Episode 934: Generals and politicians

Zain 0:03

This is a strategist episode 934. My name is Zain Velji with me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter. Guys, what's going on?

Zain 0:11

As you can see, I

Zain 0:13

I am, I am missing my my mic. So I'm doing the stand up mic. Like it's like, like that's

Carter 0:18

that's good i think you're gonna be funny for one oh yeah this is a big step forward yeah this

Zain 0:22

is uh that's gonna be good i see that i caught that a little late i caught a little late but i caught it and

Zain 0:27

and i don't i don't like it i don't like it this is my are we

Corey 0:30

we gonna have to are we gonna have to do this shit twice a week again oh yeah we might set this we might well

Carter 0:36

well this is my john mulaney setup carter

Zain 0:38

carter i just want to let you know

Carter 0:39

know people will listen what seven times a week because they want to listen to because once you've listened to one hurly burly you come rushing back to us right like that's how it goes why

Zain 0:48

why do people think corey sounds like john mulaney can

Zain 0:52

you say something corey it's

Zain 0:58

wife was talking about the

Zain 1:00

that's not bad it's

Corey 1:02

a song that's the only song i think

Zain 1:04

no it's not a song it's a song because it doesn't rhyme is the

Carter 1:08

the horse in the hospital okay

Carter 1:10

okay and it's not

Zain 1:11

not good okay pretty pretty good i feel like i feel like together we could actually be

Zain 1:16

three of us good john mulaney soundboard

Carter 1:17

soundboard yeah i like

Zain 1:18

like that uh yeah cory i think we're gonna have to do this twice a week because others i'm not gonna name names are doing this five times a week um now people can listen to us five times a week they can just listen to yeah and i'm sure they got a very rich back catalog this is true this is true uh or they could just listen to the same episode over and over because it's dense it's packed with insights isn't it carter it

Carter 1:41

it is and sometimes it takes a few times to listen to cory to figure out what the hell he's trying to get across there's

Corey 1:46

there's a there's a lot of call forwards too it's like arrested development you don't even realize it was a joke on your first listening but you watch it or you listen to it again and you understand that yeah you were supposed to know carter smelled like pee the entire time we were recording that

Zain 2:00

that the money was actually in the banana stand dave um

Zain 2:03

um carter chris cuomo is gone uh

Zain 2:07

uh speaking for transition material this is that's actually sounds like a startup stand-up joke so chris cuomo is gone

Zain 2:13

anyways uh as predicted steven carter before we jump into the headlines i want to get your thoughts on this of

Carter 2:19

of course i mean he left under the exact circumstances that we suggested that he should leave as always we prove our reach people always listen to us and then they take the right action if they hear it i

Zain 2:29

i like it cory uh chris cuomo gone because the strategist podcast podcast um any thoughts

Corey 2:37

no thank you moving on

Zain 2:40

the headlines guys our first headline comes to us from the guardian here we go anti-vaccine protesters stormed the bbc headquarters years after it moved out that is right confused anti-vaccine protesters stormed what they thought was a major bbc building on On Monday, apparently unaware the corporation largely moved out almost, wait for it, Stephen Carter, a decade ago. Well, they knew that they were behind the times, of course. This definitely seems like it is on par. Corey Hogan, anti-vaxxers finding the wrong address for the BBC, does

Zain 3:18

does it right itself?

Corey 3:21

Yeah, I, for one, am absolutely shocked that they would have found casually inaccurate information online and acted upon it.

Zain 3:31

it doesn't write itself because cory did a good job yeah adding to it steven carter does it write itself uh do you have your own version of a uh anti-vaxxers heading to a bbc headquarters that hasn't been there for a decade you

Carter 3:45

you know sometimes that what you read on the internet's not true sometimes what you read on the internet is incorrect okay

Zain 3:52

you carter thanks for that that's

Carter 3:53

that's my in-depth understanding today yeah no

Zain 3:56

no that was excellent we'll give you another shot at this. Let's go for our next headline from Fortune magazine. Cleveland Indians' new name and website domain is already taken. That is right. I talked about this last week. You guys had zero thoughts on the Cleveland Guardians, which was correct and apt. But officials at Cleveland's Major League Baseball team didn't do their homework when changing their team's name last month. They announced that they would no longer be the Cleveland Indians, would now be be the Cleveland Guardians. One problem, Corey, a male roller derby team in that city has been using the Guardians for the past decade, and it owns the website and is not willing to give it up from a branding and communications and frankly, sport strategy perspective. Please, your thoughts.

Corey 4:41

You know, my honest thoughts are this probably matters an awful lot less than it did 20 years ago. People don't write

Corey 4:47

write in domains, they Google Cleveland Guardians, and I somehow suspect the The SEO of an MLB team will be somewhat better than

Corey 4:54

than the roller derby team that's been just literally

Corey 4:57

rolling around for 10 years. I feel like they're probably fine on this one. I think they got that. In fact, if you were to go through all of your favorite sports teams, I think you would see that there's an awful lot with some pretty damn janky URLs. It doesn't really matter that much. And ultimately, I feel like the Guardians, the

Corey 5:15

the baseball team, for clarity, probably have the money to solve this problem. problem the guardians will give up the name the roller derby team for clarity because they would like the money that the guardians have the baseball team again for clarity i

Zain 5:32

get it i get it he was he was slightly upset that i used the headline and then he turned it into a joke by just adding clarity stephen carter um do you want to add anything to this exceptionally chosen headline line by yours truly listen

Carter 5:45

listen i think that all the guardians need to do is just reverse the u and the a it's going to be spelled incorrectly most of the time anyways and problem solves itself i

Corey 5:55

think we're seeing a little bit inside uh stephen carter's own phobias about certain words yeah

Zain 5:59

yeah no kidding let's move on

Carter 6:00

can you guys spell guardians right in the correct way the first time no literally

Zain 6:04

literally can do that very easy no

Carter 6:06

no one can no one no one knows how to spell guardians do

Zain 6:08

do it carter please do no i can't

Carter 6:11

can't spell guardians this is my point this is the point you've missed it again zane he's

Zain 6:16

he's seen how i look i spell for a living okay this is this is what i do this is this is i've won multiple spelling bees steven carter uh

Zain 6:23

uh let's move did

Zain 6:25

did i have to actually walk you through to the logical extension of that carter as cory's disappointed i'm not gonna do

Carter 6:30

do it in my

Carter 6:31

i'm not gonna do it let's

Zain 6:32

let's move on to our next headline now this will always delight delight

Zain 6:35

and save that word in your mind. This will always delight. Our next headline comes to us from CTV News. Saskatchewan man charged after flying helicopter to Dairy Queen to buy an ice cream cake, say the RCMP. A customer's unusual arrival at a Saskatchewan Dairy Queen has resulted in a criminal charge. Around 5 p.m. on July 31st, the RCMP received a complaint that a helicopter had landed in a high traffic parking lot in the community. According to a news release, the aircraft, quote, blew up dust and debris, unquote, in an area that includes a school and aquatic center. RCMP said a passenger had climbed out of the helicopter and bought an ice cream cake. Stephen Carter, how was the ice cream cake?

Carter 7:21

You know, it was tasty. It's never my favorite thing. I think that there's, it's not tasty enough. The crunch in the middle is nice, but it's, there's never enough crunch and there's always too much vanilla.

Zain 7:32

Corey, Or, you know, this Dairy Queen, does it need to be enshrined as a national monument of some sort?

Corey 7:39

think the real crime here is $4.39 for a peanut buster parfait. Come on. Come on. It's ridiculous.

Carter 7:45

Give that shit away.

Corey 7:46

away. It's outrageous. It does. It does. I think this makes me think that if they do build that Dairy Queen on Center Street, maybe a helipad is something to go on top. Oh, I like

Corey 7:58

like that, Carter. What do you think of that? Rather

Zain 8:00

Rather than building up, you put a helipad right on the first floor. It's just like six feet off the ground, nine feet off the ground. I really like it. Couldn't

Zain 8:09

There's a lot of people with helicopters in this

Corey 8:10

this neighborhood. I think it could work.

Zain 8:11

work. How much is a peanut buster parfait?

Corey 8:16

I'm not a pro. $4.39. $4.39.

Corey 8:18

It's a banana split. The

Carter 8:19

banana split's just infinitely more value. Do you just like— Infinitely more value.

Corey 8:22

Absolutely. This is the problem. The parfait is so small. It doesn't

Zain 8:25

doesn't fill you up. $4.39 or is it $4.39 right now because of the dynamic pricing that they're so good at? Two

Zain 8:31

Two burgers for $9.50, two burgers for $0.99. Who the fuck knows, Stephen Curry? I honestly don't know if it's still

Corey 8:36

still $4.39. It was $4.39 at one point. That's good. I like that. I assume it always will be.

Zain 8:42

Carter, any final thoughts as this gives you the opportunity to round out your favorite subject? And

Zain 8:46

And frankly, the favorite topic of- Wait, hold on, guys. Hold on. Sorry.

