Tangled up in blue
Canada's dreary political scene shaken up by Tory duo
Reviewed by Sheilla Jones
Winnipeg Free Press, Books, December 5, 2015 D23
The Big Blue Machine: How Tory Campaign Backrooms Changed Canadian Politics Forever
By J. Patrick Boyer
Dundurn, 416 pages, $35
It's been an entire generation since the original Big Blue Machine behind some of the greatest Progress Conservative electoral victories rusted out and collapsed. That machine was the hybrid created by Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins in the 1950s when their Toronto advertising agency became the de facto PC campaign war room when an election was called.
Sure, there was the big blue machine of the Alberta PCs -- or at least there was, until the machinery behind 12 consecutive election victories and a hold on power that lasted for 44 consecutive years collapsed, fractured and atrophied at the feet of the gob-smacked New Democrats last May.
Then in October, we witnessed the slow-motion take-down of Stephen Harper's much-vaunted big blue campaign machine, poisoned by its own hubris and arrogance.
None of the blue wreckage on the current landscape holds a candle to the real Big Blue Machine. It burned bright as Camp and Atkins and their tight, secretive team saw PC premiers and prime ministers into power, including the 42-year span of power in Ontario starting with George Drew and ending with Bill Davis.
The highlight of the Big Blue Machine powerhouse came in 1984, when Camp and Atkins put Brian Mulroney's election win into the record books, with the PCs taking 211 of the 282 House of Commons seats.
The secret of the dynamic duo of Camp and Atkins, according to former MP and prolific author J. Patrick Boyer, was their long-standing relationship and their desire to shake up Canada's staid and dreary political scene. It is the personal stories of Camp and Atkins in The Big Blue Machine: How Tory Campaign Backrooms Changed Canadian Politics Forever that makes it worthwhile to wade through the painstaking details of the political machinations of a bygone era.
The two met in 1942 when Camp was courting Atkins' older sister at their family's summer cottage. Both men were shaped by a strong American political sensibility. Camp was born in New Brunswick but grew up exposed to the drama of California politics through his father's connections to the state Democrats. Atkins grew up in New Jersey, but spent his summers in New Brunswick.
Camp married Norman's sister, also marrying his interest in politics with advertising when he started his own agency. He convinced PC Party leaders to use branding, consistent messaging, polling and other marketing techniques to win elections.
It worked. Before long, Atkins joined his brother-in-law at the Camp agency and they became a formidable force as backroom power brokers.
"Dalton was a prized political mistress," writes Boyer, "to men wedded to their lofty positions, self-protective of their good appearances, noble upholders of the PC Party's sanctity. They 'kept' him with government business accounts for his advertising agency..."
The two men were not, however, universally admired within PC circles. The tight secrecy behind plotting the downfall of the Grits, notes Boyer, was imperative -- spies and journalists lurked everywhere. Many Tory candidates resented being shut out of the influence, as their "speeches, signs and schedules were centrally determined by the blue machine's war room with no input from them." (That has a familiar ring to it.)
Secrecy was also paramount when Camp and Atkins took a rare paying job in Bermuda running the campaign for the aspiring leader of the United Bermuda Party. They stayed in a posh hotel suite for the duration of the campaign, always carefully locking the interior and exterior doors to ensure unionized hotel staff never got a glimpse of what was going on inside lest they leak it to opposition Union Party. They didn't know at the time that the CIA had bugged their rooms and was listening to everything they plotted.
Turning the PC Big Blue Machine into a quasi-marketing agency brought great rewards for premiers and prime ministers, but Camp was denied his own moment in the sun. The bitter Camp retired to a writing shed in New Brunswick; Atkins was rewarded by Mulroney with a Senate appointment.
Then the PCs were reduced to two seats in the 1993 elections -- the grand years of the Big Blue Machine were well and truly over.
The Big Blue Machine, although well written, suffers from being 20 years out of date. The political game has long changed, but the practice of embedding campaigns in advertising and marketing strategies has indeed changed politics forever. All the parties are now doing it.
Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg author and a former CBC political commentator.
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