As the ground game became more important in Canadian politics during the second half of the 20th Century, the monster rallies for the major parties lost their importance. The work involved in mounting the rallies took too much away from the ridings that needed the workers at the voters’ doors. There was a time though when we thought the rallies were worth it.
It was always risky but Liberals kept filling Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto through the sixties and the seventies. No precise information was ever given out but it was between 35 and 45 thousand tickets that were printed to fill the 16,000 seat arena. In the capacity of head of communications for the party in those years, a great deal of the time was taken up with reassuring party officials that there would be a good crowd. (And 40 years ago, we never would have dreamed of how inexpensive it is now to use the Internet and automated telephone calls to bring out the troops!)
The key to the attendance is still the busses that every riding within 200 kilometres is expected to fill to deliver the thousands of supporters. (Did you see the helicopter shots of the traffic jam with all those buses on Highway 410 on Sunday?) A great deal of pressure was put on the campaign managers to turn out every live body they could. That last rally the Liberal Party held for Mike Pearson in 1965 was moved from the Gardens to the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. As the largest mall in Canada at the time, it presented an interesting challenge. It was planned chaos.
You could not tell the Liberals from the shoppers unless they were carrying a sign. And you could only feel pity for the innocent shopper caught up in the tightly jammed throng. One of the organizers told us afterwards that Mr. Pearson was at his best trying to shout with a bullhorn from a stairway to the uncountable thousands of people.
Even at Maple Leaf Gardens, we always had a flatbed truck and bullhorns on standby for the leader to address the people we had to shut out of the event and blamed it on the Fire Marshall regulations.
But you will never see the Conservatives trying to showcase Stephen Harper in such an open event. They would be unable to keep out the riff-raff and there would be guaranteed protests and interruptions in the proceedings.
And we assume you could never put together one of Harper’s classic backdrops of the colours and cultures of Canada without an RCM Police and Security Investigation Service vetting them first. Mind you, the few times Harper’s organizers included children, he was obviously boring the poor kids. (Mind you the Trudeau children seemed fascinated by the Liberal bedlam in Brampton.)
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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