Corey 8:49

Sorry. I just saw this Pierre Poliev video while I wasn't listening to you. And it turns out there's inflation running amok in this country. It's

Corey 8:57

more than that, yeah.

Carter 8:59

539. Do you want a two-foot

Zain 8:59

-foot jump up to the lubber? Probably can only get a half a part fake for that. Are you going to two-foot jump up to the lubber or throw a piggy bank up in the air? How many takes does it take for Pierre Polyarv to catch a piggy bank when it comes down? Carter? Over, under, on, nine.

Zain 9:13

yeah. Any final comments on the Dairy Queen?

Zain 9:16

This is why people come to the show, Carter. Any final comments on the Dairy Queen? No,

Carter 9:20

No, but Corey and I will be sharing a banana split for charity at the live strategist event in September.

Corey 9:29

I keep telling you, we can each just have one of the different bananas. We don't need to.

Corey 9:33

No, we split. We don't need to eat them end to end. It's

Carter 9:36

It's better than when we.

Zain 9:43

Let's move on to our next headline from the CBC. This one taking us to our home province here in Alberta.

Zain 9:50

province will backtrack on plans to lift COVID-19 protocols, government sources say. The province, i.e. Alberta, for our listeners outside of Alberta that have been tracking what I call the bouncing ball on this, the province's health guidelines will remain in place for now, a Alberta government source tells CBC News. The source said that changes previously scheduled to go into effect on August 16th, only a couple of days from now, will not be implemented at this time, but the changes are scheduled, the changes scheduled, I should say, for August 31st are still on track. Dr. Dina Hinshaw, Alberta's Chief Medical Officer of Health, is scheduled to speak alongside the Education Minister on Friday morning, we record on Thursday evening, to provide an update on the back-to-school guidance and the ongoing work to protect public health in Alberta schools, unquote. She's expected to announce the changes during that press conference. Corey, what do you think of this? This is a reversal.

Zain 10:45

reversal. This is a delay. We talked about this in the past that this government, you know, when I made the statement that this government has rarely backed off, you guys provided some proof points of how they have in the past. What do you think of this particular sort of move by the government? Should it be confirmed as expected tomorrow morning?

Zain 11:05

So I was just going

Corey 11:05

going into our group chat, and I zoomed back to August 2nd, which was only like a couple of texts ago. We don't talk anymore.

Corey 11:14

anymore. I feel sad about it. And 6.01 p.m., I texted you. Okay, I'm starting to think the government folds on the end of testing and quarantine. Discuss. Stephen Carter, 6.01 p.m. Hot take. Came real fast. Not even close. They will not.

Corey 11:31

Zane Velgey, agree with Carter. Carter.

Corey 11:34

Corey Hogan, 6.14 p.m. I thought about it 13 more minutes. I think they might.

Corey 11:41

6.15. How are we feeling

Zain 11:43

feeling right now, boys? You can't

Zain 11:44

can't just reveal text messages. Are we just going to start revealing text messages now? Is that what this is going to be? A giant data dump? Come on, let me read you some other ones here. Let's hold on very quickly. I'm concerned

Carter 11:56

with the thing in my urine. That's

Zain 12:00

Let me just go back here um ha ha ha ha ha ha so that's oh that was the message yeah that was both of you back to back something i said um that you guys are responding to uh big day this is what i said i said big day and i showed you uh my 7 000 followers on twitter and then i went

Carter 12:18

went down it was great and then and i

Zain 12:21

i said are we recording tonight cory hogan i assume steven carter yes uh steven carter you've You've dropped to 6,999, which is because Corey likely unfollowed you, which brings me joy. Now, listen, let me tell you something. Why does it bring you joy when I lose followers on Twitter? But more specifically, I'm feeling just fine. Stephen Carter, how are you feeling in terms of Corey's victory lap that he's trying to take in such a protracted fashion?

Carter 12:50

Well, I mean, good

Carter 12:52

good for him. He was right once. I'm happy for him.

Carter 12:55

I really am. Yeah.

Carter 12:57

Lori will be proud.

Zain 12:59

Carter, let's talk about this from the perspective of what the government's trying to do here.

Carter 13:05

Get out of it? Like getting out of the nightmare that they're in right now?

Carter 13:10

Yeah, let's talk about that nightmare.

Zain 13:12

about the strategy. Let's talk about it from the perspective of the fact that the NDP and their critic announced these changes alongside the media before the UCP did. What do you make of that? I

Carter 13:24

mean, that that cabinet meeting leaked so much today, I heard about it. I mean, everybody in Alberta seemed to know about the cabinet meeting even before it was reported out of the media. The continued leaks that are now coming out of this government make it so that everybody knows what's going on, because people, there's

Carter 13:42

there's no loyalty to the government anymore. There's people trying to save themselves, and they're trying to leak this stuff out so that they look better in people's eyes. This is a reversal that is so obvious that even Corey Hogan could see it coming. And he didn't even understand the sarcasm when you and I opposed it. I mean, that's the part that's really upsetting is that the sarcasm that you and I both had in those responses was completely missed by him.

Carter 14:09

This is an inevitable thing. And to be honest, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what Corey talked about, I think, two weeks ago when he said what they should have been doing is resetting what the measures of success would look like. Because they didn't do that, the number of cases continues to be the primary driver. Now, I will say hospitalizations and intensive care unit hospitalizations are also going up, which is very concerning. But had they reset from the number of cases to the number of acute cases, they wouldn't necessarily be in as much trouble as they're in today.

Zain 14:46

Corey, what do you make of what happened in terms of the rollout here? of media saying government sources, they're going to announce it tomorrow morning. And then the NDP ultimately getting up on a, not

Zain 14:56

not I was going to say metaphorical, but literal mic and podium and saying, this is what's happening as if they were the government in some way to say, we've done it, we've succeeded. Here's what's ending up as your new policy. And really no confirmation from the government as of this time of recording. What do you think of that strategy by the NDs? And what do you think is going on in the government?

Corey 15:15

Yeah, I mean, I thought that the NDP strategy strategy here was just silly. Nobody in the real world gives a damn if the NDP is the one who drops the scoop. That's the media's job. That's not the official opposition's job. And even if they wanted to do it, there are ways you do it where you just say, hearing strong rumors, this, blah, blah, blah, not essentially holding a press conference of the government's own. Why do you

Corey 15:34

not do that? Why do you not

Corey 15:36

Well, because it's not a game. And this is supposed to be serious stuff. And you're trying to win points on a scorecard that doesn't matter. Ultimately, this is the kind of shit that gets It's people like you and me talking. Even Stephen Carter might arouse from a slumber to have an opinion on it. But it's not the kind of thing that moves votes. It's really not. And in fact, it can be quite off-putting to people because it just seems like games, right? Why does it matter? Who cares? And so I think that the time would have been better spent perhaps getting ready to have the most killer response rather than the fastest response, because fastest doesn't matter for breaking government news like this, if you're the official. Have

Zain 16:11

Have you seen anything like this before, Corey? And Carter, I'm going to expand it to you, too, where there's trickles of it in the media. The media is reporting that sources say, and then an opposition party just pounces on it and saying, here's what we've heard, here's what's happening, almost like they're breaking the news. I can't recall, but I'm curious if either of you have historically seen this, whether it be in our province or in our country writ large.

Corey 16:34

can't think of a specific instance, Zane, but I am quite sure that I have seen it happen. And it's the kind of thing that when you are in a political party office or a caucus actually seems like it's a win because

Corey 16:45

it bothers the other guy and you think anything that bothers the other guy is a win. But it's – and sure, absolutely leaking to the media things that you have heard that's going on on the government side. That happens all the time.

Corey 17:00

But again, it's kind of keeping your eyes off the prize here and I'm sure there were a lot of high fives around the NDP caucus. I'm sure they thought this is an awful lot of fun, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. And certainly, I think that the things that do matter, you would be better positioned to do well on if you had taken the time and used it differently. Carter,

Zain 17:18

Carter, I'm curious to get your take on this, because can I give you guys my take of the reading, which is probably a little bit more pedestrian in the sense of saying, okay, this is the NDs trying to box the UCPN. They have hearing sources, and they're trying to crystallize it and calcify it and ensure that there's no way that they can get out of it. Carter, what are your thoughts? Lay it on me. I'm curious to hear your thinking on this.

Carter 17:39

But they didn't box anybody in. They released the news like it was news. What they should have been doing is preset a trap for the expected announcement tomorrow. So preset something that is going to be trap them. Give me an example.

Zain 17:54

What would that look like? For example?

Carter 17:56

Demand that it actually happen. Demand that the numbers today drive a more comprehensive outcome. demand that they that they extend these for at least six more weeks uh so then when they announce the six weeks tomorrow it's like see we demanded it now it actually happened um or you know so set a pre-trap and then once they've done it or set something that they can't possibly attain that makes their six weeks look like it's not the right choice right but by simply announcing look what's going to happen tomorrow that they're going to do all you've done is is scoop them that's the the media's job, to Corey's point. That's not your job. Your job is to win politically, not to win informationally.

