Glad the Summer Leader’s Tours are Ending
The obligatory summer leader’s tours for the federal political parties wind down.
Blah! Enough! We don’t really care if 19 people came to meet the bus at the Timmy’s in Wisteria.
These leader’s tours are reported on too much. They are given too much meaning. They should strive for smaller goals. These goals can also be achieved by staying home. The tours are getting too big.
But the buses rolled out again, for 2010. Following them, there are efforts in the press to try to ascertain which tour is most successful, and how that will impact a party’s support. They try to drum up some excitement.
These tours must be very physically and mentally demanding for the leader and his or her entourage. Canadians take their summers seriously, and we put much effort into putting up the patio lanterns. A leader on tour forgoes this relaxation, even if that would benefit them during the parliamentary break. A bus ride all over vast Canada, to one arm-pit shirt sweat-stained barbecue after another. All that handshaking and smiling and nice-to-meet-yas is taxing on even the most youthful and extroverted of leader.
A leader may actually become better at what they do by staying home, with a huge pile of books to read, say, the classics in political theory. But they must instead hold a plastic cup with lousy, flat lager in one hand, while talking with an endless stream of Mikes from Canmore about the weather. And appear stimulated about that!
We should be proud of our leaders for keeping their grace and sanity with the thousands of inane chats they are required to endure. Especially when the really cool and interesting people aren’t at the political barbecue, they’re chilling at the lake. But the leaders must strive to meet more dullards than their competitors in the other parties!
These tours are practice for doing the real election campaign, but one-upmanship becomes the norm on the summer tours (when campaign spending limits do not apply).
A modest tour would be seen, erroneously, as an indication of little public support and weak party resources. And a big tour, making stops in every unincorporated little district, with a monster bus, huge crowds and derivative techno music pumping, well, now, that’s a leader’s tour from a successful party about to make even bigger gains. (Or a tour from a party maxing out a line of credit or going into debt).
And so we have media tidbits reporting on the tours, like insecure penis measuring, comparing how many stops Harper and Ignatieff are making. But how do the leaders USE what they have at the stops, should be the question!
I wonder how far this can the parties go to outdo their opponents. Could the leaders ever meet in a local fair’s pie-eating contest? Could the Greens take a solar powered hovercraft? And so what happens when a leader inadvertently undercooks a beef patty and then serves it to a potential voter?
And given technology including social networking and so on, not to mention the carbon footprint, could more Canadians be reached online instead of on the Trans Canada? Surely, a virtual leader’s summer tour would be a popular Facebook group.
At least, it’s neat Canada can have our top political people do these pilgrimages in safety, which is certainly not the norm the world over.
But wouldn’t it be gutsy for a party to say they were going to stay home? To give Canadians the summer off from their squabbling, and tell them, instead, we’ll be working behind the scenes to better represent you come the fall sitting. Local elected members and candidates can press the flesh on their behalf and maintain the link with the party and leader.
Much is written and talked about what the leaders do on these tours. The polls are endlessly assessed and compared to the seemingly successful running of each tour. The words spoken by the leaders at each pit stop are closely assessed.
But I think what is more valuable (and less reported on) is what the leaders are hearing. There are those rare, valuable times when the conversation with the barbecue folks turns tangible; when the views of the constituents are truly being expressed.
There can be obvious wake-up calls. A Jack Layton going for gun registries in rural BC or Alberta, for example, is not certainly going to be offered a second plate of pancakes so sincerely at the community breakfast. But surely he knows that. Stephen Harper has probably figured out by now that lots of Canadians want a long census form? (Well, they don’t mind if their neighbour gets that). These examples do not need charity softball games to figure out.
What subtle messages might come to the leaders and their parties that are more useful?
The issues and flaps and controversies wax and wane, but learning about the ways people think of political issues and ideas more generally (which by the way, is part of what we call “political culture”) can linger after the tour bus is back in the garage getting the tires rotated. This acquisition of deeper knowledge gets into how people in different parts of Canada define the issues, before we even start debating how those issues could be addressed. Leader’s tours can educate the leader.
If they do learn anything the parties have to be willing to adjust. The leaders and their staffers and their parties need time to stare at the cracks in the ceiling and ruminate. They need those reflective moments when a political party can quietly acknowledge any deficiencies in the efficacy of their messages. This is the kind of thing that takes time to sink in, and thus any political impacts that come from these tours can’t be so instantaneously measured.
And what is learned and compensated for does not have to be earth shaking. It would be an error for a leader to mistake a summer tour crowd for being a representative sample of the views of Canadians. It’s more like the “those who come out for free donuts” sample. And thus the conclusions they can draw should be smaller.
Smaller tours, smaller goals. Fertile results.
A goal of a leader’s tour, from the party perspective, is to try to articulate the views of Canadians and then bring more of these Canadians together. Well, together under their party banner. But scaled-back tours with thoughtful itineraries, and modest expectations (modestly reported on, too), can bring richer, long-term benefits to the operation of democracy and party politics in Canada.
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