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I’ve always believed that the questions on a final exam should be as challenging as the problems managers face in the real world. This year in my public management course, I came up with five such problems, and asked the students to solve any four. Here are the questions and my comments.

First, how would you implement the merger of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) in terms of both organizational structure and resource implications? I was looking for answers that recognized the complexity of merging two big and distinct organizations. Would it be a complete merger, in the sense that CIDA people right up to Minister Fantino blend into the DFAIT structure (for example Canadian embassies having development officers working with political officers and trade officers) or would it be a merger in name only? Possible resource implications involved savings from reduction in staff in either or both organizations and reductions in foreign assistance.

Second, how should Justin Trudeau go about writing a new red book of Liberal Party policies prior to the 2015 Election? I reminded students that Trudeau’s predecessor Jean Chretien issued his first red book in 1993, slightly before the Internet age. Perhaps in response to that hint, most answers emphasized social media and polling. But they were often unclear on who would do the policy development work. I was looking for answers that realized Trudeau won’t have time to write it himself, and must establish an organizational structure to produce his red book. Two groups that must not be overlooked – but often were overlooked in the answers – are the Liberal caucus and the Liberal party.

Third, which criteria should a prime minister use to appoint directors of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board? A short description of the organization – a Crown corporation whose mission is to ensure that fund maximizes returns without undue risk – elicited a response from most students that directors should have expertise and experience in investment management. Many students stopped there, without recognizing a role for any other factors. Given the pool of people with those skills, the expert board might end up composed entirely of older white guys living in Toronto. The challenge to the prime minister and his advisors is to find some people with the necessary expertise but who display some diversity: women, minorities, and people based elsewhere.

Fourth, assume that in the next election campaign, NDP leader Tom Mulcair promises to review and end most of the Harper Government’s now elaborate set of income tax credits, which he criticized as elitist, because they can be used only by people who pay income tax, and expensive, because they total up to a loss of income tax revenue of $1.5 billion (professorial confession: I made that number up). Mulcair promises a speedy review that will decide which credits to keep, which to terminate, and which to replace with other policy instruments.

The protagonist in the question is the deputy minister of finance, who should be preparing for the possibility of a Mulcair Government. A good answer included analytical criteria for reviewing each tax credit, for example: the number of taxpayers who use it, revenue foregone because of it, characteristics of the taxpayers who use it, such as their average income and geographical distribution. It also included political criteria, such as the interest groups that champion it, and who could be expected to protest if it were cancelled. Finally, the question called for some thought about the organizational structure the deputy minister should use. He should start with an internal review team to do the analytic work, but should he prepare for public consultations after Mulcair takes office?

Fifth, what should Canadian Ambassador to the US Gary Doer be doing to persuade President Obama to sign on to the Keystone Pipeline? My question assumes that Obama will not meet with Doer. Several answers mentioned advertising and social media campaigns, other answers mentioned meeting with whomever in the West Wing, State Department, or EPA would be willing to meet with him. One answer mentioned Mitt Romney. Many students missed the broader notion of looking for allies: American organizations or groups who (would) support the pipeline and answers overlooked lobbying Congress.

Overall, while the answers had lots of good analysis, one area of weakness was in thinking about organizational structure, the groups of politicians and/or public servants who would have to be put in place and given a mandate to make something happen. Maybe this is because undergraduate students are not sufficiently familiar with large organizations to think on those terms. But I’m not sure of that, because they do take organizational behaviour and amny have had co-op assignments in large organizations. I’ll have to think about how to make the point that implementation requires organizational structure more forcefully when I teach the public management course next year.

The night before last, I watched the Conservatives one-two advertising punch during a Jays’ game: their Justin Trudeau attack ad as well as an Economic Action Plan ad, the latter being nothing more than taxpayer-supported political advertising.

Yesterday I saw Justin Trudeau’s reply to the attack ad, and I consider it a good first step. Despite being titled “let’s put an end to attack ads,” it’s really a counter-attack ad. Using the words “we deserve better” to refer to the Conservative attack ads and ending “together, we can build a better country,” he’s putting forth his intention to set a higher standard in both political conduct and public policy than the Conservatives. By asserting that he’s “proud to be a teacher” and that “he’s a son, but also a father,” he’s beginning to tell his own story. He’s refusing to let the Conservatives define him, and tell their misleading version of his story.