Zain 18:39

Interesting. Corey, jump in, because I feel like the NDs probably thought that this was kind of a bit of a victory lap, but you want to chime into what Carter was saying. Go ahead.

Corey 18:47

Yeah, I think what Carter described is the much more common way it can go down, where

Corey 18:53

where you know something is coming, so you try to make it look like it was your idea in the first place, and then, of course, they announce it. And it's I mean, decisions in government don't happen in eight hours, so it's often kind of silly when it occurs. But if anything, I think, Zane, this reverse box, I mean, this gives an incentive to the government not to do it and then say, what the hell was the NDP talking? You can't trust them. They're flaky on this. They're just being followed around by rumors that are being thrown out in the Twitter sphere. And I don't know. I mean, how would that box you in if you're the government? If anything, it creates an opportunity to make your opponent look foolish by not doing what they're saying you're about to do. And

Zain 19:34

And do you, so let's, I mean, we're recording, as I mentioned, on Thursday evening. So most people won't listen to this until tomorrow morning when we know what the government will do. But do you expect that that could be a strategy swirling around tonight to say, screw it, let's not go in the direction that was pre-leaked, so to speak?

Corey 19:53

No, I ultimately don't because they obviously are coming to a conclusion. If this is true, if everything we've heard reporting is true, and there's still that caveat, although there's increasingly firm government sourcing on the media side. So good reason to believe it's true.

Corey 20:07

The problem is you obviously did it for a reason. And that would be the perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Because, again, as the government, you've got to be much more worried about the outcomes that you're trying to drive with the policy. That was probably a bit of a bit of a conversation at cabinet. So you're not going to just say, no, screw it, because I want to make David

Corey 20:27

David Shepard look foolish. That doesn't make any sense either. And so I don't see any reason why you would see that. Carter,

Zain 20:36

tell me about advocacy

Zain 20:37

advocacy in this case.

Zain 20:39

What portion of the success, if you can call it that, at least delaying the government's agenda, was due to advocacy in your mind, from the ongoing protests, from the social media commentary and petitions and advocacy? What part of this do you credit protesting and advocacy and the movements that have kind of developed across the province for this outcome?

Carter 21:04

was talking to a journalist this week who was trying to remember when we last saw this type of sustained protest. And one could argue that the only two times that we've seen this type of sustained protest in Alberta would be Jim Prentice's Bill 11 around Bill 10. Bill 10. Was it Bill 10? But who can remember the numbers? Was it the GSA's

Carter 21:23

Yeah. And was it Klein's uh bill 13 that was the privatization of health care uh that we saw in the uh in the mid late 90s um those would be probably the the two most sustained protests that we've seen here we're not a protest town we're not we don't see a lot of strikes and protests so maybe it was the protests or maybe it was the actual evidence maybe it was the increasing number of patients in icu Maybe it was the 4,101 active cases in Alberta right now. Maybe it was the over 550 new cases today and over 500 new cases yesterday.

Carter 22:03

I don't know, but I suspect if it was, you know, if I if Kenny is Kenny, the Kenny that I think he is, it was the data, not the protests. Interesting. You could protest him all day long, every day, and he would just drive by you and say, it's interesting. that you are so comfortable being so wrong.

Zain 22:22

You do say something interesting, Carter, about sustained protests, that if they have, you know, some credit to this outcome or this assumed outcome, that the sustained element might have been what it is. But, Corey, I want to get your thoughts on this. What part did advocacy have to play with this outcome?

Corey 22:40

think that it kept the pressure on, and the advocacy in Alberta fueled conversation outside of Alberta, which in turn, I think, fueled anxiety in Alberta as to whether this was the right course of action. It's funny to think that the premier just last week said, I will not be lectured by the federal minister of health for canceling it when I'm doing it. And here we are, right? And so I think what

Corey 23:03

what can't be lost here is that this was an epic own goal. Nobody

Corey 23:08

was calling for the government to do this. The government decided to do this. The government had to decide not to do this before the government got to the point of implementation. That's not good. That's not good. There is a parallel universe where this was not announced by our chief medical officer of health, and

Corey 23:27

and none of this conversation has occurred. There would be a different conversation. There would be the conversation that was already going on as to should Alberta have opened up as quickly as it did in July. but it would not have had this fever pitch, a pun fully intended, that we've seen in the past couple of weeks here. And that will be interesting to see the ramifications of, because certainly the government has said this was advice from the health professionals, right? They were very cool to say that. That was actually the trigger to my text to you all on August 2nd,

Corey 23:58

we were having this, made

Corey 24:00

made me think maybe they're willing to throw some people under the bus there. there but nonetheless

Corey 24:05

nonetheless it was their call it was

Corey 24:08

their decision and they could have said no they could have said this is out of step with other jurisdictions i am not inclined to do this i described it at the time as they just ran back into a burning building they got out of yeah i remember you saying i i mean i can't feel more strongly that was the case especially now they invited a new crisis on their management of covet 19 that did not exist it was fabricated by government action. So I

Corey 24:33

will be very curious to see what the tone of the press conference is tomorrow. I will be curious to see what level of accountability is there or not. And I

Corey 24:44

I don't know, I mean, it's just, it's utterly fascinating. Carter,

Zain 24:47

Carter, let's jump into what Corey mentioned here. You're helping script the tone and a skeleton of the message tomorrow for the education minister, of course, downloaded by the premier's office. What's the tone and kind of what are you you saying uh for your backtrack tomorrow how are you how are you stick handling something like this and are there any tenets of political strategy that would be important to consider uh when you do backtrack because

Zain 25:14

because we always talk about the double down we rarely talk about how you do a really good backtrack or how you do a really good off-ramp so to speak so i'm curious uh to hear if you've got any thoughts on that yeah

Carter 25:26

yeah i mean the first thing i would do if i was doing this is i I would make it look like it's not a backtrack. You know, we were always going to be evaluating what was going to be happening prior to the school year. We're going to keep pushing for vaccinations. We're going to make sure that vaccinations occur. We were never going to just waltz into the school year with everything just, you know, we were aware that children between zero and 11 were not being vaccinated. We understood that. We weren't going to just run into Corey's burning building. We had a good plan. And unfortunately, this plan has been undone by the number, just the sheer volume of people who are refusing to get vaccinated. We will double down on our vaccination efforts. But this is their fault, not ours. And that's probably the tone that I would take is that we're not actually backtracking at all. We want things to be open. In fact, all they're doing is reinstating some of the testing stuff. You know, you got to still quarantine. It's not like they're saying, you know what, let's get back to some of the masking things. No, they're not doing any of that. They're just they're just not stopping testing. They're just not stopping reporting the numbers. That's it. Everything else. You can still walk into a store unmasked here, man. Like it's not a big backtrack. Not at all.

Zain 26:41

Corey, how do you position a reversal, of course, an off-ramp, a backtrack, whatever you want to call it? What are some lessons here that a political party or political leader should consider? And what do you, to your introducing of the topic, expect the message and the tone to be tomorrow? And how would you script it? Should you be advising a minister of education?

Corey 27:05

We listen to our experts. We still believe the experts are correct here. This is a pause to illustrate that this plan will work because testing will continue and Albertans can see those numbers decline. Now, it's really unfortunate that the federal government has decided to make this a political football and attack Alberta and rattle confidence in the province of Alberta, taking actions that are hurting our economy, taking actions that are hurting our people who are having these concerns brought on to them by these groups that are just trying to make a point and win some political scores here. We are a science-driven. And jurisdictions like Germany are ending their public testing. They're following our lead. But Justin Trudeau would rather hurt our province, rattle confidence, and wreck kind of the public psyche here just in service of trying to win a couple of other seats in Quebec. It's absolutely outrageous, but we're out. We are not going to allow ourselves to be a football during this ill-conceived federal election that we know is coming. Nicely

Zain 28:02

Maybe if someone listens to that tonight, has it downloaded by tonight, they can maybe copy and paste some free Corey Hogan and Stephen Carter. Carter, give me your best John Mulaney before we move on.

Zain 28:17

muted? He seems to be muted, just gesticulating. That is perfect.

Carter 28:20

perfect. That literally was my best John Mulaney, too. It was really good.

Zain 28:24

I'm sure it was. We're going to leave that there. Let's move it on to our first segment. our first segment written in the stars steven carter it's happening an election aren't you excited look at we should do the video version of these of these podcasts i'm

Carter 28:39

i'm looking at your face people people want to see what we see uh with the the reactions the facial expressions the looks of disgust that we share amongst ourselves uh cory and i mostly uh and some of you you know the inane questions that we have to work our way through yeah for sure

Carter 28:58

yeah i can't remember the question say there

Carter 29:00

there was no question it

Zain 29:01

it was pretty much a way of introducing the topic to you steven carter oh good on sunday the sources are saying sources all over that justin trudeau is going to call the election on sunday and i want to talk about what a launch looks like what's going on right now we're going to do all of the fun stuff and carter let's start here which is we expect Sunday to happen for Justin Trudeau. I'm not going to ask you guys to script strategies for each party, but I want to find out what's going on now. We're in a Thursday evening.

