Crashing the Party: An Insider’s Look at Creating Political Platforms – Transcrpit

IRPP Webinar – January 25, 2022

Moderator:

Jennifer Ditchburn, President and CEO of the Institute for Research on Public Policy

Panellists:

Angella MacEwan, Senior Economist, CUPE National
Dan Mader, Founding Partner, Loyalist Public Affairs
Tyler Meredith, Director of Economic Strategy and Planning, Finance Canada

Jennifer Ditchburn

Hello everyone. I’m joining you from Ottawa, which is located on unceded Algonquin Anishinabeg territory. You might notice a new logo behind me, the IRPP is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. And we’ve always remained fiercely independent and nonpartisan. Over the years, we’ve often served as a platform, a forum for bringing together people from different political backgrounds. I’m really looking forward to this conversation about party platforms. Major public policy moves are signaled in platforms, and can have a major impact on just about every aspect of Canadian life, from the social safety net to the economy to gender equality and our relationship to the planet. So let me introduce our panelists. Angella MacEwan is a senior economist at the Canadian Union of Public Employees. She is also a fellow with the Broadbent Institute, where her primary focus is understanding the impacts of Canadian Economic and Social Policy on workers, especially climate policy, and international trade and investment treaties. She ran as the NDP candidate for Ottawa Centre and the 2021 federal election. Dan Mader is a founding partner at Loyalist Public Affairs. Before this, he was senior vice president of National Public Relations in the federal government. He led the development of policy in several departments and later served as Chief of Staff to the Minister responsible for defense procurement. He was deputy campaign manager policy on Erin O’Toole’s successful campaign to lead the Conservative Party of Canada. And Tyler Meredith is the director of economic strategy and planning for Canada’s Minister of Finance. He worked as policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office, and he was a research director here at the IRPP, where he oversaw programs on pension reform and labor market policy. Welcome to all of you. So let me dig in and start by asking each of you to describe your career path and how it led to working on party platforms. Maybe, Angela, I’ll start with you.

Angella MacEwan

Sure, so I studied economics at Dalhousie, and one of my electives that I took in my graduate work there was social policy. And the professor hooked me up with a think tank, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. And as part of that work we did we put out an alternative budget. And so that involves a lot of the similar types of things for platforms, costing policy, thinking about what values are, sort of, you know, being signaled with certain types of policy, and then what would it take to make that happen. And then when I came to Ottawa, and I was working for the Canadian Labour Congress, one of the professional left wing people. And so in 2015, the NDP were looking for validators to validate their platform. And I was one of the validators. And they walked me through the platform. And I gave a quote saying, I thought it was great. And so that’s very nerve wracking to kind of be the one to say, Yeah, this is good policy and math works. And so that’s how I kind of got started doing it, and I really enjoy it. And I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s fun, important work.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. Dan?

Dan Mader

I got involved in politics back when I was in university, although I was studying computer science at the time. And so after graduating, I did a summer internship on the Hill, but then went off to have what I thought was going to be my career writing software later did a couple other things in the tech space, but kept getting pulled back to being interested in politics excited about politics. And in 2006 when the Harper government was elected, I left the job management consulting was trying to figure out what to do next and got offered a job doing policy for a Minister John Baird. ended up spending about six years on the Hill. And then even when I left working in politics sort of stayed involved volunteering a little bit. And a few years ago, when Erin O’Toole ran for leader of the Conservative Party, I reached out and said, I want to help got involved in his first campaign. And we basically told we, you know, we’ve got a bunch of policy ideas, we need someone to write them up, someone can take these rough notes and, and, and write them and turn them into some policy papers that we can publish with a campaign. I said sure, that sounds like fun. And it sort of grew from there to putting together a platform, to then the second time we ran successfully for leader, leading policy from the beginning. And then when he won the leadership being too old, okay, well, now, now he’s new to the party. So we got to be ready for election. So we went and got the platform ready.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Not not small tasks. I love that that story of your career journey, it really speaks to today’s economy and how your skills can be transferred into a whole other domain. Tyler?

Tyler Meredith

Yeah, well, listen, actually, in my own career path has been actually kind of a version of both Dan and Angela’s in that I spent the better part of about, you know, 10 to 15 years in consulting in the think tank world. And even since the age of about 10, I had been involved in, you know, at a local level in the Liberal Party on various different campaigns always just at a local level. And it wasn’t until after the 2015 election, that I got a kind of call out of the blue saying, Would you like to come up and work for Justin Trudeau? And I said, Yeah, that’d be kind of cool. I’m just obviously, as someone who, you know, been interested in politics for a long time, but not ever formally working as a staffer before. And I saw it as an opportunity to kind of take a lot of what I had done in consulting and in the think tank world, and try to actually apply it in government. And so I worked in PMO, for a number of years, was very involved in a lot of economic files. And then was asked in advance of the 2019 election, kind of in my spare time to go out and basically start consulting with people on what are the ideas that we might take into the next campaign, because obviously, you know, people talk about this a lot in the course of discussion, when you when you build a platform, you actually need to go out and talk to a lot of experts, because there’s a lot of work you need to do. And given my background in the think tank world, I think I had, you know, I had a bit of a standing start there. And, and really, you know, since then I, I’ve been at finance and was also similarly involved in 2021 platform. And you know, it’s a really, it’s a really cool experience.

Jennifer Ditchburn

It sounds like it. So most of us mortals, we see, we see the platform in its finished form either the whole document that we download online, or else we get snippets of it, you know, either through social media that we read about in the media, but there’s a whole cast of interesting characters and steps that go into platform development. Dan, maybe I’ll start with you on this, who are the different people involved in platform development?

