The Conservative Party of Canada’s feed for the 2021 virtual policy convention.
Author: redding
Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam and Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo will give up an update on COVID-19. Dr. Marc Berthiaume, the director of the Bureau of Medical Science at Health Canada, will also be in attendance.
Jason Kenney is putting voters in the driver's seat with recall and citizen initiative legislation.
He just failed to mention the seat is in an autonomous vehicle. The UCP doesn't really want the average joe touching the steering wheel.
The bar set by bills introduced this week is so high to actually yank a sitting politician or directly effect legislation that precious few voters would hazard the attempt.
Generally following the pattern set in the 1990s by similar legislation in BC, recalling an MLA under Bill 52 requires a little essay submitted to the electoral office, a petition with the signatures of 40 percent of eligible voters collected over 60 days, and then there still has to be a vote.
In B.C. only one bid for a recall has come close, although the MLA resigned before the final outcome.
It looks easier to turf a municipal politician under Bill 52. There's no final vote required just 40 per cent of eligible voters have to sign the petition. The voter turnout in the 2017 municipal election in Edmonton was just 31.5 per cent. There aren't all that many folks deeply engaged in municipal politics.
Bill 51, The Citizen Initiative Act, allows voters to propose new laws and policies if they can gather signatures from 10 or 20 per cent of the province's voters, depending on whether the proposal involves provincial jurisdiction or requires a constitutional referendum.
The signatures have to be collected in person, not online, within 90 days. The chief electoral officer has 60 days to verify the signatures. The petition then goes to a legislature committee which has 90 days to decide whether to support the initiative or not. If the committee decides against the initiative it triggers a non-binding public vote.
That's a lot of time and a lot of work.
Wouldn't it be more empowering if the grassroots voter could, say, phone their MLA, have a reasonable discussion about a pressing issue, and then have the MLA present those view in the legislature?
Isn't it the job of elected representatives to always be listening to their constituents' concerns?
The Kenney government has been criticized for its lack of meaningful consultation on important policies. Doctors felt disrespected by lack of consultation when the government tried to change their contract. Teachers were outraged by changes to their pension which happened without discussion.
The government is about to hold public hearings on its coal mining policy after revoking the last one in 2020 without saying boo to affected stakeholders.
A grassroots uprising of farmers, municipal councillors, country singers and nature lovers prompted a pause in the UCP's coal plans. When the Citizen Initiative Act passes, opponents can jump through a zillion hoops and wait months for what would likely end in a province wide vote. By that time who knows how many mountain tops would be blown off by coal mining conglomerates.
Kenney used the example of the previous NDP government's imposition of a carbon tax as a worthy target for a citizen initiative. With taxes in mind the Alberta Taxpayers Federation is applauding Bill 51 as a step forward in participatory democracy.
No one in government is suggesting a petition on coal mining would be just as good an example. One wonders if that would make it through a legislature committee, dominated by the governing party.
These bills are aimed at the populist wing of the UCP which just loves the idea of recall and referendum. But even within the party, grassroots democracy isn't everything it's trumped up to be.
It was announced this week that Kenney will face a leadership review during the UCP's fall 2022 general meeting. It looks like the party is addressing rumblings in constituency associations about the handling of the pandemic lockdown and the UCP's continuing plummet in political polls.
But the timing of the review makes it impossible for malcontents to actually turf the premier. The general meeting happens in fall 2022 and the next election is slated for spring 2023. No political party is going to jettison a leader six months before an election.
The devil is in the details. The timing of the leadership review; the number of signatures required to fire an MLA; endless red tape in changing government policy or legislation — it's all detail that undercuts Kenney's claims he is putting power in the average Albertan's hands.
Photo Credit: Calgary Herald
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Well, who saw this one coming? Americans elected Joe Biden as president partly because of widespread Democratic, journalistic and smart-set mockery (but I repeat myself) of immigration restrictions as "putting children in cages". And now there's a flood of migrants to the southern border unlike anything seen in decades and they're desperately placing youths in lockable detention facilities. Almost as if incentives matter.
So who saw it coming? Nobody who's anybody foresaw the consequences, including the journalists Matt Taibbi recently mocked as having embraced a one-party orthodoxy redolent of the old Soviet press. But all the nobodies did who study economics and try to apply it to public policy.
We may be a dwindling group. But conservatives have, or once had, a habit of comparing the laws of economics to those of physics, saying you ignore either at your very real peril.
