HAMILTON—Fact: neither Prime Minister Stephen Harper nor Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is a regular drinker of Tim Hortons coffee.

When Harper skipped a United Nations assembly a year ago to do an event at Tim Hortons in Oakville — welcoming the doughnut chain back as a Canadian public company — the Prime Minister, a non-coffee drinker, chose to sip hot chocolate.

And when Ignatieff was touring Canada by bus this summer, Tim Hortons was almost always the roadside stop, sometimes a couple of times a day. Never, ever, a Starbucks. Never, ever, a latte. Yet steeped tea was Ignatieff's regular order.

So if neither of these political leaders is a huge fan of Tim Hortons coffee, why are they both paying so much attention to this simple beverage? Here's the simple answer: because they really like the people who drink Tim Hortons coffee. They want their votes and their affection.

“In terms of the politics of symbolism, clearly the Tim Hortons connection symbolizes being in touch with ordinary people, drinking what they drink,” says Brian Lee Crowley, head of the Macdonald-Laurier think-tank in Ottawa and author of several books on the evolving Canadian body politic. “It's not the place where anyone knows the price of arugula.”

The United States has its Tea Party movement; Canada has its Tim Hortons. What's bubbling in the political kettle here, so to speak, is populism, of two very different but related sorts.

A simmering segment of the American population has chosen tea to symbolize its demand for government to stay out of people's lives. A less hot segment of the Canadian population sees Tim Hortons as a way of saying “Keep politics out of my face.”

What's yet to be seen is whether all this coffee symbolism in Canada is a portent of stronger, Tea Party-like sentiment emerging in the electorate.

Certainly some would like to see it that way. A recent spate of attention has shone the light on Tea Party wannabes here in Canada. There's a Facebook group, the Tea Party Movement of Canada, spearheaded by a determinedly right-wing fellow in London, Ont., former political science student Andrew Lawton. It has about 1,400 members and high hopes for rallies in Toronto and other cities in the near future.

It's all about bringing the value of freedom to Canada, says Lawton, who also proudly calls himself a Conservative Party member, even if he doesn't like the way it's been spending lately.

“It's time that we go back to re-evaluating what government should and shouldn't be involved in and telling them to stop overspending,” says Lawton, who thinks the arrival of the harmonized sales tax in B.C. and Ontario may be the clarion call for his new movement.

There's the coming conference in Quebec this fall to mark the launch of the “Quebec Freedom Network,” dedicated to smaller government and lower taxes and a direct nod to the Tea Party in the U.S. Some see Alberta's Wild Rose Alliance, an upstart challenge to the Conservative dynasty in that province, as a nascent, Tea-Party-ish type of affair.

CNN in the U.S. recently did a feature arguing that Canada was actually ahead of the Americans in tea partying, calling the Reform Party of the 1980s an early version of the same, militant, less-government sentiments.

Crowley agrees with that, believing Canada has got a lot of this spending-revolt out of its system, as its government spending has shot down in subsequent decades from 53 per cent of gross domestic product to just 42 per cent now — an “unprecedented feat” in the Western world. “To the extent that the Tea Party movement is based on the idea that government is out of control, that we're immorally spending ... I think we have largely fixed those problems,” Crowley says. “My view is that we've had our Tea Party.”

Others say that the mood is still alive here and that the Harper government itself has been sending signals all summer to Tea-Party-like sentiments in Canada: declaring war on the mandatory census and Tamil asylum-seekers, whipping up fears about guns being taken away from law-abiding citizens, and even laying down some broad hints about ending affirmative action.

Is this really what's on the burner in all those Tim Hortons across Canada? How did a simple donut chain turn into a symbol of the anti-political sentiment that must be constantly coddled and assuaged by federal politicians in 2010?

Ignatieff, asked about his Tim Hortons patronage on the road, bristles a bit.

“It's something I actually don't like about the Conservative vision of the country. I don't think there's a division between a Tim Hortons nation and any other nation,” he tells the Star in an interview. “I don't think there's a division between people who've lived outside the country and people who've lived inside. I don't think there's a division between people who go to Tim Hortons for their coffee and people who go to Starbucks for their coffee. I see one country, right?”

