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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.

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.

Now that the election has been called, here is my narratological analysis of the latest Conservative and Liberal TV ads about Stephen Harper. The key hypothesis of narratological analysis is that a message is more convincing if it presents a coherent narrative, namely a series of events unfolding over time. As the campaign itself unfolds, we will see which messages resonate most with the electorate.

The Conservatives’ is a feel-good ad and the Liberals’ an attack ad. Each will appeal to the party’s core supporters and alienate the other party’s. The question is how they will be perceived by those who are currently undecided.

The Conservative ad, titled simply “Stephen Harper” is available at conservative.ca on the TV ads page. It runs for a minute, is narrated by Harper himself, and presents 19 full-colour images. The first 6 images are patriotic: the flag, a flypast over Parliament Hill, a child with a face-paint maple leaf, an elderly ethnic couple, the eternal flame on Parliament Hill, and finally two fighters jets escorting a passenger jet.

The next 11 images are of Harper, grouped into four consecutive themes:

• As patriot (visiting war memorials in images 7 and 9),

• at work (in his office in image 8, visiting a construction site in image 10 and a factory in image 11),

• as international statesman (at the G20 summit in image 12, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon – a curious choice, because even if Obama and Berlusconi are too controversial, Sarkozy, Merkel, or Cameron are higher profile – in image 13, and waving as he boards his jet in Korea in image 14)

• as family guy, with his wife and kids (image 15), with a child (image 16), and playing the piano at home (image 17).

The penultimate image is a crowd cheering, and the last image Harper again with the Conservative slogan “here for Canada” superimposed.

This ad fits perfectly into the heroic national renewal-protagonist growth quadrant of the public management narrative that I presented in my post of March 7. Harper’s words begins in synch with the patriotic images (“we’re lucky to live in Canada … a country that is a symbol of freedom, democracy, and opportunity”). Then his national renewal narrative – “we’ve been through a lot these past couple of years; the whole world has, but we’re doing it our way, the Canadian way … today our country is walking taller, standing prouder, getting stronger” – is blended with the images (10 and 11) of him in hardhat overseeing economic renewal, and the images of his personal progression to international statesman (12, 13, and 14).

The final part of the speech – “our best days are yet to come, together as Canadians let’s strengthen our country, and make it better for families, and ensure our kids have more opportunities than we did” – and the family images (15, 16, and 17) take the viewer back down from the lofty plane of international statesmanship to the family guy and the pitch to the Conservatives’ core constituency.

Conclusion: it’s a very carefully-crafted ad, not only combining patriotic appeal and messages aimed at the Conservatives’ target voters, but doing it within a coherent story. However, its exploitation of patriotic sentiment for a partisan political purpose could alienate some voters if they consider it shameless exploitation.

The Liberal ad, entitled, “Abuse of Power,” ran as a banner on Liberal.ca last week and is now available under Liberal Party of Canada on YouTube. It is 30 seconds long and narrated by an anonymous and urgent, even panicky, female voice. For images there are six black-and-white newspaper stories about Conservative abuses, also containing unflattering photos of Harper. The narrator begins with the words, “Stephen Harper: he’s gone too far” over Harper’s silhouette. It then goes quickly through four episodes of abuse of power: refusing to fire Minister Oda for misleading Parliament, shrugging off charges that could lead to jail time against his inner circle for breaking election laws, shutting down Parliament (prorogation), and relabeling the Government of Canada the Harper Government.

The ad then displays the words Abuse, Deceit, and Contempt, each accompanied by the bang of a gavel. These are superimposed over a particularly nasty image of Harper, looking like a cross between a carnival huckster and a party boss (Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men). The narrator concludes “Harper thinks he’s above the law,” and provocatively asks “is this your Canada or Harper’s?”

The ad is without doubt a hard-hitting critique of the Harper government along the lines of what the Liberals have long signaled would be a major component of their election messaging. The question is whether undecided voters will shrug it off as being about inside baseball on Parliament Hill, with no impact on their daily lives.

