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My research on political narrative has focused on works set in the US and UK, two countries with rich and deep traditions of political writing and film. As for political narrative about Canada, my home and native land, Gertrude Stein’s remark about Oakland seems appropriate: “there’s nothing there, there.” In the last forty years, Canada has seen a flowering of literature and, to a lesser extent, film, but very little of it has been about politics, government, or organizations. If politics has been involved, it’s been about family, not electoral, politics.

With anticipation and willingness to revise the sweeping conclusion of the previous paragraph, I came to Terry Fallis’s 2008 first novel “The Best Laid Plans.” Fallis, a former political insider for the Ontario and federal Liberals, and now a public relations practitioner, initially self-published the novel, which indicates publishers didn’t see much of a market in political narrative. Winning the Leacock Medal for Humor in 2008 led McClelland and Stewart to change its mind and publish it.

I begin with a brief plot summary. Protagonist and narrator Daniel Addison, a speechwriter in the office of the Liberal leader of the Opposition decides to leave politics for academe after he discovers his politically-connected girlfriend servicing the Liberal House leader after hours in his ornate Centre Block office. With an election just called, Addison agrees – as a last service to the party leader – to find a Liberal candidate for the rural eastern Ontario riding of Cumberland-Prescott. Such a candidacy will be hopeless, as the riding was traditionally Conservative and represented by the popular Conservative Minister of Finance Eric Cameron. Ultimately Addison found a candidate in Angus McLintock, a University of Ottawa engineering professor nearing retirement, on the promise that he need do no campaigning (reminiscent of the US comedian Pat Paulsen’s credo: if nominating, I will not run, if elected I will not serve). Cameron’s campaign collapses when – how life imitates art ! – he is discovered in full bondage gear engaged in an intense S-and-M session with his frighteningly-efficient middle-aged EA.

Narrowly elected in an election that returns a Conservative minority to power, McLintock quickly establishes himself as a political maverick who, in a thorough reversal of public choice thinking, puts the national interest ahead of the interest of his constituents, and their interest ahead of his self-interest. This creates consternation for both his own Liberals and the governing Conservatives. The tale culminates in a debate on the Conservatives’ budget which proposes deep tax cuts, but no spending increases, in the face of a deep recession. The Conservatives hold the budget vote in the aftermath of a fierce winter storm that has immobilized Ottawa, but through heroic efforts –piloting a home-made hovercraft up the Ottawa River – McLintock makes it back to the House to cast the decisive vote that defeats the budget and forces the government to face the electorate.

As a reader, I found the novel’s fast-moving plot and satire of the conceit and foible of Canadian politicians very entertaining, and I zipped through it quickly, a considerable portion during a short flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Bravo, Mr. Fallis. You certainly deserved the Leacock Medal.

Looking at it from the analytical perspective used and narratives discussed in Governing Fables, it could sit comfortably within the chapter on American political narratives. The political assistant as focalizing narrator is a well-known technique, used in Primary Colors and All the King’s Men. The rare honest politician who attempts to serve the national interest over party ideology, constituency interest or personal self-interest brings to mind both Senator Bulworth in Bulworth and, at his best, President Bartlet in The West Wing.

While The Best Laid Plans is a satire, it clearly fits the heroic fable I presented in Governing Fables. Addison returns to political life on much better terms than the ignominy with which he left at the outset of the novel. McLintock is elevated from a curmudgeonly professor awaiting retirement to a political figure of national significance. As I’ll discuss below, McLintock’s devotion to the national interest ends up benefiting his constituency, the nation is spared a misguided federal budget, and (from McLintock’s point of view and I assume Fallis’s) the novel ends with the hope of political renewal in the coming election.

What makes this novel gentle satire – indeed reminiscent of Leacock – is that it treats politics as a form of Liberal wish-fulfillment. Two examples suffice to make the point. McLintock opposes subsidies to an outdated shoe factory in his riding and pressures the Ontario Environment Ministry to shut down an American-owned aggregates plant that has been polluting the Ottawa River. Forcing both factories out of business will result in the loss of scarce manufacturing jobs. This excruciating political dilemma is, however, solved by a classic deus ex machina — a young engineering colleague at Ottawa U. with an idea for a high-tech business that will set up shop in Cumberland-Prescott and hire and retrain all the laid-off shoe and cement workers.

In the novel, the Conservative tax-cutting budget, while extremely popular with the voters, is unanimously opposed by economists throughout the country, including the C.D. Howe Institute, Conference Board, and Fraser Institute. We know from recent policy debates that in Canada, just as in the US, there is a strong constituency, with many economists as members, for smaller governments, and the use of tax cuts as a lever to achieve that goal, regardless of the macroeconomic context.

These plot choices make The Best Laid Plans a satire, rather than a confrontation with tough political reality, such as the movie The Candidate or many episodes of The West Wing. Nonetheless, the book was an enjoyable read and it has made an important contribution to developing a body of thoughtful Canadian political narratives.

