Public Eye has obtained a copy of the Saanich-Gulf Islands federal Conservative's confidential election debriefing document. According to the document, the Tory braintrust in that riding believes the national campaign "declared victory too early" and the election effort in Saanich-Gulf Islands was hurt because the party "lacked clearly defined moderate, urban policies." Also a concern: "Island wide Reform voters went NDP or Green" rather than Conservative - an indication the Tories are no longer seen as populist in British Columbia. The document also notes that, although the Conservative candidate in Saanich-Gulf Islands, incumbent MP Gary Lunn was re-elected, he had trouble delivering a positive message "when national negatives (Randy White) occured." The following is a complete copy of the debriefing.

Election Debrief
Bruce Hallsor
Campaign Chair

The Saanich-Gulf Islands campaign team took advantage of our well known candidate and spent less on advertising and promotion than we had in past elections. Instead, we spent significant resources on voter identification.

Pre-writ, a generic piece was mailed to every household in the riding. This mailing served the function of a general brochure, a fundraising device, and a voter ID mechanism. The second stage of the this strategy focused on a paid phone bank to locate voters and send out our message. These two prongs met with mixed success.

During the writ, we relied as much as possible on traditional volunteer activity to identify supporters through door-to-door canvassing, telephoning and email. Generally volunteer support was good throughout the election however it recognised that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to recruit people to either ID the vote through telephoning or canvass. Many candidates experienced the same and believe people are far less likely to provide information to volunteers as there is a dramatic increase in tele-marketers. Once again we had great support on Election Day.

During this campaign, we faced a number of significant changes from past elections:

* We experienced a significant shortage in the number of volunteers in specific areas. Some of this is attributable to changing demographics, and was experienced by all parties. It was great to see volunteers, both the former PC and CA branches, all work so well together. There is still challenges to overcome from a few board members who were noticeably absent throughout the entire campaign. We also note that despite these challenges, we still had the largest base of volunteers of all parties, which was particularly noticeable on Election Day.

* We witnessed a major growth in Green Party support, particularly in the Gulf Islands. This presented communications challenges, as the media focused on Green issues and Green strategies. As the Green Party was excluded from the national debate the CBC offered them two eight minutes segments on the National. The Green Party elected to have all the coverage on SGI. The rest of the national media followed suit resulting in concentrated national coverage of the Green Party in SGI. Although this issue frustrated our campaign communications at times, it also knocked the Liberals and NDP off their message, and by limiting their potential for exposure, probably helped us more than it hurt us. Our communications team was very effective in promoting Gary’s record. The local media reported consistently throughout the campaign that Gary is a hard working constituency person that fights for the little guy. I was refreshing to have the Times Colonist endorse Gary finally because of his local work.

* There was good integration of former PC and Alliance members on the campaign team.

* Although our fundraising was good it is believed direct fundraising is much more effective than generic. This campaign we sent out a generic piece to the entire riding which was not as effective as direct mailings we have done in previous elections.

* Our focus on local issues and achievements paid off with an endorsement from the Times Colonist and positive recognition from other media.

* We protected our base (kept our core voters from previous elections) better than any other candidate on Vancouver Island, and our candidate saw the lowest erosion in his margin of victory of any MP re-elected on Vancouver Island .

Issues:

1. Advertising

The objective was to support the overall conservative campaign themes (“demand better”) with a record of accomplishment on local issues.

Principal delivery was through two direct mail pieces, along with local newspaper advertising.

Objectives were met. Although Gary received positive editorial coverage throughout the campaign we met significant challenges in the last few weeks when a few of our veteran MP’s made national headlines including our local press. Consequently national party support started to drop but fortunately Gary was able to retain the highest base of support for a Conservative candidate on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast.

2. Signs

Our sign crews did an outstanding job once again. All major locations had 4x8 signs installed on election day.

It is recommended in future elections to have a separate lawn sign department that aggressively pursues potential locations with our canvassers and installs them.

Graffiti sign damage reduced dramatically from previous campaigns.

3. Voter Contact

The return-a-lope more than paid for itself in donations. Even factoring in an assumption that half of the donors would have contributed anyway, the mailing made sense from a financial point of view. Approx 1,000 voters were also identified as a result of this effort. A small number of volunteers and lawn sign locations were also obtained. It is recommended that a direct fundraising piece should be done as well.

Even though the results of the paid phone bank were similar to those of other paid phone banks, it proved to be very expensive for extremely limited results. Phoning was during odd hours and quality control was questionable. Only about 1,000 voters were identified despite phoning more than half the polls in the riding.

More success was gained by our own paid phone bank of students, who worked evenings out of the campaign office. The student callers were effective, energetic, and generally got about ten times the results per dollar of the paid phone bank, not including the cost of providing infrastructure. I would highly recommend using this strategy again to the exclusion of professionally paid phone banks.

Other campaigns that used central paid phone banks achieved similar disappointing results, including neighbouring ridings who paid the party central office to conduct their telephone canvass.

The volunteer door-to-door canvass, which in past elections has proven a very effective method of contact, was not achieved in this election due to lack of volunteers. New methods should be found to find volunteers for this job, or to devise new strategies for personal voter-to-voter contact.

3. Election Day

Our election day effort was hampered by the sudden unfortunate collapse of Jans Diemer, two days before voting day. Fortunately, many people picked up the slack and the day went off with good results, ensuring that over 95% of our identified support showed up to vote.

We did, however, lose dozens if not hundreds of hours of organisational effort trying to re-create Jans' system. In the future, election day systems should be filed in the computer with a direct link to our voter ID system.

It is worth noting the rental of ARC facilities and their technology for election day worked very well.

Debrief Summary - The following items are based on a post-campaign brainstorming session held in July 2004.

Things done well

* Good volunteer base - volunteers were organised well and tasked with appropriate jobs
* Good media relations - created positive media perception of candidate as solid constituency MP with significant record of achievement
* Professional approach to campaign (no offside messaging from national campaign or "unusual" tactics)
* On message - nationally and provincially - for entire campaign
* Well prepared for controversial issues - although they did not manifest here
* Polls that were door knocked (targeted polls) seemed to yield good response
* Candidate managed to door knock 30+ polls during the campaign
* Seemed be good integration between PC & Alliance members
* Volunteers were treated well
* Excellent office location and set up
* Candidate's performance in public was solid, well informed
* Campaign generally went well in earlier weeks
* The campaign was technologically superior to previous (CA and PC) campaigns
* Good Correspondence coordination. Letters went out to voters in a timely fashion. Personalised letters implemented mid way through campaigin in response to voter ID responses.

Things that could have been done better

* More polls should have been walked by volunteers
* Positive messaging did not work when national negatives (RW) occurred
* Not enough volunteers at all candidate meetings
* Needed more youth volunteers
* Use of volunteers for voter turnout on election day could been improved (voter turnout vs. scrutineering)
* Visibility/strength in early campaign may have worked against us - motivated NDP and Liberals to turn their attention to us.
* "Victory disease" - national campaign declared victory too early
* Island wide Reform voters went NDP or Green - lost populist element in BC (national issue)
* Did not address Liberal ads (national ads)
* Party lacked clearly defined moderate, urban policies