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

in the ad business, it seems, Camp’s talents were more suited to supporting than leading—more useful in the backrooms than on the stage. Lester Pearson became prime minister in the spring of 1963, kicking off a reign of Liberal power that would stretch for another twenty years.
    In power, the Liberals’ attachment to advertising and imagery would only deepen. When Pearson went on TV to do a broadcast of “The Nation’s Business” in May 1965, Davey wanted to know how the audience was reacting. A select group of citizens in Hamilton and Toronto was asked to watch the show and then give their reactions in telephone interviews afterward. Though 2,000 people were invited to participate, the survey eventually winnowed down to 189 respondents, who offered their critiques of Pearson’s performance, on everything from his trustworthiness to the question of whether he was wearing makeup. More than 60 percent thought Pearson had “things under control,” for instance, while 39 percent were “somewhat bothered” by Pearson’s voice. Forty percent did not believe he was wearing makeup and 93 percent thought he “looked in excellent health.”
    The southwestern Ontario city of London, Ontario, was often used as a test market for new consumer concepts and products. It was mid-sized, situated in the middle of Canada and had a large middle class, so Londoners were seen as good arbiters of potential success or failure in the commercial world. London was the site of Canada’s first McDonald’s restaurant, the first downtown enclosed mall, the first K-Mart, the first automated bank tellers and the first debit cards. At one point in the 1960s, Keith Davey and the MacLaren ad agency even surveyed the good citizens of London to determine what would make the perfect Liberal candidate—the idea being that you could apply consumer-preference test methods to politics, too.
    So London was a natural place for Liberals to trot out an idea aimed at capturing consumer-citizens’ hearts in the 1960s. In 1967, the new Consumer and Corporate Affairs minister John Turner gave a speech at the University of Western Ontario in London, in which he sketched out plans for a guaranteed annual income for Canadians, to be financed by tax increases. Globe and Mail columnist Dennis Braithwaite caught the speech and wrote a column headlined “Beware of Grits”: “I wish someone would explain to John Turner and all those ambitious chaps who are seeking our favour that it’s a new ball game today. We don’t want any more handouts, thanks a lot. We just want to keep a little of our own money, so that when we save a little, or get a raise or pull off a deal, the rewards will be real and tangible, not an illusion and a mockery.”
    Another person also noticed the speech with disfavour: Colin M. Brown, an insurance executive at London Life, one of the city’s major industries. Brown was perturbed at the way in which politicians were monopolizing the media to put only their own positions across—he believed that Canada’s hard-working citizens deserved a say, too.
    On April 14, 1967, Brown took out a full-page ad in the Globe and Mail protesting that the Liberal government appeared to be on its way to turning a budget surplus into a projected deficit of $3 billion within the following five years. The ad reprinted the Braithwaite column, as well as some excerpts from other financial commentators. Brown, for his part, wrote, “All federal political parties, in their race for votes, seem to be prepared to make Canadians, in all walks of life, the heaviest taxed people of the world.” He ended the ad with an appeal for donations, to finance more and similar ads: “If you share my alarm, your support is welcome.”
    Apparently, Brown had many allies. His son, Colin Jr., would recall bags and bags of mail landing at his dad’s office or on the doorstep of their London home, many with cheques. In this way, an organization called the National Citizens