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When the Liberals moved non-confidence in the Harper Government, I was surprised that the NDP went along. Jack Layton was ailing, fighting prostate cancer and recovering from hip surgery. A campaign with a leader who looks tired or unwell does not often succeed. Examples that came to mind were Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and Ernie Eves in Ontario in 2003. Yet Jack Layton was willing to take the risk of a grueling national campaign.

Starting in the debates and continuing since, Layton has managed to project himself as engaged, self-confident, and regaining his health, despite the demands of a national campaign. Jack Layton’s personal story has come to reinforce, perhaps even to dominate the NDP’s policy narrative. In terms of our four-quadrant narratological analysis, the NDP campaign is staking out the upper-left quadrant, combining policies that it claims will benefit the country – more spending on popular programs like training doctors and nurses and improving public pensions – with Jack Layton’s story of personal renewal. Notice that his story isn’t about renewal by achieving an ambition but rather a much more elemental struggle of renewal against illness.

The latest NDP commercial – “you do have a choice” – blends the two narratives of policy and personal renewal very skillfully. It shifts from policy – “I will fund more doctors and nurses and strengthen your pension” – to personality: “you know I’m a fighter. And I won’t stop until the job is done.” Layton presents himself as a fighter, both for policies and for his own health. The ad runs 30 seconds, and Layton, in 12 different clips, is present the entire time. Layton has now become the NDP’s best asset, and the party is shrewdly putting him front and centre for the remainder of the campaign. I want to make clear that Layton isn’t eliciting sympathy or pity because he is ill, but rather that he is eliciting admiration because he is, or at least appears to be, overcoming his illness.

I titled this post “Teflon Jack’s Narrative,” because for the remainder of the campaign Layton will be Teflon. The Liberals and Conservatives will continue to attack his policies. But because his main adversary is his health, it would be unseemly to attack him personally. In contrast, the Conservatives’ constant attacks on Ignatieff have done considerable damage to his image, and the attacks on Harper at least some damage to his. Layton, personally, will be above the fray.

Layton’s powerful personal narrative is strengthening the NDP in the polls, and it may be very difficult for the Liberals (or Bloc in Quebec), by focusing on policy alone, to drive the NDP vote down to its historic level. While I’m not a pollster, it seems to me that the NDP is taking votes from the Liberals, Bloc, and Greens, rather than the Conservatives, in the Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Ontario.  In the west, however, the NDP may be taking votes from the Conservatives. Say that the Conservatives maintain their vote share at 35 percent, but the NDP gains a bigger share of the 65 percent who oppose the Conservatives. The ultimate beneficiary would be the Conservatives. With a deeply split left and centre-left, a majority government of the right might be a possibility.

If a Conservative majority is the outcome, on May 3 the Liberals, NDP, Greens, and at least some Bloc supporters, rather than denying Harper’s coalition accusations, might start to think about some sort of coalition, alliance, or even merger that would allow the majority of the population to regain power.

The tributes that have been paid Allan Blakeney have focused on his achievements as minister of health when the Douglas Government introduced comprehensive public health insurance and as premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982. Blakeney, however, had three careers, first as a public servant; then as a politician, serving as minister, MLA, Opposition Leader, Premier, and again as Opposition leader; and for the last two decades of his life as teacher and writer. The third career received the least attention in the Canadian Press obituary, only a short concluding paragraph. Since my relationship with Allan Blakeney was entirely within that third period, I will focus on it.

Blakeney and I met when he came to Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and wanted to teach a public administration course. I was already doing that at the Faculty of Administrative Studies (now Schulich School of Business), and we decided to combine our efforts. From our first conversations, it was clear to me that he had thought deeply about statecraft, the practice of government, at both the political and public service levels. In our preparations for each class, I would provide a set of questions and he would take them away, and come back with well-thought-out answers, written in clear, flowing hand writing – a marker of his generation – on a yellow legal pad.

