The simplicity and substance of Conservative Party slogans

Slogans! Those catchy phrases the copywriters on Mad Men come up with while smoking their 10th cigarette of the day in their mistress’s house after polishing off half a bottle’s worth of scotch whisky in one sitting. 

Slogans are everywhere and used by everybody. Stores, restaurants, insurance brokers, lawyers, public service announcements, and others sell you their products. 

We see them on T.V., radio, billboards, bus benches, sides of buses, those placards inside the bus you are vaguely aware of, and YouTube ads, which break the flow of that near three-hour-long retrospective of the Serial Experiments Lain PS1 video game. Who cares if Canadian Tire is having a sale, I want to know more about the themes of social interaction of the digital age, perceptions, and the screwy styles of the gameplay! 

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, slogans.

Unlike my opening paragraph, slogans are meant to be short, snappy, and memorable. When it comes to following these three principles, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative campaign has it down pat. 

Their official slogan is “Canada first – for a change,” but you would be forgiven if you thought they had multiple mini slogans given how prominent they are at campaign rallies and in advertisements. 

Whether it’s “axe the tax,” “stop the crime,” “build the homes,” “fix the budget,” or “name and shame,” team Poilievre found a working recipe — verbing the noun, maximum three words. 

They are short and sweet heuristics to fall back on without needing to think too hard about what they actually mean because they practically describe themselves.

“Stop the crime” is my personal favourite because of how excessively simplistic it comes across as. Crime is a problem? Just stop it. How? Just stop. It almost reads like Poilievre is going to personally stop crime the same way that Dora the Explorer tells off Swiper the Fox. 

“Axe the carbon tax” seemed to have been Poilievre’s personal favourite given how often he pulled that one out of his bag — he even put it on a shirt! 

But since Liberal Leader Mark Carney actually axed the consumer carbon tax, that one has lost quite a bit of steam since people are probably not as irked by the industrial carbon tax as they were the consumer tax that applied to them directly at the gas pump. With so much nuance now applied, it fails the simplicity test.

“Build the homes” is more annoying to me than anything. Housing and homelessness are serious issues in this country and Poilievre’s idea of building homes is likely going to be far more middle class oriented than what we actually need it to be.

“Fix the budget” is the political talking point equivalent of when a pro-wrestler name drops the local sports team — uncreative, overused, and a guaranteed way to get a cheap pop out of the audience. 

Just about every conservative party everywhere says something similar. You would be remiss if you did not have this staple speech already in your verbal arsenal.

I’ve never heard “name and shame” uttered by Poilievre to my recollection. It was probably from when Justin Trudeau was the Liberal monster under every good Tory’s bed. The Trumpian sound it makes probably got it dumped when Poilievre needed to put some distance between himself and the south — bad for business.

The moral here is that slogans are just the tip of the iceberg. You could go around speaking only in quips and catchphrases like Transformers’ Generation One Wreck-Gar, but that just signifies shallowness on your part. 

Dig deeper to learn what is going on with party platforms. Now let me get back to my three-hour Serial Experiments Lain retrospective.