So this post could also be titled “Why Marketing is Important in Politics” because it’s based on how people in power use their own statistics or their own personal stories to either write their own narrative to make it look like they’ve accomplished what they’ve set out to; or to mask greater failures with viewpoints that everyone agrees with as a distraction mechanism. Usually these viewpoints are inherently non-value add. To the first issue, here’s the power in statistics, you can’t fudge them when they are known to all involved, at the onset of process improvement… key work: onset. When defined at the onset, the statistics represent what they’re supposed to (from a customer { or citizen} perspective) and you don’t need this extra type of “marketing”, to tell you what to think. This is why the people in power do not want to establish KPIs, once KPIs are established, it’s very very difficult for politicians to “write their own narrative”.

This article goes hand in hand with the Great Job Fallacy article I wrote previously because that article explicitly defines the disconnect between what is expected and what is actually done. Let’s just look at some elected representatives who spend their time making the rounds at events, “listening to their constituents”, where is this data stored and how does this data drive change in political office? That is the key question. Where is the criteria for doing a good job defined? When this criteria is hidden, how do we know if the right objectives are being pursued by those in office? We don’t & with the onset of the Internet this is unacceptable. Information has never been easier to store, transmit and analyse, yet there’s no indication that politicians are pursuing positive change the right way (notice positive and right). Politicians will say they’re spending their time listening and doing what constituents say, but there’s no literal proof to support this. This is the exact definition of the “Great Job Fallacy” and no mater what cross country tours certain politicians are doing, if this does not drive any noticeable change in policy, does that mean politicians have always been right? That is to say, external inputs had no affect on the process output. The hardest thing for many people who are new to private industry to understand, is that client objectives and risk are continuously-evolving animals, animals that must be maintained and understood by those who call themselves problem-solvers. If the problem-solvers in society are not keeping current with the latest and greatest news in their field, this can lead to a lag between what action is required to satisfy market demand and the action itself. A key skill by those who call themselves problem-solvers is to be able to sniff out bullshit and with this inherent ability, I don’t see how problem-solvers can do their jobs. In industries (e.g. politics) where there’s a clear disconnect between the problem solvers (MPs) and the people affected by the problems (the citizens they’re supposed to serve), the root cause is the self-anointed problem-solvers having not kept their knowledge and documents that should be living documents (PFMEAs and control plans) current. Again this is where the marketing is absolutely required. Of course, if you believe there are no problems in society and that MPs are doing a suitable job, then ignore my Blog Posts.

There are two different kinds of marketing employed by the politicians of today; one is KPI correction and the other is the aforementioned virtue signalling. Virtue signalling has many used cases. Case number 1: helping masking promises of $10B annual deficits turning into $20-$30B annual deficits with new KPI inventions. Notice, I had never heard of GDP-to-debt ratios until the Greeks got caught fudging their numbers and the EU had to put a positive spin to it. Well the Greeks were not the only ones to do this, as it was an exercise the Spanish and Italians also used to hide the debt they had borrowed. All of a sudden because the numbers were SO bad, they invented a new metric and Canada, all of a sudden got a get out of jail free card because we weren’t as bad as some of the worse offenders, if judged through the GDP-to-Debt Ratio lens. Let me tell you this, with extreme confidence, it’s very myopic to look at 1 statistic and use it to lead government policy. Notice that countries like Greece, Spain & Italy, all countries who have been employing Socialist policies in many of their Government Processes all suffered the same fate and were forced (indirectly) to join the Euro. In the Canadian case, it’s very irresponsible to use this KPI because Greece (& it’s other failed Euro states) are in a completely different Economic situation compared to ourself; we are not a small player in the EU and if we head down the path of Greece, we will very soon turn into a vassal state of the Chinese or 52nd state of the good ol’ USA. In a previous article, I mentioned how people should negotiate from a point of confidence and if you’re all of a sudden basing your economic policy on a made up statistic that could nosedive if automotive/or oil and gas went away (e.g. through the rewriting of NAFTA or the mass production of electric vehicles) then were clearly not negotiating from a point of strength. Go to Greece and ask them how hard it is to open up a business, find out how they’ve had to fire sale their public assets to the Chinese and Germans, find out how there’s a lost generation of young people who’ve been out of work because they have no work to do in Greece. Then ask yourself if voting for the incompetence of those who virtue signal is worth the price that’s paid by the eradication of your civilisation. I’ve touched on how Greece is in the unfortunate situation where their industry (outside of tourism) is no longer competitive, Canada can very easily head down the same path.

Now we get to what Virtue Signalling actually is, a collection of empty gestures not limited to selfies with people (India’s Modi does this as well and I find it to be odd), viral photo ops with just about anyone (from high school senior’s prom trips to all the way to suspected terrorists, looking at Joshua Boyle) and just the overall propensity to post on Twitter and have the “popular” opinion on nearly every issue. I just mean to say that he offers a lot of opinions on a wide wide array of topics and it’s really not necessary – there is no consistent fact based message he pitches. I guess that’s what you get when you elect a rolodex to office, & maybe it has to do with his looks, I’m not against pretty people running for office (I know many pretty people who are great) but I feel like his marketing is distracting people from the issues. It’s crazy to even say this about someone in that kind of office because you would not expect someone to get to the Prime Minister’s office based on Marketing but that’s why Trudeau is there. They say getting your first 1000 votes is the hardest thing to do and JT has never had to work for it, life has come easy to him; the fact that he rode his father’s coattails to the PM’s office really speaks to how desperate we were to elect someone who could deliver results. I really wanted to put more effort and give instances of his virtue signalling but I do not want to put the work into such a BS topic. I’ll just try to periodically update this article with instances of it in the future, don’t worry, I’ll add date stamps.

Edit 1: I do not get the RIPs to all his ex Liberal donors (Apotex guy and Shaw guy). I just don’t see the point. Why doesn’t he write RIP to all people. Again it’s to gain sympathy to show that he’s more virtuous than all those politicians who don’t even think to offer compassion to those who have passed.

Edit 2: Apologies to LGBTQ, Komagatu Maru, Residential Schools… what’s the value in this? Does the government not have better things to do than apologize for things that happened 30-100 years ago?

Edit 3: Bill M103 – Does this really decrease racism against Muslims? Why even create a division between Muslims and other Groups, doesn’t the Charter offer equal protection to all CDNs? Why pass a bill to provide certain people with more protections? I do not understand.

Edit 4: Worst of all when he said that Canada was open to all refugees than Canada had record illegal border crossings from the USA. I’m sorry but there’s countering the Donald’s very negative stance on immigration and then this is the act that’s financially probably had the greatest impact via a single tweet

Edit 5: The fake Muslim hoax issue. He tweeted right away how incidents like this have no place in Canada and it ended up being a fake event. This actually increases racism towards Muslims because again it shows favourable treatment and no one likes favourable treatment

Edit 6: http://vancouversun.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/canada-will-push-g7-partners-to-sign-no-plastics-pledge-to-save-the-oceans/wcm/e0d927da-f986-4ce3-ba9f-8006eafb1232

Virtue signalling at its finest, ban it in the industrialized world, outsource it to the developing world. On the surface it looks like a great piece of legislature that has a noble goal but you realize, it’s strictly for marketing purposes as it will not curb consumption and have a noticeable impact on consumer behaviour – point being, consumers will still demand plastic.

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