With the dust now settling, I’ll interpret the campaign from a narratological perspective. This is substantially different from the traditional electoral politics approach. In the latter, political parties are seen as dividing the electorate up into segments (“slicing and dicing”) and in their platforms proposing sets of policies to appeal to these segments. If a party wins the support of enough voters in enough segments, it will win the election. One challenge in this approach is classification – how to reduce people’s multi-dimensional lives to homogeneous population segments – and a second is coherence – how to write a platform that is more than a shopping list of (possibly conflicting) policies.

The narrative approach to campaigning focuses on leadership, historical continuity, and coherence. It postulates that people are voting as much to choose a leader as to choose a set of policies. In choosing a leader, they are evaluating a candidate’s (that is, a party leader’s) life experience and inferring from it about how he or she would perform in office. Candidates present essentially the same set of experiences – the same story – to the entire electorate. When a leader presents a platform, he or she is telling a comprehensive story relevant to the entire electorate. In this approach, candidates are talking about where the country has been and where they have been, and, if elected, where they would take the country and how they would lead it.

In the electoral politics approach, competition involves either parties bidding against each other by offering more to particular groups of voters, or going negative by attacking policy proposals that they claim will hurt the interests of segments other than the one at which it was directed.

In the narrative approach, campaigning involves a struggle of competing narratives. Each party and its candidate is trying to frame an attractive and compelling story for itself and a repellent story for its opponents. The goal is to make both stories stick.

As in previous posts, I’m using my four quadrant narrative model to categorize these stories. The vertical axis refers to the country and whether it advances or declines. The horizontal axis refers to the candidate and whether he or she achieves or fails to achieve a personal ambition. An incumbent party wants to tell a story that under its stewardship the nation has advanced, and that that its leader has in some way grown in office. If that party is elected, the nation will continue to advance, which justifies the fulfillment of the prime minister’s personal ambition. This is the upper-left quadrant of the four quadrant model. An opposition party wants to take issue with the incumbent party’s interpretation of recent history, and argue that its policies promise the best hope of national advancement, and that its leader is therefore worthy of personal advancement to prime minister. The upper left quadrant is the high ground, and incumbents and opposition struggle to seize it.

In contrast, the lower-left quadrant represents the low ground, and each party is trying to force its opponents onto it. It associates decline for the country – either in the past or projected into the future – with the realization of ambition on the part of a party leader. In effect, the country will suffer if the leader achieves his personal ambitions.

The results of the election can be interpreted as three leaders (Elizabeth May, Jack Layton, Steven Harper) successfully claiming the high ground in the upper-left quadrant, with two, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, being forced to the low ground of the lower-left quadrant.

Elizabeth May’s policy goal is to preserve and enhance the Canadian environment. She wisely chose to run in a constituency that is among the physically most beautiful in the country. Her winning message, given force by her exclusion from the leaders’ debate, was that she would most effectively advance this goal from a seat in the House of Commons. This outcome represented a clear alignment between her vision of national renewal and the achievement of her ambition.

As I argued in my most recent post about Jack Layton, he combined an optimistic personal narrative of cheerfully overcoming illness with advancement for the voters through improving health care and more generous public pensions. He had the advantage that both the Conservatives and the Liberals ignored him until the last ten days of the campaign. Because of his personal circumstances, when the attacks did come, they focused on the cost of his promises, but did not attempt to disrupt his personal narrative.

Stephen Harper’s initial narrative, as I argued in my post of March 28 that analyzed his first television ad, focused on a story of successful economic recovery for the country combined with Harper becoming an internationally significant statesman. That message changed during the campaign, and Harper redefined personal advancement as becoming the leader of a majority government. By portraying himself as the facilitator of economic renewal, Harper argued that his personal ambition served the public interest: a win-win. His surrogates, for example, Preston Manning, emphasized that Harper is a “trained economist.” And, given the widespread perception of economists as people who don’t have the personality to become accountants, Harper’s low-key self-presentation was certainly in keeping with his message.

Michael Ignatieff made the fatal mistake of allowing the Conservatives to write his narrative through their attack ads that associated bad economic policy (from a conservative perspective, tax-and-spend) with the fulfillment of his personal ambition. That a market-oriented party succeeded at portraying a man who has spent his career thinking about the mutual obligations of state and citizens as acting solely out of personal ambition is deeply ironic. The fact that as thoughtful a group as the Globe and Mail editorial board saw fit to ask him the question posed in the attack ads – why did you come back to Canada ? – meant that Ignatieff never developed a compelling personal narrative encompassing his pre-political career as scholar and public intellectual and his return to Canada as a political actor.

Not adequately responding to what he now calls a campaign of “personal vilification” had, I believe, another effect on Mr. Ignatieff. He carried a huge burden of pent-up anger against the Conservatives and Mr. Harper, in particular, for his role in authorizing the campaign. The anger was finally released in the debates and in his campaign. By and large, voters are more attracted to cheerful optimists than angry prophets. When Michael Ignatieff chose to play the latter role, it was easy for Jack Layton to assume the former.