Most importantly, he’s signaling that, unlike recent Liberal leaders, he’s willing to fight back. It’s essential that he send this message right at the outset of his leadership.

The YouTube count as of today, April 25, is promising. The Conservatives’ ad, which has been running for 10 days or so, has 258,000 views, but the Liberals’ ad, by only its second day has 202,000 views. It may well overtake the total for the Conservatives’ ad. Clearly there is a lot of interest in Trudeau, from both the Liberal faithful, who were waiting for this, and from citizens who want to check him out.

As I mentioned at the outset, the Conservatives have their positive story about the Harper government, which claims that it has delivered economic renewal, and their negative story, which claims that the Liberal (and, in the future, NDP) leadership combine ambition and incompetence.

The Liberals also need to develop their two sided narrative, with a powerful story of hope, determination, and gravitas attributed to Justin Trudeau, and a negative story about the failings of the Harper Government.

We saw the makings of the first part of this with the counter-attack ad. The Liberals should not – I emphasize not – put an end to their attack ads. If they want power, eventually they have to develop attack ads that delegitimize Stephen Harper. They should be watching his every word and every move, looking for inconsistency, hypocrisy, mendacity, and corruption. Political survival demands no less.

This is a maxim about negative campaigning that Jim Coutts, former Liberal party strategist and principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau, told my public management class decades ago. I quoted it in a blog post on March 12, 2011 in which I questioned then Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff’s unwillingness to respond to Conservative Party attack ads. Given that Ignatieff ended up in the dustbin of Canadian political history, I return to Coutts’s maxim in the hope that Pierre Trudeau’s son will listen to Coutts’s wisdom.

As 243,000 (and ever increasing) YouTube viewers and God knows how many television viewers know, the Conservatives have begun their attack ads on Justin Trudeau. Like their attack ads on former Liberal leaders Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, they are personal and they come with a narrative. They dredge up history (Rae’s record as NDP premier of Ontario) and public statements (Michael Ignatieff on US television) to demonstrate that the Liberal leader, while motivated by overarching ambition, lacks the competence to be Prime Minister. The narrative about Trudeau is that, while he has the political pedigree, he doesn’t have the experience, judgment, or gravitas to be prime minister. And the Conservatives have also set up an attack website, justinoverhishead.ca, to amplify their point.

As I discussed in my post about Ignatieff, this is a use of what I call the ironic political fable. It contrasts the achievement of personal ambition (Ignatieff, Rae, or Trudeau becoming prime minister) with the predicted deleterious consequences for Canada.

Why are the Conservatives so stridently attacking Trudeau? One might simply argue, because they can. The Trudeau attack story is ready-made and the Conservatives have the money needed to tell it.

But it goes deeper than that. First, the Conservatives are intending to create conflict within the Liberal Party between those who counsel ignoring the attacks and those who advise strong and swift retaliation.

Second, it is part and parcel of the Conservatives’ desire to reshape Canadian politics by destroying the Liberal Party so as to create a two-party system consisting of the Conservatives and the NDP. In Conservatives strategy, the Liberals are a centre-left party, so must be destroyed, so that the Conservatives can occupy the centre. The Conservative attack machine has virtually ignored NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, with only the occasional attack on his policies but nothing attacking him personally.

What should the Liberals do? If they do nothing, Justin Trudeau risks the same fate as Michael Ignatieff, having a disastrous story told by the Conservatives about him so convincingly that he has no capacity to tell his own story of hope and heroism.

Coutts’s point was that you don’t deny what your opponents claim as your weaknesses because that just perpetuates their story. Rather you attack your opponent’s leader with your own negative attack ads. Liberal pollster Mike Marzolini’s suggestion of trying to parry the Conservative attack ads with parody and satire has the unfortunate effect of perpetuating their story.

Are the Liberals ready to launch attack ads on the Conservatives? Do they have the money? I recall that when Bob Rae was being attacked, they raised a special fund of several hundred thousand dollars for response, money which has yet to be spent. And they are attempting to raise more now for the same purpose.

Do they have the message? They could certainly attack Harper as having an ideologically conservative agenda, contrasting his May 2011 election-night statement that he would govern on behalf of all Canadians with his record since then. They could attack his omnibus bills and other perversions of parliamentary democracy. They could find clips of him smiling supportively with ministers whom he has later thrown from the bus. There is no shortage of material.

