Liberal vs. Conservatives on grassroots politics and social media

There is a talking point commonly heard in Ottawa that the political right provides a grassroots, populist approach to governing whereas the political left rules from a pedestal. It is for this reasons that comments such as Minister Clement's recent description of Canadians who express an interest in the prorogue as "elitist" come as no surprise. It is why Ignatieff's professorial demeanor (and background) are referenced in a derogatory manner, and why his global success is treated with false suspicion in Conservative talking points.

What is interesting to compare and contrast, however, is how the leaders actually act.

Take today, for example, In Ottawa, the Prime Minister leveraged his quick and comprehensive (and we should all give him full kudos for that) response to the unfolding disaster in Haiti to his political advantage in his usual reticent manner. Photo ops and announcements, but no questions allowed. In contrast, Michael Ignatieff gave his comment on this issue, as well as on many others, in one of his series of  town hall meetings. While it could be argued that Ignatieff's decision to hold all of his meetings at universities and colleges plays into the Conservative positioning of him as being too tightly tied into the world of academia, it is to his credit that he seems more willing to put himself into a public forum. It has been a long time since the Prime Minister offered an open microphone to allow the public to ask him unscripted questions in public. It is also refreshing to see a politician actually encouraging people to become involved in politics.

Indeed, the Liberal Party seems to be moving towards a more populist, grassroots means of interacting with the public than the Conservative Party, and they also seem to be trying to take a page from the Obama success of leveraging web-based networks into a political movement. However, where the American political sphere has become tightly tied to web-based campaigning, the Canadian parties seem to be experiencing growing pains as they adapt to this new paradigm. Conservative MPs almost all host a cookie-cutter website presenting the official party line under an approved template and with little in the way of differentiation between them save the MP's picture and links to local newsletters. Liberal Members of Parliament, meanwhile, are free and willing to create their own online identities. The Liberal sites mix official party branding with more personal content, and many have clearly made their personal branding and web presence a priority.

Similarly at the party level, while the Conservative Party site is a fairly dry presentation of official policy and news releases, the Liberal Party site includes blog entries and far more calls for member interaction. Of course, this is not without risk as the Liberals discovered when they created a contest to have people submit photoshopped pictures of where the Prime Minister would rather be than at the Copenhagen conference on climate change. One person submitted a picture of the Prime Minister as Lee Harvey Oswald getting assassinated by Jack Ruby and the Liberal Party suffered backlash for allowing the picture to be published.

But the reality is that more and more people are getting their information from online sources, and the parties have to adapt. As traditional media sources such as newspapers flounder, online information sources flourish. On all sides of the political spectrum, bloggers provide news and opinion geared towards supporting their parties, and blog aggregator sites provide means of viewing collections of articles along partisan lines. On the right, the Blogging Tories. On the left, Liblogs and Progressive Bloggers. It is one thing, however, to put out a blog or article. It is another thing entirely to have it reach a wide enough audience to make a difference.

This is where social networking has become the lynchpin to leveraging an idea and spreading it around to the widest possible audience. Facebook alone, for example, has about 12 million Canadian members. When considering that Canada only has 26 million voting-aged citizens, this puts 46% of voting Canadians within reach on a site where the interconnections between members mean that a popular item can be propagated across a significant portion of the membership at no cost to the originating source. MySpace and Twitter also provide the means to disseminate ideas, and the networks cross-pollinate as members link between them.

However, the difficulty is not only in achieving penetration in these networks. It is in translating this penetration to action on voting day. After all, it is easy to protest via clicking a button from the comfort of home. It is quite another to actually motivate people to devote time and energy to putting that protest into action. Going back to the American experience, John Kerry clearly had more online momentum in 2004, however this did not translate into his team being able to motivate people to get out and actually vote. Obama and the Democratic Party managed to do both in 2008. Closer to home, many news stories have brought up the FaceBook anti-prorogue group as an indicator of public dislike of this decision. However it was not until actual poll results showing eroding support for the Conservatives that they abandoned the arrogance of demonizing opponents to the decision for attempting to reframe this decision with a more palatable explanation for the decision.

But as the American experience has shown, social media can become a powerful tool in an arsenal of gathering grassroots momentum and party support. In that regard, the shorter cycle of the Canadian electoral system is less conducive to this sort of online support building during a campaign. However, if any party is to succeed in this realm they will need to build up their penetration into online social networks such that they can immediately and effectively utilize those networks as a means of disseminating policy positions and information outside of the filters and editorial oversight of the mainstream media. Certainly this has become apparent to some as here in Ottawa, local IT startup Purple Forge has developed an application to facilitate extending political interaction with social networks to mobile devices, and has already successfully marketed it to the Independence Party in the UK, and American Senate nominee hopeful Chuck Devore.

While thus far the Liberal Party seems to be far ahead of the Conservatives in making inroads into social networks, no party can yet claim to have a fully integrated netroots movement as part of their campaign strategy. Rest assured, however, that should the FaceBook anti-prorogue protest manifest itself into a sizeable physical protest as they hope to do on January 25th, then there is no doubt that the parties will take note and try to build up their social network penetration efforts.

Indeed, the only question remaining is who will manage to build an effective online network sufficient to significantly sway an election result, and when.