by Laurent Carbonneau

Part 5 of our Canadian election Political History Series. Check out last week's history of the NDP!

For those of us who follow politics closely, the cynicism and shallowness of the modern campaign advertisement strikes us as crass, boorish, and worst of all, boring. A sinister voice intoning dire warnings about a party's opponents, an upbeat song and saccharine delivery of platitudes soothing you into complacency: at this point, we are all well acquainted with the tricks of the trade. The relentless application of the art of advertising, however, is a fairly recent development in the world of Canadian politics.

Susan Delacourt argues in Shopping For Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (an essential read for those interested in the history of advertising in Canadian politics) that the first truly modern use of advertising in a political campaign was the 1952 New Brunswick provincial election. There, an enterprising young advertising executive named Dalton Camp was recruited as advertiser-in-chief of Hugh John Flemming's Progressive Conservative campaign against the well-entrenched incumbent Liberal Premier J.B. McNair. McNair, ironically, had been the first politician to hire an advertising agency to direct his campaign in 1944.

In this post, we'll explore some of the newspaper ads of this pivotal election. All the ads used in this post appeared in the Sackville Tribune-Post, whose archives can be consulted in the microfilm room at the Mount Allison University's Ralph Pickard Bell Library in Sackville, N.B.

Before Dalton Camp's makeover of the traditional political campaign, advertisements in newspapers were dense, wordy, and typically focused on self-promotion rather than attacking. Take, for example, this Liberal ad: