The “not ready” television ad of 2015 was only the latest in a series that the Conservatives had been running from the moment Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader in 2013. In terms of tone and ridicule, it was gentler than the initial wave of Conservative ads, which had mocked Trudeau for his background as a drama teacher in the 1990s. While it was true that Trudeau had filled in teaching drama and poetry while a fellow teacher was on maternity leave at West Point Grey Academy in B.C., his main job was to teach French and math. It’s harder to mock a former math teacher, though, especially given contemporary political marketing’s reliance on numbers and data.

When Trudeau wanted to relax on vacations or long plane trips, he would do logic puzzles or sketch out intricate drawings composed entirely of dots. Riding from one event to the other on the road, Trudeau would often grab the iPad from his aides and plot the best route to the next destination. So the mechanics of modern political campaigning, loaded with tiny points of data plotted on maps, were also his idea of a good time. This would be more than a handy coincidence for a party that was building itself into a modern data-collecting enterprise. The famed “Big Red Machine” of the 20th century was being massively retooled — all the clunky old hardware transformed into a sophisticated series of data and analytics, and poured into a computer program dubbed as the “Console.”

The Console, with its maps and myriad graphs and numbers, was the most vivid evidence of how far the Liberal party had come in its bid to play catch-up in the data war with its Conservative and NDP rivals. Call it Trudeau 2.0. Just as the old Rainmaker Keith Davey brought science to the party of Trudeau’s father in the 1960s and 1970s, the next generation of Trudeau Liberalism would get seized with data, science and evidence in a big way, too.

And in the grand tradition of Davey, Allan Gregg and all the other political pollsters and marketers who went before them, this new squad of strategists set about dividing Canada’s electoral map into target ridings, ranked according to their chances of winning in them. In a 21st-century-style campaign, though, the distinctions would be far more sophisticated than simply “winnable” and “unwinnable” ridings. Trudeau’s Liberals divided the nation’s 338 electoral districts into six types, named for metals and compounds: platinum, gold, silver, bronze, steel and wood.

Platinum ridings were sure bets: mostly the few dozen that the Liberals had managed to keep in the electoral catastrophe of 2011. Gold ridings were not quite that solid, but they were the ones in which the party strategists felt pretty certain about their prospects. Silver ridings were the ones the Liberals would need to gain to win the election, while bronze ridings, the longer shots, would push them into majority government territory. Steel ridings were ones they might win in a subsequent election, and wood ridings were the ones where the Liberals probably could never win a seat, in rural Alberta for instance.

The Console kept close track of voter outreach efforts on the ground, right down to the number of doorsteps visited by volunteers and what kind of information they had gathered from those visits — family size, composition, political interests, even the estimated age of the residents. By consulting the Console, campaigners could even figure out which time of day was best for canvassing in specific neighbourhoods or which voters required another visit to seal the deal.

When the Liberal team unveiled the Console to Trudeau, he was blown away. He told his team that it was his new favourite thing. He wanted regular briefings on the contents of the program: where it showed the Liberal party ahead, and where fortunes were flagging and volunteers needed to do more door-knocking. Actually, he wondered, why couldn’t he be given access to the Console himself, so that he could consult it on his home computer or on his phone while on the road?

And that, Trudeau would say later, was the last he ever saw of the Console. “My job was to bring it back, not on the analysis side, but on the connection side — on getting volunteers to go out, drawing people in, getting people to sign up,” Trudeau said. Clearly he was doing something right on that score — Liberal membership numbers had climbed from about 60,000 to 300,000 within Trudeau’s first 18 months as leader.

Volunteers for the party would learn — often to their peril — that the leader was fiercely serious about turning his crowd appeal into useful data. Trudeau wasn’t known for displays of temper, but the easiest way to provoke him was to fall down on the job of collecting data from the crowds at campaign stops. Few things made Trudeau angrier, for instance, than to see Liberal volunteers surrounding him at events instead of gathering up contact information. “That was what I demanded. If they wanted a visit from the leader they had to arrange that or else I’d be really upset,” Trudeau said.

Back at headquarters in Ottawa, the primary force in the data collection enterprise was Katie Telford, Trudeau’s campaign manager, whose friendship with the leader dated back to the 2006 Liberal leadership contest. Telford had worked with Gerald Butts at Queen’s Park when she was chief of staff to education minister Gerard Kennedy. When Kennedy decided to run for the federal Liberal leadership in 2006, Telford was the national campaign director. Thanks to his old friend Butts, Trudeau was thinking of supporting Kennedy but he wanted to meet Telford. They hit it off immediately — and unexpectedly in Telford’s case. After she and Trudeau had a spirited discussion about the state of Liberal politics, he got up to leave the restaurant. Trudeau looked over his shoulder, smiled and said to Telford, “I’m not quite what you thought I was, am I?”

Telford preferred to stay out of the limelight, carefully picking her moments to speak publicly. One of those was in a December 2013 video sent out to Liberal partisans in which Telford laid out the party’s challenge as one of numbers — urging everyone to view numbers the way she did, as “competitive” and “addictive.” She said her favourite email each day contained a spreadsheet tallying up the funds raised or support recruited. “Numbers tell stories,” Telford said. At every campaign strategy meeting she convened, Telford asked participants to arrive prepared to deliver a number — any number that would tell the story of how the Liberals were faring.

In one fun-with-numbers story, the Liberals decided to see in late 2014 whether the Canadian political universe was still sharply divided along the lines of coffee preference. The survey found that although Conservative voters were slightly more likely to be loyal Tim Hortons drinkers, Liberals still led by 34 per cent to 29 per cent among all patrons of the patriotic doughnut-and-coffee chain.

In yet another sign that Canadian politics was blurring those sharp, Starbucks-versus-Tim’s distinctions, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair unapologetically told a CTV interviewer during the 2015 campaign that he preferred Starbucks for coffee, but Tim Hortons for the Timbits. “The espresso at Starbucks has really been fuelling this campaign,” Mulcair said in the CTV interview. “For the Timbits, OK, fair enough, after a really busy night when we finish at 11 at night, we can be seen sneaking off to Tim Hortons for a box of Timbits.” So much for the great coffee divide in Canada’s political market. In 2015, things in the consuming world of politics were extremely fluid.

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Excerpted from Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them, © 2016 by Susan Delacourt. Published by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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