Parti progressiste-conservateur du Canada. - The big blue machine: how Tory campaign backrooms changed Canadian politics forever

The Human Face of Machine Politics

The Big Blue Machine is about the struggle for political power in Canada during the second half of the twentieth century by those attached to the Progressive Conservative Party, both at the federal level and in many provinces. But, rather than focusing on the politicians whose names and faces are known to the public, this book presents the perspective of individuals in the campaign backrooms.

Political parties and their election campaigns have changed beyond recognition from what one would have found even a few decades ago. Those responsible for this transformation operated in tandem with the advent of television, the emergence of opinion pollsters, and advertising agencies that could shape and manipulate election outcomes. Paralleling these changes came three others: campaign publicity to brand the party and emphasize its leader to the exclusion of others; election finance reforms that broke the corrupt link between money and power and replaced it with an entirely new system for campaign funding; and the centralization of control over political operations that diminished local autonomy and reduced individuality. These new approaches abetted the rise of professional campaign organizers. All the while, new sources for public policy replaced traditional party-developed programs. The pace of electioneering accelerated with computers, fax machines, and mobile phones. This overall transformation set the stage for the second revolution in Canadian campaigns that would arrive with the digital age and politics in cyberspace.

In the decades covered by this book, even ordinary events like a party leaders tour became transformed beyond recognition. John Diefenbakers stately election travels aboard a special train morphed into media-focused campaign caravans with chartered airplanes, fully equipped buses, the Dirty Dozen shock-troop advance men, and the Tories in-house band, Jalopy. New campaign characteristics appeared: televised leaders debates; the use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds; and more permissive rules for political commercials that led to attack ads. Both the nature and context of these changes cumulatively reinvented public affairs as we now experience them, altering peoples expectations and changing Canadas political culture.

The story begins with one man, Dalton Camp, whose career and motivations became absorbed in the unique role of his disciple, Norman Atkins. Out of that team, a legendary campaign organization was born. Their machine was no campaign organization assembled for just a single election or a one-off leadership race, but, rather, it was a juggernaut, one that came closer to being institutionalized within the Albany Club and the Camp Agency, through the Spades and Rough-Ins, fused within the Tory party than any political formation in Canadian history. The course of their lives became inextricably meshed with the roller-coaster fortunes of the Progressive Conservative Party itself, to whose cause they devoted themselves. It consumed their best efforts, produced government advertising contracts to sustain them, and required remarkable personal sacrifice.