Ignore gravity and take a painful fall. Raise the minimum wage, and put teens, women and the poor out of work. And among these laws, an important place was once given to the law of unintended consequences. The point being that if you have your intentions right but your incentives wrong, you won't get the results you wanted. And it might properly be called the law of unintended but predictable consequences, because we know incentives matter.
No, really. In our personal lives, if for instance our kid's sunglasses are covered by the company plan, we're going to get a more expensive pair than if it's an out-of-pocket expense. Not one person in 50 fails to make that calculation and not one in 10 has to think about it first. Shout "free beer" and see what happens.
Alas, when it comes to public policy, people appear to lose focus. Suddenly 2+2=4 turns into one over the square root of (one minus v squared over c squared) and they can't figure out what to do next so they ignore it and hope it's gone in the morning.
It's not. Instead this one started, for me at least, with a March 8 New York Times email saying "The number of migrant children detained at the border has tripled in two weeks to more than 3,250, as the U.S. struggles to find room in shelters." Which is a far cry from "Trump puts kids in cages".
At least it's a far cry as a headline. But as NBC conceded the same day, "More than 3,200 unaccompanied migrant children are being housed in Customs and Border Protection holding facilities, two sources confirmed to NBC News. Nearly half of the children have been held beyond the three-day legal limit in small concrete cells with no beds, known as iceboxes."
Oh dear. Orange man bad. But still…
The next day the Epoch Times, which bears no resemblance at all to Pravda, reported that "DHS Pleads for Volunteers to Assist With 'Overwhelming' Surge at Southern Border". So what was to be done?
The Washington press corps was busy fawning over Biden, or would have been if he were having press conferences, so instead they were fawning over Jen Psaki as she circled back to not answering softball questions, and then running stories about how great Biden's dog Major is that amount to unconscious self-satire, or how "Comedians are struggling to parody Biden."
At least that one continued "Let's hope this doesn't last" because the problem isn't that Biden isn't funny, in a creepy way. It's the abdication of the duty to criticize, and the capacity to, if the person is left-wing. And that abdication is no service to anyone including the left-wing. For instance with this increasingly problematic border issue.
By March 13 NBC was reporting "FEMA to help with influx of migrant children at U.S.-Mexico border" and adding "'A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,' said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas." But there's an absolutely classic case of substituting saccharine sentiment for serious analysis, and staring stunned as the LUIC returns with flaming brand like one of Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings. Because if unaccompanied minors are sent into the United States (and not all of them are seven and just wandered up to the lack of wall by the way) you either turn them away, let them in or put them in a facility.
There's no fourth choice. As you should have foreseen. And it gets worse.
If you make a big hoohah about how the other guy was a monster for adopting the third choice, and you can't or won't adopt the first, or the second, you… uh… say. This game is hard. You adopt the kid-in-cage choice without meaning to, preparing for it or acknowledging it. And meanwhile you've sent a gigantic signal that the border is open to the land of opportunity, so more and more people come and your problem becomes worse and worse and your sickly sweet rhetoric more and more revoltingly irrelevant.
As NBC finally warned on March 14, the election being safely won, "Playing to the Democratic base on the issue while ignoring the need for more enforcement has merely exacerbated the problem." Gosh. Ya think? How'd that happen?
Oh right. If you think all the way back to the 2016 election, anybody who was anybody directed a two-minute hate at Trump for his border wall, declaring it evil and impractical. Actually more like a five-year hate. But his stand on immigration was an important reason for his victory.
Of course his wall never did get built, partly because of his deplorable habit of not thinking things through either. But by failing to contemplate whether it really was evil, whether it really was impractical, and what if any relationship exists between the two, the Democrats and their media and cultural sympathizers dug a big pit they just tumbled into going "Aaaaah, what fool put this pit here?"
You did. Not just by failing to anticipate this predictably unpredicted visit from the Gods of the LUIC. By your far more general disposition to shout angrily that all you need is love, practicality is a trick of the hard-hearted and problems will vanish if only we elect Joe Biden as saviour of the universal human race.
C'mon, man, as someone might say. Think like grownups. Or even like migrant youth, who see perfectly clearly what hey, Trump's gone and the border's open means. Why didn't you?
Photo Credit: Slate
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
So just who does Erin O'Toole think he is.
A few weeks ago, he's looking to be the soft-focus dad character. A former Air Force guy and hard worker just looking to give families a chance. He and the party seemed to want to move away from the more aggressive true blue version of O'Toole that charged his way into the leader's office.