It also lacks a story line. It doesn’t put this abuse of power in any historical perspective. There are two story lines the ad might have used. The first is “the leopard doesn’t change his spots” story, digging up some historical evidence that Harper has always been a hyper-partisan, so that having gone too far now is simply indicative of the man’s basic character from way back.

The second is the “power corrupts” story. The ad could have reminded the viewer of the Conservative’s vaunted Accountability Act, and then showed how Harper’s behavior over the last few years has contradicted the act, rendering him a hypocrite.

The ad criticizes Harper’s behavior; an ad with a stronger story line would criticize his character. It may be that the Liberals don’t want to go this far, but the Conservative attack ads about Michael Ignatieff attack his character.

In my next post, I will look for the narratives contained in the Liberal and Conservative ads about Michael Ignatieff.

This was a political maxim Liberal strategist Jim Coutts told my public management class on a visit several years ago. Tit for tat. Continuing from last week’s post, this is not the strategy the Liberals are following as they choose not to respond to the Conservatives’ attack ads. Perhaps they simply don’t have the money to market test, produce, and air the ads, or even to post them online.

Michael Ignatieff has taken the position that he won’t dignify the attacks on his integrity with a response. This position is a well-known implicit narrative: I demonstrate that I’m the better man by not responding. By not responding, he’s denying additional attention to the attack ads. But he’s also leaving it up to the public to assess them.

Some voters will agree with Ignatieff that the ads are beneath contempt, but others will agree with the Conservatives that they reveal a sort of opportunism in Ignatieff that represents a serious character flaw.

If the Conservatives’ market testing reveals that these attacks work for a significant portion of the electorate, particularly swing voters, we can expect to see more of them during the campaign. It has also been darkly suggested that, given Ignatieff’s many televised utterances as a public intellectual, the most damaging ads are yet to come.

One can interpret Ignatieff’s most recent book, True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada as an attempt to write a counter-narrative that responds to the Conservatives’ attack ads. The problem is that the initial hardcover ranks 49,325 on amazon.ca. Even if his publisher releases a paperback edition in time for the election campaign it will reach far fewer voters than televised ads.

Political campaigns – and governing – are about both policy and leadership. Policy is the easier of the two to discuss. Policy positions can be presented with some specificity and citizens can see policies put in place and affecting them. But leadership, defined as that set of intellectual and emotional traits that a politician brings to the job, matters enormously. The vast majority of voters have never met the party leaders, and only a few hundred have ever spent long enough interacting with them to have any in-depth understanding of their leadership styles. So what most of us know, or think we know, about party leaders – as leaders – comes from the media. We form our impressions from their speaking style, body language as glimpsed in short clips, or insider reports or gossip.

(Personal disclosure: I have never met Stephen Harper. I met Michael Ignatieff once, at a reception in Toronto for Harvard Kennedy School alumni. The Dean of HKS cancelled at the last minute and Ignatieff gave a graceful and eloquent speech in his absence, leading me to the limited conclusion that he handles the public component of academic leadership very well.)

I see attack ads that deal with a candidate’s character as a legitimate though imperfect element of political discourse. They attempt to talk about character weaknesses, though often using questionable evidence.

If the Conservatives are attacking Ignatieff’s character, then it is legitimate for the Liberals to attack Harper’s. Notice that Coutts didn’t say “if he says you’re fat, you say you’re thin.” There is a big difference between denying that you’re fat and saying that your opponent is bald.

The Conservatives’ narrative is that Stephen Harper has grown in stature as prime minister. The Liberals’ response would be to attempt to disrupt that narrative, to argue that he hasn’t grown in stature, that he’s still the “same old Harper” he was in his Reform Party and Canadian Taxpayers’ Foundation days. They could focus not only on his policies but on well-known aspects of his record as prime minister such as his controlling, autocratic, and secretive style of leadership. And they would also point out parallels with the past.

Whether the Liberals will do this when the campaign begins is another matter. But Jim Coutts was an awfully shrewd and successful political strategist.