I thought it was essential to preserve his ideas, and he came to agree, and so we had the classes taped and transcribed. This was the origin of our book Political Management in Canada. In it, Blakeney did something unique at the time, recounting how he managed his government and why he did it that way. Thus he took us inside the cabinet room, not to recount particular decisions, but to explain how his cabinet made decisions. In the years since our book, Jean Chretien, in My Years as Prime Minister (2008), and Eddie Goldenberg, in The Way it Works: Inside Ottawa (2006) have, to an extent, applied Blakeney’s approach to the Chretien Government. Students of government will benefit if other ministers and first ministers follow Blakeney’s lead.

I recently donated the audio tapes of our classes to the Saskatchewan Archives. The better to preserve Blakeney’s voice, I hope the Saskatchewan Archieves will digitize them.

The middle of a federal election campaign is an appropriate time to revisit Blakeney’s views on politics and policy. He titled his political memoirs An Honourable Calling because he believed politics IS an honourable calling. In this view, politicians regard one another as people of principle and integrity who differ over policy and base their campaigns on these differences in policy.

Discussing his electoral defeats in Political Management in Canada (p. 237), he wrote “Ideally an election defeat would be regarded as a rejection of one group of policies in favour of another, and there should be little sense of personal rejection. But if this was ever true, it isn’t now in today’s climate of personalized politics. … [the media] regard politics as a contest of salesmanship rather than a comparison of products. [Elections] are increasingly becoming contests of personalities rather than policies. Canadian politics is poorer for this.”

Blakeney was a strong advocate of public enterprise and critic of the privatization of the potash and uranium industries in Saskatchewan. He saw Crown corporations as making a social as well as economic contribution to the province. Thus, he supported SaskPower keeping its rates down for local curling rinks during the winter because “they were almost always the heart of village life in January” (Political Management in Canada, p. 138). This was a classic example of reducing the cost of living in rural areas.

Blakeney warned that if Crown corporations were privatized, the head office would de facto move outside Saskatchewan and senior management would be paid as private sector executives rather than as public servants.

And his view of public enterprise was part of a broader commitment to equality, a belief that society as a whole would be better off if the state helped those most in need and reallocated some of the wealth the economy produced.

At the end of An Honourable Calling (p. 250), he wrote: “Our challenge in the future will not be primarily to produce more goods, but rather to distribute the goods more fairly. … When governments have intervened to distribute education, health, and many other services at low or reduced cost, society has been better for it. .. A look around the world tells me that where able and active governments (and there are many) intervene on behalf of people with special needs or lower incomes, society works best.”

Blakeney’s views on political campaign, Crown corporations, and the distribution of income are certainly contested, and likely he was in the minority in all three areas. But Blakeney did not despair, and maintained to the very end both an optimism and willingness to advocate for his vision of Canada. Thus his advocacy after leaving office is just as much part of his legacy as the decisions he made while in power.

Earlier this week I was at former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney’s Toronto launch of his new book An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs, published by the University of Toronto Press. Blakeney and I were co-authors of an earlier book Political Management in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1998). Here are a few impressions from the evening.

Two of the guests were former Ontario Premier Bill Davis and Attorney-General Roy McMurtry. While Davis and McMurtry were and are Tories and Blakeney was and is a NDP’er, they were politicians during the same period, and were all deeply involved in the repatriation of the Canadian constitution in the early Eighties. This was clearly a significant life experience, and their mutual affection is far stronger than the differences in their political allegiances.

Rather than the traditional reading from his book, Blakeney and I continued the dialogue we initiated in Political Management in Canada. In Blakeney’s view, political campaigns should involve parties presenting their ideas in some detail, and providing opportunities for voters to meet the leader face-to-face and unscripted. We agreed that the American presidential primaries – particularly the early ones – live up to this ideal, but Blakeney decried the Canadian practice of leaders campaigning in a tightly-controlled cocoon, reciting a purposely vague message.