Dan Mader

Sure. There’s a whole lot of folks involved. And, you know, I’d say it starts particularly conservative, it starts from the grassroots members of the party, who are involved in policy development, who are involved in attending our policy conventions, voted on policy resolutions. And that was one thing that was very important to us, as we put ours together, was looking at the policy process that was going on at the time and incorporating that members of parliament are also very involved. I mean, we have the you know, the shadow ministers, sometimes known as critics, whose job it is to come up with alternative ideas in each area of government, as well as just backbench MPs. All of the MPs are part of the process. They’re all invited to submit ideas. In our process, we had a couple of MPs who took on the job of kind of correlating all of that, of being the liaison for MPs with ideas, putting it all together and presenting it to the team. As well as the staff and the leaders office. So in this case, as the official opposition, there’s a there’s a team of policy staff and the office leader, the opposition, they were also very involved in that process. And then there were a whole lot of there was a team of volunteers who came together from across the country, who had often you know, often were activists with expertise in a specific area who were involved. And then, you know, outside groups and stakeholders I mean, the one of the one of the things that MPs were doing all the time that staff and leaders I was doing all the time is meeting with groups be they think tanks, be they industry groups, being a kind of civil society organizations and hearing their ideas and all kind of comes together into a big long list of ideas which ended up being shaped into a platform.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Tyler, I saw you nodding there. That sounds like a pretty thorough description of all the people that are involved or there’s some others when you’re in government that would be different?

Tyler Meredith

Well, and I think this is an important distinction, right is that when a when a party is in government, they are still a party, they’re still political party. And so they have to, on a simultaneous track, be working and thinking the exact same way, as Dan said, because actually, when you’re in government, one of the challenges, and I think if you were to talk to folks, you know, who around in government during the time of the conservatives, they would say the same thing, which is that, you know, the greatest challenge that a party faces, especially if they’re in government going into a campaign is that they think like their government, right? And, and actually, in a campaign, you have to think like you’re a party. And so the key is to build a process that engages really all the same people that Dan just mentioned, but through the channels of the party. And so, you know, in our case, one of the things that we have leaned on heavily in the last couple of cycles, is the platform co-chair. And so in 2015, that was Ralph Goodale, in 2019 that was Ralph Goodale and Mona Fortier. In 2021. That was Mona Fortier and Terry do good. And what they do aided in part by staff is basically go out and talk to lots of people have lots of conversations with lots of people inside the party, outside the party, with experts, and really bring back to the leader into the campaign team, a whole bunch of ideas that give a buffet really of options of whatever way the campaign wishes to run at that moment in time to express the values that the party wishes to highlight.

Jennifer Ditchburn

I like that buffet idea. So Angella, once you have this, all these ideas that you’ve pulled from all kinds of different people, how do you decide between all of them, I didn’t just which ones you put in the platform and which ones you leave to get cold on the buffet table?

Angella MacEwan

Yeah, I don’t get to decide that, unfortunately. So I’ve never seen that process happen. But what I do get is I’ll get, okay, we want something like this, but we want it to, you know, meet these social democratic principles that we have? How can we sort of meet what stakeholders are asking for meet what our grassroots are asking for and have it be technically solid, and so you kind of come up with that technical piece, and you hand it back to them? And I guess if it makes sense with the stakeholders in the grassroots, like, they go back and say, Hey, what about this, and then, if it works, kind of as part of the whole strategy, I think, then that’s when it, it gets into the document. If it’s something that will capture people’s attention, will illustrate the values and principles that you’re looking for, and makes people who are going to be really noisy about it during the election, if, if you want, you’re talking to these validators, and you want them to be happy, you don’t want Morna Ballantyne, to say bad things about your childcare policy, right? So because they’re the experts in the field, and they’re understood by media to be the expert. So you really want to make sure that you’re crafting this thing. And it’s, you’re, you’re optimizing a lot of functions. At the same time, it’s really kind of tough to do that in such a small space. But that’s the strategy people get to decide whether it does or not.

Jennifer Ditchburn

And so Angella, what role does the leader play in while all this is going on? Is it leaders sort of the last veto, or just one voice among many? Yeah,

Angella MacEwan

I mean, I think that probably varies from leader to leader and, and from team to team. But I think the leader is absolutely involved in a setting the direction like this is where we want to go. And, and saying no, make sure you listen to these people. I think, again, hopefully they’re able to delegate well, and put people that they trust in charge of the day-to-day stuff. But yeah, I think the leader would definitely have a veto as well, for sure.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Dan, how do you come up with the overall strategic narrative? Because every platform has kind of a storytelling thread, if you will, that kind of frames the whole, the whole platform. So where does that come from?

Dan Mader

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, it is that strategic narrative that is also kind of used to shape and kind of, you know, go through those ideas and figure out which ones to put in. It comes with a bunch of things. I mean, it comes from what the leader stands for, and it’s about to come to what the party stands for, and wants to be talked about. And it comes from research. I mean, increasingly, you know, campaigns are research driven. And campaigns are thinking about things like who are the types of voters who are accessible to us, what are the issues they care about today? And therefore what you know, what are the problems we need to present solutions to in order to appeal to to those voters, and that leads to an overall strategy and an overall narrative that then shapes the platform.

Jennifer Ditchburn

And when you say research, you’re talking about public opinion research or policy research, all of it?

Dan Mader

Yeah, public opinion research. You know, campaigns do a lot of polling, they do a lot of focus groups, they do a lot of analysis of that data. And that, that ends up shaping campaigns strategy included the platform.

Jennifer Ditchburn

You mentioned earlier, while all of you mentioned in some way that the party, Tyler, in terms of the party, the policies that come up from the grassroots at the policy conventions, you know, how, how committed are you during the platform process to reflecting those because sometimes there’s kind of wacky resolutions that that arise from party conventions? And how do you kind of determine the mix between new stuff and stuff that the party at grassroots wants?