Then this week he's braying into the camera, "Do your job, Mr. Trudeau." The Conservative leader wants the prime minister to give the country a budget, or else he'll, I dunno, tweet more or something. This was the swing back toward the more shitposty version of O'Toole that managed to capture enough votes to be the big man.
That the leader of the Conservatives can't figure out whether he's king poster or nice guy serious man is probably not a great sign that he has things under control.
A few weeks ago, the big Tory focus was making the big issue the complete and total failure of the COVID vaccine rollout. The trouble with that is things no longer seem so disastrous. Once early supply chain issues got ironed out, and production really started to ramp up things just aren't at the crisis point anymore.
This was the pretty obvious outcome of going to DEFCON 1 over vaccines. If things get better — and they have gotten way, way better — you end up looking kind of dumb and have to pivot.
So, now we have O'Toole trying to stoke a similar amount of popular outrage against the idea that we haven't had a budget in a very long time. It's an issue, surely, 2019 was a long, long time ago. But I'm not sure it has quite the ability to get one's blood up in the same way "You're all going to die because the prime minister is incompetent" does. Yet it still feels, and quite literally sounds, like it's coming at the same urgency. It's certainly coming at the same volume: shouty.
And when a budget shows up next month or in May, is this really going to seem like the crisis he's trying to make it out to be now? (It will not.)
Then there were a few errant social media issues at party headquarters. First, there was the since-deleted post with one of those shareable meme-type images about how Justin Trudeau is hiding under your bed to steal the money straight from your wallet while you sleep. The accompanying text was, "Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are more worried about saving Canadian jobs than their own." Which, uh, oops. Don't think that's what you meant guys.
Then today, while preparing for writing the thing you're reading now, I was scrolling O'Toole's learn about me page the little animated helicopter that follows you as you scroll seemed rather familiar. It's got a little Maple Leaf on it, but is actually based on a Soviet-era helicopter.
Neither of these is anything approaching fatal, but it does kind of give the impression of flailing.
It's probably no coincidence that right now there is a parallel crisis of anonymous Tory sources talking about their unhappiness with the direction of O'Toole's leadership tenure.
Every day, or every couple of days, a new story based on sources in the Conservative Party asking to keep their names out of it so they can speak candidly about their boss show up.
Wednesday there was one in the National Post about how the O'Toole leadership team purposefully torpedoed the candidacy of his one-time rival Peter MacKay for the Conservative nomination of his old seat in Parliament. Last week there was this one in Maclean's where various and assorted Tories were talking about how they don't really know what the Conservative platform or strategy will look like when the soon-but-not-yet federal election is on and are starting to get antsy.
"There's frustration with his leadership. Nobody's saying, 'We so-cons [social conservatives] need to rise up,' or 'Next time we're going to be united behind this other person.' There's no danger of a coup, but people are saying, 'Let's go. Tell us what you stand for and we'll get behind it and support it.," one source told the magazine.
A leader who knew what it is he was about wouldn't be having this problem. His vision of where to take the party would have a firm bearing, and he'd bring his caucus along with him.
Where this all seems to stem from are O'Toole's two leadership campaigns. The first, when he lost by a fair margin to Andrew Scheer, O'Toole cast himself as a middle of the road type Conservative. Not quite a progressive Conservative, but something a little more conciliatory and not so willing to indulge the party's right flank.
In his winning bid, he played himself as the opposite of that. MacKay was the soft nice guy this time around, so O'Toole went with a pitch of himself as the true blue hardliner, ready to come in and kick around those weak libs.
After becoming leader, it seemed like he was maybe going to dial back that in part or maybe in whole and lead the party in a way closer to his first pitch. Then the oscillations began.
If he doesn't go about deciding what sort of leader he is, O'Toole has little chance of winning anything when the election does inevitably roll around.
A better leader wouldn't be left in this sort of jam, they'd already have a plan for who they were and what they would do. But Erin O'Toole isn't that leader, he's this one — or some other one, it's not yet clear. For his sake, he should figure it out.
He's running out of time to pick what sort of leader he is, pretty soon "a good one" is going to be ruled out for him.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
The flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, the vaccinations are finally happening.
What better time to have an election?
Because, make no mistake: Justin Trudeau feels he has unfinished business to attend to. He "won" in 2019, sure, but he really didn't. He knows that.
Andrew Scheer's Conservatives got more votes than he did. He lost his Parliamentary majority. He lost his coveted international celebrity status first with his obstruction of justice in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, and then with being caught wearing racist blackface no less than three times.
