By-Election Follow Up, Aggregating Scandals, Google’s Political Ad Ban
SNC-Lavalin is not just any old scandal, but a political contagion perfectly suited to weaken the Trudeau Liberals as it spreads across digital networks. That leaves Andrew Scheer’s ready to strike.
The last few weeks have provided the clearest picture yet of the role social networks will play in aggregating voters during the upcoming federal election. In particular, the ongoing fallout of the SNC-Lavalin affair is ripe to be exploited by Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives in the party’s quest to wrest power back from the Trudeau Liberals. Before we get to that though, let’s review the results from Burnaby and what’s next for the NDP.
By-Election Follow Up
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was sworn in as the representative for Burnaby South this week after winning the riding’s by-election last month with 38.9% of the vote, or 8,848 ballots cast. Liberal Richard Lee came in second with 26% while Conservative Jay Shin earned 22%. Notably, Laura-Lynn Thompson, the candidate from the newly formed far-right People’s Party of Canada, put on a strong showing with 10.6% of the vote.
For the New Democrats, the top line result is encouraging. With a decisive win, Singh has eliminated a persistent criticism that has followed him for the last two years. Looking to make a quick and meaningful impact, he has wasted no time going on the offensive against Trudeau both on the issues and the scandal that has plagued the PMO over the last six weeks in an effort to boost his national profile beyond progressive circles. On the heels of his win, Singh is now looking to make his case to all Canadians.
A closer look at his by-election results, however, reveals some potential red flags. In 2017, Singh won his leadership bid for the NDP on the first ballot on the core thesis that his technological savvy, superior organizing, and broad likability made him uniquely suited to confront Justin Trudeau’s “campaign from the left, govern from the middle” brand of faux-progressivism. After becoming leader, and especially since he began his by-election campaign in earnest, Singh has moved to meld his personal brand with that of the party in the hopes of raising his own profile and the party’s along with it. In doing so, it would be his popularity that would draw more voters to the NDP, giving New Democrats a larger and growing pool of resources with which to organize and fundraise. This is Singh’s Playbook, and so far it seems to have served him well.
But Singh and the NDP continue to face headwinds that prevent the party from generating the critical mass required to run the playbook as effectively as Trudeau did in 2015. Take another look at Singh’s vote tally in Burnaby South. While he may have won with nearly 39% of the vote, overall voter turnout was dismal at just 29%. More importantly, if Singh were growing the party’s brand, energizing voters outside of die-hard supporters, we could expect to see that support not merely localized to a specific race, but extended across other geographies. Instead, the NDP lost its seat in Outremont, Quebec and was soundly defeated in York-Simcoe, Ontario, meaning the NDP actually ended February 25 in a worse position than when the day began.
In addition, NDP MPs Murray Rankin and Nathan Cullen both announced not long after Singh was declared victorious that they would be joining 11 of their colleagues in not running for re-election come October. With nearly 30% of the NDP caucus now declaring their intention to leave federal politics, this not only reanimates the narrative of an untested leader leading an uncertain party, but means the party will have to spend additional resources to run new candidates in those ridings. That additional setback at a time of ongoing concerns about fundraising and the overall few number of candidates named compared to the opposition make February’s by-election results less an unchained moment of jubilation than a reminder of the extensive work still to be done.
Singh’s more aggressive posturing in the House and online is a good start. Building the momentum required to aggregate votes requires drawing sharp delineations between yourself and your opposition, and communicating that narrative effectively. Singh has made some positive steps in this direction, particularly since shuffling his communications team, and it’s starting to show in polling.
However, the New Democrats have only just begun to claw back the support they lost in 2015, while Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives have spent years waiting for the perfect time to strike.
Aggregating Scandals
The SNC-Lavalin scandal continues to make life difficult for Justin Trudeau. From The Guardian,
“(Jody) Wilson-Raybould, the first Indigenous Minister of Justice and Attorney General in Canadian history, had described a sustained effort by government officials to influence her judgment. Nearly four months after she said the pressure began, she was removed from her job as the country’s top prosecutor — and instead was named minister of veterans affairs. She has repeatedly said she will run again in the federal election as a Liberal party candidate, a move experts view as difficult given her public spat with the prime minister.”
It is difficult to imagine a story better suited to damage Trudeau’s chances of holding on to his majority government than this. The potency of the scandal is two-fold. First, and most obviously, every detail of this story runs opposite to the brand Trudeau has spent years building. He ran as someone who would support the middle class but is accused to protecting a multinational corporation. He campaigned on reconciliation and called himself a feminist who installed gender-balanced cabinet. Now he has removed the country’s first indigenous attorney general under the guise of a cabinet shuffle. Lastly, he has said time and again that Canada is a country where people receive equal treatment, but is alleged to have pressured the minister of justice not merely for the sake of big business but his own personal political gain. Indeed, SNC-Lavalin seems to be tailor made to undo the Trudeau brand point-by-point, making the prime minister out to be all the worst things his opponents have accused him of being.
