"The Liberals were so good at the data campaign in 2015, in fact, that Americans were taking some lessons from them." ---

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals may have dodged a bullet when the party opted to not work with Chris Wylie, the digital whiz at the centre of the exploding controversy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

But that doesn’t mean the governing party will remain untouched by the growing questions surrounding campaigns and Big Data. It probably already means that the 2019 campaign is going to be a lot different than the 2015 campaign.

Canadian Press is reporting that Wylie pitched his services early in 2016 to the Liberals, just months after they won the election, but the party took a pass. No one should assume from this, however, that Liberals are averse to Big Data campaigning. In fact, Trudeau’s team probably owes its majority to the magic of social media and algorithms — maybe not Wylie’s brand of data mining, but highly sophisticated digital marketing nonetheless.

As I wrote in 2016 in the updated version of my book, Shopping for Votes, the federal Liberals relied heavily on Facebook to win the last election — under the leadership of none other than Tom Pitfield, Trudeau’s close friend, occasional vacation partner and husband to Liberal party president Anna Gainey.

How important was Facebook to the Trudeau team? Here is some info that the Liberals themselves gave me after the campaign:

More than 13 million voters were reached by the Liberals through Facebook throughout the campaign; many of them deliberately targeted because they were in competitive ridings.

Roughly half of all attendees at Liberal rallies came from invitations received through Facebook, email or Twitter.

Trudeau was the first ever leader to launch his platform on Facebook.

Facebook was one of the tools used to identify individual voters through “calls to action” on social media, along with channels on Twitter and Instagram too.

Quite apart from the traditional TV, radio and print ads, Facebook was being used to generate hundreds of online advertisements, directed to specific audiences, much more cheaply. Liberals, like other parties, were using this data to see which messages worked and which ones didn’t, and constantly revising the pitch.

Some of this reliance on Facebook was a necessity. Unlike U.S. politicos, Canadians don’t have the same access to huge banks of consumer data (we have better privacy laws.) Moreover, as Pitfield explained to me at the time, consumer data wasn’t all that helpful to Liberals.

“We had limited time, so we had to decide which pieces of data would help us assess whether someone was a supporter,” he said in an interview. “Knowing whether they bought red shoes or drank beer didn’t meaningfully tell you whether they were going to vote for you.”

Facebook, on the other hand, kept track of things that did influence people’s votes — their work, their friends, their hobbies and their neighbourhoods. And bonus — people give it up voluntarily.

All of this data was being fed into something called “The Console,” which ranked ridings according to how winnable they were for the Liberals — from no-hope wood to sure-bet platinum — and in which individual voters were ranked from 1 to 10 on their likelihood to support Trudeau and his candidates.

Yes, some of these rankings were based on information gleaned in person, in door-knocking campaigns, but Facebook was a powerful tool too.

The Liberals were so good at the data campaign in 2015, in fact, that Americans were taking some lessons from them. None of this is a secret. Pitfield was on stage at the 2016 Winnipeg convention with Democratic strategists from the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns.

Scott Goodstein, the Sanders strategist, said he admired Pitfield’s part of the Liberal campaign for the way it worked out of the box.

“It was proving that experimentation works,” Goodstein told me in Winnipeg. “You had a party that had done zero, digitally, and all of a sudden now, they were moving up the ladder and actually using it and getting real results.”

He added: “Ultimately, they weren’t afraid to experiment even when things didn’t work.”

All political parties like to carry their favourite tools from election campaigns into government. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, for instance, loved their Constituent Information Management System (CIMS) and the data it provided on voters.

Post-2015 campaign, Liberals have carried on their love affair with Facebook. Just last month, we learned that digital advertising had finally overtaken TV advertising for the largest share of government advertising — $7-million spent on social media ads in total, with $4.6-million of that going to Facebook.

There’s a good reason that the Liberals (and all parties) like to advertise on Facebook, beyond the ability to target specific audiences and people who may not be in touch with politics on a daily basis. Facebook not only sends information, but it receives it too — information about people who are using it.

That information, we’ve long known, is gold to political strategists. But the Cambridge Analytica controversy is starting to make this look like pirate’s plunder — stolen on the high seas of the internet, buried on some political parties’ secret island.

Throughout the past few days, I’ve been trying to recall whether I met Wylie as I researched the Liberals’ data campaign. I’m pretty sure I didn’t, though I have been looking for him this week. It’s noteworthy that his experience with the Liberals dates back to 2007 or so, when the party was really quite lame at data campaigning — far behind the Conservatives and the New Democrats. When I originally wrote Shopping for Votes, in 2013, the party’s database was barely more useful than a phone directory.

That all changed when Trudeau came to power. He was an ardent fan of data collection. As Trudeau himself told me in early 2016, he had wanted to keep The Console installed on his own computer (his team refused that request) and he would regularly exhort volunteers all over the country to keep focused on collecting data about people who showed up at rallies. “That was what I demanded,” he said. “If they wanted a visit from the leader they had to arrange that or else I’d be really upset.”

I don’t think Trudeau or Pitfield will be giving any interviews on how the Cambridge Analytica controversy is rippling through their operation right now. Nor will we likely see an on-stage discussion of the Liberal data campaign at the Halifax convention, as we saw two years ago in Winnipeg.

But you can count on the fact that the shadows now being cast over Facebook and Big Data campaigning are going to make the 2019 campaign look a lot different from 2015 — for Liberals, for sure, but the other parties too.

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