And he formed a government, barely, with the smallest share of the popular vote in Canadian history.
So how did he survive, against a better-funded, better-organized Conservative Party? Two reasons.
One, it's the O.J. Simpson Principle. Celebrities like Justin Trudeau are held to a different standard than us mere mortals. They breathe a more rarefied air. So, he got away with things LavScam and blackface, most notably that no other politician would.
Two, he had expanded his base. After he won the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 2013, he set about radically transforming it. He moved left further left than any other Liberal leader had and essentially took over the New Democratic Party.
It wasn't a hostile takeover, either. After the death of Jack Layton who would have never, ever let it happen the NDP effectively became an extension of the Trudeau Liberal Party. It has remained that ever since. It's a proxy party.
Conservatives not the senior and experienced ones, but the rank-and-file commenced making mistakes. They underestimated Trudeau, over and over. Having worked for many years for Jean Chretien, I have learned how useful it is for your opponent to underestimate you at election time.
The Conservative grassroots attacked Trudeau for being not manly enough even though he wiped out their champion in a celebrated boxing match. They attacked him for having been enthusiastic about drama even though one of their heroes, Ronald Reagan, had done likewise.
And the Conservative core consistently and wrongly assumed that Canadians hated Justin Trudeau as much as they did. And, when they were taught hard lessons on election night in 2015 and 2019, they'd lash out at other Canadians, the ones who didn't hate Trudeau like they did.
They'd call them puerile names Libtard and Lieberal and the like. They'd even say they were going to put Trudeau in an outhouse. Not exactly a winning strategy.
The Oil Patch won't defeat Trudeau. Neither will the myriad third party advocacy groups. Nor will the conservative media. None have the resources or the bandwidth to do so. Only the Conservative Party, and its leadership, can beat him. How?
To defeat an enemy, learn from your enemy. To win an election, learn from your mistakes. To beat Trudeau and I increasingly believe Erin O'Toole simply won't, and that he may well secure fewer seats than Andrew Scheer did you need to pay attention to what Trudeau did.
He abandoned traditional media and embraced social media, because that is where most Canadian voters are to be found. He united the left in the way that Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay united the right. He didn't, and doesn't, pay any attention to negative coverage and he gets his fair share, too. He stays above the fray, and he stays on message.
Most of all, he isn't like Paul Martin he doesn't need to be loved by everyone. He focuses, laser-like, on only the voters and regions that he needs to win. And then he wins.
Justin Trudeau should not be underestimated. But he can be beaten.
To do that, the Conservative Party needs to learn from him, and not merely loathe him.
Kinsella was Special Assistant to the Rt. Hon. Jean Chretien.
Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
Last Friday, the government announced that they had formed an Advisory Group for the appointment of the next Governor General, which looks increasingly to be a bit of cosmetic damage control rather than a substantive change in just how they are approaching vice-regal appointments. Indeed, the very fact that this is an "Advisory Group on the Selection of the Next Governor General" and not a reconstitution of the vice-regal appointments committee is an indication that this is a one-off whose sole purpose is to try and take the smell off of the lack of a process that led to Julie Payette's disastrous appointment. But more to the point, this is just one more half-measure from a government for whom half-measures have become its stock in trade.
When the group was announced, everyone in the media declared that Trudeau had taken up the path laid by Stephen Harper in forming the committee, but they would be mistaken, because this committee has only the most superficial resemblance to the process laid out by the committee Harper created. For starters, the advisory group is not independent, like the vice-regal committee was. The fact that this is co-chaired by the minister for democratic institutions, Dominic LeBlanc, as well as the interim Clerk of the Privy Council means that this is very much under the government's thumb, rather than compiling a short list at arm's length that the prime minister would then get to choose from (which is an important component under the system of Responsible Government). In no way can prime minister Justin Trudeau claim that this committee is giving him independent advice.
The Canadian Secretary to the Queen, who chaired the old vice-regal committee, is absent from the Advisory Group, which is also somewhat telling because of how Trudeau appointed the current Canadian Secretary. Whereas the Canadian Secretary under Harper was a long-time civil servant who was attached to the Privy Council Office because it gave him the ability to act as a central coordinating body for royal tours, the current Canadian Secretary is a senior bureaucrat in PCO, three levels below the Clerk (and yes, there is a difference). The Canadian Secretary position is very much part-time for his other duties, which is another of the kinds of half-measures that this government enacted, and in my mind was partially borne out of necessity because relations with Rideau Hall had already deteriorated and the prime minister needed a different line of communication with the Queen. But that half-measure means that it was a poor fit for his inclusion with the half-measure of the Advisory Group.