Those are the optics of the scandal, but politicians have survived public scandals before. What makes SNC-Lavalin particularly dangerous — or useful, depending on your political stripe — is how well the mechanics of the story prime it to move so fluidly through digital networks. By tacking a strong partisan spin on the narrative, the opposition, and in particular Andrew Scheer, can use it to not only build their own databases, strengthen their media targeting, and bolster their fundraising, but break apart the bloc that Trudeau has spent the last four years carefully cultivating.
Recall how Trudeau built the coalition that would sweep him into office. From How Trudeau Won,
“In 2015, overall turnout shot up to 68.3% — the highest since 1993. Much of this was driven by an increase in three groups: first-time voters, young voters, and women. All three groups would typically have been thought to be favoured to swing to the NDP. Instead, they all broke heavily for the Liberal Party.”
At the conclusion of that first update, I noted that the trouble with a loosely-held, personality-based coalition like the one Trudeau pieced together is that it is, by definition, fragile. It’s not unimaginable to think a number of those voters could be persuaded to desert the Liberals should their standard-bearer turn out to be corrupt, and throw their support behind another candidate without that baggage.
For Andrew Scheer, SNC-Lavalin is the clearest path yet to reframing the debate to exactly that end. Using die-hard Conservative supporters as his base and social networks as a force multiplier, Scheer can use the scandal to decouple Trudeau from the people who voted for him.
Instituting this would be a four-step process. First, as has been happening since the day it broke, Trudeau will be forced to take up a defensive position around the affair as he faces intense scrutiny from the news media; a sustained barrage of stories that permeate print, radio, television, and the web. This allows Scheer to easily frame Trudeau as an unethical leader who has lost his mandate. Secondly, as these attacks continue, the Conservatives are able to seed social networks with negative ads that reinforce and amplify this new narrative to a public that is more susceptible to it. This aides the Conservatives in their list-building and fundraising efforts, while simultaneously boxing out the New Democrats who, with a diminished reach and limited organization, are more likely to be seen as following the Conservatives’ lead.
The third action happens as the narrative spreads, bouncing between feeds and group chats. The message mutates, taking on a life of its own as different memes and posts on Twitter, reddit, and in Facebook groups. The more extreme these media get, the more likely they are to galvanize the Conservatives’ more extreme supporters. Finally, Scheer is able to insert himself as Trudeau’s obvious replacement with — what else? — a message of change to replace a corrupt administration.
This is why Scheer’s initial pronunciation that Trudeau must resign was not an overreach but in fact a well executed maneuver to the right. By making such a bold, clear statement, then using Question Period, hearings, and other opportunities to reinforce the moral authority argument, Scheer generated countless sound bites and quotes worthy of being posted, remixed, and memed. They continue to bounce around Facebook now, and while the comments underneath some of them are reprehensible, the authors are part of a group that Scheer has chosen to court.
For Trudeau, this is the real danger of SNC-Lavalin to his political future. While he may not have necessarily done anything illegal, frankly to many people that nuance simply will not matter. It will certainly feel like he has. Increasingly since the story first broke, polling has shown the Conservatives making sizeable gains amidst the Liberals’ falling support. The question is whether or not it’s enough to change the balance of power.
Google’s Political Ad Ban
As the scandal continues to overtake news feeds, Google made a big announcement. From The Globe and Mail,
“Google is banning political advertising on its platforms ahead of the Canadian federal election because of new ad transparency rules it says would be too challenging to comply with.
“The decision comes in response to the Liberals’ signature election measure, Bill C-76, which passed in December. Among other things, it requires online platforms to keep a registry of all political and partisan ads they directly or indirectly publish. The penalties for not doing so include fines and possible jail time.”
It seems Google decided that building that ad registry just wasn’t worth the hassle. While those political ad dollars may not be worth much to Google in the grand scheme of its business, it certainly seems like they are to the search giant’s chief rival, Facebook, which said it will comply with Bill C-76. That leaves the social network the only game in town to reach millions of Canadians during the campaign period.
This shift in spending could play a major role in the coming air war. Not only was Google a key channel during the 2015 election, but so too was YouTube. By banning all political advertising for the upcoming cycle, candidates, parties, and every other stakeholder will have no choice but to increase their use of Facebook’s ad platform, which includes Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp in addition to Facebook’s core app. And unlike Google’s search and display ads, Facebook’s ads are inherently social by nature, which is to say they are designed to be shared, amplifying those paid messages beyond a single individual. By retreating from the ad space during the election period, Google will cede a large and growing part of every political campaign to a single player, one that has spent the last three years trying to combat the very type of extreme political ads that are about to flood the network once again. For all the progress Facebook claims to have made in cleaning up its advertising platform, the core incentive of campaigns to create extreme ads meant to spread through the social network continues to exist — and SNC-Lavalin is perfectly suited to fill the need.
Andrew Scheer can’t believe his luck.
