A6 O THEGLOBEANDMAIL | WEDNESDAY,SEPTEMBER11,
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
will visit Governor-General Julie
Payette on Wednesday morning
to kick off the 40-day election
campaign.
Mr. Trudeau will be accompa-
nied by his wife, Sophie Grégoire
Trudeau, when he visits Rideau
Hall in Ottawa to seek a dissolu-
tion of Parliament. Mr. Trudeau
will make remarks and speak
with reporters after meeting with
the Governor-General, according
to an itinerary notice issued by his
office. Mr. Trudeau will head to
Vancouver on Wednesday, where
he will attend a rally with Liberal
candidate Tamara Taggart in the
evening at an Italian cultural cen-
tre.
Mr. Trudeau is seeking a sec-
ond four-year mandate, after the
Liberals won a majority in the
2015 election. While the Liberal
campaign is expected to focus on
the government’s child-care ben-
efit, job creation and poverty re-
duction, Mr. Trudeau will also
face opposition criticism over his
government’s ethics scandals, in-
cluding the SNC-Lavalin affair,
and its introduction of a federal
carbon tax.
Conservative Leader Andrew
Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet
Singh will be looking to make
their mark on Canadians in their
first federal election campaigns
leading their parties.
“Where it stands on Day One is
that the Liberals have a marginal
advantage, but the election is still
up in the air,” said Nik Nanos, the
founder and chief data scientist of
Nanos Research, referring to his
company’s most recent polling
numbers.
“One of the issues will be ethics
and people’s judgment of the
Prime Minister and what has tran-
spired over the past year; another
key issue will be the environ-
ment.”
According to Canada’s fixed-
date elections law, the vote is
scheduled to be held on Oct. 21.
The Conservatives had already
planned on launching their cam-
paign Wednesday, regardless of
whether the election was called.The party has a planned morning
stop in Trois-Rivières, and a sec-
ond stop in the Ontario riding of
Vaughan-Woodbridge.
Brock Harrison, the director of
communications for the Conser-
vative campaign, told The Globe
and Mail on Monday that the par-
ty chose those two ridings to
launch its campaign because they
are “two very important battle-
ground areas.”
Wednesday also marks the 18th
anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks in the United
States. Mr. Harrison said Mr.
Scheer will deliver remarks ac-
knowledging the anniversary of
the attacks at his campaign
events Wednesday.
The NDP launched its cam-paign last Sunday with a rally in
Toronto. Mr. Singh is spending the
week criss-crossing the Greater
Toronto Area and Southwestern
Ontario in his newly revealed
campaign bus.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr.
Singh said he was excited and
“ready to go” for the official start.
“Most importantly, I’m ready to
show Canadians that there is a re-
al alternative in this election –
that they don’t have to choose a
Liberalgovernment or a Conser-
vative government that works
hard to make the life of the people
at the top easier and making it
harder for everyone else,” he said.
Green Party Leader Elizabeth
May will launch her campaign
from her home province in Brit-ish Columbia. The Greens cur-
rently hold two seats in the House
of Commons; both of them are on
Vancouver Island.
Ms. May told The Globe her
team was “scrambling” to book a
rally for Wednesday morning. She
said it’s tradition for the Greens to
hold a rally that starts very early
in the morning on the West Coast
so that they’re launching their
campaign while the Prime Minis-
ter visits the Governor-General.
“We have, for the last two elec-
tions, rallies that started in dark-
ness and, as the sun came up, the
national media would come to us.
So that’s what we will be doing,”
Ms. May said.
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-
François Blanchet will be in Que-
bec City on Wednesday as well as
in the riding of Beloeil-Chambly,
where he is running. He doesn’t
hold a seat in the current Parlia-
ment.
People’s Party Leader Maxime
Bernier will launch from Toronto,
at candidate Renata Ford’s cam-
paign office. Ms. Ford, wife of the
late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, will
join Mr. Bernier at the event.
The writ is dropping one day
before the first leaders’ debate in
Toronto, where every major party
leader will be except Mr. Trudeau.
Maclean’s and Citytv are co-host-
ing a televised debate Thursday
night with Mr. Scheer, Mr. Singh
and Ms. May.
