Root

The new world of leaders’ debates is not the
only way traditional news media are on the
defensive. Party leaders typically hit the road for
five or six days each week during a campaign
and charge news organizations to send reporters
along. However, as broadcast and print news
budgets continue to contract, fewer and fewer
media outlets want to spend the money to
cover leaders’ tours first-hand – which in turn is
shrinking the size of those tours.
Going On Tour
Today, reporters who do join a tour are travelling
light: for print reporters, an iPad, cell phone,
and notebook suffice; and broadcast reporters
are packing less than ever before. Once, a
TV network needed a correspondent, tons
of cumbersome equipment, and a cluster of
technicians just to get a few minutes of news;
today, more compact production technology
makes broadcasting news easier and faster than
ever before.
This has a big impact on the business of
campaigning. Not long ago, 150-200 people
might have accompanied a candidate, travelling
across the country every day. Parties still usually
charter an Airbus 319 or similar airplane for the
five or six weeks of a campaign – but with fewer
members of the press going along for the ride,
fewer campaign staff are needed to move them
around. If not during this election, the day is
coming when political parties will take advantage
of the opportunity to make their tours much more
compact and nimble. Reducing media and staff
contingents make smaller airplanes feasible – and
those smaller airplanes can get into less-populous
centres more easily. Maybe future campaign
teams will opt to forego chartered aircraft for
most of the campaign in favour of devoting more
time to big cities, where news outlets can cover
campaign events with local correspondents at a
lower cost. The recent drop in oil prices makes
the Airbus 319-sized campaign tour affordable in
2015, but the day of reckoning for gigantic tours
is coming.
If a party decided not to charter a large airplane
for an entire campaign, could it get the same
effect with a more virtual tour? Parties could
create their own, proprietary TV studios and put
their leader and other key personalities into local
TV shows, webcasts, and online townhalls from
coast to coast, reaching voters more directly. That
kind of campaign would be less spontaneous
than the gigantic leader’s tour, but it would not
necessarily be dull – and it might allow campaigns
to speak to voters more clearly.
Reaching Untraditional Voters
Budgeting for a national election campaign is
a special art when you have a fixed budget to
spend. Every campaign activity is in competition
with every other campaign activity in this
fixed-pot approach to financing: a dollar spent
chartering an airplane can’t be spent on TV ads or
social media. This makes campaign planners very
conservative, and reluctant to take risks on new
technologies or tactics.
The cap on campaign spending often
discourages parties from trying to reach
untraditional voters: it’s usually better to
invest on reaching habitual voters. Youth, new
Canadians, shift workers, and the self-employed
are difficult to reach through traditional
campaign tactics, so it’s no surprise citizens
don’t turn up to vote like they used to. Hectoring
ads from Elections Canada haven’t reversed the
downward trend in voter turnout, so it’s up to
campaign teams to mobilize citizens to show up
on election day. In a world of campaign spending
caps, spending money on untraditional voters is
hard to justify.
Creating an incentive for parties to reach out to
new voters – who often pay limited attention to
election campaigns until a few days or even hours
before the polls open – might increase voter
turnout. In Australia, where voting is mandatory,
parties typically run safe, traditional campaigns
until the very end of an election when the leastengaged
voters start to take notice. Then, all hell
breaks loose as the parties compete with a frenzy
of flashy announcements about new benefit
programs, tough new law-and-order policies, or
anything else that will cut through the boring
news reporting of the “political horse-race” and
interest people who don’t usually follow politics.
Despite the fact that parties can only accept
very small donations, the spending cap system
is unlikely to be abolished any time soon.
However, as an experiment, maybe we could
run an election where spending wasn’t regulated
in the last 24 or 48 hours of the campaign. That
would allow the parties to test new tactics and
techniques to reach habitual non-voters and
infrequent voters – without having to skimp
on their spending to get habitual voters to
the polls. n
Ian Brodie in The Twig,
1985.
Ian Brodie ’85 is an
Associate Professor at
Law & Society Program
at the University
of Calgary. He was
Executive Director of
the Conservative Party
for the 2004 federal
election, and travelled
with Stephen Harper’s
tour during the 2006
election. He served as
Chief of Staff to Prime
Minister Harper from
2006 to 2008.
THE UTS ALUMNI MAGAZINE
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