dropped in a few days, we couldn’t answer the key question of what the election was about. We’d soon discover we hadn’t done a very good job of crafting the campaign commitments, either.
The Manitoba ndp had just come off a successful campaign, re-electing Gary Doer as premier with an even greater majority. Doer’s five-point plan in the 2003 campaign had played very well with voters, but despite objections from a few of us, many were convinced that our list of commitments needed to be exhaustive. Narrowing these down to a concise, memorable list of priorities was an exercise in discipline we weren’t ready for.
On the eve of the election, we had eight commitments, each with sub-points. Jack would later admit that even he couldn’t remember them all. It was a problem that would plague our campaign for the next five weeks: a campaign by committee tends to focus on satisfying internal interests, not appealing to voters.
This wasn’t an ideal situation for a party about to embark on the ndp’s most resource-rich campaign to date. In September 2003, we had put together a campaign budget of $8.8 million. We upped it to $11.6 million just before the writ was dropped. A significant chunk of that—$4.7 million—was earmarked for media, the biggest amount in party history. By contrast, the 2000 campaign ad media budget had been $1.8 million.
We had already spent an additional $700,000 on pre-election tv ads that ran in February and March. One English spot introduced Jack to Canadians; the other criticized Paul Martin. It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of pre-election ads, but we thought they were a crucial investment. The idea was to energize the base, impress the media and increase Jack’s profile. If anyone thought the ndp was down, we’d remind them otherwise.
The plan seemed to work. Just as the Conservative Party selected Stephen Harper as its first leader in March, the ndp hit 20 per cent in popular support in a Compass poll. That was more than twice what we’d earned in the 2000 election, and Jack’s goal had been to get to 20 per cent before his first federal campaign. So the benchmark was important to us.
The epc had identified that step one along our road to building the ndp as a national alternative was to reassemble the people who used to support us. In 1988, under Broadbent, the ndp had garnered 20.38 per cent of the popular vote (2,685,263 votes) to form the party’s largest-ever caucus, with forty-three members. We believed the selection of Harper as Conservative leader would help us win back our Western populist voter base: he was polarizing and was not well known in most of Canada. Then, in January, Broadbent jumped back into politics, winning the nomination as the ndp candidate for the Ottawa Centre riding. Just before getting ousted by Paul Martin the previous fall, Chrétien had appointed long-time loyalist and mp for the riding, Mac Harb, to the Senate. This opened up an opportunity for the ndp in the long-held Liberal riding, now being contested by Martin insider Richard Mahoney. Broadbent’s job was to bring home the ndp votes lost in Ottawa Centre and elsewhere over the previous fifteen years.
Armed with a poll commissioned by the party showing that Broadbent could win the downtown Ottawa riding, which included Parliament Hill, Jack began to lobby the former leader. Broadbent didn’t take much convincing, he says today, though he “hadn’t even thought of it” before Jack approached him. “There was a rebuilding going on. Having supported Jack in the leadership I felt I could carry that on. Besides, I could be competitive in the campaign, I could help Jack and I could walk to work to boot.”
The downward trajectory of Liberal support in all regions, and the Conservative-ndp fight in many places west of Ontario, meant opportunities for the ndp. Our internal polling from December 2003 showed that New Democrats under Jack had significant support all over the country. The campaign team opted to spread our ground resources accordingly. At the outset, in addition to our fourteen incumbents, we invested people, time and money in dozens of additional seats.
The Quebec riding of Manicouagan, where former leadership candidate Pierre Ducasse was carrying the ndp banner, made the list. Most of the campaign team knew that it was a long shot, but we needed targeted ridings in Quebec and this was likely the shortest of the long shots. In 2000, the ndp had received a paltry 2 per cent of the popular vote in the riding, matching the provincial average in Quebec. Under the leadership of McDonough, who had struggled in the French-language debate, the party had no ground game or money to spend on ads in the province. Instead, the party had mostly write-in candidates—known as “names on ballots” in English and “poteaux” in French.
