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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I have been thinking about energy policy – a field in which I claim no expertise – as the ongoing catastrophe unfolds at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. The quandary is that, as Jeff Sommer argues in an article in the New York Times on Sunday March 20 entitled “A Crisis that Markets Can’t Grasp,” markets have not succeeded in putting a price on the long-run costs associated with disposing of nuclear waste (the best case) or of dealing with nuclear disasters (the worst).

It is clear to me that the nuclear industry has underestimated the risks and, as a consequence, failed to invest sufficiently in risk mitigation. What would nuclear energy cost in Japan if its plants were built to a standard secure enough to resist a magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami? If plants had to be built to that standard, would Japan have invested very much, or even anything, in nuclear energy?

Similarly, the Times article referred to the $ 6 billion nuclear power plant built at Shoreham, Long Island, and decommissioned in 1989 before ever going into operation. The key argument in public opposition was the impossibility of evacuating populated areas of Long Island in the event of a nuclear disaster.

To make intelligent energy policy decisions, we need to compare alternative energy sources in terms of their capital cost, operating cost, ongoing environmental impact, and potential for, and impact of, catastrophes. Nuclear energy now looks much worse in terms of either the latter factor or the cost of mitigating it. The immediate reactions of newspaper columnists – the predictable first draft of history – do not in any quantitative sense deal with those complexities. As the Fukushima story plays out – and it will certainly be a long-running story – we’ll begin to get a sense of more realistic costs and tradeoffs than have been estimated in the past.

A personal note on the Japanese story. An article in the New York Times assessing the role of the Japanese government in reacting to the crisis quoted Masahiro Horie, a former senior government official who is now a dean at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. The name seemed familiar, and indeed it turned out that I had interviewed Mr. Horie – then a budget examiner in the Ministry of Finance – twenty five years ago for an article I wrote about public management in Japan (“Management of the public sector in Japan: are there lessons to be learned,” in Canadian Public Administration, summer 1986, pp. 175-96). Mr. Horie was particularly forthcoming and helpful with my research then, and I vaguely recall not only an interview in his office, but also a restaurant lunch.

He and I re-established contact by email. In his view, the “strong social cohesion, solidarity, and mutual assistance” of the Japanese people will enable them to “overcome these difficult times and stand up again.” I certainly hope he’s right.