Tyler Meredith

Look, I think what you’ll hear from all of us is that a good platform needs to have a balance of kind of four things, it needs to have some things that directly reflect the priorities as stated by the members. And that can be, you know, as reflected by resolutions, the past recent policy convention, it can be things that come in from your Commission’s process, because oftentimes, every party will have groups formally within the party structure that represent different demographic groups that that are part of the party constitution. And you will also then in a second bucket need to have something that reflects caucus because caucus itself needs to see itself in the document, and they need to be able to sell it at the door, you need something that reflects the leader and leaders priorities, and then you need something that kind of reflects the moment of the time right, and what are the issues that experts and stakeholders and the press gallery are talking about as issues because the combination of those four things is what makes for an authentic campaign. And to the extent that parties don’t have enough weighting in in each of those four buckets, they can sometimes get themselves into trouble. And that’s really what brings to life a campaign. And I would just say, you know, I think if you look, I can really only speak from for our party, the Liberal Party, but if you look at at the arc of our process, you know, you can point to a number of things over time, whether it is same sex marriage, or whether it is legalization of cannabis, as things that have been championed directly from party policy resolutions, and then became part of the platform in a subsequent election.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Angella, is that reflected in the NDP as well?

Angella MacEwan

Absolutely. I mean, if you look at something like childcare, the Liberals have actually promised that since the 80s. So some of these promises take a while to come to fruition. But there are lots of activists in the grassroots that are pushing for that. I was actually just thinking I was not involved in partisan politics before this, this job. But as a teenager, I was very interested in politics. And I did Saskatchewan Youth Parliament where we went to the legislature and Regina. And one of the big things we debated there in like 1993, was gay marriage. And so it’s often also what we might call stakeholder groups, but people who are working through different organizations that are pushing these things, and are able to capture the attention of whoever’s writing the platform, to get their thing in there, and to push that issue forward. So that’s a really, I think that’s a really important piece that what is what are people pushing in the broader public, so our students really pushing for, you know, tuition, debt, or student debt to be eliminated. And then you’ll often see that reflected in some way in all of the party platforms, and they, they kind of have their own take on those different pieces to show what their specific values are around that issue.

Jennifer Ditchburn

So earlier, Angella, you mentioned the word ‘validators.’ So once the bulk of the work is done, how do you sort of test the platform to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, there isn’t like a huge mistake….?

Angella MacEwan

Yeah, I mean, as Tyler and Dan both said, often, you will have staff and MPs reaching out to people throughout the whole process. And so you’ll be touching base while you’re developing the policy, with experts in the field with people that it’s going to impact. So if you’re working on an issue around, say, income supports for people with disabilities, you better be talking to people with disabilities to understand what they need, and it’s not just what you think they need, you’re not nice white parenting it. And so that doing that early, I think is really important. And you really have to do it or and if you haven’t, then you get caught in the middle of election, I think like the NDP did in this past election around March occurred. And we hadn’t kind of developed the validators, the experts to push back and say, No, we have a different strategy here. And we did a different strategy, but we just didn’t have the communications around it to sort of push back when somebody of the stature of Mark Jaccard says, yeah, that doesn’t make sense.

Jennifer Ditchburn

You’re welcome. To the prominent Canadian climate expert and, and he wrote a very popular piece grading, for Policy Options, grading the different parties and their climate platforms and wasn’t overly I guess, complementary to the NDP’s platform. So Tyler, do you see the process having changed much? I know not all you we haven’t, you know, worked in platforms for 40 years. We haven’t been around them for four decades. But do you see some kind of change in how the party’s approach platform development?

Tyler Meredith

Totally. And in fact, I think, you know, it’s interesting, a lot of people regard the kind of modern platform, at least in Canada as being really kind of a benchmark set by the Liberal Red Book of 1993. Like, that’s the kind of standard that often a lot of people will talk about, as whether you’ve got a plan to govern. And I think that’s true in the sense that, you know, I think that over time, you have seen platforms become thicker and more detailed in the way in which they try to explain and meet a bar of kind of seriousness, you know, than just saying, in principle, here are kind of your four or five, you know, value statements that we believe in. But what I would say that it’s really different. Now, even more so compared to that Liberal Red Book that everyone thinks about, is the democratization of input to the process that has come from access to digital tools, open media, data, where, frankly, you know, on, you know, with a bit of stack can data from can sim, anyone can be a policy analyst, right. And anyone can kind of put together a serious piece that, you know, if you write it on policy options, or on a sub stack, or a medium blog post, it could get noticed. And I think that changes, in part, the way political parties have to go out and talk to lots of more people to gather the kind of full range of ideas that they might want to consider. The other thing I think that’s different, is obviously the process that we have, since the 2019 campaign of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, where that is a resource that parties can actually use in order to get detailed costing, now it’s gonna, you know, still have, you know, some degree of error in it, because like anyone who comes up with these estimates, there are a bunch of them, they’re all based on a bunch of assumptions. But it’s, but that really, I think, has those two forces, it really put parties in a whole other universe of almost having to think about what an alternative government would look like, right? And that’s really what a what a platform process eventually becomes.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Dan, what do you think about the PBO’s involvement? Because there have been voices that say PBO should not be involved in elections.

