Americans can have their Tea Party. In Canada, the political beverage of choice is coffee — Tim Hortons coffee, in particular.

In the fall of 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper skipped a summit meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, opting instead to sip hot chocolate at Tim Hortons headquarters in Oakville, Ont. Rather than sashaying about on the world stage, rubbing shoulders with political celebrities and sketchy foreign despots, this 50-year-old dad and baby boomer planted himself close to home. Harper was there to hail the return of Tim’s from the U.S. as a Canadian, publicly traded company — an unsubtle way to persuade Canadians of Harper’s true patriot love and homespun authenticity.

In his remarks, Harper delivered an ode to the doughnut chain and its hallowed place in Canadian iconography. In the space of a couple of minutes, in fact, Harper managed to link this doughnut store to many great things about Canada: hockey, family and even Pierre Berton, chronicler of Canada’s nation-building efforts.

And not accidentally — this prime minister never said anything accidentally — Harper’s tribute to Tim’s cast the business in the sepia-toned hues of a simpler Canadian past: a time when there were only six teams in the National Hockey League and when his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs were winning Stanley Cups.

“Now, if I were to look back to the early days,” he said, “I think there were a couple of things about Tim Hortons that really connected with Canadians. First, of course, was the name and reputation of the co-founder, the great Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Tim Horton. Baby boomers who grew up watching the Original Six remember him as one of the strongest and sturdiest blueliners ever to play the game. And, of course, for millions of long-suffering Leafs fans across the country, the name Tim Horton conjures up their four Stanley Cups and the glory years of the 1960s.”

Naturally, being a politician, Harper inserted himself into this picture as well. “Millions more Canadian hockey parents like me know well that when it is 20-below and everyone is up for a 6 a.m. practice, nothing motivates the team more than a box of Timbits and nothing warms the parents in the stands better than a hot double-double,” he said. “Perhaps no one said it better about Tim Hortons than the great Canadian author Pierre Berton. Let me quote: ‘In so many ways, the story of Tim Hortons is the essential Canadian story. It is the story of success and tragedy, of big dreams in small towns, of old-fashioned values and tough-fisted business, of hard work and of hockey.’”

Brand loyalty

It is a truism of Canadian politics in the early part of the 21st century: everybody wants the support of the “Tim Hortons voters.” It now seems easier to categorize Canadian voters by coffee choice rather than their loose, partisan affiliation. This is a cultural development roughly a half-century in the making. When the first Tim Hortons store was opened in 1964, most Canadians cast their ballots in elections based on loyalty or attachment to a party — only about 10 to 20 per cent changed their vote choice between elections. Fifty years later, that mass of “shopping” voters had swelled to as much as 30 or 40 per cent in each election. People were far more attached to their brand of morning coffee than they were to the Conservatives, Liberals or New Democrats.

Canada’s modern Conservatives, it’s fair to say, were the first to figure this out. Between the 2004 and 2006 federal elections, as the Conservative party was in the midst of overhauling its brand and its platform, top strategist Patrick Muttart would repeatedly drill this wisdom into the troops who were out trying to expand Conservatives’ support: “(It) means going to Tim Hortons, not to Starbucks.”

So what is a Tim Hortons voter? The Tim Hortons constituency speaks of solid, double-double-drinking citizens, looking for politicians to serve them up simple, plain-spoken truths in Timbit-sized, consumable portions. They are the “ordinary” Canadians depicted in the hugely popular “True Stories” ads for the doughnut chain, which helped vault this fast-food outlet to Canadian-icon status. Tim Hortons voters don’t like fancy, foreign synonyms for their morning coffee and they like their politics to be predictable, beige — just like the doughnuts and decor at their national treasure of a food retailer. Tim Hortons voters support the Canadian troops. That’s why there was an outlet of the doughnut shop in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where thousands of Canadian troops were stationed through most of the first decade of the 21st century. And that’s also why Tim Hortons was chosen to be the exclusive corporate distributor of the special poppy-embossed quarters to honour Canadian veterans in 2004. Tim Hortons voters are older Canadians, maybe even retired from their jobs, who remember the real Tim Horton, just as Stephen Harper does. Conveniently, for all those politicians hanging out at Tim Hortons, older Canadians are the ones who vote, in far higher proportions than younger people. And, as Harper pointed out, Tim Hortons voters like hockey.

Is it any wonder, to borrow the doughnut chain’s jingle, that politicians always have time for Tim Hortons? Where politicians once made church basements the fixture of their campaign road trips, the refreshment-stop of choice is now the ubiquitous Tim Hortons. It’s a fitting change of venue. Canadian politics no longer bears much resemblance to the church (except maybe the occasional sermon) but our marketing politicians seem right at home among sales posters, advertising and cash registers. Harper’s finance minister, Jim Flaherty, made a Tim’s pilgrimage in 2009 to unveil his government’s spending plans — an announcement that once would have been made only within the hallowed halls of Parliament.