Zain 29:33

We're expecting a Sunday election. What is everyone doing at this hour? This is what I'm really fascinated about because I'm sure different strokes for different folks applies, but there's probably some conventional wisdom in terms of as we move from political strategy to our sweet spot, campaign strategy what are people doing to to put their campaigns together right now like what exactly is happening so we'll go through i'll try to go through it in terms of like order but carter i want your thoughts first of all give me overarching right thursday night to sunday everyone now knows we were expecting it for a long time it's been telegraphed for everyone that was going to happen last sunday or this sunday but now that it's real it's clicked into focus what are some of the high level things that that that each um each political party perhaps perhaps even agnostic of their partisanship, is thinking of right now? And then, Corey, same question to you, and then let's dig deeper on a bunch of stuff.

Carter 30:25

Every single campaign has got two things going right now that they've been working on. And we've actually been seeing some of these things. The first is the proactive messaging structure, right? So what is it that we want to be talking about on any given day? And they've now mapped out their message board for the 36 days of the campaign. In fact, they've been mapped out for they probably did a 50 day, 60 day message board where they could start the RIT, so

Zain 30:52

so to speak. Yeah.

Carter 30:53

Yeah. So they know exactly what they were saying prior to the RIT. They know exactly what they're going to say.

Carter 30:58

You know, like the fact that this leaked today through Reuters, that wasn't a big scoop from Reuters. Someone in the liberal campaign said, you know, we should do we should make sure that three days before we actually drop the RIT. Yeah. People are prepared mentally for the RIT to drop. We do not want this to be a surprise. eyes right if this is a surprise then this is gonna this this will take us off of our message of that particular day and that particular day's proactive message is blank whatever they want it to be and i imagine that it is we need a new mandate for uh economic recovery post-pandemic rather than the amazing spectacular pandemic response that we've managed up to this point um so

Carter 31:38

so that that's the first piece is the proactive then the second thing and i think we've seen evidence of this in play as well, is the reactive messaging. The war rooms are all up and running for each of these parties. They've got their top 15 to 20 media professionals all sitting in a room. They've assigned out desks. They've got the phone calls from each of the regions. Each region has a reporting structure to make sure that the HQ knows what's happening in each of the areas. areas those professionals have been working 12 hour days for the last week and a half anyways doing

Zain 32:17

doing what accumulating oppo is that what's going on

Carter 32:19

on the oppo research has been done for for months and months so it's in the can you think this is testing the processes right we heard a whisper of this thing there's a candidate in nova scotia that peed into a cup how are we going to respond to it right there's a candidate in british columbia that's been accused of sleeping with a sheep how are we going to respond to it um these things these

Corey 32:42

these things candidates in pei who drank from that pea cup how

Carter 32:46

how are we going to respond

Carter 32:48

how are we going to respond to it those are the those are the things that have been tested and we talked about it a couple times on the podcast actually where we've talked about this was a message of the day this was essentially the war room reacting to a story and trying to spin that story into something more than it potentially was. So we've seen that in the podcast already. We've talked about that in the podcast. And those reactive pieces are ramping up. And the third thing, and I don't want to get into any detail on it, because it's a totally different thing. And that is the actual logistics of a 36 day election campaign and tour. That's all written. Of course, there'll be variants, there'll be variations. And the plan will change every every election professional knows that the plan will change but that doesn't mean you don't already have your 36 day logistics schedule and your logistics captains all ready to go because i'll tell you something we're all going to be shocked when the airplanes roll out of the hangar and there's a conservative airplane and there's a liberal airplane and

Carter 33:49

and there's an ndp bus you're

Zain 33:53

you're such a shitty

Zain 33:56

cory can i can i can i quickly Quickly summarize. Green

Zain 34:02

Chigmeet Singh is the one with the foldable bicycle, which, by the way, let

Zain 34:05

let me summarize for our listeners here. Rarely do I care for the listener, but I know there might be a couple. So scripting the writ, war room, scripting logistics. Corey, what else do you want to add to the mix? What is going on in this moment a couple of days before, quote, unquote, riptrop?

Zain 34:24

I mean, a lot. A

Corey 34:26

lot of butterflies, man. It's the climb before the drop on the roller coaster. It's the calm before the storm. You can't believe you're out of time. You can't believe it's here. There's never enough time. You start thinking about the things that you've decided to do. You second guess so many decisions. You're making these revisions like it's a wedding seating plan on your kind of message board. board, weekly themes, daily themes. Maybe we put this one first. Maybe we put this one second. Maybe this is stronger in week two than it is in week three. You're blocking out where your oppo hits come if you've got them ready to go. And you've got the plan and you're ready and you've got the plan and you think this is what you're going to do for the next 36 days. But you know it's not, right?

Corey 35:05

right? That's the thing. If you've done even one campaign, you know it won't work. It never does. With apologies to Harold McMillan, you know, what knocks campaigns off of course. Events, dear boy, events, right? Things happen, and then you have to react to them. And then you're all of a sudden saying, do I react to this thing? Or do I try to stay on my message box? And how do I make this about my message box? And sometimes there's inelegant fits. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that along the way. The other thing I want to say is, generals and politicians are always fighting the last war.

Corey 35:34

And so you're looking at the last election, and you're saying, this happened last time, how are we going to react to it? This happened? What would

Corey 35:41

do to make make sure we didn't find ourselves in a similar situation and you're almost running the scenario test, but using the data sets you have, which are previous campaigns. And, and so you, you do tend to think a lot about like

Corey 35:54

like how you would have fought that fight and

Corey 35:56

what you're going to do if you're in a similar situation. And, you know, again, you know, the situation's not going to be the same, but you're, you want to make sure you're more durable than the previous campaign, whether you were the person who won the campaign before or the person who lost the campaign. And then what Carter said is really important. they are testing systems right or they should be somebody has to hit send on a press release through campaign tools for the first time in years yeah i remember we talked about this in 2015 because there was some sort of uh

Corey 36:24

this was during the provincial campaign for the i believe when we first yeah yeah

Corey 36:28

where i think it was the wild rose we're getting really mad because they said somebody has hacked our systems that's that's why our news releases aren't going to all of the the newsrooms no they fucking didn't you just used a a spam tool to spam people for the first time in four years and it went into the spam folder for a bunch of people and

Corey 36:47

and so that's all got to be dealt with uh logistics around planes logistics around buses last minute ad buys because now you're really sure even you were 90 sure before you're going to start dropping money at certain moments it's um and

Corey 37:00

and there's never enough time there's never enough time can

Zain 37:03

can i take carter jump in and then i want to take a few of these piece by piece to kind of dig in a little bit more jump in carter well

Carter 37:09

well i think both of us have said that it's really important to have the plan and

Carter 37:12

and it's really important to test the system uh and and both of those things need to happen because what you're doing is you're switching off of all of your existing government paid systems and then they they kind of shift into something completely different yeah and so that that has to be completely rethought and tested all the way through and the plan itself everybody knows it's not going to happen the way you wrote it down, but you still have to have that written down. And

Corey 37:39

the reason why is the plan is about the exercise. It's the thinking that goes into it. It's the processes where you identify the issues that you are strong on, you identify the issues they are weak on, and all of that rigor that informs a plan, that's the important part in many ways. I say it all the time, but good strategy comes from good analysis. And the

Corey 38:00

the analysis that you have to do, even if the strategy ends up changing because of all of the various events. That's durable product. That's useful things to have at hand. And it gets your team ready. You know, if they have to build a plan and then rebuild a plan and then rebuild a plan and then rebuild a plan and then rebuild a plan and then rebuild a plan, when they have to rebuild the plan, they're going to be ready to do so. Right,

Zain 38:22

Right, right. And so that iterative exercise matters. Carter, you guys both talked about government to campaign, both from a technology technology perspective. I want to talk about that in a second. But before I get into that, talk to me about, bring me inside. If I'm someone listening to this show who's never seen what is quote-unquote scripted in a political campaign, tell me what sort of elemental things are scripted. And I think there's a few things that are obvious. Policy, logistics, who's going to be where, where the leader is going to be at certain times. What other things that might surprise people are scripted? I assume oppo research and timeliness of that are scripted. Is the whole story of the campaign scripted in a sense where it says if we hit this oppo piece, we hit this oppo piece, it means this and they're going to say this and they – bring me into it a bit. I

Corey 39:13

I don't necessarily – I mean you can do that. You can say if

Zain 39:16

if this happens, then

Zain 39:17

happens. If they do,

Corey 39:17

I'm curious if – That kind of decision treeing is kind of useless after a couple of steps.