Party activity had increased in Quebec during the last leadership race, so we had several credible candidates besides Ducasse lined up for the 2004 campaign. Still, the amount of resources devoted to the province was a testy issue for the campaign team. Some thought we should devote our resources to areas of traditional strength and work from there. Jack, Bruce Cox and I, among others, disagreed with that position. Jack, from very early on, had been convinced we needed to make a breakthrough in Quebec. He was born and raised there, and it was very important to him to try to tap into the province’s social democratic history. That’s why he’d continued to work so hard at improving his French with weekly tutoring sessions, despite his gruelling schedule. A quip from someone about Stephen Harper’s French had really stuck with him. “Harper’s French is better than my French,” Jack told us.
Low polling numbers in Quebec would keep the party down nationally and help make the case for strategic voting arguments, particularly in Toronto. I didn’t think we’d win a seat in Quebec in the 2004 campaign, but I knew we had to increase our votes there—and that meant spending time and money in the province. If we didn’t raise our support in areas of non-traditional strength, the three of us argued, then we wouldn’t regain the areas where we used to be strong. Quebec served as a proxy for that debate, and the leader prevailed.
It was showtime. By now, it was too late to address the basic problem that Topp had flagged. With no clear answer on what the campaign was about, every decision became a drawn-out debate without any grounding. What flowed from this process were poor decisions—or no decision at all.
Jack kicked off the campaign on Parliament Hill on May 23 flanked by local candidates Ed Broadbent and Monia Mazigh. Mazigh had worked tirelessly to free her husband, Maher Arar, from a Syrian prison after the U.S., in a case of extraordinary rendition, deported him there in September 2002 despite his Canadian citizenship. Alexa McDonough and the ndp had advocated for their cause, and over the years, Mazigh and McDonough had become close. McDonough, with the enthusiastic approval of Jack, had approached Mazigh to see if she would be interested in channelling her tenacity and energy as a Member of Parliament. After the launch, Jack promptly boarded the leader’s plane and headed to Vancouver’s Chinatown with Olivia to signal that the West held promise for the ndp. There, he announced our eight commitments.
It was the beginning of the party’s most ambitious tour on record. Additional resources, along with Jack’s high energy, meant we could go wherever the votes were, or might be. But the first week would also include a lot of self-inflicted wounds caused by an inexperienced team.
We were committed to learning from the mistakes of the 2000 election campaign, so we wanted to make sure both local campaigns and the media on tour had the necessary materials. These included a series of fact sheets that highlighted particular issues, summarized the failure of the Liberals and the other parties to address those issues, and outlined what the ndp would do to solve them. Eager to court the media and impress them with our preparations, the media team on the leader’s plane distributed all of the fact sheets at once, instead of giving them out day by day. That meant we’d effectively handed the media our platform in the opening hours of the campaign.
It was always going to be hard to get heat on our upcoming policy announcements, given that reporters like to file off-script, especially when covering a fourth party that doesn’t shape the debates. Now, our announcements were old news, and reporters were still looking to file copy. It wasn’t long before the devil found work for these idle hands. The next few days were a trifecta of trouble.
Jack released our platform in Toronto on Wednesday, May 26. The document, stick-handled by Franz Hartmann, was fiscally aggressive in outlining how we’d pay for our promises. Before the campaign launch, Brian Topp had asked to have a look at the platform. When Hartmann refused, Topp persisted. Soon Topp was told to let it go, part of a pattern of leaving internal conflicts unresolved. “I shouldn’t have backed off. I should have threatened to resign,” Topp told me years later, saying it was one of his biggest regrets in the campaign.
Topp’s concerns were warranted. Among other things, the platform called for an inheritance tax, as had the ndp’s platforms in 1997 and 2000. In those earlier campaigns, the proposal hadn’t generated any trouble, likely because of the ndp’s irrelevant stature in the world of Canadian politics. This time, it was different, and the tax on the sale of a house following a person’s death became the central media story about our platform launch. We were finally getting coverage, but we’d handed our opponents a heavy stick to beat us with.