Dan Mader

Yeah, I mean, having dealt with them in this past election, I think they really do contribute something. And I think part of the part of the reason is, we are in an increasingly partisan age, where it is harder to get other third parties to be involved. It used to be that people would get an accounting firm, or maybe even a think tank to cost their platform. And I know, having been involved in this having gone out to some third party groups, people are nervous to do that, you know, so much politics gone so nasty these days, that a lot of organizations are nervous that if they give their sign off, they’re gonna face blowback for it. And so having an organization that is credible, that everyone is using, also, which is good. And as judging people by the same standards, I think it’s good. I mean, the one comment I would make on the process is, the current rules in a minority Parliament mean that the PBO can only start costing when the rate is dropped, which means that they are scrambling during the campaign. And you know, it takes them a while during the campaign, it would be a lot better if they could start that costing in advance. And that’s a change. I’m hoping we’ll see maybe before the next election. But I think, you know, once they were able to start looking at it, I think they did a good job. I think, you know, having one organization that’s credible, it’s costing everyone’s platform is a good thing.

Jennifer Ditchburn

There might be some people on this in this webinar from that office listening…. Angella just wanted to pick up on one thing that Tyler was talking about in terms of the democratization of the process and how, you know, lots of people have access, but how do you ensure that that the platform development processes is inclusive? And by that I mean that you know, policy development, has been traditionally very kind of confined and Lord knows that, you know, and Ottawa political circles are not very, very diverse. So how do you ensure that, you know, equity-seeking groups get a voice in platform development, we know how important the platforms turn out to be. I don’t know if you have some some thoughts on that.

Angella MacEwan

Yeah, for sure. So, before the last election, I think it was during, you know, the pandemic, which has now stretched on for a while. So timelines are a little fuzzy. But the NDP did launch a process called Build Back Better before Joe Biden. And they talked to experts, and they did the work to reach out to different groups. And I think being virtual made it easier. And so there were a whole bunch of topics where they made an effort to reach out to diverse groups. And there are lots of organizations now that are doing that work on 2SLGBTQ+ issues, or there’s Operation Black Vote, or there are great organizations that that do work for people with disabilities. But I think you also still have to do that work that Tyler was talking about reaching out to academics and experts and finding them and making it easier for them to engage with you. Because often there are multiple barriers, like, I mean, again, before I moved to Ottawa, I would have had no idea how a platform was formed. Because as much as as Dan and Tyler talked about the policy books, and the NDP has that to the policy books are sort of an overall principles and you draw from that. But what’s happening at the moment isn’t always like the same as what was in the policy book. And so you have to adapt, you can’t just pull it directly from the policy book. And the policy book deals with everything in government. And you really have to be a bit pickier. When you’re narrowing it down for a platform, you can’t fit all of what you would do as government in this one communications document. It’s really meant to communicate your values, how you’re going to make decisions, that you are technically competent, and can be trusted to govern.

Jennifer Ditchburn

On that, so you know, we focus Tyler a lot on the details. Like, you know what all the small little promises are, but it seems like there’s something else going on? Maybe that’s more symbolic. In terms of a party platform?

Tyler Meredith

Yeah, look, I mean, a good like a good platform, especially one that has a couple of big markers that people will remember, right, like the CCB, for example, in 2015, for the liberals, or I think, you know, remember, when Stephen Harper ran on the renovation home tax credit, I mean, they’re meant to be things that grab people’s attention that connects with real problems. But they’ve also got to be simple enough that people can understand why you’re proposing them. And they have to generally, again, fit with the values and the time that you’re trying to propose them. Right. Like, if you find yourself proposing something, and this is this is, you know, some of the challenges that parties face when they’re trying to develop policy, well in advance of a campaign is you can come up with something. And because you need or want to plant a flag on a particular issue or to get attention on something, and just circumstances are going to change right over the course of 10 or 12 months in the lead up to that election. And the kind of situation you find yourself in in the campaign is gonna be totally different. And, you know, parties have to be nimble enough to to adjust for that, because they are asking for people’s vote right, and confidence to say that they would have the ability to meet the challenge that Canadians have at a given point in time.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Dan, I see you nodding there.

Dan Mader

Yeah, that’s very true. I mean, we started developing the platform almost a year before the election, or, you know, actually, almost even when the election was called, as soon as Erin became the leader. And that was because we didn’t know when the election was going to be. And we thought there was a chance liberals want to call an election on the throne speech in the fall. So we were scrambling to be ready with some response if there was an election a month after became leader. And then after that, okay, we got a few more months’ time, let’s get ready for winter. Okay, they’re probably gonna call an election in the budget, which I think was the plan until the third wave COVID made that not possible. And then it became a summer election. But what that meant was, we had to keep updating it. And the extra time was good, but we had to, as Tyler was saying, keep it relevant. And, you know, change things and add things as new issues became salient. And I think the biggest one that became a big issue towards the end was cost of living, where there had not been a big issue six months before the election. And that was the last chapter inserted into the platform was just before the campaign when that became such a big issue. And, and we have to be sure we were speaking to that. And that’s, you know, it’s, it is so important. You can’t let yourself get stuck on Yeah, but I’ve got this great platform. I’ve got this great set of ideas about what I want to be talking to what matters is what the voters want to hear you talking about what they care about when they’re going to base their vote so

Jennifer Ditchburn

So I’m just want to let the audience know that in about five minutes, I’ll go to your questions. I see that there’s quite a few questions coming in and good ones, but just Dan, staying with you. Describe what it feels like the day that platform goes out.