Zain 39:22

steps. Right, like bouncing sort of – yeah, yeah.

Corey 39:24

Change all the way. But the story is the most important part. I think Stephen and I would both agree as him as a current campaign practitioner, me as a former campaign practitioner, nothing is more important than story because we've talked about it all of the time. You are trying ultimately to establish a ballot question. You want a narrative in somebody's mind when they go to the poll and say, this is what this election is about. And by defining that question, you define the answer, right? If you're worried about issue X, conservatives. Issue Y, NDP. Issue Z, liberals. And you set that question if you've got a successful campaign. But then you break the story into themes. Those themes become your weeks, in all likelihood. It doesn't have to be. It's kind of arbitrary. And within those themes, you have individual announcements or events. And those become your set pieces. And you're able to move those around within your theme weeks relatively effortlessly. Within all of that, you also then have the oppo and the way you're trying to knock them off of their theme weeks. And Carter, you're trying to jump in, so I'll stop there.

Carter 40:24

Everything is scripted and everything has to fit. And the trick is, so I work on an awful lot of character development for the opposition, right? So what is the brand or the character positioning that I want the opposition to occupy? And then how do I write that into my stories? Because the stories that we're writing, I like to think of it like a very long novel, right? Right. And so the 36 day campaign structure is 36 chapters and you're going to have 36 scenes. You know, so within each of those, there's so you're doing three events a day. Right. So there's three different scenes a day. Inside of those scenes, you have the characters. Right. You have a character of yourself. How much do I want to spend exploring the character of Justin Trudeau? How much time do I want to spend exploring the character of Jagmeet Singh? thing? How much do I want to explore Aaron O'Toole? And you can put into your script how much time you wish to expose those people to. So I'm in the middle of a campaign right now. We're not doing any character exploration of our opposition right now. We could do character exploration, but the opportunity hasn't written itself into our script. So you don't just jump into it just because you think to yourself, you know, I haven't talked about Aaron O'Toole for a while. You only talk about Aaron O'Toole in the context of the chapter that you're writing, right? So So all of these stories have to tie together. So at the end of it, the 36 days reads like an actual planned novel. And the interesting part about it is some pieces were planned. Sometimes you know that on the 11th to last day, you're going to do Lake of Fire. But more often than not, you don't know that on the 11th to last day, Lake of Fire is going to be there. But if you've done your work properly, when Lake of Fire happens, it's exactly the character expectation that your primary audience has and that character expert expectation is all the work that you did prior to the 11th last day right

Carter 42:22

right so you have to do those pieces of work and you have to do that scripting so that that when these opportunities arise they are actually seen one of the things that was a challenge with blackface uh last time is because it was it kind of came out of nowhere the set the expectation wasn't there no one no one was walking around thinking you know know what i

Carter 42:42

wonder if justin trudeau is a little bit racist if

Carter 42:45

if they've been thinking that then that blackface would have landed totally different how

Zain 42:50

how are you can i ask cory i know you want to jump in but carter to your to your last comment on the blackface brownface um oppo

Zain 42:58

oppo from last time

Zain 43:00

it seemed pretty clear that team trudeau did not know that was coming out based on you know how flat-footed they were, where he responded, how he responded. If you know something about you will emerge, do

Zain 43:13

do you also script that? And how are you scripting it? Give me an example of how you're perhaps scripting. And then, Corey, I'll let you respond to this, and I'll move it on to other elements. But curious on that one, Carter. The

Carter 43:23

The classic is the one-on-one sit-down, right?

Carter 43:26

You know you've got something negative, so you set up your one-on-one sit-down, and you let it come out in the one-on-one and you're you're decimated you're really upset and then it runs a three-day cycle and it's over if Justin Trudeau had leaked his own photos like I probably wouldn't have done so so many different techniques and tactics that you can use right you can go down and you can do a mea culpa before it happens you can leak it before it happens and then do the mea culpa afterwards you you know you can expose it by accident like there's a bunch of stuff that we've done in the past where i accidentally send out an email to the wrong people um you know oh golly that's terrible how did you get that oh geez um those types of techniques and tactics are available to you to get your information out so that people you

Carter 44:15

you frame your response right so bad news like we we've talked about this before it's very difficult for the you know for the population to have a collective memory of longer than three or four days so if you want something to disappear just

Carter 44:31

just do it at the beginning you know um just

Carter 44:34

just do it at the beginning it's it's so much easier and and that was one of the problems with blackface brownface uh with trudeau it came too early in the election cycle last time people were able to factor it in if

Carter 44:45

if it had come if it had come with uh like when we had the uh

Carter 44:49

uh lake of fire with 11 days to go i mean frankly that was too early too, but Danielle Smith kept fumbling the ball and kept it in the story all the way through to election day. Had she dealt with it appropriately, it would have been a three-day cycle and it would have been over.

Carter 45:03

I mean, we were prepared to keep it going for six days or so, but I don't think I could have sustained it for longer than six days.

Zain 45:09

Corey, jump in on any of the scripting comments you have, and then I want to get into a conversation with both of you about the stress testing and building the muscle memory of governing to running an election, both from personnel, but also from the candidate's perspective. So anything on scripting before we jump into that second category? Carter

Corey 45:27

Carter covered an awful lot of it. But of course, when you are working on your campaign narrative, you're also trying to imagine the other guys or gals campaign narrative, and you're trying to imagine their steps. And it's a game of chess in some ways.

Corey 45:40

In other ways, it's much blunter than that. It's who can put their message the loudest and most consistent. And there's, you know, the theory of communication, say it enough enough time, say it loudly and say it well, and people will probably agree with you. So I think

Corey 45:56

realistically, this is part of what makes it so hard to plan as well, too. You're trying to imagine what other people are up to, but it doesn't mean you don't do it for all of the reasons we've just talked about. Corey,

Zain 46:06

Corey, let's jump into the stress testing of systems. What sort of stress testing are you generally doing? And then let's talk about also, you know, this transition between governance and campaigning. One of the things we've seen in the past is certain leaders and teams, not just on a systems basis, but on like a cadence tone basis, kind of still feel like they're governing in the first days of a writ period. They still feel like they're in almost like either premier or prime minister mode, not leader of the party mode. So talk about how you kind of prime and test all of those things, heading into a pretty short election period and making sure you're you're ready on day one yeah

Corey 46:47

yeah realistically one of the best ways that you're able to provide that continuity is that the staff that you had who were either government staffers or caucus staffers if you're the opposition or you know working in the olo they take leaves they go on vacation whatever and then they go and they do the exact same function for the campaign so you the the media spokespeople are the media spokespeople and the

Zain 47:09

the people who do

Corey 47:10

do tour people people who do tour and and you sort of all get it and of course with campaign it's different it's absolutely different and there are different skill sets you need to play along but uh that's part of it and one of the things though it's like if an entire office you know what it's like it's you remember in the show mad men where they left uh sterling

Corey 47:29

sterling cooper and they started stealing sterling cooper draper price and they had to sort of figure out how everything worked in this new environment and they didn't have the trappings of that previous large organization it's like that, right? You're used to things. You use certain tools. All of a sudden, you've got to use different tools. You don't have the same tools available. You've got to make sure you're able to work the same workflows. You've got to put out news releases over the wire, maybe differently. Maybe you're using the same service. Depends on how you're doing it right now, right? And what you want to do is you just want to make sure all of them are working. You don't want the first time you hit send on an email to continue to use this example to be when it really matters. You want to have some other examples there. You want to make sure all of the phones are there. You want to to have people go through it and and um sort of vet that everything is occurring uh you know with the right phone numbers on it and everything as you're going through i mean in many ways zane it's like setting up any office you've got to go through the checklist of of things big and small as small as where do i get pens yeah and as big as um how

Corey 48:30

how do i get a plane i mean you don't get much bigger than that carter

Zain 48:34

carter talk to me about the leader of the party how do you ensure that the rust is off from either governance mode or opposition mode into full-on campaign mode? Is it different? Maybe I'll ask you that question. Is it different than the muscle that they've been using perhaps prior to a rip being dropped and a full-on campaign being on? And how do you ensure and how do you stress test your candidate, your leader, your chief spokesperson to ensure that they're at the top of their game on day one well

Carter 49:05

well first of all it is different uh it has similar elements right because uh you know you have question period every day when you're in the house of commons and that feels like it's very much um you know the theater it's not uh it's totally different because the audience is different right so you know i came up studying theater and and one of the things we learned very quickly in theater is that the the the venue matters right Right. If you try and do a black box theater and in a giant, you know, Broadway style theater, Presidium Arts Theater, it won't work because the space is different. And one of the things that I fear with with elections is that everybody just thinks that what they're doing is moving the House of Commons outside.

