There was an interesting op-ed in the Toronto Star a while ago by a former New Democrat strategist claiming that political crises cannot be managed. He boiled it all down to the simple statement that you have to bury a crisis before it buries you. He was getting some reluctant nods to his thesis until he complimented Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown on his management of the recent sex-education reversals in the Scarborough-Rouge River by-election.
It seems ludicrous to congratulate the source of the problem for solving the problem. If there is a crisis management problem in the Conservative leader’s office it is the Conservative leader. Patrick Brown created the problem on the sex-education file and always has been the problem.
Those of us who know Brown and have watched him weasel around problems of his own creation over the years know him for what he is. He can be a dishonest and duplicitous politician. He tells you what he thinks you want to hear. He looks like a small town nerd and he is one. He is an embarrassment to the voters in Barrie and will likely prove to be more of an embarrassment to the Ontario Conservatives than his predecessor Tim Hudak.
Why the Ontario Conservatives allowed him to steal the leadership from a much more capable candidate, MPP Christine Elliott, is the question? It is easy enough to prove that many of his sub-continent Conservative party sign-ups did not bother to pay their own memberships. If you can buy a political party for just a few hundred thousand, why not? (And why do you think the federal Conservatives recently raised their membership fee to $25?)
But giving the Trudeau team a ‘B’ for its crisis management of the recent moving expenses kerfuffle is missing the entire point. Trudeau failed to support two of his key people. He told them to make restitution that looked like an admission of guilt. That is not crisis management. It is crisis capitulation. It could come back and bite him hard any time.
You have to agree with the NDP writer though that the best crisis management is still prevention. The real responsibility of the people looking after this is not to manage crises but to train managers to watch for signs of trouble. They are an organization’s first line of defence.
Over many years in public relations, you can get many desperation calls from organizations that are in trouble. The temptation is great but you know that they will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis until the attitudes of the people responsible are changed.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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