As for the rest of the committee, there are legitimate questions as to why some of the members were chosen, aside from the obvious notion that this doesn't look like the permanent members of Harper's vice-regal committee, who were all white men (though the ad hoc members for each provincial appointment were much more varied). Daniel Jutras, the Rector of the Université de Montréal, has a background serving as the Executive Legal Officer to former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and sitting on the Senate appointment advisory committee, but as an academic, he has no record of writing about the Crown. Judith LaRocque, a former Secretary to three Governors General, is the only member who makes any particular sense because she would have the best notion of what the job entails.
Of the other two members, I don't object to the inclusion of Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, given that the Governor General plays a particular role in terms of the relationship between the Crown and Indigenous people in Canada, and he would have valuable perspective to offer in that regard. That said, the inclusion of Suromitra Sanatani, the current Interim Board Chair of Canada Post, doesn't make any sense, most especially because in the government's press release, they listed her as an "experienced corporate director." This should ring alarm bells because someone with corporate board experience won't have any experience with the nature of the role of the GG, and more to the point, this was one of the problems with Payette's Secretary, Assunta di Lorenzo, where her experience as a corporate lawyer showed no actual understanding of the role of the GG when she was in the role of Secretary, and it caused a lot of problems with the office. This inclusion makes me wonder whether this government actually learned any lessons from the Payette appointment.
The creation of this half-measure reinforces the notion that Trudeau and his government refuse to take the vice-regal offices and the monarchy itself seriously, and more to the point, the announcement of this Advisory Group without any stated timelines or criteria of what they will be looking for in a successful candidate makes me wonder if they don't already have someone in mind and have created this group as a bit of window dressing to make it seem like they are course correcting after what happened with Payette, but only for show. That they won't properly reconstitute either the Canadian Secretary to the Queen's position, or the vice-regal appointments committee in its proper form demonstrates that they see these kinds of half-measures as being good for the purposes of optics, but without any of the substance behind it, which is poor form for any government.
What is going to be the most galling part of this exercise is the fact that this government will rush to pat themselves on the back and be self-congratulatory about the creation of this Advisory Group, when it's clear that they haven't actually done the work, as is the case with so many other half-measures that this government is becoming famous for. The fact that nearly six years into this government's time in office and they still haven't figured out that the constant half-measures aren't working for them and keep blowing up in their faces should be particularly alarming, especially as they're set to go for yet another round, crossing their fingers that they won't get another Payette rather than simply putting in the effort.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
It seems, when it comes to keeping his party united, Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole will require the wisdom of Solomon.
After all, on the one hand, O'Toole wants to convince Canadians that he's "pro-choice" on the question of abortion, while on the other, he wants to keep the "pro-life" elements of his party's base loyal.
For sure, it'll be a difficult square to circle … or should that be a difficult circle to square?
Anyway, the geometry doesn't matter; what does matter is O'Toole, if he employs the right approach, can be pro-choice while keeping his Christian soldiers happily marching.
And I'm going to tell you how.
But before we get to the nitty gritty of tactics, we need to first ask ourselves why O'Toole would believe it's important for him to emphasize his pro-choice credentials?
The answer to that question, of course, can be expressed in two words: Andrew Scheer.
My point is, it's widely believed that in the last federal election voters turned against Scheer (who was then Conservative Party leader) mainly because his devout adherence to Roman Catholicism led to fears that he planned to institute a modern-day version of the Spanish Inquisition.
As one-time Conservative Cabinet Minister (and later Conservative leadership candidate) Peter Mackay so subtlety put it, socially conservative values were "thrust on the agenda and hung around Andrew Scheer's neck like a stinking albatross."
Hence, in order to avoid the political encumbrance of having a metaphorical fetid fowl dangling from his body, O'Toole is determined to brand himself as a secular, non-threatening, religiously generic, leader.
The hope behind this strategy is clear; O'Toole wants to attract new voters (especially those voters who might be socially liberal but fiscally conservative) to the Conservative camp.
Sounds like a good strategy to be sure, but the danger it poses is equally clear: by wooing socially liberal voters, O'Toole might also alienate social conservatives, people who are already at this side.
Now it should be noted that social conservatives are not nearly as powerful a political force here in Canada as they are in the United States.
I know that from personal experience.