Carter 49:49

You're not moving the House of Commons outside. You are doing a completely different batch of theater. And the audience turns on through the course of the 36 days. you know those of us that that pay attention to question period on a daily basis that's a small number of people but

Carter 50:05

but by the time this thing is over i

Corey 50:07

do not count myself in that group either like it's a small i was

Carter 50:10

was talking about other people if i'm actually honest none of us question period we've

Carter 50:15

we've got ted lasso

Zain 50:15

lasso to watch that's what that's

Carter 50:16

that's what we're up to is where it's at but this is not this

Carter 50:20

this is we're not that audience and it turns and and neither is the general public and now the general public's going to turn on and they're going to see things completely differently they approach things completely differently and the audience impacts the political theater is

Zain 50:35

is it is it rude to say are you lowest common denominator in yourself or is that is that not the right approach like i wouldn't use that word no you know but but what are you actually trying to do like if you're you're

Corey 50:46

you're trying to simplify your messages to a way that somebody who does not think about these things all of the time can hear what you're saying and understand what you're trying to do and it is a different type of communication in some ways it's It's about putting aside the jargon. It's about putting aside the pageantry and the theater of the metapolitics that we all get so absorbed in. We start talking about things like who scooped whom on the release of news from the government. It's getting it down to what matters to Canadians writ large, not just the Canadians who follow this the way others obsessively follow sports or whatever,

Corey 51:22

or knitting. Some people love knitting. It's not just sports. Yeah,

Carter 51:27

can put this into a theatrical point of view, or you can put it into a sports point of view, or you can put it into an arts point, you know, like a giant movies on the Oscars night, right? People, when they start to pay attention differently, it changes the show, right? So the Super Bowl is different than every other football game, but it's still the exact same football game. Oh, that's a good analogy. So if you know that the Super Bowl is different, what is it that makes it different? And what pageantry and changes do you add that actually makes it work, right? So every once in a while, you got to rip off Janet Jackson's costume and show a little bit of nipple. That's what makes it all work, right? So, no, that's

Carter 52:10

that's not part of the football game. I mean, you were on such a great track and then you weren't. You

Corey 52:14

You were doing fine and then you weren't, yeah.

Carter 52:18

so for me it's it and it's also like watching a great theater actor try and do tv it

Carter 52:24

it doesn't work right and and for me justin trudeau um

Carter 52:30

you know i think he does that thrust and perry of the of the house of commons actually fairly well i don't think it transfers to the elections particularly well i don't think he's a great election performer and that's one of the reasons that they've never I mean,

Carter 52:44

mean, they broke through in 2015 on

Carter 52:47

on the grounds of their newness. 2019

Carter 52:52

felt like it was a

Carter 52:54

a little bit forced, and the electorate rewarded

Carter 52:57

rewarded him by giving him a government without giving him the majority of the votes or the plurality of the votes. So this is going to

Carter 53:06

to be a very interesting exercise to see if the pandemic has changed his relationship with the audience. and I'm really looking forward to see if the Liberal Party itself has changed the way that they're approaching their election because I just don't think they're very good at it still and the thing that drives me a bit crazy is they always keep going back to the same people Tom Pitfield is still going to be doing the digital hasn't been any good digital since you know it hasn't been good digital but they're going back to the same people listen we've

Zain 53:34

we've got we've got close to 40 days to be able to assess the content that's being put out and I look forward to doing that in terms of the individual pieces But take me into a

Zain 53:45

Corey Hogan run or Stephen Carter run campaign this weekend, right? You guys are the national directors for Agnostic. I don't care which party heading into this weekend. What are you doing? You talked about stress testing. You've talked about scripting. You've talked about tweaking all of those things, making sure the logistics are right. Corey gave a good sort of laundry list of all the emotions that you're feeling. But it's Thursday night. You finally know if you're if you're the NDP or the conservatives and you're finally here, if you're the liberals, what

Zain 54:17

what are you doing this weekend? And Corey, give me a sense of if this is a Corey Hogan run national campaign. Are you huddling the troops together this weekend? Are you meeting with the leader? Give me a few things that could happen that you would be considering this weekend as you head into what you're expecting Sunday, Monday. Yeah,

Corey 54:36

Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting bridge period between all of the behind the scenes and the, you know, in front of the curtain, Carter, whatever you would call it, using your theater metaphors. But this is a time that has characteristics of both. So you are rapidly trying to get all of your plans into place. It's not done yet. It's never done, right?

Carter 54:56

And even when the campaign

Corey 54:57

campaign starts, you're tinkering with these things. But you're also making those bridges to the external community now. Now your communication is like the pregame show, to continue the sports metaphor. There are a few more people tuned in. They're thinking about it. So the campaign has this set date where it starts, but the reality is the actions now, and we've seen even Aaron O'Toole in Quebec where he's making promises, it's sort of starting. It's already beginning. beginning if you're the campaign director you're also making those connections to your regional directors you're probably taking the opportunity to do the things you don't really have time for during the campaign with all of your other campaign managers so that big round table conversation okay this is happening here

Corey 55:36

here we go let's all talk about it this is how we're going to run it every morning you're going to hop on this call you're going to get these things you're

Corey 55:42

you're getting everybody out there in volunteer land a little bit ready and getting their sea legs under them as well and there's

Corey 55:49

there's There's really not a lot of time for too much more than that, right? Ideally, you already have your sense of team, the camaraderie. You're not trying to build that on day one of a campaign because you've assembled your team in the times past. And likely, it is a continuation in some way, shape, or form of a lot of the senior people in other contexts. And you're working with them already. Of

Zain 56:08

Of course. You've already probably met with them at the very least and have got deep intimate ties with them if you're doing this right. But

Corey 56:15

But there's a lot of people you haven't been meeting

Zain 56:16

meeting with. Right. That

Zain 56:18

getting redeployed or deployed to one of the regional branches or whatnot. So this is

Corey 56:23

is the time. This is the time to build those connections that you don't want to be building and tightening up on the first days of the campaign. It's how you establish expectations. It's how you establish the pecking order, bluntly, between I'm going to tell you to do these things and you're going to do them.

Zain 56:36

Despite what role you've done on a previous campaign or what chief of staff you used to be for a minister, this is how it works. Well,

Corey 56:43

yeah. And also, if you are under the illusion that as a local campaign manager, you were getting to choose A, B, and C, it's not on the call. You're not on the call saying, unless you're a real dick, I guess it could work for some people. But you're

Corey 56:56

you're not saying, you're not going to get to do that. You're not going to get to do that. You are setting those expectations, though, through the words you use, the way you're talking to people, the firmness you're doing to some of these suggestions that come up. Because there'll be someone, some manager somewhere who says, yeah, Corey, I've got a question on a call with

Corey 57:14

dozens or more candidates saying, where do I get lawn signs here? And you say, that's not what this call is about. Call your regional person. They will manage all of those things. Here is what this call is about. And you just have to be firm and establish those things because you don't want to be establishing them on a morning call during a very busy campaign. I,

Zain 57:33

I, Carter, I want to come to you, but I know the answer to this next question I'm going to ask Corey from your perspective, or at least I think I do. So I'm going to ask Corey for it. Corey, you know, from a strategy perspective and transparency on strategy, if you were the national campaign director for a campaign this weekend, you had your call, let's say, Saturday morning, right? Saturday morning, 9am Eastern, every campaign manager in the country dials in. How open source are you with our campaign strategy, with the party's campaign strategy? Because I think I know Carter's answer to this, which is why I'm asking you, what's your approach as it relates to, hey, here's what we've scripted, here's our story? Now, you could go in varying degrees of it, but how are you kind of getting buy-in from a group of people across the country, decentralized, leading up, knowing that they've still got disproportionate skin in the game? I'm kind of curious how you would lead into that. Carter, I'll ask you too, but I want to go to Corey first on this. So

Corey 58:26

So there's two things, right? I talked about generals and politicians are always fighting the last war. We've talked about the military metaphors. It's called a campaign, for fuck's sake. It's because it is a bit more command and control. So you're not necessarily under any kind of requirement to share all of this information down. It's go do your thing, we'll do our thing. Now, obviously,

Corey 58:46

obviously, in a modern campaign, and I think even if you were Patton back in the day, you're not going to run entirely like that. You want to build a sense of camaraderie amongst people. You want to give people a sense they're on the inside. There are things, frankly, that make people feel like they're on the inside that it would be great if they were run on the front page of the Globe and Mail. This is what this campaign is all about. Rah,

Corey 59:07

rah, rah. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be coming in hard on these issues. No harm in that. And I think you should share those things. And I do believe, ultimately, you

Corey 59:15

you want to be making sure that everybody understands the strategy at a fundamental level. This is what we're trying to do here. But especially with a national campaign, those are big, big calls, right? You have to assume that somebody could slip it out. You have to assume

Corey 59:31

security is not 100%. And, you know, you don't necessarily always run big calls like that. There's regional calls. But my point here would be, you

Corey 59:40

you can't be dumb. you

Corey 59:42

can't say next week we're going to drop this oppo on yeah

Corey 59:45

on justin trudeau or anything like that and you also don't want to give a sense that it's up for conversation or debate because when people know the specifics that are coming through there you're going to get a lot of opinions and

Corey 59:57

and so you've got to be careful how much you're hitting various throttles and you've got to sort of read the room and understand what your troops need at different times to continue the metaphor i do generally like transparency for these things but there is a limit particularly particularly in a campaign context. Carter,

Zain 1:00:11

Carter, how open source are you? Two questions for you. How open source are you with your strategy if you're leading a national campaign? You got to huddle with the troops this weekend. And secondly, let's

Zain 1:00:22

let's talk about what your priorities would be this weekend as national campaign director. What would you be doing? Corey talked about limited time, right? So he would talk about some items related to relationship building, bridge building.

