Tories are a PC, NDP are a Mac, Bloc’s a RIM. Are Liberals a Kodak?

• May 03, 2011

By Francis Moran

The morning after the election that wouldn’t change anything, the political landscape in Canada has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered.

The Conservative Party of Canada, led by prime minister Stephen Harper on his fifth stab at power, finally grabbed the brass ring, winning 167 seats and a decisive majority. That he did it with just a handful of seats in Québec defied all conventional wisdom that said Canada can’t be won without Quebec. Certainly, no Tory predecessor has managed to take the country with so few seats in Québec.

The Liberal Party of Canada, long nicknamed the Natural Governing Party for its historic hold on the broad political centre of the country, went down to its greatest defeat in history. First-time campaigner Michael Ignatieff, better known in Washington and London as a globe-trotting journalist and intellectual before returning to Canada several years ago, did what no Liberal Party leader, not even John Turner with his epic 1984 loss that yielded a scant 44 seats, has managed to do before — reduce the once-dominant Liberals to third-party status for the first time since Canada was born.

The Bloc Québécois, born as a protest party when the Meech Lake Accord failed to bring Québec into the Canadian constitution in 1987 and the dominant political force at the federal level in that province ever since, saw the wind go completely out of its sails. Decimated across the only province where it runs candidates, it was reduced to a mere four-seat sump that will see it lose both its leader, Gilles Duceppe, and its official party status in the Canadian House of Commons.

Finally, the New Democratic Party, perennially the third party or worse in Canada, achieved an historic triumph by winning 102 seats and becoming the official opposition. Leader Jack Layton built on his ever-growing success over the past several elections but nobody, least of all Layton, expected a seat haul as impressive as this one.

The results show a growing polarisation between right and left in Canada that may become the established political narrative in this country for some time to come.

The results and the campaigns that produced them also showed sharp divides between several competing marketing philosophies, with lessons to be learned for politicos and marketers alike.

In a modern social-media era where openness and engagement are supposed to be the watchwords of the day, the Harper Conservatives, with their obsessively managed campaign that sharply controlled the message and kept the leader almost hermetically sealed away from any but the most carefully vetted of voters, proved you can still win with a command-and-control messaging strategy. Further, their politics of fear and loathing, characterised by nasty attack ads that vilified Ignatieff, were devastatingly effective. In a continued environment of economic worry and doubt, they successfully portrayed themselves as the safe harbour, just like Microsoft or IBM.

On the other end of both the political and the marketing spectrum, the NDP ran an open and inclusive campaign that, emulating U.S. president Barack Obama’s 2008 race, put a premium on hope and aspiration even if the details of their platform were sketchy and the sums in their economic plans didn’t quite add up. Like Obama, a vote for “Smiling Jack,” as the Canadian media dubbed Layton, was a vote that said “Yes, we can,” at the same time as it said, “But we’re not entirely sure how.” In this approach, the NDP most resembled Apple — all the features may not be fully worked out but it’s a far better looking and hipper product than the competition.

The Bloc Québécois is like any company that has nowhere to go when the sharp point of differentiation on which it once galvanised its marketplace is now revealed as much less appealing than the more comprehensive feature set and more attractive design of the competition. Like RIM, which built its market dominance mainly on the one-note tune of superior security, the Bloc has found itself out of harmony with a marketplace looking for a more forward-thinking feature set.

And Ignatieff and his Liberals have learned that market dominance, even persistent and historic market dominance, will wither if you don’t offer up something new. In this campaign, Ignatieff was compelling on why Canadians should not vote for Harper but he was completely unpersuasive on why they should vote for him. With nothing new to offer, the Liberals have seen their market share erode like the Kodak of the early digital photography era. The biggest question is whether they, like Kodak, can resurrect themselves by taking the best of their historic dominance whilst evolving for the contemporary marketplace.

Postscript: This was to have been Canada’s first social media campaign. However, while social media channels were fully engaged with the election, I did not see the election fully engaged with social media channels. None of the parties made nearly the use of social media to the extent we saw in the U.S. 2008 election with most of them reverting to broadcast behaviour on what are supposed to be bidirectional channels.

One notably promising phenomenon was the effort by university students and other young people to use social media channels to encourage their peers to get out and vote. However, the full impact of this has yet to be analysed and, with voter turnout up a bare percentage point or two from the all-time low it hit in the last federal campaign, it may yet prove to have had little effect.