The inheritance tax hurt us everywhere but especially in urban markets, where we were hoping to make breakthroughs. ndp policy people could argue with anyone on the proposal’s merits: it was progressive because it affected only the top tier of the wealthiest homeowners in Canada. But all the public heard was that we were thwarting their ambition to build a better life for themselves and their children. And in cities like Vancouver and Toronto, where real estate values were very high, it wasn’t hard for middle-class homeowners to imagine a hefty tax bill for their children after their deaths. The reaction on the doorsteps in ridings across the country was so negative that the campaign would drop the policy from our platform a week before voting day.
The night of his platform launch in Toronto, Jack was scheduled to headline Olivia’s nomination meeting for the Trinity–Spadina riding at the historic Church of the Holy Trinity. The event had been purposefully left until then to create momentum for her local race. Jack was anxious that everything go well. In an attempt to calm things down, Karl Bélanger suggested that after Jack’s speech, he hold the post-nomination scrum outside the church. Jack was distracted, though, making it difficult to brief him, and he had a special connection to the place. The church did outreach with Toronto’s homeless community, and a plaque in the church square commemorated homeless people who had died on the streets.
During the scrum, a reporter picked up on a theme raised during Jack’s speech at Olivia’s nomination—Paul Martin’s cancellation of the federal social housing program—and asked whether Jack felt the prime minister was personally responsible for the deaths of homeless people. The question was an obvious trap, and Jack was experienced enough to avoid it. He didn’t. Flanked by Olivia and Marilyn Churley, the candidate in Beaches–East York, another ndp target riding in Toronto, he started ranting. Pressed again by the reporter, Jack agreed it would be fair to say Martin was personally responsible for deaths of homeless people because of federal cuts to affordable housing. “I believe that when Paul Martin cancelled affordable housing across this country, it produced a dramatic rise in homelessness and death due to homelessness, and I have always said that I hold him responsible for that,” Jack said. “He chose to give the money in tax cuts to his corporate friends, and I will not forgive him for that.”
Initially, Heath and Bélanger disagreed about how much damage had been done. At least people would be talking about the ndp campaign and thinking about homelessness, an issue on which only the ndp had credibility, Heath figured. But the reporting was brutal. Jack’s comments made front pages and the top of newscasts. News outlets held online polls asking whether he should apologize. Reporters started quizzing ndp mps on what they thought of Jack’s remarks, generating negative stories about unease and a split within the ranks. Some reporters even approached dial-a-quote political scientists to criticize the idea of personal responsibility in the arena of public policy. That’s when we knew the story wasn’t going away.
Our campaign’s first attempt to diffuse the homeless bomb, at a scrum in Montreal on Friday, May 28, didn’t go well. Jack understood that he had screwed up, but the reaction to his comments frazzled him. He knew there was a relationship between public policy decisions and people’s lives. The scrum with assembled reporters was cut short when a visibly upset Jack turned and headed to a waiting rcmp vehicle, where he climbed into the back seat and put his face in his hands, a move captured on camera. The media were dead silent as he walked away.
Since Jack hadn’t apologized explicitly, just tempered his language, the resulting headlines kept the story alive, with variations on “Layton Keeps Swinging at Homeless Issue” and “Layton Unwavering in Criticizing pm: ndp Leader Gets Dissident mps On Side.” It wouldn’t be until the following Tuesday, when Jack did two interviews with the cbc while in Vancouver, that our campaign was able to pivot from the issue. Even so, the resulting stories carried an unhelpful frame. The cbc’s Peter Mansbridge asked Jack if he believed Martin was a killer. “No, not at all,” Jack replied. “Martin Not a Killer of Homeless, Layton Says,” read the headline afterwards. Another, “Blame for Homeless Deaths Belongs to All Canadians, Layton Now Says,” played up Jack’s comment that blame should be shared “collectively” by “Canada as a whole.” He couldn’t relinquish the idea that government decisions have concrete effects on people’s lives. “The consequence of the action is we’ve had an explosion of homelessness, we’ve had more deaths in the street and Canadians want something done about that,” he had told the cbc. “I know the remark jarred some people, but you know, what jars me is that, in a country as rich as this, we have people dying in the streets.”
In her Ottawa Notebook in the Saturday, May 29, edition of the Globe and Mail, Jane Taber created a new “Super-Not-Hot” category for Jack that week, in addition to her usual “Hot” and “Not Hot” political players of the week. The campaign’s third misstep had occurred too late in the day on Friday to make it into Taber’s column, but it did hit the front page of the Saturday Globe under the headline, “Layton Would Axe Clarity Act.”