Zain 1:00:34

What are you doing this weekend? What's going on for you? So those two questions. Well,

Carter 1:00:38

Well, let's start with the strategy one. And I'm, I'm way more open than Corey, but I'm, I agree with him that you're not telling everybody when you're going to drop the oppo piece, right? But you do need to make sure that everybody understands your core messages. Everybody understands the brand structure you're trying to create. Who is, who are we? What are we talking about? When are we talking about it? How do we respond to things? You know, are we the conservative party and we never send our candidates in into a debate? Or are we, you know, are we going to say yes to all the debates? Like, there should be some sort of big strategic, you know, strokes on the painting that everybody knows where they are. Everybody operates the exact same way because that's how you're going to be able to build the brand, frankly,

Carter 1:01:21

the public needs to interact with. We like to pretend that the leaders tour is the only way that people experience the brand. And it is a huge

Carter 1:01:29

huge percentage of how the brand is communicated, but you still need your local campaigns to be on brand and able to communicate and understanding what the next step is that the major campaign is doing. So my view is that, you know, you're not Eisenhower creating, you know, a fake strategy

Carter 1:01:48

strategy or a fake campaign with Patton, you know, when you're about to storm Normandy. I mean, you're not doing that.

Carter 1:01:56

You're making sure that everybody knows that you're going to storm, you

Carter 1:01:58

you know, you're going to storm into Europe. And this is how you're going to do it. And this is how you're going to win. But you're not telling them the exact beaches, the exact dates, the exact elements. You're telling them the themes and the ideas. is and in terms of what i'm doing this weekend there's probably been a bunch of people working on a on a video for three weeks that is going to launch this campaign group of really talented six eight people that have been working on a video that has been three weeks in development and i'm throwing that fucking thing in the trash can i'm saying it's crap and i need a new one because

Corey 1:02:29

forgot this this speech too this speech

Corey 1:02:31

speech is going to change a lot this weekend The

Carter 1:02:33

The speech is all wrong. It's fucking garbage. Throw it away. Bring me a new one by tomorrow. This is, fuck you.

Carter 1:02:42

horrible. Start from scratch. Three blank pieces of paper.

Zain 1:02:45

Why? Tell me why. Because

Carter 1:02:47

Because you've got to get them worked. You're working them. Because campaigns don't work with a three-week window. Campaigns work with 12 hours, 36 hours. That's what you get. So you can make it work. So you've got to be able to have that muscle expressed. And it just doesn't work in government. so

Zain 1:03:02

so that's another almost it's it's all it's it's real but it's also part of the stress test it's what i'm

Carter 1:03:07

i'm hearing it's part of getting yourselves ready like who the fuck cares what you launch with what whose launch video do you remember on election day no one's but you so you throw the fucking thing away and you force them to do the work again because that's how they're going to fill that's how they're going to write and create the best finishing so i

Corey 1:03:24

i don't know if i 100% agree that you do it just for fun like it's not for fun but

Corey 1:03:30

that you agree with there's there's a lot that i agree with and i think particularly if you're coming from government into a campaign yeah

Corey 1:03:36

these are these are they run at different different different speeds yeah i you know i it's not unreasonable in a campaign actual example to have your 7 a.m meeting out of that meeting have an idea have a website launched by 1 p.m that's

Carter 1:03:51

that's a real example

Corey 1:03:51

example we've all done it yeah yeah um yeah

Corey 1:03:55

at government you it would be 60 days for the rfp like it's just like

Corey 1:04:03

got to sort of shake that off i

Zain 1:04:05

i recall the three of us and i'll bring a story in right i remember when we used to work in the agency world they were like hey guys this is an agency this is not corporate stuff this moves at a faster pace oh yeah and it was fucking glacial it was

Carter 1:04:19

was so great it

Zain 1:04:21

was it was glacial because if you felt and i felt the same way going back to my business too after a political campaign you come back and like the world is just moving at like you guys are grabbing coffee and it's like the day's done and all we did is just write the video and we didn't shoot it and we

Corey 1:04:37

edit it and it's

Zain 1:04:38

not out there it's

Zain 1:04:39

it's like it feels extremely

Zain 1:04:40

you normalize to that pace and then you have to ramp up to your to your point so i i appreciate that now the

Corey 1:04:46

pace over decades as you are with a career is absolutely unsustainable yeah but Well, campaigns are not built to last for decades. Campaigns are built to last for 36 days. And they are held together by bailing wire and duct tape by the end. And people's nerves are frayed. And if you're not seeing – like, you shouldn't see tears in an office. I'm being flip. But you will see tears in an office. You will see people frustrated, people who haven't slept in, like, a week, at least not in any kind of substantive sense. Campaigns break people. You'll

Zain 1:05:16

You'll probably also see on the positive side stars emerge, people who starred in one role on day one. end up in a very different role on day 36,

Corey 1:05:25

speak. Stephen Carter can start at a campaign manager and be installing signs before the end of it all.

Carter 1:05:31

I started off carrying John Charest's luggage in 1997. By halfway through that campaign, I'd organized the first digital press conference where we had video and audio from Montreal in

Carter 1:05:44

in Calgary. And that was the first internet press conference that was ever held in Canada. That

Carter 1:05:53

didn't work, by the way. I

Zain 1:05:54

going to take a shit on you, but that's actually pretty cool. Because I think you just undercut yourself. So listen, to both of you. Carter, you've given me your answer in a previous statement.

Zain 1:06:05

You're doing all this this weekend. You're gearing up.

Zain 1:06:08

Corey, how important is launch day? Is launch day just important to get started, get the nerves out, and be there? Or are there real stakes to launch day? And I know we'll discuss this on Sunday, so let's start the conversation here, and then we'll jump into every party, what they did on Sunday, their own after. But give me the stakes to get started.

Corey 1:06:28

It's not a one-size-fits-all answer, Zane. Lunch Day matters an awful lot more for Aaron O'Toole than it does Justin Trudeau, because for Aaron O'Toole, it will be an introduction to a great number of Canadians who don't know him. And you only get one shot at a first impression, right?

Corey 1:06:43

For Justin Trudeau, he's a known commodity. He could have a terrible Lunch Day. He could have a gaffe. he could have the audio just broken.

Corey 1:06:51

It's not going to have the same kind of effect that it would necessarily on somebody who's new. Similarly, if there's a sense that there's a campaign that can't shoot straight, and they don't shoot straight, that will reinforce narrative. So it's going to have a different answer depending on who you are and where you are in the overall political conversation. But by and large, I think launch day is pretty important. I think it's important because it establishes so many of the themes that in theory you are going to carry throughout the election you want to be able to hear them coming through clear as a bell and it's also important because it's when your team has to start moving and if you have a campaigns take a while to ramp up don't kid yourself they there are hiccups galore and you only see a few of them from the public point of view but there's there's all sorts of troubles occurring uh there'll be somebody who's texting and they'll realize four days later they were texting the government phone that that person previously had, not the actual phone, and they haven't seen these texts. I mean, this shit happens.

Corey 1:07:48

But what you need to sort of, or what you hope to see is things are moving well enough that you don't have major foundational problems. The structure is good. The bones of the house are good. If you have problems with that, you've got problems. If it's just the regular stuff, it's the shakedown stuff, okay, manage it. That's what managers do. Managers managers manage. But in that sense, the launch matters.

Zain 1:08:12

Carter, give me the, maybe it's not the one size fits all answer, maybe give me the specific one as a tee up to Sunday, perhaps, in terms of what

Zain 1:08:22

what does launch day mean? Does it matter? Is it perhaps overblown in your mind? And what are the expectations of a launch day? Not

Carter 1:08:34

Not a single vote is cast on election day because of the launch day success or failure, But a launch to a success or failure determines the overall success of the campaign. So that is a gobbledygook answer that just tells us that where we're going, if you can't launch properly, you're probably not going to campaign properly. But just because you launch well doesn't mean that the entire campaign is just going to unfold for you like the yellow brick road. It just doesn't work that way.

Corey 1:09:04

I would say that a good launch is neither necessary nor sufficient to win an election, but it strongly correlates to one's election performance.