The NDP is quite pleased to see the Conservatives attacking the Liberals if it will help establish their role as permanent, rather than one-time, Official Opposition party. Just as the Conservatives have muted their broadcast attacks on the NDP, the NDP has silenced their broadcast (as opposed to parliamentary) attacks on the Conservatives.

Liberal attack ads would differentiate their party from the NDP. They would energize the Liberal base. They would put the Liberals in a position of leading the attack on Stephen Harper and constitute a bid for the support of the majority of Canadian voters who want something other than Stephen Harper.

Justin Trudeau must choose, and choose very soon, whether he wants to let the Conservatives tell his story, with all the predictable consequences that follow, or whether he will authorize a different narrative.

So began this year’s crisis management exercise for my public administration students. I always start our discussion of crisis management and government communications by giving the students an exercise. This year’s exercise imagined that President Obama, responding to environmentalist pressure, decides to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and announce his decision on Earth Day, Monday, April 22, 2013.

As a courtesy, he calls Prime Minister Harper on Sunday night, adding that in his announcement he will describe Keystone “as a defining climate change decision for a generation” and that “by saying no to Keystone, we are taking a stand for an economy that will make less use of fossil fuels, that will expand use of renewable energy, and that will put a priority on preventing further global warming.”

The exercise asks the students to put themselves in Harper’s shoes and indicate what he should immediately say to President Obama over the phone and what he should say to the Canadian people the next day.

After discussing Harper’s response, the exercise asks the students to divide into three groups to prepare public responses to Obama’s decision by Russ Girling, President of Transcanada Corporation, as well as Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair and newly-elected Liberal leader Justin Trudeau (the latter, an easy prediction). A little twist in the second assignment is that Prime Minister Harper has called Girling Sunday night to tip him off, but that Mulcair and Trudeau hear about the decision only when Obama announces it on Monday morning, and are being pressed by the media for an instant reaction to scrums outside their office doors.

I won’t attempt to lay out detailed answers but here are some suggestions for an overall approach.

In Harper’s case, the challenge for the phone call is to keep calm and not express the anger, disappointment, and surprise (at the speed of the decision) he must certainly feel. The question portrays Obama, by explaining how he will present his decision to the American people, as lecturing the Prime Minister. While Harper might well take umbrage at the lecture and suggest that Obama’s environmentalism is cynical given America’s continued heavy use of coal, responding to a lecture with a tit-for-tat debating point does nothing to enhance their relationship.

Harper’s public statement – one student suggested waiting until the day after Earth Day when the media would give him more attention – should combine a small measure of regret about Obama’s decision, an affirmation of the government’s policy of continued development of the oil sands in an environmentally responsible way, and a commitment to pursue other options, such as speeding the review process for the Northern Gateway pipeline to facilitate selling the oil on Asian markets, or developing pipelines in Canada that would allow the oil to satisfy the eastern Canadian market and be refined, possibly for export, in eastern Canadian refineries.

Given how controversial Keystone has become (something I demonstrated by giving the students the New York Times editorial of March 10 about Keystone entitled “When to Say No”), Harper should be having both the PMO and PCO hard at work on contingency planning.

Russ Girling’s challenge will be to convince capital markets that he hasn’t bet the company on Keystone and that Transcanada has many other profitable options. Given the market’s inevitable focus on Transcanada’s stock price, when trading resumes after the announcement, it would be a good idea for Girling to appear with his chief financial officer, who can field more detailed questions about the company’s plans. This would be a clear instance of the double-headed public face of the organization, Girling to outline the big picture, and the CFO to fill in the details. For Transcanada as well, contingency planning is in order.

Mulcair and Trudeau face the same challenge, except that Trudeau is a newbie, having been Leader of the Opposition for only a week. Both will want to criticize Harper for his over-reliance on one economic option as well as his lack of concern about the environment. The media will press both as to whether they favour any of the government’s Plan B options, such as Northern Gateway or new or enhanced pipelines to Eastern Canada. Neither will want to make a commitment of such consequence in a scrum, and both will want to change the topic to strengthening the environmental review process.

These scenarios will not play out on Earth Day, because the period for public response to the State Department’s draft environmental impact analysis of Keystone will not have concluded by then and Obama would be very unlikely to act before State has presented its final analysis. But the end game appears to be coming soon, and Canadian politicians, corporations, and public interest groups should be doing their own contingency planning.

I just saw director Pablo Lorrain’s movie “No,” about the unexpectedly successful referendum campaign in Chile that unseated dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988.