With the clarity of perfect hindsight, Mr. Ignatieff should have responded to the attacks when they first came. But how? The Liberals didn’t have the money to buy negative advertising. What Mr. Ignatieff could have done, inexpensively, was to have spoken in depth and unapologetically about his career as writer and scholar. He could have associated himself with the internationalism of the careers of Mackenzie King, Mike Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau. He could have shrugged off addressing Americans in the first person plural as intended only to get their attention, hardly a renunciation of citizenship. He could have presented his returning to Canada not as an ego trip, but a decision to personally fight for Liberal values. Perhaps the Liberals could have introducing an amendment to the Elections Act to ban political advertising when there is no formal election campaign. Or perhaps Ignatieff could have sued the Conservative Party for defamation. The Liberal Party might have sponsored a competition to crowd-source the best anti-Harper attack ads and “not just visiting” responses to the Conservative attack ads, and posted the winners on its website.

Finally, Mr. Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois. They were seen by the Quebec electorate, particularly nationalists, as having done little to advance Quebec’s interests, while having enjoyed the salaries and perks of federal MPs. They were ripe for the picking when the NDP came up with a better story.

If there are lessons to be learned from this election, and I think there are, the most compelling is Mr. Ignatieff’s on the necessity of preventing your opponents from writing a story you cannot revise or replace.

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.

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.

A look at the Liberals’ ads extolling, and Conservative ads attacking, Michael Ignatieff shows that narrative features significantly in both. On the Liberal side, that is to be expected from a writer-politician whose output includes biographies, novels, and history. On the Conservative side, Ignatieff’s career as public intellectual provides an extensive public record from which to unearth embarrassing and contradictory material. Indeed, the campaign presents much more personal narrative about Ignatieff than about Harper, for whom even the Conservative narrative is confined to his five years as Prime Minister.

Ignatieff’s penchant for personal story-telling is evident in a recent Liberal ad. Narrated by Ignatieff, it starts with a photo of him with his elderly mother recounting that she died of Alzheimer’s disease and that “caring for her was the toughest thing that ever hit our family.” It then unveils the Liberal’s family care plan.

There are two earlier personal narratives – no longer election ads – on the Liberal web site (Liberal.ca). In the first, Ignatieff begins by talking about and showing photos of his father, who came to Canada in 1928 as a penniless immigrant from Russia, and who made his way up the ladder through his own efforts. Like the ad about the family care plan, Ignatieff generalizes from his personal story to the importance of hard work – on the immigrant’s part – and equal rights, as enshrined in the Charter, on our society’s part.

In the second, a longer ad entitled “Meet Michael,” he talks about his career (in implicit contrast to Stephen Harper) as a “self-employed writer without a safety net, living from paycheque to paycheque.” .He also talks about his marriage, showing that his wife Zsuzsanna Zsohar (in implicit contrast to Laureen Harper) both uses her own name and speaks in the ad. As in the other ads, he expands upon his own experience to talk about his “vision of the country in which we stand together through [difficulties]” and he refers to pensions, medical care, and education not in terms of the hackneyed safety net metaphor, but rather as “basic stuff, the granite under our feet.”

The Conservatives’ attack ads on Michael Ignatieff have been running almost since he became leader and are well known. The main theme, as epitomized by an ad entitled Arrogance (uploaded on YouTube by the Conservative Party on May 13, 2009) is that Ignatieff is an ambitious “cosmopolitan” who is “just in it for himself.” Indicative of Ignatieff’s lack of patriotism is a quote from Maclean’s on November 20, 2006 that “the only thing he missed about Canada [while away] was Algonquin Park.”

Though recent Conservative attack ads have shifted to Ignatieff’s policy proposals, they still build on the well established narrative of personal ambition. Thus, the latest starts by calling him “an opportunist who only came back to be prime minister,” and then shifts to the charges that Ignatieff will raise taxes and establish a reckless coalition that will include the Bloc Quebecois.

The Conservative ads are relentlessly historical in that every charge about Ignatieff’s current policy proposals is anchored to a quote drawn from past statements or interviews, with the source and date flashed on the screen. Whether or not these quotes are taken out of context, as the Liberals charge, is beside the point for the Conservatives. Presenting the paradox of an incumbent party running against the opposition leader’s record, the ads argue that Ignatieff is not a fresh new face, but is already well known and has been found wanting.

The Conservative attack ads apparently have established for both core Conservative voters and some swing voters the personal ambition/disastrous policy narrative I discussed in my post of March 7. Is this enough, however, to win an election? The Liberals have responded, appropriately, with the argument that the “just visiting” attack ads are a slur on both the two million Canadians who are now working internationally and the 20 percent of Canadians who were born outside Canada. Furthermore, the potential advantage for Liberals in the Conservative attack ads is that, by demonizing Ignatieff, they have lowered the expectations he has to meet. If in the campaign he can – especially in the debates next week – embody a sincere love of country, he might well confound the story the Conservatives have attempted to tell.