The Liberals' blogger on the bus, Adam Goldenberg, joked recently that he's been eating so many Timbits on the journey because they represent the “progressive centre of the Canadian donut”—a riff on Ignatieff's bid to put the Liberals in the moderate middle before next campaign.

Ignatieff, pilloried by the Conservatives as a latte-drinking intellectual, out of touch with Canada because of his years spent abroad as a journalist and Harvard professor, goes on: “The idea that this country is divided into elite snobs and real, honest people is just phony.”

And yet, Ignatieff's bus will stop again and again at Tim Hortons . The mere sight of a Starbucks' cup on the bus, photographed and circulated on Twitter, gets Conservative bloggers smirking and making smart remarks again all over the Internet.

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The first Tim Hortons opened on Ottawa Street in Hamilton in 1964 and though the original building was torn down, there's still a Tim's on the site today. It's a modest little shop — just eight tables with seating for about 20 — and two glass cases by the door contain bric-a-brac and mementoes of Tim's through the ages.

The atmosphere in this Tim's is somewhere between local pub and social drop-in centre. The women behind the counter, funny and irreverent with the customers, are media-shy, preferring not to do any interviews.

The steady stream of regulars clearly sees the servers as friends, showing them photos of their children's latest exploits or recounting details of recent vacations or family dramas.

The ladies behind the counter are asked whether politics is part of the daily conversation at Tim's. “Oh no,” one says, laughing at the idea. “Not at all.”

Rita Giulietti was born the same year that the Tim Hortons opened on Ottawa Street and it was a big part of her growing-up in Hamilton, a place for the family to go while her mom shopped for textiles in the row of old fabric retailers on Ottawa. On a sunny summer morning, Giulietti wanders in to pick up a coffee and gets to chatting about how a childhood treat turned into a political symbol in her country.

Giulietti doesn't fit the mould of the anti-politics type of person that Tim's has come to represent. She's actually a vegetarian and environmentalist and wishes Tim's had fair-trade coffee. She's a parent, with children and stepchildren of a spouse's previous marriage. Her love of Tim Hortons is eminently practical.

“Look, it's more affordable at Timmy's. It's more the common person's coffee shop, because it's what most people can afford,” Giuletti says.

Corporately speaking, the Tim Hortons firm is probably not surprised. Though the company politely refused comment on its symbolic role in federal politics, a spokesperson did draw attention to a 2009 poll that showed Tim's customers as very hard to pin down, politically. The Harris-Decima survey showed that Conservatives favoured Tim's over Starbucks, 53 per cent to 10 per cent. For Liberals, it was 49-13 for Tim's over Starbucks; the NDP, 54-11; Greens, 50-14 and Bloc Quebecois, 44-12. In other words, it would be folly for anyone to align themselves with anything but Tim Hortons.

“Targeting Starbucks customers will not yield anywhere the near benefit the Tim's vote promises,” Jeff Walker, Harris-Decima senior vice-president, said when the poll was released in May, 2009.

In the U.S., the Tea Party is a little more monolithic, politically speaking. A CNN Opinion Research poll earlier this year found that Tea Party activists were mostly white, male, conservative/Republican, generally well-paid (more than 65 per cent of those polled earned more than $50,000 annually) and more likely to live in suburban or rural communities.

The biggest difference between the Tea Party and Tim Hortons voters, however, may be a political agenda. The Tea Party definitely has one — drastic cuts in taxes, government and bureaucracy. Lawton says that if his movement takes hold in Canada, it will be a powerful force to getting drastic reduction in government — taxes, regulation, the whole works.

So do Tim Hortons' voters have political goals?

Crowley says that politics, north and south of the border, actually can be seen on a simple axis—privilege versus opportunity. The first U.S. Tea Party, the revolt against tea taxation, was against privilege as much as it was against taxes. In that way, the anti-elitist symbolism of Tim Hortons follows that theme—it speaks to Canadians' mistrust of people speaking down to them. Tim Hortons is all about skepticism toward privilege, embrace of opportunity. But opportunity to do what?

Part 2: What do hot beverages have to do with politics?

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