Years ago, I was working for a guy running in a Republican Senate primary whose pro-choice stance made him a target for pro-life Christian groups, who went after him with a savage multi-media attack ad campaign.
Believe me, these Christians could brawl.
Such a thing, could not happen to O'Toole.
But even though they're small in number, social conservatives are still an important part of the Conservative voting coalition; they tend to be disciplined and passionate, meaning they can be counted upon to punch above their weight; they work hard for the party, they make donations to the party and most importantly, they get out and vote for the party.
In short, losing their allegiance could hurt the Conservatives.
That's why it'll be important for O'Toole to try his best to keep social conservatives on board, even as he's trumpeting his pro-choice views.
Fortunately for him, there's template on how he can do that.
All he needs to do is follow the example of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Harper, keep in mind, was a social moderate. (Yes, I know that will shock a lot of people in the media, who kept trying to push the narrative that he was some sort of wild-eyed, religious fanatic. But I worked with the guy for five years, I know.)
As a matter of fact, during his time as prime minister, Harper did next to nothing to advance a social conservative agenda in Canada.
Yet, despite that he managed to keep social conservatives loyal.
The way he did it was easy, he simply treated social conservatives with respect.
That's to say, he never talked down to them or downplayed their values or beliefs, he never referred to their ideals as a "stinking albatross."
He even ended his speeches with the phrase "God save Canada."
And every once in a while, he threw social conservatives a tiny bone, like when he ended the policy of paying for global abortion services.
At any rate, my point is, with careful messaging, O'Toole can appeal to both social liberals and to social conservatives.
Mind you, when it comes to winning the election, O'Toole still might need a prayer or two.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
When you think about it, the entire scene was ridiculous.
On the one side, the telegenic young millionaire couple unelected, but still possessing great power. On the other side, the billionaire media star, the one who had scored an exclusive interview with the telegenic young millionaires. And what had they come together to discuss?
How life is unfair to them. Seriously.
The utter absurdity of that notwithstanding, Oprah's interview with Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle did boffo box office, naturally. Some estimated that half of Britain watched Oprah's chit-chat with the former Royals. Everywhere else on the planet even during a deadly global pandemic The Interview was the event that everyone was talking about. It dominated the news for days.
And despite the stakes despite the fact that billions of people would likely tune in the Royal family still figured out a way to screw up their response. By the time the news cycle slowed down, the Royal family were left looking like a bunch of bigoted, brainless brutes.
It all could have been avoided, too. Full disclosure: this writer runs a crisis communications firm, the Daisy Group, and we've learned a few things over the years. Some could've been useful to the Royals. Here's five.
One: when in a hole, stop digging! The monarchy will simply not survive if it continues to be about bad stuff instead of good stuff. For instance: the Royal family does more for charity and then perhaps any other family in the world. They need to get out and talk about the good works they do, instead of simply responding to public relations nightmares, like the Oprah sit-down. Change the channel, Windsors.
Two: don't fire people in the middle of a crisis! It's one of the Daisy Group rules: if someone knows a lot of secrets, it's a usually bad idea to summarily dismiss that person in the midst of a public relations controversy. That's effectively what the Royals did with Harry and Meghan, and now they're paying the price, big time. In a crisis, always treat your team (and all your staff) with support and affection. The Royals didn't do that with Meghan and Harry. Meghan and Harry got back at them, with a vengeance.
Three: stop leading with your chin, and lead with your strength! In the case of the Royals, that's the Queen. This writer is Irish, with the Irishman's stereotypical antipathy towards the monarchy. But even I have to admit that Her Majesty is one of the most if not the most respected women in the world. My former boss, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, has often remarked how politically smart and strategic she is. She needs to be the face of the Royal family, not her royally-messed up children. Make her the designated spokesperson. Nobody else.
Four: leave no charge unanswered. When Meghan made the unsourced and unverified (and probably unfair) allegation of racism with Oprah, the Royals needed to respond to that immediately. They didn't. They let it hang out there, and it has now become the conventional wisdom. They needed to push back, hard, right away. They needed to unambiguously denounce racism and talk about the many things they've done to promote diversity. They didn't.
Five: don't screw up on a slow news day! The Royals knew this story was coming. They knew it wasn't going to be good. They did nothing absolutely nothing to proactively get positive stories out there to offset it. They just let it happen, and that made it even worse. Always, always have some good news in your pocket that you can quickly get pull out when you are having a PR rainy day!
Will the Royals listen to any of that advice? Of course not. They're the Royals.
They can't be fired.
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The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