Dan Mader

Terrifying, terrifying. You haven’t slept in days. You know, I was… I knew, ya know, that morning. We surprised everyone by releasing there was the first full day to campaign. We kept it very tight and somehow it didn’t leak that we were releasing it, which was impressive. A lot of people did know towards the end. And you know, we got up, we went to brief the leader we did his final prep he went out to do is kind of morning press conference, and nobody in there in the audience knew that he was actually releasing the full platform. And went and did it and then immediately after that, myself and a colleague of mine did a technical briefing for journalists, which was the scariest part of the campaign for sure. The second scariest was the technical briefing we did on the platform costing when we put that out a few weeks later, and my colleague and I walked into a big room and there were all the bureau chiefs, the Ottawa media, all the toughest journalists from, you know, Chantal Hébert to Susan Delacorte, to Bob Fife, to David Aiken, all of them are just sitting there waiting to ask us questions. And it was sort of, I hope we didn’t get anything wrong. I hope we didn’t miss anything. And, and then it was great after that, you know, we started to get a lot of positive feedback. A lot of people are really excited, a lot of candidates really happy that we’re giving something so substantive to us in the door. That’s another important thing is, you know, when we when you know, candidates get questions to the door, where are you gonna do on this? What do you do on that little issue? And we put out a very substantive platform, 160 pages, so they cannot complain that they did not have an answer on just about anything. We’ve given them stuff to say. And that started to feel good, but a very stressful very, very frightening there.

Angella MacEwan

Yeah. So I went into the technical lockup in 2015 as the validator, the academic validator, and I remember David Aiken asking me a question about GDP or something. And I’m like, I hope they don’t find anything like I haven’t missed something huge here. And then my say-so now means nothing but no, it worked out. I was able to answer his question and it but it’s terrifying, because there could be a mistake in Excel that all of a sudden becomes a huge credibility issue for the for the rest of it, and so yeah, you definitely double check those things. And I was talking to a friend I was, I took a leave of absence from the Canadian Labour Congress. And I did, I worked on the Saskatchewan election in 2016. And for the platform release, we drove up from Regina to Saskatoon, we got dressed, we briefed the leader, we did the technical thing, and then the journalist didn’t have any questions. So like, there was all this terror that they were gonna find something or pull it apart. And they’re like, Oh, that’s good.

Jennifer Ditchburn

No, that’s pretty rare. That’s pretty rare. I’ll go to questions just after this. But, Tyler, what goes into figuring out the timing of the release of a platform? And whether you’re going to release the whole thing or pieces of things?

Tyler Meredith 38:00

I mean, look, it really it. There is no one rule. It depends on the campaign and whatever the you know, the plan that the campaign team has for how they want to prosecute each day of the campaign, because, you know, what, a lot of people, you know, may not realize is that every campaign has a calendar, right? I’m the NDP, us, the Conservatives, we all are operating. You know, when we start the campaign on, here’s by day, 10, day, 12, day 15, what we think we want to be doing, obviously, those things change as you go during the campaign circumstances arise, stuff happens. You just got to be nimble with that. But it really, you know, your decision about to you when you publish the the platform is a function of what your calendar is that you’re trying to prosecute. When do you want it out in relation to debates? You know, how far is too early? How far is too late? Where you want to position yourself? These are things that the campaign team at the given time of whatever election you’re in, we have different ways of looking at it from election to election.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. Okay, so I have a lot of questions. So we have one from Hugh Segal, who was one of my predecessors as President at the IRPP and many other illustrious rules. So Hugh asks, How would Dan say that you would resist narrow right wing ideological bias in shaping a platform? And how would Angella resist narrow left wing ideology? And Tyler the massive biases imposed by the public service in platform formation? Maybe Tyler start with you. So how do you resist the biases imposed by the public service and platform formation?

Tyler Meredith

Um, well, the public service has no role, right? Like they can’t. So they’re just not involved in any way. What I would say to that, and I, you know, to the I think the part of what’s, you know, also behind that question, and it’s a bit of what I said at the beginning, which is, anyone who’s in government, right, whether it is us, whether it is the Conservatives, should it ever be the NDP some day, anyone who’s in government and then going to the polls at a later point in time, has to make sure that they have built a process through their party to act in, you know, to act and feel like a party platform. Because, you know, campaigns are not governing right campaigns are about talking about how you what you aspire to do in the future, not about what entirely you’ve done in the past. And I just think that that success, you know, parties that are that are coming from government have to really actually work almost against their own instincts. Because you’ve spent so much time in government thinking a certain way about certain issues, you actually have to be more political, you have to be more engaged with your party in the things that that the party, the membership, the caucus want to see in here.

Dan Mader

A party platform and everything that flows from it, every speech leader games, every press release, you put out, it’s all about speaking to the electorate and getting the votes of Canadians and getting the votes of undecided Canadians. And you can’t do that if you’re speaking only to your hardcore party supporters. I mean, it’s something that we thought about a lot when prepping this platform, it’s something I think we succeeded in, in that, I think we did present a conservative vision, but it was a third of vision for stimulus for growing the economy. And, you know, getting Canada back on its feet. This was, you know, not a low spending platform in any way. But it was, you know, it was a platform, which I think we distinguish ourselves by saying we’re going to spend money, but we’re going to do it in a more conservative way. We’re going to do it with less government control, more broad based tax cuts, versus government picking winners losers, for example. But in our overall messages, we’re in the middle of a recession, we can get Canada back on its feet. And and, you know, it’s and that was because we were speaking to the broader electorate and speaking to undecided voters, you know, while ensuring that we have enough conservative ideas in there to ensure that our party activists were excited about it. And I think that’s, that’s always the balance that you have described.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Angella?

Angella MacEwan

Yeah, I think where we are right now, in the if you think about the Overton Window, or where the policy discussion is, the NDP, actually, I often encourage actually doesn’t have to worry about like being to left, they have to have the courage to go to the left of where the Overton Window is. So I had the luxury of being a candidate, and knocking on doors in very nice neighborhoods in Ottawa Center and talking about wealth taxes. And we proposed a one or 2% wealth tax, 1% wealth tax on incomes over 10 million, or sorry, wealth over 10 million. And often people would say that’s not enough. Like the answer was great start. But that’s not far enough. And this is probably like the boldest left platform that we had had in a lot of years, especially on that revenue piece, which is kind of my wheelhouse. And so, yeah, I mean, are we do have a problem that the left flank is almost never happy with what we run on. But they will often come out and work for us anyway, because we’re so much better in terms of what matching their interests than the other options on the table.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. So I have three questions that are alike and they have to do with external parties and their you know how they influence or can help the party of the platform process. So Vass Bednar from McMaster. She asks, How do you and your colleagues build familiarity with more complex mainstream policy issues? For example, competition issues in the digital era? And how can researchers think about being useful to all parties on such topics? I’ll just gonna continue. Philip Ney says how best should nonprofits engage in the platform development process to get their ideas represented? And Joe Gunn asks, could each panelists give an example of a civil society group that successfully implements their party’s campaign? And how so they’re a little bit similar theme there, which is how to impact the the policy process from outside. So maybe Tyler I’ll start with you.

