Steven Del Duca, shown in 2012, bills his party’s Common Ground initiative, of which he’s co-chair, as a ‘unique and different’ process that reflects Kathleen Wynne’s open and accessible persona.GALIT RODAN/The Globe and Mail
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The numbers, Steven Del Duca boasts, are "off the charts."
By the Liberal MPP's count, a total of 12,533 Ontarians participated this fall in his party's online effort to crowdsource platform planks. Among them, they offered 1,701 policy suggestions, commented on each other's contributions 10,069 times, and registered approximately 116,000 votes for or against the various ideas.
Mr. Del Duca bills his party's "Common Ground" initiative, of which he's co-chair, as a "unique and different" process that reflects Kathleen Wynne's open and accessible persona. Culminating in January with three policy proposals being presented to the Premier around the time of the Liberals' annual general meeting, it's clearly meant to demonstrate a more inclusive approach than under her predecessor Dalton McGuinty.
But Liberals acknowledge the exercise is intended to serve another purpose as well. Like a growing amount of the outreach done by our political parties, it is also aimed at collecting data on the electorate.
Unlike with most pre-election platform processes, participation in Common Ground has not (until the final vote on which proposals make it to Ms. Wynne) been restricted to party members. Any Ontarian was able to submit ideas and to weigh in on those put forward by others – provided that he or she submitted a name, e-mail address, and postal code.
Those individuals can now expect to be added to lists of potential supporters, donors or volunteers, allowing them to be targeted as an expected spring campaign draws closer.
The collection of postal codes, meanwhile, will allow the Liberals to gain some insight into where certain issues resonate. That could help both with policy formation, and with narrowly targeting messages to specific audiences.
In a province of 13.5 million people, the engagement of a few thousand non-members is of course a drop in the bucket. But for Canadian political parties, there's little choice but to be patient and take advantage of as many such opportunities as possible.
While political operatives in this country look longingly south of the border, where data collection and usage has made voter targeting a much more sophisticated science than it used to be, a combination of factors – ranging from stricter privacy laws to a different voter registration system to less money flying around the political system – means useful information is harder to obtain here.
Particularly with the general population generally less engaged in electoral politics than it was previously, Canadian parties can't afford to simply throw up their hands and give up on advanced methods of engagement. That's something of which Ms. Wynne's Liberals are acutely aware, having watched their federal cousins work much less diligently on data management than their opponents and pay a steep price.
What the Liberals are doing data-wise with Common Ground will hardly put a huge scare in Ontario's other two major parties, which are each experimenting with their own methods, but it suggests they're at least in the game.
It also suggests that, if Ms. Wynne keeps her job long enough, her vaunted openness could be key to her party's efforts to play that game. While the Liberals may be happy with the level of participation this time around, a call for platform ideas might draw more interest if there wasn't a common sense that when it comes to making big decisions, parties remain mostly closed shops.
If Ms. Wynne can prove it's worth their while, more voters might be willing to volunteer the information her party – and every other one – is eager for.
Adam Radwanski is The Globe's columnist covering Ontario politics.