Zain 1:09:23

advantage that comes with that or the conventional wisdom of the incumbents advantage that comes with the 36 day rate period overrated

Zain 1:09:40

overrated or underrated steven carter i

Carter 1:09:42

i think it's overrated i think that you know it's an incumbents advantage until such time as they piss it away and history has shown that many many incumbents piss it away i remember doing the liberal party special uh in 2015 which is up on our feed people should listen to it uh we were talking about you know mulcair's advantage and how far back Justin Trudeau was. Now, there's a longer campaign, and maybe you could make the case that in a shorter situation, he wouldn't have been able to pull it off. But the truth is that campaigns matter, whether they're 36 days or 85 days. Campaigns can shift

Carter 1:10:21

shift in ways that an incumbent government can't possibly foresee. And while there may be an advantage, I just don't think it's as overwhelming as people seem to think. It would make it sound like Pierre Elliott Trudeau or Brian Mulroney or Stephen Harper would never lose because they always had such an advantage, and that's just not the case.

Zain 1:10:45

Corey Carter says overrated on the incumbent's advantage on the 36-day shortened, or not the shortened writ period, but the shortest possible writ period. The incumbent's advantage associated with that, overrated or underrated, Corey?

Corey 1:10:58

Overrated for sure. 36 days, it's cliche, but it's true. It's a lifetime in politics. And think about, let's

Corey 1:11:05

let's just sort of blend worlds here. And let's talk about where Alberta was 36 days ago on COVID, just to give you an example.

Corey 1:11:11

Because COVID is a real thing that's happening here in Canada, writ large as well. And I think we can expect to see that situation evolve in ways we may not anticipate. A lot can happen in a month in politics, especially if every day there's this newsmaking activity that is the leaders out there making news, intentionally trying to do this. I mean, in some ways, it's

Corey 1:11:32

it's like six months of normal political activity compressed into 36 days that people are paying intense attention to. It matters. It matters a great deal. Now, one

Corey 1:11:42

one of the things that we always have to be watching is just the evolution of voting patterns. And I think with COVID as well, we can expect there'll be a lot of people who vote early and by mail. And

Corey 1:11:51

And so in a sense, is this a 36-day election or is it something shorter still?

Corey 1:11:56

that might not be enough time for any substantive changes when you get right down to it, which might be part of the liberal calculation here. But

Corey 1:12:04

But campaigns matter. I would never say otherwise. And I think it would be foolish to suggest that what is is destiny.

Zain 1:12:13

Corey, I'm going to stick with you on this launch days. Overrated? Underrated?

Corey 1:12:17

I, they're overrated simply because people put so much into them from the outside, but they matter. I wouldn't want people to think that they didn't matter or I thought they didn't matter, but I, you would be really hard pressed to actually

Corey 1:12:27

actually quote from a launch day speech. Remember too much of the visuals of launch day for most of the leaders. I can remember, I guess it was in 15, Mulcair was across the river in Gatineau

Corey 1:12:39

Gatineau somewhere, and I think Trudeau was in BC in front of a bunch of candidates. Couldn't tell you what Harper was doing. I mean, sometimes you remember, sometimes you don't, but rarely is history determined by them.

Zain 1:12:53

Carter, same question to you.

Zain 1:12:55

Launch days, overrated, underrated?

Carter 1:12:57

Overrated. Even Corey, with his amazing memory, can't remember anything of any real detail of

Carter 1:13:02

any launch day ever in the history of mankind.

Zain 1:13:05

Carter, Justin Trudeau is obviously coasting across the country, signing child care deals, just got Saskatchewan in the bag. But I want to ask you a more general question. The pre-writ promises by an incumbent heading into a writ period, the pre-writ sort of like promises, tour, money drop, making it rain, overrated, underrated in your mind. Do voters actually remember that shit when we're going through a 36-day period that will feel like a lifetime anyways? Well,

Carter 1:13:30

Well, it makes you go into, it's, I think it's overrated, but at least it takes you into the election with the right type of brand framework. So you're not coming in from the deficit. You're able to come in a little bit ahead of the game, but it can change. I mean, we

Carter 1:13:43

we entered, you know, I've been involved in elections

Carter 1:13:48

elections where we enter really strong and very, very quickly it turns on you. and and sometimes that just you know it

Carter 1:13:55

doesn't matter what you've promised if if things go against you during the election it can all be very very quickly undone yeah

Zain 1:14:01

yeah like the the tightening of the polls is something that that we've seen very often early on and then it kind of has some oxygen and cory same question for you uh you know on the heels of justin trudeau signing saskatchewan getting them in the bag a lot of rumors by the way that he was going to try to get ontario prior prior to the writ here. But he got Saskatchewan, another conservative province, I should say. But overall, pre-writ promises heading into the writ period, overrated or underrated in your mind? I

Corey 1:14:29

I believe they're underrated. They're not your moves. People just aren't paying attention, so it would be foolish if they were your moves. But it

Corey 1:14:36

it is setting the chessboard. It's putting your pieces where you want them to be, and it allows you to have things to talk about.

Corey 1:14:44

there's nothing that stops politicians from re-announcing things they did in the lead-up to the election and it's still going to be news to a number of people and there is going to be components that you can then pull out and use by

Corey 1:14:56

by announcing so there are no liberal mps in saskatchewan i haven't looked at the polling i don't know if you know wascana's all of a sudden back in play you know ralph goodale's old writing but what i do know is that all of the the liberal candidates in Saskatchewan have something pretty good to talk about this weekend that they didn't have before. And that that matters. That's pretty important. And so it shouldn't be underestimated, particularly because you have such a finite amount of time, it makes an awful lot of sense to do as much as you can outside of that finite amount of time. It really does. And it's not just about making these policy announcements that allow you then to call back to But it's also things like, if they do X, I will do Y. You want to move as much of the decision-making out of that 36-day compression as possible. You want to move as much of the table-setting outside of that 36-day compression as possible.

Zain 1:15:46

Corey, I'm going to stick with you for the final one. We're going to see a lot of this. We're part of the problem, or we're maybe part of the help. Political pundits and punditry heading into this election, overrated or underrated?

Corey 1:16:01

feels like it's pretty hypocritical

Corey 1:16:06

hypocritical to say overrated, but I think it's generally overrated. One of the things that I think

Corey 1:16:12

think we need more of is kind of political punditry that is not tied to a political point of view but is actually trying to unpack why they're saying the things they're saying and talk about what the moves are behind that and why maybe we should look at these things a bit differently, maybe a bit more cynically, and really understand exactly how the sausage is made. That's kind of the thesis of this show, so that's pretty fucking self-serving of me for sure. Oh, thank you for hype manning

Zain 1:16:40

manning it, Corey. I love it.

Corey 1:16:42

it's important. It's important people understand why the wheels are turning the way they are, because it can tell you a lot about whether that policy pronouncement is durable, right? Is this something they truly care about? Are they going against type? Are they being deeply cynical about it? And, you know, there's going to be no shortage of people doing the boxing card, they won today, they lost today, but it also helps.

Zain 1:17:04

helps. Because of the jersey

Zain 1:17:04

jersey color that they wear,

Corey 1:17:06

so to speak. Sure. But it helps to step outside of it and say, what does this all mean? What does this mean for the election? What does this mean for our country? And, you

Corey 1:17:14

you know, there's, punditry

Corey 1:17:15

punditry is a broad category. There's good punditry and bad punditry. We've got examples of both on this show. Good with myself and bad with Stephen. But generally

Corey 1:17:24

generally speaking, it is overrated. Stephen

Zain 1:17:27

Stephen Carter, political punditry. It's going to be everywhere, anywhere. You can find it in every vending machine, on every street corner, in every household, Alexa, radio station, smartwatch. It's going to be everywhere for the next 37, 38 days, however many we have left, overrated

Carter 1:17:49

pundits are you know

Carter 1:17:51

know they're they're political hacks that are all wearing their their team jerseys and and again giving us uh insight

Carter 1:17:58

insight that's not insight it's all packaged up and bullshit uh

Carter 1:18:02

uh i'm fucking tired of it and then watching the journalists come in and try and tell

Carter 1:18:07

tell us what they should have seen oh well the journalists came in and all they they really understand it fucking

Carter 1:18:12

fucking no clue and then the pollsters come in afterwards and the fucking And pollsters are just throwing the numbers out. Oh, this is what this means. This is what this means. Not a fucking thought in their heads. And then the political scientists come. The political scientists come. And the political scientists are even the worst of all of them. The fucking political scientists haven't set foot outside of a classroom in 30 years. The only people that matter in this whole thing are the three strategists on this show.

Carter 1:18:42

So does that mean we're recording

Zain 1:18:42

recording twice a week? We should probably figure that

Corey 1:18:44

that out. I think we should do it. We are. Sure. We already said

Zain 1:18:45

said we're doing it. So,

Corey 1:18:46

So, I mean, actually, that doesn't mean anything. We could even not. But yeah, I guess I'll see you guys Sunday.

Zain 1:18:53

We'll leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 934 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velji. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

Transcript