Tyler Meredith

Yeah, look. So I would say that, you know, it’s very important to work closely, as Angella has said, and Dan has said with some of the key stakeholder groups, if you know that you’re going to have you know, things that automatically connect with those groups as a as a key offering because you want to make sure that they will say nice things about you and that they regard what you’re proposing as a serious, the thing I would I would just maybe caution is, it’s really though important in a platform, to also make sure that you’re not just taking off the shelf, all of the ideas that are put to you, right? Like a platform can’t be a Christmas tree of every kind of trinket that someone has pitched you, it’s got to coherently fit together. And it’s got to, you know, connect with the values and aspirations of the campaign you’re trying to run. And sometimes stakeholders will be very good at identifying a problem, but may not have actually the right solution or may have only partial solution. And the challenge that a platform drafter has, is to try to be that integrator to take the idea to refine it a little bit to make it perhaps a little bit more political, but also to see the the edges of things that need to be changed or tweaked in order so that it actually might have broader appeal, or actually might be more implementable. And, you know, I think there’s lots of great groups out there in the environmental community. I think, also, you know, some of the work that we’ve done in connection with, you know, groups that have fought for gun control, you know, where we’ve, we’ve gone inside and talk to experts from those communities about, about what it is that we should do, and they’ve given us, you know, pretty good solutions, but we’ve also had to over time, you’ll refine them a little bit.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Dan, and I’ll just ask you to like, so how does one interact with people who are working on a party platform? It might not be obvious, you know, how to, like actually find the right people?

Dan Mader

I’ll answer a couple those questions by really focusing on particularly for an opposition party to deal with an opposition party, the leaders office, and the critics or shadow ministers are really the ones both to deal with. And also the way how you get expertise in areas I mean, an opposition party’s critics and their staff. I mean, each MP who is a was a critic or, or who is a shadow minister usually has an executive assistant, or less than a system is working with them on policy and their job, you know, the credit and their staff are can become an expert in that area. They’re also there to meet with stakeholder groups. And so they are both gathering information from stakeholder groups, they’re the ones who stakeholders should be going through. And they’re the ones who the who the campaign team are then leading on to be experts in an area. For example, I think of Brad Vis, a Conservative MP who’s become a total expert on on housing policy – on housing affordability. And we had a lot to say on that, as it became a huge issue in the campaign. And it was Brad and his EA, who really came up with a lot of it. The policy staff and the leader, the leaders office are the other people in that when you have a group of policy staff, they can use specialize in a few areas, and become a bit more of an expert in them. And I think you know, that, that really, you know, those are your ways in. And as the person who was trying to coordinate all of this, I mean, I got to the point where I could speak knowledgeably about everything, but I knew I had these people I could go to were really were experts on things and who had met with a lot of the the key groups in these areas. And really were familiar with them.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Angella?

Angella MacEwan

So one of the things that’s really useful for me, there’s a group called the progressive economics Forum, which has a lot of left wing sort of political economist, economists. And we blog and we share information. And we go to the Economics Association meetings every year. And so you go to, and meet and talk policy with the experts in the field in Canada who are doing that work like Kevin Milligan and Lindsey Tedds and that kind of thing. So being familiar with the state of actual research, economic or academic research in the country, I think is really important in terms of exposing yourself to the types of ideas that are out there, and having forums to have those conversations with other policy wonks, who like it so like this. I think that that’s, that’s pretty crucial. So IRPP does a lot of his work, a lot of think tanks do this type of work, Broadbent, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, bring people together to talk policy and sort of help create the soup where good ideas come out of and you make connections between people and, and you’ve got, you know, Efficiency Canada. So you’ve got some very specific think tanks in Canada that are doing research on this stuff. So really, a lot of it is personal relationships. And so maintaining those personal relationships and expanding those networks and finding out what interesting things are happening, reading what’s being written. So reading what Vass writes wherever it is, or Robin Shaban writes a lot about competition policy, and is very interesting. And so pulling those pieces in and making it and this is what the Liberal Party is really good at, like they are really good at forming those relationships and making those connections and and reaching out to people. Partly, you need a lot of resources to do that work, right. Like you need a lot of staffers to cover the field. And so I have found personally as someone who works for an organization that sometimes lobbies governments, interacting with liberals, they are really good at this. And it’s something that the NDP I think often is trying to get a lot better at. But it’s definitely partly a resource issue.

Jennifer Ditchburn

So I’ll move on so Nobina Robinson, she asks, How does any party ensure that platforms are informed and shaped by nonpartisans? Or do they only listen to their own party stakeholders? Is this made clear to the electorate as to who was being consulted for input, and hello Nobina in Ottawa. So, Angella, I’ll stay with you. Is there an effort to make sure it’s not just partisans, NDP partisans, or…?