Looking back at Blakeney’s eleven years as premier (1971-1982), he was called upon to guide Saskatchewan’s transition from what the late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset called “agrarian socialism” to a resource rich economy. In this, Blakeney’s challenge was to balance three priorities: prosperity for the province, efficiency in government, and equity for the entire society, in particular its large aboriginal population. I asked him to focus on current-day Saskatchewan, and one development of which he was particularly critical was the privatization of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan and of Cameco Corporation. Both were crown corporations started during the Blakeney Government, and Blakeney believes that they should have remained as Crown corporations, which would have searched within Saskatchewan rather than outside for their leadership, and would have been more likely to allocate their earnings to benefit all the people of Saskatchewan.

I urge you to read Blakeney’s book. It is in part a history of the policies and programs of one of Canada’s most effective and creative provincial governments. It is also a personal narrative about how someone from a Nova Scotia Tory background – and Blakeney reminded us that none of his ancestors ever voted for the CCF – came to join the political left, embracing democratic socialism as an ideal and a program. Blakeney also writes about his post-political career of the last two decades, encompassing academe and numerous public causes such as world federalism, aboriginal development, and political institution-building in South Africa. Blakeney is very experienced and very wise and there is much we can learn from him. I recognized that two decades ago when we taught public management together and recognize it just as much today.

While there is no end to the analysis a leader’s debate could engender, I choose to focus on the narratives that Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have used the English-language debate to convey. Both attempt to tell a story that extends into the future, namely what the country would look like with either a Harper or an Ignatieff government.

Stephen Harper’s narrative is based on continual tax reduction. As I indicate in the title, Harper is a supply-sider who has lowered taxes in the past and would like to continue doing so in the future because he believes that lower taxes, both corporate and personal, will dramatically stimulate economic growth. And this economic growth will enable the government to pay for future programs while maintaining fiscal balance. Harper thus downplays tradeoffs among policies. For him, parliamentary democracy, “bickering” as he called it, is an impediment to enacting his economic program. If the Conservatives are given a majority, Canada won’t have such frequent elections, and Harper will be able to get on with assuring economic growth.

Harper’s personal delivery was in synch with his message. Straightforward and looking at the camera, not the other leaders. Low key uninflected tone of voice. Very few facial gestures except for the occasional half-smile. Hands in front, opening outward, in effect presenting a package.

While the promise of lower taxes is designed to appeal to the voter’s self-interest, Harper also referred to academic research by the well-known economist Jack Mintz claiming that lowering corporate taxes by 1.5 per cent will create 200,000 jobs. I find it interesting that Harper cited this research and that the opposition leaders didn’t challenge it. Yes, Jack Mintz is a respected economist. But as an economist myself, there are numerous questions I’d ask about the model that underlies Mintz’s claims. What does it assume about the level of employment in the economy? If there are unemployed resources, as is the case now, wouldn’t corporations use the money to strengthen their cash position, rather than invest it to increase capacity? Does Mintz’s model compare private sector investment in physical capital with public sector investment in human capital? For example, if corporate taxes are not lowered and if, as the Liberals propose, the money is used for programs to enhance human capital, what would be the impact on the economy?

Michael Ignatieff engaged in a spirited attack on Harper, both in terms of his policies and his style of governing. The policy attack dealt with Harper’s agenda of both lowering taxes and building up the coercive machinery of the state, in particular prisons and next generation fighter aircraft. The governance attack, epitomized by the soundbite, “what you can’t control you shut down,” focused on Harper’s being cited for contempt of Parliament, two prorogations, and lack of transparency. Ignatieff’s alternative narrative is of a government that would, through taxation, keep a greater share of GDP in the public sector, using it for the human services policies contained in the Liberals’ family pack: support for post-secondary education, childhood learning, family care, public pensions, and green renovation.

Ignatieff’s vision of governance, while spelled out less clearly than his policies, is very different from Harper’s. He would provide greater transparency, more parliamentary debate, and more public consultation and deliberative democracy.