This political obsession with Tim Hortons is the most visible evidence of just how much Canada’s democratic culture has become enmeshed with consumer culture — as you shop and eat, so shall you vote. But while Tim Hortons has been a marketing success, Canadian politics cannot make the same boast. Over the past 50 years or so, Canadians have, by and large, checked out of the political process. Some sobering statistics:

Voter turnout, with a few exceptions, has been steadily declining since the Second World War, from nearly 80 per cent of the population casting ballots in the 1950s and 1960s, to only about 60 per cent in more recent federal elections.

The turnout figures are even more dismal for young people, with Elections Canada estimating that fewer than half of voters under the age of 30 showed up at the ballot box in the last few federal elections.

Only about 2 per cent of Canadians belong to a political party, according to studies by academics William Cross and Lisa Young. Moreover, within this tiny fraction of the Canadian electorate, all but a scant few are over 40 years of age. As Nathan Cullen, the idealistic New Democrat MP from British Columbia, was fond of noting in his run for the federal NDP leadership in 2011-12, Mountain Equipment Co-op has been more successful than political parties at recruiting members in Canada.

Repeated surveys carried out for the Manning Centre for Building Democracy show that Canadians hold their politicians in low regard. A full 90 per cent of respondents to a 2012 poll said that politicians were most concerned with money; only 10 per cent believed that “people” were the prime preoccupation of the political class. More than three-quarters of the respondents to the same poll said politicians were “untruthful” and only 1 per cent had a “very favourable” view of politicians.

In the fall of 2011, after a year of multiple elections in many parts of Canada, the Gandalf Group polled Canadians about advertising. While 72 per cent of Canadians tended to see normal commercial advertising as truthful, the poll showed only 30 per cent believed they were getting any truth from political ads.

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These studies paint a picture of a country deeply cynical or just plain bored with politics, and maybe even democracy.

The profound irony is that the more Canadian politics focuses on communication — as witnessed by the 25 per cent and upward increases in Ottawa communications jobs under Liberal and Conservative governments since the beginning of the 21st century — the less the message is getting through. As federal politics has become more partisan, Canadians have become unattached from parties. The political class is stuck on “send” but the Canadian public isn’t in “receive” mode. The people who work in the political realm, including all the elected politicians, the folks in the backrooms, the journalists and the pundits, are increasingly conducting an exclusive dialogue, often laden with marketing jargon. We may have to confront the fact that marketing — this increasing tendency by all sides to treat politics as a shopping trip — is turning people off democracy. To use the language of shopping, people aren’t buying.

Effects of consumerism

We have been reading for years about consumerism’s effect on everything from our health to our education to our family life. Rabid consumption has made us fat. It’s destroyed our environment and erected malls and big-box stores where our communities once thrived. But consumerism has been infiltrating civic institutions, too. Shopping culture has crept into democracy as surely as television has. Where TV demands images, consumerism demands transactions. In schools and universities, education becomes an “investment” toward future income. At the ballot box, voters become “taxpayers.” And if education and civics can’t be entertaining, they must at least promise a material reward — more money in one’s pocket, specifically, so consumer-citizens can buy more stuff.

In this world, citizens aren’t informed consumers. They tune in only to the politicians — and the governments — who provide them with tangible improvements to their material world. It creates a democratic debate resting on value for the dollar, not values of the heart or head; one about wants, not needs. And in turn, this is not a citizenry that can be easily sold on anything that increases their taxes, or reduces their consumption — witness the long-standing political difficulty of “selling” environmentalism to Canadian citizens.

What’s more, in a nation of consumer-citizens, the customer is always right. It is not the politician’s job to change people’s minds or prejudices, but to confirm them or play to them, to seal the deal of support. Speeches aren’t made to educate or inform the audience, but to serve up marketing slogans. Political parties become “brands” and political announcements become product launches. Canadian author Gilbert Reid, writing on the website The Mark in 2010, laid out the rules for handling citizens as consumers. Do not talk of sacrifice, collective good, facts, problems or debate, he wrote. Instead, make extravagant promises and blame others when the wishes can’t be fulfilled.

Reid wrote, “The Citizen — and I’m idealizing here — was an adult, had an attention span, was patient, was interested in the common good, had some knowledge of history, had empathy for others, was open to debate, and was willing — often — to make individual sacrifices for the good of all. The ‘Consumer’ is the exact opposite of the ‘Citizen.’” Is this the sum total of civic life in Canada as it approaches its 150th birthday as a nation?

We may well want to throw up our hands, and conclude these are forces that have been too powerful to resist, on either side. And it would be tempting to blame politicians or the plotters in the political “war rooms” for this reality. Certainly, modern methods of advertising and marketing are as fundamental now to Canadian political operatives as old-fashioned speeches and town hall meetings were to their historical predecessors.

But ordinary citizens may also recognize their own complicity in their transformation into consumers of Canadian democracy.

And perhaps we may want to ask whether it’s time to draw some clearer lines between our civic life and our shopping pursuits.

From the book Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them, © 2013 by Susan Delacourt. Published by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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