The campaign had made a point of going to Quebec during our first week out to signal to Quebecers—and the rest of the country—that Canada’s second-largest province mattered to Jack and the ndp. Jack hadn’t travelled with Pierre Ducasse to the remote community of Sept-Îles, Ducasse’s hometown, to talk about the Clarity Act, legislation passed by Parliament in 2000 that outlined some of the conditions by which a province might secede from Canada. But when a reporter asked him about the law during a scrum, he was knocked off message and gave a clunky answer: “If there was a proposal to withdraw it, I don’t believe that it contributed to the promotion of Canadian unity.’’ He also said he’d recognize a declaration of Quebec independence if sovereigntists there won a referendum.
The campaign moved quickly to try to contain the damage with a declaration from Jack on May 29. He clarified he would not push for Parliament to repeal the Clarity Act; the issue was not a priority, and he was only expressing a personal view. We got the headlines we needed—“Layton Backs Off Repeal of Clarity Act”—but our opponents made sure the story didn’t die there. The Liberals trotted out Stéphane Dion, who had introduced the Clarity Act when he was intergovernmental affairs minister. “A lot of [Layton’s] mps in his caucus must be very embarrassed,’’ Dion told reporters. “The mystery to me is how come a committed Canadian like Mr. Layton is so irresponsible and ambiguous and confused about the unity of his country.”
Reporters also asked Bill Blaikie and Ed Broadbent about Jack’s comments. Both were astute politicians, and they knew they couldn’t dodge the issue. “It was difficult,” Blaikie says now. “The last thing you want to do is disagree with your leader in the middle of the campaign. When the media phoned me and said, ‘Jack Layton just said that he would repeal the Clarity Act. What do you think of that?’ I wouldn’t agree with that.”
Broadbent also answered the best way he could, telling reporters that Jack “gave his personal view that he thought [the act] was a bad idea. He took the same position as Mr. Lapierre.” It was a clever pivot to refer to Paul Martin’s Quebec lieutenant, nationalist Jean Lapierre, who had said publicly he considered the Clarity Act “useless.” But Broadbent also had to state the obvious. “My own position is that I support the Clarity Act. I appeared before the committee as an expert witness.’’
“Our party has had discussions of this issue over the years. I’m sure that will continue, but let’s hope that in fact what we can do is look forward to the building process of a flexible and cooperative federalism,” Jack told reporters in the northern Ontario town of Timmins, where he had hoped to talk about something else. “It’s a debate really from the past because what we’re all agreed on is we want to build for the future and build that positive relationship with Quebecers.”
These three incidents, all occurring within a day of each other during the first week out on the hustings, came to define the ndp campaign. This rocky start also caused an already uneasy relationship between headquarters and the tour to worsen.
Federal campaigns are huge undertakings, and the most important relationship in a campaign is the one between the central campaign office and the team on tour. The conditions under which each operates are unique, and the perspectives are very different. If you are part of the leader’s tour, you see a completely different campaign than you do from headquarters in Ottawa. The team on the plane deal with the travelling media all day and spend most of their time in the air and in hotels. Their day is made up of logistical considerations. Staff in headquarters feed the plane daily and see none of that. They are consumed with the messaging and coverage of the campaign. These two entities must work in lockstep, or there’s trouble. There must also be absolute mutual trust.
If you lose that trust, your entire campaign can break down. The plane can “go rogue,” meaning the tour team begins to rewrite speeches and press releases. And that’s what started to happen during the 2004 campaign. The plane began to improvise. Sometimes, it was because they were operating in a vacuum. Other times, they disagreed with headquarters.
The fourth party in Parliament doesn’t get onto the front pages of newspapers with innovative policy ideas. You do get coverage if you screw up or say something outrageous. So the balance is tricky to achieve. After our horrendous start, we kept trying for coverage, but we often failed. The fourth party talking about the dangers of private health care or the need for investment in infrastructure hardly merits a news story when the governing party and the one nipping at its heels in the polls release key planks and bicker back and forth about the issue of the day. One headline captured the situation: “Layton Drops from Radar.”
