Looking For A Coherent Message To Happen

How To Sell Policy Properly

How many people could accurately describe what a political leader believes, solely based on things that leader has explicitly committed the party to?

We know that political engagement is not enduringly high outside of crises and national campaigns. This Ontario campaign we’re all stuck living through has been remarkably uninspiring and is going to be very bad for turnout, because nobody cares. And part of the reason that’s true is politics on the progressive left can be rather ineffectual if you don’t prioritize the whole of the message and only focus on the specific policies.

Most policies take immense amounts of repetition to enter the mass public consciousness, but in a campaign you might get a few ideas that break through the haze. What happens to all the policy areas that don’t, however, get filled in by the voters themselves. Take Doug Ford’s quote that home invaders who kill people should be sent to the electric chair as an example - as far as I’m aware this is the first official confirmation Ford is pro-death penalty. It’s also the least surprising news of all time, and if you had asked me what Doug Ford thought of the death penalty before that quote I would have confidently said he was pro despite no proof.

We draw inferences based on the stuff we do know. In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour didn’t run on increasing welfare spending - there was no meaningful increase to the Department of Work and Pensions budget in that manifesto - but because Corbyn was a left-Labourite with impeccable credentials on opposing welfare cuts, Labour voters when asked in vox pops and focus groups said increasing welfare was a Labour policy, because they just assumed it was.

In the same way, take this Ford death penalty comment. Nobody was surprised by it, because that’s who Ford is, for good or for ill. I don’t know the answer to this, but I feel quite confident that, say, Nate Erskine-Smith, who is a vegan resident of the fucking Beaches, probably does not share Doug’s enthusiasm for Sparky. Do I know that, or have any proof? No, but I know I’m right anyways. And that’s how the vast majority of voters think - they get a sense of the leader and fill in the gaps.

One of the problems the Ontario Liberals have faced is an utter lack of coherent policy vision. There is no clear answer to who Bonnie Crombie is, because from answer to answer her approach changes. There is no core ideology, and no core explanation for why she holds the views that she does. It’s just aimless, a transit announcement on a Monday and a whatever else on a Tuesday that don’t fit together in a clear or obvious way.

One of the obvious priorities for the party has to be rejuvenating the party’s standing with young voters. There’s a lot of good ideas out there on policies that will help young voters, but Steven Del Duca had a lot of good ideas that didn’t have any connective tissue between them too and it didn’t do shit. Instead of just having a day of Youth announcements that can be written up and then forgotten about, use your broader policy agenda to address the issues in multifaceted ways.

Nate Erskine-Smith has been making announcements around housing policy in the weeks since he took this job, and they’re good announcements that we should push (and have the PM show up to to get media coverage). In them, he talks about the need for more density near transit, but we need to be framing that not just as a housing solution but as a solution to the crises of loneliness and disconnection. By explicitly talking about more density or more mixed-use development - say, housing units on top of a ground floor pub or bar or restaurants - as a way of solving these problems in addition to lowering prices you can appeal to the concerns of young voters.

If we’re looking at a pivot back to the centre on public safety and crime issues, use that as a way of showing our concern for young women by talking about the need to make transit safer. Instead of some patronizing announcement to show we’re good feminists, use a good public policy issue that actually matters to voters as an opportunity to also do a bit of politics. Young women are likelier to be harassed on public transport and are likelier to feel like they have to take cabs or Ubers home than transit, and we can solve policy issues and a political problem all at once in a way that moves us beyond the culture wars.

Take climate policy, where Mark Carney softlaunched an incentives-based approach in a video today. Something like the Youth Climate Corps makes a ton of sense in that framework, a voluntary way of achieving good outcomes that can also work to provide young people good paying jobs at a time of high youth unemployment. It also strengthens a more small-c conservative sense of environmental policy, instead of focusing on governmental dictates to be more focused on restoring ecosystems, planting more trees, and concrete efforts that will be seen in communities. The problem with the carbon tax is that while it does change behaviour, it isn’t seen to change behaviour, because people don’t believe it works. A series of highly visible community based projects will be seen to be effective, and provide a great base for youth needing work or those in a waiting period deciding on their futures. And it works with the idea that we are trying to lower emissions through a carrot, and not a stick, approach.

Student loans and tuition are not the political football that they are down in the States, but if we want to engender more national pride there are lots of ways we can help that cause through Federal post-secondary action. Expanded federal bursaries and loan eligibility for STEM and other in demand programs would be a great way to encourage more people into useful professions (and less into jackassery like Poli Sci, of which I’m guilty). Converting student loan repayments into a graduate tax model, where you only repay your debt once you start making over a minimum income threshold (say, when you enter the second tax bracket) would similarly help a lot of people who aren’t yet making the big bucks that their degree will hopefully lead to. Those are good ideas on their own merits, but there’s also more.

Other ideas in the post-secondary realm could include making it cheaper for students to leave their home provinces. Plenty of people who would love to experience a different part of Canada stay at home because of cost. If we want to engender more loyalty east to west, then Federal bursaries for students studying out of province could be an answer. It would make it easier for people to see other parts of the country, be more connected to the rest of Canada, make friendships that can make this vast country a bit smaller, and make us all feel closer, if only by mutuals, to people everywhere. If you live in Toronto, went to school in Toronto, and most of the people you know from school live in Toronto, your circle is very Toronto. If you’re from Toronto and went to UBC or St. FX, and you know Albertans and Newfoundlanders and Quebecers too, you’re more likely to visit St. John’s or Montreal or wherever to see those friends, as opposed to jetting off to Florida or Havana.

These are a bunch of nominally unrelated policies - transit safety, student loans, housing, youth climate corps - that are tied together through a sense of “appealing to youth”, sure, but they also fit together with the broader policy ambitions of the government. They’re easy to sell components of a broader, more coherent message, as opposed to sticking out like a sore thumb as tacky giveaways to the young to buy their votes.

What we need is a revival of a coherent Liberalism in this country. It is too often about ticking boxes and not making sure the message works together. If Carney wants to avoid the mistakes of Crombie he needs to ensure the message is as coherent as the policy agenda. If not he’ll suffer her fate.

Bonus Poll Analysis: Angus Reid Enters The Chat

There’s reasons to be sceptical of Angus Reid’s poll, namely that they’ve gone to just naming Carney as the Liberal leader, but it’s still a 10% swing since their late January poll that had him down 13%. My model, updated for Nanos and this Angus Reid poll, has the Liberals at 136 seats and the Tories at 160. (For those wondering why I include the Angus Reid Carney question but none of the other Carney questions, the answer’s simple - I included the last Angus Reid Carney poll so I’m not going to exclude this one solely because it’s good for the Liberals.)

I still maintain there is some amount of honeymoon in these polls for the Liberals, and the fact that David Coletto still isn’t seeing a huge swing worries me endlessly. But even if you think the Liberals lose 50 seats from their peak, their peak being 136 and not 100 matters. The Liberals will virtually certainly survive the next election as a fighting force. That wasn’t guaranteed, hell that wasn’t even likely, two months ago. This is a huge victory - and one that many people need to answer for fighting against for months.