Ignatieff’s personal style, as befits someone taking the offensive, was much more animated than Harper’s. More vocal dynamics, in particular expressions of indignation towards Harper, and a greater range of facial gestures and arm gestures.

The debate has thus given us two very clearly contrasting visions from the two people who could emerge on May 2 as prime minister.

The question, on several levels, is what voters will make of these contrasting visions. Which of the two policy packages will they prefer? While the neo-conservative ideology Harper embraced favours tax reduction and a diminished public sector, there is still strong support in Canada for a more dynamic state.

How will voters react to the very differing personal styles, the cooler Harper or the passionate and indignant Ignatieff? There is a presumption that, in our supposedly phlegmatic northern culture, the cool “in charge” style generally wins over the passionate and indignant. How do Canadians feel about democratic governance and parliamentary institutions? Are they just partisan bickering and of much less significance than the private pursuit of prosperity?

Harper, in a way, channels C.D. Howe, the Liberal super-minister for economic development in the fifties, a person who also had much more affection for the executive than the legislative role of government. Ignatieff channels the election campaigns of John Diefenbaker in 1957 and 1958 and Brian Mulroney in 1984. In both cases, Conservative leaders were able to ride to power on a wave of public indignation about Liberal disrespect for parliamentary democracy.

The debate has, I believe, established these two rival policy and governance narratives. Over the remainder of the campaign, the question is how voters will react to them.

In this post, I’m taking a break from following the federal election campaign to discuss an ongoing function of government – service delivery. It happened that that my passport, health card, driver’s license, and vehicle registration were all due for renewal this spring, which provided a good opportunity to see how both the federal and provincial governments are doing.

With the passport renewal, I learned on the Passport Canada website (ppt.gc.ca) that I was eligible to use the simplified renewal process. Essentially I could mail in my expiring passport along with the names of two non-related references. The process no longer required sending my birth certificate and two other identity documents as well as finding a guarantor. While Passport Canada promised delivery with 20 business days, I had by new passport in 10. So the process was both simpler and faster than in the past.

For the health card, I visited the Service Ontario website (serviceontario.ca) and booked an appointment – an option not previously available. When I arrived at the Service Ontario office, I was given a number, and it was called before I even sat down to wait. The service was being provided by a trainee (Richard) and trainer (Joanne). Richard noticed that my driver’s license – one of the identity documents I provided for the health card – was expiring, and asked if I wanted to renew it as well. I recalled that I needed to renew my license plate, which Joanne and Richard could also do. Thus I was able to complete the three transactions in less than 10 minutes. While Joanne and Richard were doing training, they were not inconveniencing me at all. The only inefficiency I noticed in the process was that one photo was required for the health card and another for the driver’s license, rather than a single photo that could have been used for both.

To sum up, I was very satisfied with both Passport Canada and Service Ontario. Evidently, both agencies are using up-to-date service methodologies. Passport Canada is reusing data it previously gathered and is also applying the 80-20 rule to speed up and simplify the easy transactions. Service Ontario now uses appointments to reduce waiting and applies single counter service.

It is noteworthy that these are areas of public service that do not appear to be politically contentious or that require extensive political oversight. Passport Canada appears to have convinced the politicians that it can speed up and simplify its processes without compromising public security. In the case of Service Ontario, the recent Ontario budget cites increases in customer satisfaction it has achieved. The budget sets a goal of saving $200 million over the next 3 years through increasing efficiencies in major agencies. Service Ontario is expected to be part of the solution, either through increased internal efficiencies or by taking over additional areas of service delivery on behalf of other agencies.

In my opinion, a measure of the effectiveness of a democracy is the liveliness, even raucousness, of the debate in its election campaigns. Both sharp debate about policy proposals and searching examination of the character of those who have the audacity to lead are desirable. But it’s also important to tell the good news stories of public servants who are quietly striving to improve performance on government’s front lines.