That dynamic played out until debate week, the fourth week of the campaign. This would be Jack’s opportunity to stand alongside the prime minister and the Official Opposition leader and get noticed. Our debate prep, though, became a microcosm of the troubles of the campaign: no one was really in charge. Ron Johnson from now Communications was pegged as the lead, and Franz Hartmann also had a major presence, drilling details into Jack about every policy area that might come up. But the prep sessions involved too many people with too many opinions, many of them ineffective. During one session, Jacques Thériault, a communications staffer from Quebec, left the room crying. That’s how well things were going. We did all agree on style, though. The other leaders would have an interest in pushing Jack out of the debate, so our plan was simple: don’t let them. Fight to get in and be noticed. Our mantra, invisibility is death, applied in spades here.
In the French-language debate on June 13 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, Jack held his own with his populist French, clearly the best of any ndp leader since the party’s founding in 1961. This was an important introduction for Jack to French-speaking Canadians, and he used the opportunity to tie the policies of the ndp in with the progressive impulses of Quebecers. At this stage in the campaign, the Bloc was surging, and we were a mere blip on the radar. The debate didn’t put much of a dent in that dynamic.
It was vital for Jack to make a good first impression in French, but it was a dress rehearsal of sorts for the bigger audience the next night in the English-language debate.
Just before showtime, Olivia, in Ottawa to support her husband, handed Jack a water bottle with a little whisky in it. Backstage, he took a sip for courage. This was the biggest night of his political career, and he was nervous.
Once the debate got underway, Jack stuck with the plan. Paul Martin came up with a good line meant to cut him down. “Did your handlers tell you to not stop talking?” he asked Jack. It was a cutting rebuke, but Jack had little choice. If he stood by passively and didn’t interrupt, he would be invisible. Engage too much, and he would look overeager. It was the classic fourth-party conundrum.
There was another dynamic at play during the debate that didn’t help. Unbeknownst to any of us, Donne Flanagan and Jack had cooked up a signal system. Jack would leave his BlackBerry on so that it would vibrate on his hip every time Flanagan sent a message to remind him to smile. Jack’s smiling persona was in contrast to that of Harper and Martin, so he wanted to use that to his advantage. The problem, of course, was that many people across Canada had Jack’s pin, which makes your device vibrate when someone sends you a note. Messages kept coming in from all over the country, and Jack’s BlackBerry buzzed throughout the debate. Jack thought it was Flanagan telling him to smile more. He followed the directive and smiled way too much. According to a Compass poll released June 16 on the public perception of the leaders’ performances, Jack had come third in the English debate and dead last in the French-language debate. This was not the boost we’d been hoping the debates would give our less-than-inspired campaign heading into the final stretch. The endgame had arrived, and we weren’t feeling confident.
In any campaign, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when an election is either won or lost, because there are so many variables. But there are events that are turning points. During the 2004 campaign, something that would change the race dramatically occurred on June 18. It became a lesson the ndp war room would never forget.
We weren’t riding any momentum by June 18, but we were still holding steady. The Liberals were floundering, and the Conservatives were seeing an uptick in support. Trying to build on that, the Conservative war room issued two press releases, one headlined “Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography?” and the other “The ndp Caucus Supports Child Pornography?” The Conservatives were referring to a debate in Parliament in which the other parties had opposed Tory proposals to close a loophole exempting some art from anti-pornography legislation on the grounds of “artistic merit.” Our position, and that of the other parties, was that judges could distinguish between nude angels in ecclesiastical art, for example, and images of sexual assaults on children.
Stephen Harper, blindsided by his war room’s charge, quickly convened a conference call with his advisors. Harper decided against apologizing and went on the offensive instead. But the explosive charge against his opponents hurt his party. The Conservative momentum stalled.
This wasn’t the first bozo moment for the Tories. Earlier in the campaign, the party’s official languages critic, Scott Reid, had questioned bilingualism. Ontario Conservative mp Cheryl Gallant had compared abortion to beheading, and a video of B.C. Conservative mp Randy White had surfaced in which he talked about wanting to restrict the Charter. The child porn screw-up, on the heels of these other missteps, reinforced people’s discomfort with the new party’s perceived radical edge on social policy. It was a cumulative effect that finally seemed to affect the Conservative numbers.
