Abstract
The writs are dropped, and local parties and candidates leap into a flurry of activity, distributing signs for supporters to display, knocking on doors, accepting or refusing invitations to all-candidates’ meetings and seeking out opportunities for the local candidate to interact with potential supporters. In countries that use single-member electoral systems, national elections are the sum of many local contests. Even while media and scholars focus on national campaigns and party leaders, elections play out on the ground in local races in the labour-intensive and seemingly mundane rituals of Canadian electioneering. Marland and Giasson’s edited volume offers a rich analysis of the many dimensions of local campaigning in Canada. Focused on the Canadian general election of 2021, it is a companion to the editors’ in-depth look at the national campaigns in the 2019 general election, Inside the Campaign: Managing Elections in Canada.
Canadian political science has tended to focus its attention on national campaigns, as it is at the national level that platforms and electoral strategies are developed. In the era of personalised politics, party leaders play a significant role in shaping voters’ decisions, and so much attention is focused there. The exception to this tendency is a rich body of literature focused on candidate selection, and the role of local party organisations in performing this function. Once the sole preserve of local parties, candidate selection remains an important function of local party organizations. Political scientists’ interest in the representation of women and racialised minorities has focused attention on this one function, but many of the other dimensions of local activity have attracted relatively little scholarly attention.
This collection offers the most detailed examination of the local dimensions of Canadian elections to date. It looks at everything from the conduct of elections to candidate selection to constituency management and campaigning to local communications. Some of the chapters take a comprehensive look at phenomena across the country while others are grounded in the specifics of individual electoral districts or even single local campaigns. Taken as a whole, they provide a glimpse into much of the diversity of local campaigning in a complex political context spread across a vast area.
Three themes emerge from the chapters. First, the unique context of the 2021 general election offers insight into the local impact of conducting a national election during a pandemic, affecting everything from voting locations to candidates’ ability to campaign door-to-door. Second, many of the chapters reflect on the role of local campaigns in the era of data-driven political organization. The third theme relates to the shifting balance between local and national campaigns.
The 2021 Canadian general election was held in September after COVID-19 vaccinations were widely available and some public health restrictions were being lifted. As in many other aspects of life, the pandemic accelerated various trends. Various chapters in the collection report increased use of digital campaign communications, including social media outreach, virtual all-candidates’ debates and town halls. Holly Ann Garnett’s chapter looking at local election administration details the challenges faced by election officials operating in widely varying conditions governed by different provincial approaches to public health. She concludes that the 2021 election demonstrates the “precarity of electoral management in Canada” - a reason for concern in an era of natural disasters and pandemics produced by climate change.
A central theme developed in many of the chapters is the role of local campaigns in the collection of data employed by central party organizations in developing strategy and messaging. Chapters by Marland, Wilson and Robbins-Kantor provide rich detail about the role of volunteers and local campaigns in harvesting information about voters’ intentions, often by canvassing door-to-door, and then uploading this information into central party databases. But, as Munroe and Munroe demonstrate in their chapter, these trends are not universal. Some campaigns can cling to traditional modes of campaigning, ignoring the central party’s apps and demands for data collection.
Another theme that emerges in the collection is the shifting balance between local and national party organisations. Wesley and Maksymetz’s examination of regional campaign directors demonstrated the important role these individuals play, implementing national strategy and feeding information back to the central party. They make it clear that this role is an important element of an increasingly centralised campaigning. Likewise, Koop and Sayers note that local campaign managers now must manage not only their volunteers and their candidate, but also their relationship with the central party office.
Although it has admirably captured many of the dimensions of diversity in contemporary Canadian politics, the volume was strangely silent on the distinctive aspects of local constituency organising and campaigning among racialised communities. Waves of immigration have rendered major Canadian cities some of the most ethnically diverse places on the globe. Canada’s single-member electoral system has created significant opportunities for geographically-concentrated diasporic communities to organize politically. While the collection included some discussion of diversity among candidates, it was largely silent on the complexities and opportunities entailed in local campaigns and election administration in these diverse urban centers.
For scholars, practitioners and students interested in Canadian electoral politics on the ground, Inside the Local Campaign is a welcome resource. Its range of well-researched and highly readable chapters make it suitable for both scholarly and more general audiences. Its contributions to our understanding of local campaigning in an age of data-driven and digital politics promise to spark new interest in the local dimensions of elections in Canada and other places that hold elections using single-member systems.