The Liberals currently have 177
MPs in the 338-seat House of Com-
mons, followed by the Conserva-
tives with 95 MPs and the NDP
with 39 MPs. There are 10 Bloc
Québécois MPs; two Green MPs;
one People’s Party of Canada MP;
one Co-operative Common-
wealth Federation MP; eight inde-
pendents and five vacant seats.WithareportfromDanielLeblancTrudeauto dropwritonWednesday
PMtoheadtoRideau
Hallseekingtodissolve
Parliamentforvoteset
totakeplaceonOct.
MICHELLEZILIO
JANICEDICKSON
KRISTYKIRKUP
MARIEKEWALSHOTTAWA
Fromleft:JustinTrudeauwillbelookingforasecondfour-yearLiberalmandate.ConservativeAndrewScheer
andtheNDP’sJagmeetSinghwilloverseetheirfirstfederalelectioncampaignsasleaders.GreenLeader
ElizabethMaywilllaunchhercampaignfromherhomeprovince,B.C.FROMLEFT:BERTRANDGUAY/GETTYIMAGES,
JUSTINTANG/THECANADIANPRESS,TARAWALTON/THECANADIANPRESS,JOHNWOODS/THECANADIANPRESS“Who’s on my side? It’s a core ballot question,” said Greg Lyle,
the pollster and veteran strategist who is president of Innova-
tive Research Group. “It’s arguablytheballot question in the
absence of something bigger.”
The parties’ slogans underline that.
The NDP’s “In it for you” is an on-your-side message that
fits with Leader Jagmeet Singh’s claim that Liberals and Con-
servatives are cozy with corporations.
The Conservatives’ “It’s time for you to get ahead” suggests
Mr. Trudeau’sgovernment spends time and money on things
that aren’t ordinary folks’ real concerns, and that Conserva-
tives share your priorities.
Both seem tinged with post-SNC-Lavalin-affair insinua-
tions that Mr. Trudeau helps the well-connected.
The Liberal slogan, “Choose forward,” is a value-judg-
ment-laden tagline that evokes a choice between their pro-
gressive approach and turning back the clock to Stephen Har-
per.
It also packs a sly hint that voters should see Mr. Scheer’s
social views as backward: The Liberals mass-tweeted videos
of Mr. Scheer’s 2005 speech
against same-sex marriage to
spread the notion that his views
haven’t changed – although he
says he won’t change the law
now.
There is a danger for all of
those parties that a campaign
without a driving issue is suscep-
tible to twists. Events can wreck
narratives.
A campaign without a central
issue might highlight that Eliza-
beth May’s Green Party has one,
and its recent bump in polls al-
ready make it look like a threat
to the NDP and to Liberal re-elec-
tion hopes.
Or the Greens might just get squeezed out of a culture war.
And the middle class? Both Conservative and Liberal strat-
egists say this election campaign will revolve around their
economic concerns. Now, they will battle over which party’s
values reflect them.
The Conservatives cast the issue as being about affordabil-
ity, about which party’s instinct is to leave money in Cana-
dians’ pockets.
The symbol is the promise to scrap the federal carbon tax.
forget that it only applies in half the provinces, or that it is
accompanied by rebates. The point, to paraphrase, is that
Liberals have an elitist reflex to take your money to fund
some bureaucrat or activist’s plan.
No wonder Conservative partisans gleefully tweeted a
campaign poster in which Finance Minister Bill Morneau was
fiddling with his cuff-links, sarcastically commenting that it
screams middle class. Presumably, Mr. Scheer will promise
new tax cuts, too.
The Liberals cast it as a question of who willuse govern-
ment to help ordinary folks deal with insecurity, arguing
they’ll spend to help people, while the Conservatives will cut,
warning there will be no pharmacare and fewer services and
asking what else Mr. Scheer might slash.
If you’re not careful, the warning to “progressives” goes,
you’ll get an era of austerity and Doug Ford’s Ontariogovern-
ment in Ottawa.
Those narratives aren’t entirely divorced from governing.
There will be issues.
But as yet, there isn’t a dominant one, on which voters will
judge the best offer. It starts as a campaign about political
cultures and motivations.
And a fight over who thinks like you.Clark:Withoutone
dominantissue,thisrace
willbeaboutculture,
valuesandwhothinks
themostlikeyou
Andthemiddle
class?Both
Conservativeand
Liberalstrategists
saythiselection
campaignwill
revolvearoundtheir
economicconcerns.
Now,theywillbattle
overwhichparty’s
valuesreflectthem.W FROMA
ith the arrival of the fed-
eral election campaign,
The Globe is asking for
readers’ help in monitoring how
political and third-party groups
use advertising to communicate
with voters on Facebook.
