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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.

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.