Angella MacEwan

Absolutely, because as Dan said, you’re speaking to the electorate. So you want as many nonpartisan people involved in sort of validating your policy. Yes, that has something that’s gonna resonate with people outside of my bubble. And it can be really difficult to do that, especially if you are on the left wing, because people don’t really want to get associated and, and become, you know, how people think that there any, so it can be quite challenging. To get that nonpartisan, you have to be really persistent and capable. And the policy has to be really good, I think, in order to make that magic happen when you’re not in the center. But what you can watch for is there’s often backgrounders, and then there’s quotes from validators. And so if you look at where those quotes are coming from, those are often the organizations or individuals who are consulted in developing the policy.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Dan, I’m gonna ask you a different question. Is consultation with writing presidents and writing boards actually just window dressing to create the illusion of engagement?

Dan Mader

No, not at all. In the Conservative policy development process anyway, it’s – they are really the people who decide what resolutions get to be discussed on the floor for debate at policy, conferences, policy conventions. And it is those resolutions that get passed by policy conventions, which the campaign team that looks at least in the case of last election, we looked at them and said, Okay, our party has said our party members have said these are issues of concern, they want to see these types of solutions, we have to make sure that we are we’re looking at those and we are integrating those. And the party, you know, the writing presidents played a huge role in deciding which ones of those actually came through for debate, which then led to the ones that got passed. So yeah, they play they play a very important step there and decided, what are the policy priorities that the party wants to be talking about.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. And that question, by the way, came from John Ecker. So Tyler, Richard Elliot asks, to what extent do parties ever have regard to recommendations from parliamentary committees in developing their platform?

Tyler Meredith

Oh, fair, I think a fair deal. Like I mean, I think if you look at if you look at, you know, the Liberal, Conservative, NDP platforms, in the last couple of cycles, I think, you will see that certainly probably, which is true of the, the opposition, you know, the committees are a bit of a staging ground for ideas that they will put on the record. And sometimes those things just kind of travel directly into the platform. And similarly, you know, I can say, from our experience, you know, we do look at those reports, be they from, you know, the House, be they from the Senate. And, you know, if there are good ideas in them, we will certainly look at them. I mean, I, I take for example, you know, there were some recommendations, I remember from, I think the 2015 parliament that talked about whether or not Canada should have a national security committee, you know, similar to what other countries have had, and that was something that eventually went into the 2015 liberal platform and has subsequently been created. And I can think of a number of other examples where, you know, Senate or the House have done studies on issues, they’ve raised ideas, they, you know, they get they get stakeholders in much the same way we as in the platform process, go out and talk to stakeholders, those studies do kind of the same work, right, but getting people to come and get depositions. And you know, you get a fertile ground of stuff to work with.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you, Angella. We have a question from Scott Crighton. What social media tools do you use to engage people around the party platform?

Angella MacEwan

So Tik Tok, I’m not on Tik Tok, but…

Jennifer Ditchburn 54:33

But your leader is, because my kids show me that quite frequently.

Angella MacEwan

Yeah, Jagmeet uses that really well. We’ve also done you know, town halls on Facebook or streaming. Twitter, and pulled out in the last, so when I was a candidate, what we would do is, is we would pull out pieces from the platform on whatever issue we were talking about that week. And because I like graphs, we’d make a graph. And so we’d share the graph on on Instagram with some key sort of information about the cost of housing in Ottawa, for example, or something like that so often that helps to distill the issue into something that is quickly meaningful for the viewer. And then they can engage a little deeper if they want to.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. I guess it’s on a similar issue. Dan, Keith Corcoran asks, what are the key tips to keep in mind in order to effectively communicate platforms, and our specific points to various audiences.

Dan Mader

Still in Canada, we sort of have campaigns that are very much driven around a message event of the day and announcement of the day, that isn’t necessarily the case in other countries. I mean, in the last campaign, in the US, Joe Biden wasn’t announcing a plank. And you know, we didn’t have one day where he’s coming out with his childcare policy, and the next day, a health platform next thing and infrastructure platform that isn’t in the culture of the US, but in Canada, very much is. And so you know, if you watch the news coverage, it’s built around today, the Conservative campaign announced this, the Liberals announced this, the NDP announced this, the Greens announced this, I mean, it’s, it’s driven by that. And so what you’re doing is the campaign is sort of, you know, trying to pick your top issues, set up your message days around what you want to do, and then try to push that out through all the channels you’ve got on that day. And so that’s, you know, your leader making announcement with us, particularly with this, this last campaign with being able to do less in person, because of COVID, we had a you know, we would go and record a set of videos every day, we announced something. First, we put out a video, with a short announcement, we pushed that out on various social media platforms, we do the announcement and the press conference on it. We do probably a Facebook Live that afternoon where the leader could talk about it some more and answer questions on it, we’d get a package of information to candidates and they could also be talking about it. And so really just focusing around, you know, picking out those important pieces, focusing a day on them, and then using all the tools at your disposal to try to push that out, to try to get it to resonate with people.

Jennifer Ditchburn

So I’ll ask two more questions. And then and then we’ll wrap up it’s gone very quickly. Laurence Charbonneau, I think it is, asks, Angella platforms include more promises than a well-meaning government can possibly work through in a four-year mandate how much prioritization for government happens during – well, actually, it’s probably a question for Tyler, sorry, but how much prioritization for government happens during the platform development process.