More lucky than smart, the Liberals pounced, and the tide began to turn. They’d always planned that their endgame message would be to tell ndp voters they needed to rally around the Liberals to make sure Harper was defeated. This turn of events fit perfectly into that narrative.
During the final week of the campaign, Paul Martin, the country’s most conservative Liberal prime minister in history—he initially opposed gay marriage, supported his pro-life mps and slashed social spending in favour of huge corporate tax cuts—went from riding to riding repeating his disingenuous endgame stump speech. “There are differences between ourselves and the ndp, and we shouldn’t try to hide them, but we share the same values. They spring from the same well. In an election race as close as this one... with the stakes as high as they are, the simple fact is that a vote for the ndp on Monday could very well make Stephen Harper prime minister on Tuesday.”
Martin’s claim was not only desperate but also untrue. In fact, his plea would help to elect more Conservative mps, because the Liberal Party had little chance of winning many seats west of the Ontario-Manitoba border. But try to convince the media establishment of that, let alone voters.
Our senior team hadn’t settled on the best way to combat strategic voting, and ten days before election day, we landed on a compromised message: the ndp was looking for a central role in Parliament. We sharpened that message as we entered the last week: Jack wants a minority Parliament and wants to hold the balance of power. But that didn’t address the basic argument the Liberal campaign was peddling, that ndp voters must vote Liberal to stop the Conservatives. All we could say was “that’s not true” when faced, over and over again, with Martin’s claim that the Liberals and the ndp sprang from the same well. We had not thought through the third period of the campaign, and it hurt us badly. What we were learning would inform how we approached the issue during the next federal campaign and throughout the rest of Jack’s leadership. But first, we had to get through election night on June 28, 2004.
When Jack stepped onstage that evening, the numbers indicated the ndp would hold the balance of power in a minority Liberal government. His speech was framed around this projection. Reporters filed their stories and headed to the bars.
Jack’s press secretary, Karl Bélanger, and some other staff and party activists had gathered back at the hotel for a few drinks. The tv was on, and Karl was watching the numbers roll in from B.C. They kept going down. At twenty seats, Bélanger punched the screen. “We just lost the balance of power,” he muttered.
A few floors up, in my hotel room, I was watching the final results from tight races out west between the Tories and the ndp. Earlier in the evening, there were as many as 26 seats in which we had won or were leading. It was now early morning, and it seemed every few minutes another ndp seat moved over to the Conservative column. I thought if I shut the tv off, maybe our slide would stop. It did. At 19 seats. The Liberals had won 135 seats, the Conservatives 99 and the Bloc Québécois 54, with 1 independent elected as well. We’d fallen 2 seats short of holding the balance of power in a minority Parliament.
In the end, the ndp received 2.1 million votes and nearly doubled its share of the national vote, capturing 16 per cent of the popular vote. Yet, despite this strong growth, the party had gained only five new seats. We lost both our seats in Saskatchewan, and Olivia Chow lost in the Trinity–Spadina riding. Despite Jack’s pitch to urban voters, we had failed to win a batch of urban seats. Other than Jack’s own seat in Toronto–Danforth, the pickups were largely traditional ndp seats from the industrial heartland or rural Canada: Hamilton, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins and northwestern B.C.
Jack had insisted that we ensure Olivia’s campaign had everything it needed for her to win. We had. So what had gone wrong? Every riding has its own distinct characteristics, so what happened in Trinity–Spadina during the 2004 election helps to explain, in part, what happened right across Canada.
Internal polling at the start of the 2004 campaign had Olivia ahead with a nineteen-point lead: 48 per cent for her and 29 per cent for Liberal incumbent Tony Ianno. The news came as a relief. But then we got overconfident.