The Globe and Mail took over a
global project that monitors and
catalogues political advertising
on the platform in June. In recent
years, the social-media giant has
become an essential voter ou-
treach tool, due in part to its mas-
sive audience: In the first quarter
of 2019, it reported 243 million
monthly active users in the U.S.
and Canada – almost 70 per cent
of the countries’ combined pop-
ulations.
Users of The Globe’s tool can
see the political ads others have
come across on Facebook. Ads
collected by the crowdsourcing
project are sent to a central data-
base that helps reporters learn
how groups are reaching voters
on the platform.
The Facebook Political Ad Col-
lector (FBPAC), started by U.S.-
based journalism non-profit Pro-
Publica in 2017, was designed not
only as a way to inventory politi-
cal ads, but to see how they were
targeted at users – such as by age,
race, gender, geography or inter-
ests. Since then, ProPublica has
added more than 30 other media
organizations to the project, in-
cluding Der Spiegel in Germany,
The Guardian in Australia and
Openpolis in Italy, and the ad col-
lector has amassed more than
180,000 political ads worldwide.
The Globe became a partner on
the FBPAC project last year and
has used it to report on Ontario
and Quebec’s provincial elections
and Toronto’s municipal vote.
With ProPublica’s funding for the
project having run out last year, it
was looking for a new steward.
The Globe took over because it is
important to continue to monitor
how entities around the world
communicate with voters
through ads on the platform.
“As political parties and other
interest groups increasingly turn
to social media to promote their
message, the Political Ad Collec-
tor provides reporters with data
needed to be a critical check on
politicians and third parties,” said
David Walmsley, The Globe’s edi-
tor-in-chief.
The Globe’s takeover of the
FBPAC tool follows the federal
government’s efforts to safeguard
Canada’s electoral process, in-
cluding new advertising regula-
tions and efforts to battle disinfor-
mation.
Ottawa has enacted new ad-
transparency rules as part of the
Elections Modernization Act.
Among other things, the new
rules require platforms such as
Facebook, Google and Twitter to
maintain a registry of political
and issue advertising during the
election period. (Large news orga-
nizations such as The Globe, the
Toronto Star and the CBC are also
required to maintain a registry.)
The registry requirement has
proven controversial. Google,
Canada’s largest online advertis-
ing platform, said it couldn’t com-
ply with the new political-ad rules
by the deadline of June 30, and
told The Globe it would not be al-
lowing political ads on its plat-
form for the fall election. Twitter,
meanwhile, will be providing a
registry during the campaign pe-
riod. Facebook made its registry
available in June.
In the past, Facebook has been
criticized for a lack of transparen-
cy around political ads on its plat-
form. ProPublica has reported on
how Facebook’s U.S. ads archive
didn’t seem to include political
ads that the FBPAC had captured –
Facebook eventually cancelled
those ads. It also reported that the
platform’s U.S. ads archive didn’t
include all the targeting informa-
tion FBPAC was able to capture.
In January, Facebook changedits website’s code in a way that ex-
plicitly blocked the FBPAC tool’s
ability to collect targeting infor-
mation, saying that it did so to en-
force its website’s terms of service.
The Globe has now updated the
tool so that it once again collects
ad-targeting information, and has
improved it so that it can collect
ads in the more than 100 languag-
es Facebook supports.HOWYOUCANHELPIf you’re a Facebook user and
you’d like to participate in the
FBPAC project, all you need to do
is install the Chrome or Firefox
browser extension.
As you browse Facebook, the
extension will send the ads and
their targeting information to The
Globe’s database, which reporters
can then use for their stories.
The Globe values your privacy,
and will only collect information
on the ads you see. The tool will
not collect your Facebook ID,
name, birthday, friend list, likes,
comments, shares or any other
personal or identifiable informa-
tion.
If you have questions about
The Globe’s Facebook Political Ad
Collector, send us an e-mail at
[email protected].HelpTheGlobemonitorpoliticalads
onFacebookthiscampaignseason
TheGlobehastakenoveraglobalprojectthatmonitorsandcatalogues
politicaladsonFacebook.Thesitereported243millionmonthlyactive
usersintheU.S.andCanadainthefirstquarter.THEGLOBEANDMAILTOMCARDOSO
FEDERALELECTION