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This article was published 5/4/2011 (3465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

OTTAWA -- When John Diefenbaker ran as prime minister in 1958, his whistle-stop train tour across the country included short stops in small towns where he mingled with people waiting on the train station platform.

Crowds at his rallies numbered in the thousands and often spilled out of auditoriums and into the streets. Nearly 80 per cent of people voted.

THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES John Diefenbaker: more open era

More than a half-century later, if a few hundred people turn up to a campaign rally it's considered a good day. In 2008, voter turnout dropped to 58 per cent.

And for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, gone, too, is any risk he might encounter someone who doesn't like what he has to say.

Announcements and visits to local establishments are by invitation only. Rally attendees must register in advance. Media are kept at a distance and limited to four or five questions a day.

The highly scripted campaign style of modern-day politics is contributing to voter disengagement, said University of Manitoba political science professor Paul Thomas.

"It deepens and reinforces a public mood that is already anti-politics," he said.

Harper was under fire on Tuesday after students in London, Ont., told the media they had been ejected from Harper's April 3 rally. Awish Aslam, 19, told the London Free Press she was reduced to tears after an official escorted her and her friend out of the rally, tore up their name tags and told them they were not welcome. She said the official told her the Conservatives knew they were Liberals because of Facebook.

Aslam's Facebook site is closed to non-friends but her profile picture available publicly shows her and a friend with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff when he was in London last week.

Chief Conservative spokesman Dimitri Soudas apologized to the students through the media and said he'd like to do so personally because students should be encouraged to vote. In 2008, fewer than one in three young voters cast a ballot.

Thomas said spurning reporters isn't going to make many waves with voters but turning away 19-year-old first-time voters because they had also attended another party's rally just might.

"There used to be a time when meeting face-to-face with ordinary Canadians was part of the campaign," said Thomas. "This just pushes the limits of trying to maintain the positive news coming from an event."

He said he was a child when Diefenbaker was prime minister but remembers his Conservative father dragging him downtown to attend Diefenbaker's rallies.

"It was more spontaneous. Now it's all artificial, with professional politicians surrounded by their political advisers, pollsters and sophisticated communications strategies."

Aslam and her friend are the only two who claim to have been thrown out of a Conservative event, but at least four others say they were barred entry. They include a veterans' advocate in Halifax, a student in London for having an NDP bumper sticker on his car, and two in Guelph, Ont., because they had just participated in a "vote mob" designed to encourage students to engage in the election.

NDP and Liberal leaders were both happy to target Harper for the banishments saying the prime minister is afraid to talk to real people and does more background checks on students for campaign rallies than on people he hires for his office.

They were referencing Harper's claims that he had no idea former aide Bruce Carson had five convictions for fraud when he hired him to work in the Prime Minister's Office. Carson is being investigated by the RCMP for allegedly illegally lobbying the government after leaving the PMO.

Both the Liberals and NDP brag all their events are open to the public, and they repeatedly interact with unscreened voters even if it means facing tough questions or angry Canadians. Last week at Kelekis restaurant in Winnipeg, one man refused to shake Ignatieff's hand and muttered profanities about the Liberal leader under his breath.

Ignatieff didn't linger but did wish the man and his group to have a nice lunch.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca