The Hill Times
OAKVILLE, ONT.—According to a military adage, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” That’s to say, no battle plan can be relied on with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force.
The same is true for plans in politics where changing circumstances in a political battle will demand that communication strategies be either tweaked or sometimes completely overhauled. Case in point is the Conservative Party of Canada which is currently implementing a major revision to its communication strategy, not because its original plan didn’t survive contact with the enemy, but because it didn’t survive contact with a newly emerging world order. And, yes, a lot of changes have occurred over the past month, changes which have totally upended the playing board and created a brand-new game. First off, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he would soon step down as Liberal leader. That’s a huge development since, I’d argue, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre wasn’t doing well in the polls recently because Canadians liked him; rather, he was doing well in the polls because Canadians just didn’t like Trudeau. With Trudeau soon to be out of the picture, the Liberals can now offer voters a brand new leader with brand new policies. Indeed, both of the leading Liberal leadership contestants—Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland—have pledged to scrap the unpopular carbon tax. Of course, the biggest change that occurred of late is that U.S. President Donald Trump is now looming like a menacing colossus on our southern border, threatening Canada with a tariff war, while he muses menacingly about annexation. What all this means is that the Conservatives' communications mantra which worked so well for them up until about a month ago,—“Axe the tax,” “Stop the crime,” and “Canada’s broken”—isn’t resonating with Canadian voters as it once did. Thus, the Conservatives needed to go back to the drawing board to concoct a more relevant message. Mind you, that isn’t easy to do on short notice, but luckily for the Conservatives, they have lots of money. Having lots of money means the Conservatives can afford to conduct lots of polling, conduct many focus groups, and hire lots of creative ad people. All of this, in theory, should allow them to quickly come up with a new competitive communication strategy. By the way, there’s nothing unusual about a political campaign retooling on the fly in this way. It happens all the time. In fact, sometimes it happens in the midst of an election. I recall, for instance, having to do just that back in the 1988 federal election. A small conservative advocacy group I was working for had come up with a months-in-the-making ad campaign designed to scare people out of voting for the NDP. Things were going great for us until—almost overnight—that election basically transformed into a referendum on free trade with the United States. As a pro-free trade group, we were forced to suddenly shift gears, and in a matter of a few days we had replaced our anti-NDP ads with pro-free trade ads. Anyway, getting back to the Conservatives, we can already make out the outlines of their new communications strategy. Basically, it’ll be a two-pronged approach. On one hand, they’ll seek to degrade whoever takes over the Liberal Party—I’m already seeing anti-Carney TV ads—while on the other, they’ll wrap Poilievre in the Canadian flag, proclaiming him to be Captain Canada, the only one strong enough to stand up to Trump. Only time will tell if this new plan survives contact with the enemy. Gerry Nicholls is a communications consultant. The Hill Times
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