Jack, recognizing that Olivia would be an asset for other ndp candidates running in ridings with large Chinese-Canadian communities, directed the campaign to put together a “B” tour that would take her around the country. We had a full-time staffperson dedicated to coordinating her events. In the ndp, it was common to establish “B” tours for surrogates—political stars who can raise the profiles of candidates or stand in their place—but it was unprecedented to send a yet-to-be-elected candidate on the road when she was in a tough local fight of her own at home.
By week four, the race was tightening. With ten days to go, internal polling had Olivia holding at 48 per cent, but Ianno had inched up to 35 per cent. The Liberals were following a two-pronged strategy in an effort to close the gap. The first was to persuade Olivia’s supporters that if they sent her to Ottawa, they would lose a great city councillor. Like other city councillors who ran for federal office in the 2004 campaign, Olivia had not stepped down from her civic seat. Ethics officials at city hall had informed her in writing that there were no problems with her running for Member of Parliament while sitting as a councillor. But even though she was perfectly within the guidelines, we had left ourselves open to the Liberal gambit.
The second tactic was strategic voting. The line being peddled was, “only the Liberals can defeat the Conservatives in this riding, so you must vote for us.” In Trinity–Spadina and across the country, the argument worked by demonizing Harper, downplaying the chances of the ndp winning and blurring the policy lines between them and us.
On the weekend before election day, canvassing on Bloor Street, Olivia knew something was up. People wouldn’t look her in the eye. Her heart sank, because she sensed what it meant. That Monday, Liberal mp Ianno bested Olivia 23,202 votes to 22,397; the Conservative candidate received just 4,605 votes.
Jack had known that strategic voting was a challenge for us across the country, but seeing it play out in Olivia’s riding had made it personal. He was devastated by the loss. The couple were supposed to be heading to Ottawa together. On Tuesday morning, as Jack and Jamey Heath were on their way to the Toronto airport for their flight to Ottawa, it was all he could talk about. He committed right there to focussing our time and resources on finding ways to combat strategic voting—in Trinity–Spadina and across the country. “I want a full debrief on why we lost, and I want a plan on how we win it next time,” Jack told Heath.
To be effective, we would have to do two things: show that the ndp had the strength to beat the Conservatives and shine a light on the differences between us and the Liberals. During the 2004 campaign, we had failed at both.
Winning only nineteen seats in the election was devastating. Our publicly stated goal had been to capture more than 20 per cent of the vote and beat Broadbent’s record of forty-three seats. We fell well short. The 2004 results were a kick to the groin—and that was exactly what we needed. Our campaign team had made a lot of mistakes, and we committed to learn from every one of them.
Internally, we had two problems going into the 2004 election. First, those with the titular authority hadn’t actually been in charge. Campaigns are not democracies, we’d been reminded. You do need to hunt and gather, but then you need to reach a decision point.
Second, we’d had a fundamental disagreement over what the campaign should be about. Members of the senior team were not like-minded, and we’d been thrown together for the first time, making it harder for the group to gel. But identifying your opponent is perhaps the most important thing to do in a multi-party campaign, and we’d failed in that respect. Our message was too complicated for voters.
Analyzing the campaign showed us we’d spread our resources too thin on the ground, encouraged by poll numbers taken before the campaign that suggested we could win in ridings all over the country. We didn’t have the air war figured out, and our missteps throughout the campaign had us drowning in crisis management that knocked us off message. Our platform, too unfocussed and too expensive, had been more about satisfying internal interests than about appealing to voters. And in the absence of a compelling message, both the leader and the campaign were forced to improvise, staying one day ahead of events, if that. As Brian Topp put it, “The first two-thirds of the campaign were self-sabotage.”
Still, in the post-campaign debrief, we found three reasons to be optimistic. We had increased our vote count by 1 million; we’d come in second in fifty-one ridings; and we had lost eleven seats by fewer than a thousand votes, giving us leads for growth in the next campaign.
We were facing a more immediate opportunity, too. For the first time since 1979, Canada had a minority Parliament. And although the ndp did not hold the clear balance of power, we did have a chance to steer the direction in Parliament and get things done. If we managed that, our mps would not only be fulfilling their duties as parliamentarians, but we would be giving our leader and candidates in the next election something that very few opposition parties have: a record of accomplishment. The question was, could Jack pull it off?