Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them – Susan Delacourt (Douglas & McIntyre)

Here is an insightful and provocative look at the inside world of political marketing in Canada – and what this means about the state of our democracy in the 21^st century – from a leading political commentator.

“Canada is now a nation of shoppers… We may want to ask whether it’s time to draw some clearer lines between our civic life and our shopping pursuits,” says Susan Delacourt, author of Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them.

Inside the political backrooms of Ottawa, the Mad Men of Canadian politics are planning their next consumer-friendly pitch. Where once politics was seen as a public service, increasingly it’s seen as a business, and citizens are the customers. But its unadvertised products are voter apathy and gutless public policy.

Susan Delacourt takes readers into the world of Canada’s top political marketers, from the 1950s to the present, explaining how parties slice and dice their platforms for different audiences and how they manage the media. The current system divides the country into “niche” markets and abandons the hard political work of knitting together broad consensus or national vision. Little wonder then that most Canadians have checked out of the political process: less than 2% of the population belongs to a political party and fewer than half of voters under the age of 30 showed up at the ballot box in the last few federal elections. Provocative, incisive, entertaining and refreshingly non-partisan, Shopping for Votes offers a new narrative for understanding political culture in Canada.