The movie focuses its attention on Rene Saavedra, a fictional young ad man, to whom it attributed many of the ads used by the “No” side. (They were the “No” side because the question asked was whether voters would agree to an eight year term as President for Pinochet.) The rules permitted a maximum of 15 minutes of national television advertising by both the yes and no sides in the month before the referendum.

Following the movie’s focus, most of the critical discussion has revolved around the use of American-style advertising tactics. Comparisons have been drawn to Madison Avenue and ‘Mad Men.” Ann Hornaday wrote in the Washington Post “Saavedra co-opts Madison Avenue ad strategies to create a down-with-dictatorship/up-with-people campaign.” Liam Lacey wrote in the Globe and Mail, “from a marketing perspective, [Saavedra] sees a chance to put his product over in the marketplace, and if that means selling regime change with a We Are the World-style charity video, why not?” Andrew O’Hehir, wrote in Salon, “ On one level ‘No’ is an inspiring tale of peaceful liberation, self-determination, and the fundamental clash between optimism and pessimism. On another, it’s a darker a more complex fable about the birth of the media age and the rise of the neoliberal consensus that conceived of all humanity as a market.” He concluded, “do you want to speak truth to power, and less the election? Or do you want to beat the dictator at his own game, and move Chile into the future. Because the road to the future is paved with focus groups and cheerful rainbow logos…”

I think this notion of “selling out to win” that has dominated the discussion is misguided. I suggest looking at the Si and No referendum campaigns from the narratological perspective I developed in Governing Fable, and have frequently applied in this blog.

Every successful political campaign must have a positive story about itself and a negative story about its opponent(s). For the Si campaign the positive story was about Pinochet bringing calm, stability, and prosperity to Chile. In its ads, Pinochet the military dictator is re-interpreted as a genial, avuncular, civilian paterfamilias of the nation. The Si campaign also had its attack ads, associating the No campaign with economic instability, Marxist ideology, and the suppression of traditional family values. A No victory raised the spectre of a return to the chaos of the Allende years.

The No side had its negative fable, and it was a compelling one: Pinochet’s history of military dictatorship, suppression of human rights and civil liberties, torture, and the disappearing of the junta’s opponents. This story was told quite compellingly in ads narrated by the mothers of the junta’s victims.

But the No side could not win without a positive fable.

Because the No side was an alliance of opposition parties, there was no one individual who could be presented as a protagonist whom the voters could see as preferable to Pinochet. Rather the No side had to present its positive fable as an idea – the idea of personal freedom in a democratic regime. It portrayed the idea of freedom by portraying the goal of freedom as the pursuit of happiness. Hence the upbeat slogan “happiness is coming,” the upbeat music, the pictures of people openly enjoying themselves. I don’t see this is evidence of “the neoliberal consensus that conceives of all of humanity as a market” but as a reasonable attempt to portray, to people who may have forgotten, what it means to live in a free society.

The movie, at the end, shows spots with Christopher Reeves, Jane Fonda, and Richard Dreyfuss (speaking in Spanish) endorsing the No. I don’t see this as Hollywood-ism, but rather as a message to Chileans to reject the insularity of the Pinochet era and embrace a wider world.

As the character of Rene was a composite, one can reasonably ask whether a more factual approach would have portrayed the proponents of the positive message in the No campaign as less adman-like than Rene. In his review, O’Hehir noted that No has provoked a controversy in Chile, in particular about whether the movie’s exclusive focus on the advertising campaigns ignored the broader political campaigns, in particular the No campaign’s ground-level political organizing and voter registration drive.

The movie suggested that, when the counting of the ballots began, the possibility of the Pinochet regime stealing the election arose, and then made the case that people knew Pinochet had been defeated only when other military leaders publicly affirmed the No side’s victory. People living in stable democracies take for granted that elections will be run fairly and this fairness extends to the critical activity of counting the vote. In so many countries this is not the case.

Finally, a word about production values. The movie was shot with U-matic video cameras that were in common use in the late 80s. This has the advantage of making the film and the clips culled from the image archives indistinguishable. But the movie has the appearance of what Lacey called “smeary desaturated music videos from decades ago.” I would have opted for something more aesthetically appealing, and maintained historical realism through the use of clothing styles, facial hair, and home furnishings.

No is definitely worth seeing because it applies to a critical moment in Chilean history an understanding of the importance of political communication, and shows how an underdog group was able to communicate effectively.