Free Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them by Susan Delacourt

Ontario, it became systematized—and marketing-friendly. Atkins was the brains behind a system that helped centralize the advertising message among the local campaigns, to make them more leader-dominated. It would turn out to be a template for many election campaigns at the federal level in future. The result was called the “Candidate Service Centre,” run by another ad executive with offices not far from Camp and Associates. Conservative riding organizations were urged to send in their proposed advertising material for an “upgrade” and assessment by the experts in Toronto, and then they would be sent back all kinds of red-white-and-blue paraphernalia prominently featuring the leader. Customized posters, proclaiming the candidate’s support for Davis, would also be tucked into the return package to the ridings. It was an unsubtle way to ensure that all campaigns revolved around the leader, and thus all candidates owed their election success to him. Politicos learned a valuable lesson: you could achieve a kind of control over your caucus through advertising that you couldn’t through charisma, charm, discipline or any other traditional tool of leadership. All you needed was a unified “message,” with everyone speaking from the same script, with the same pictures.
    The Big Blue Machine’s methods attracted many admirers, including Richard Nixon’s Republicans in the United States, who flew to Canada to observe the machine in action. It was one of the few times that Canadians were imitated by American politicos rather than vice versa. In the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s, a Republican pollster was quoted as saying of the Big Blue Machine that its operatives were “very good at retail politics—identifying their vote and getting it out—probably better than most organizations in the US.”
    Rival Liberals paid the Big Blue Machine the immense compliment of imitation. History would repeat itself—just as the federal Liberals saw and watched the success of the Diefenbaker campaign and put it to use in the 1960s, so too would the Liberals go on to borrow some of the Big Blue Machine’s methods in the mid-1970s.
     
    Red Cap Nation
    Trudeaumania faded in the early 1970s. Hobbling along with a minority government after the 1972 election, Trudeau himself was emerging in the public eye as a haughty, even aloof character—a far cry from the populist leader he’d appeared to be when he first vaulted into power.
    In the spring of 1974, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal minority government staggered to an end and the country was plunged into an election. At this point, the Liberals’ affection for advertising was turning into ambivalence; the 1972 ad campaign had been a bit of a disaster. The team from MacLaren had come up with the slogan “The Land Is Strong”—a slogan that became more of a punchline than an effective sales pitch for the Liberals. Keith Davey had also fallen out of favour with Trudeau and the inner circle; a cloud fell over his reputation because his legendary organizing skills had failed to win majorities for the Liberals. Trudeau was also permanently wary of professional backroomers, and of the whole Toronto Liberal crowd. At a dinner at 24 Sussex in 1973, he’d told them he wasn’t sure why they were involved in politics—where was the fire in their bellies?
    For all these reasons, the 1974 election loomed with only lacklustre Liberal enthusiasm in the advertising hub of Toronto. Although Davey had been put in charge of the national campaign committee, and some bridges had been rebuilt between Trudeau and Toronto, things were not going all that well in the city most pivotal to the Liberals’ fortunes. And that’s where Jerry Grafstein, a long-time Liberal supporter and a good friend of Davey’s, came to play his part in the fusion of Liberal politics and advertising.
    Grafstein, a lawyer, was part of the “new guard” of Toronto Liberal partisans, a skilled and sophisticated thinker about