Tyler Meredith

We’ll look, I would say, you know, any party that puts something in their platform has to feel confident that if they were in government, they would be able to get close to if not on the mark of trying to deliver that, obviously, there are reasons why things change, and ideas evolve once they go into government, but for the most part, you shouldn’t put something in your platform unless, you know, you think that it is it is worthy, potentially, of being something you would do in government. And I say that in part, because I think the research actually shows that more or less what parties say they will do, when they get into government, they more or less do and, you know, I I’ve seen different estimates out there. But you know, in general, about 75 to 80%, of what isn’t a platform will be undertaken in some manner or enough, right? In government. And obviously, you know, things like COVID can happen and throws you entirely off course. But parties, when they when they say they are doing something, they’ve got a if they’re a serious party, they should be putting it forward because they think that they can do it. And, you know, once you eventually then get to the having the privilege of working in government, you have to you do have to think about you know, what is the sequence of things you want, but sometimes to the question of prioritization, sometimes in platforms, you will be very specific about saying, within the first 100 days, here are the things that we are going to do, or, you know, within the first year, here are the things we are going to do in part that’s intentionally already showing your priorities. Sometimes it’s because you want to make an issue of something. But, you know, as I say, platforms are a way of showing a little bit –

Jennifer Ditchburn

I lost your audio a little bit there, Tyler, but to Angella, sorry, I realized that was a little bit rude. I just assumed that you didn’t have a point of view on that. So go ahead.

Angella MacEwan

Well, I just wanted to say that that’s sometimes where you have difficulty making something that appeals to you’re – balancing the pragmatism of, you know, we can’t implement dental care in four years. So we’re going to put in our platform, the steps to dental care. And but that’s not as exciting for the activists as the whole program. And so sometimes you come up again Has that pragmatism as a as a problem.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Okay, I’ll go to one more question from the people watching this webinar. Dan, Amanda Rosenstock asks, How do you reconcile advice from different experts that may be conflicting?

Dan Mader

Yeah, look, that’s a great question. I mean, that is one of the challenges in politics. It’s a massive challenge in government. And you know, at the end of the day, political leaders are decision makers, I mean, they are chosen by the public to make decisions. And one of the hardest things they have to do is go and consult and get different points of view and different expert advice and then decide. And, you know, sometimes that is experts, you know, siding with experts who they have grown to trust, who they, you know, they have built a relationship of trust with sometimes it’s, you know, hearing from a number of people and kind of seeing where, where the kind of more overwhelming evidence is. But at the end of the day, I mean, that’s what our political leaders are there to do is make these tough decisions, make decisions with imperfect information, make decisions, when there are conflicting views, and go and convince the public that they are making the right decisions, they’re making decisions in an intelligent way that they can therefore be trusted. I think, at the end of the day, that’s what most people are voting on is, you know, who is the leader, and who are the team where we can trust to make the important decisions that are involved in managing the country every day.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. So I’m going to exercise the moderator’s prerogative and ask one last question of each of you. And I’ll start with Angella. So can you just leave us with some thoughts on what it means to work on a platform? You know, in? Is it rewarding? Is it a big deal in terms of your career, maybe you could help characterize it. So Angella, then Dan, and Tyler,

Angella MacEwan

I think it’s really rewarding. You’re working with a team of people who are very engaged, who care about Canada and are wanting to make it better and are putting forward a vision. And so you’re working with this team of people. And in my case, I have like a particular skill set in terms of numbers. And you’re working with people who have very different skill sets who have the strategy skill set who have the calm skill set. And so you learn a lot from the process as well, and how to communicate the values that you’re trying to get across how to connect with people. And so it’s really rewarding. And it’s especially rewarding when you’ve been working on it for a while. And you see some of these ideas actually filtering through into governments and making people’s lives better. So it’s a bit of an iterative process, you don’t always see the gains that you want to see right away. But yeah, it’s definitely rewarding in the immediate term, I’m ADHD, so I really like fast moving fun, things. Really. That’s exciting. If you enjoy that type of thing. Campaigns are great. But also then it in the long term, it’s rewarding.

Jennifer Ditchburn
Thank you. Dan?

Dan Mader

Yeah, it was a massive honor to get to lead platform development for a campaign I got involved when I was at university 20 years ago, going to political conventions and finding that these were a place where I could, you know, stay up late at night talking to people from around the country on how the policy issues and solutions and ideas. And, and as a giant political nerd, I quickly said, you know, the coolest thing to get to do one one day would be to write a platform. And so it had been a dream for a while to get to work on a platform and to get to travel the country with a leader of our party during the campaign, I got to do both during this campaign. And it was a massive honour to get to do that. It was great to meet so many people from around the country and be involved in this and, and a great, you know, great to see our country like this and go to places I wouldn’t have gotten to go to otherwise, with the leader, see him interact with people, and see people talk about ideas that I’d help pull together. Just a great experience.

Jennifer Ditchburn

And Tyler?

Tyler Meredith

Yeah, and look, I’ll just echo what everyone else has said, it is one of the greatest privileges of anyone if you get the chance to do it. And I would say, especially to the students who are on here, you know, if you ever get a chance to participate in one of these processes, jump at it, because there’s very few opportunities in one’s life where you get the opportunity to be part of a process that can just imagine what it is the Canada that you want in the next three or four years to look like. And these things matter, right? Like the reason that we have an enhancement to the Canada Pension Plan now is because Justin Trudeau ran on it in 2015. The reason that we have the Canada Child Benefit is because Justin Trudeau ran on it and 2015. The reason we have carbon pricing because Justin Trudeau ran on in 2015, and so on and so forth, right? The reason that we are increasing the Old Age Security pension by 10% for people over the age of 75 is because Justin Trudeau ran on it in 2019. And so these things matter, it is like, I can’t tell you what kind of experience it is to be part of a process where you write something out on a platform, think about it, you put all your energy into how to design it, you then get the privilege and government to get to implement it. There’s really no other opportunity like that, that I can think of in many other parts of society. And I just, you’re a student out there, if you ever get a chance to do this jump at it.

Jennifer Ditchburn

Thank you. Thanks to all of you. It was really great. I appreciate you sharing all your insights. Thank you, Tyler, Angela and Dan. Thank you to everyone who watched and also to our friends at Carleton University at the Riddell Political Management Program.

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Crashing the Party: An Insider’s Look at Creating Political Platforms – Transcrpit

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