PMO puts communications staff in vote-rich cities

VANCOUVER - The Prime Minister's Office has set up outposts of its own staff in three Canadian cities that are key electoral battlegrounds for the minority Conservative government.

PMO communications advisers have been operating from regional ministerial offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal for roughly 18 months.

Part of their job is to facilitate access to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ministers for reporters from non-English media outlets -- conduits into large and growing ethnic groups that once leaned heavily Liberal but whose votes appear increasingly up for grabs.

The staffers, drawn from communications jobs elsewhere in the public service, also monitor local media coverage and feed back information to the PMO's communications apparatus in Ottawa.

A senior Canadian government official confirmed the role of the PMO staffers. There is one each in Vancouver and Montreal and two in Toronto, the country's largest media market. They operate out of existing regional offices used by federal ministers.

It's an unprecedented expansion of the PMO outside of Ottawa, which the official says is part of an effort to address complaints about a lack of information from and access to top Tories.

"Prime Ministers Offices essentially live on information," says Norman Spector, former prime minister Brian Mulroney's chief of staff.

"So to the extent that (Harper's) trying to keep up with what's going on in British Columbia, that's probably good."

Harper's antipathy towards the news media, especially the parliamentary press gallery, has been evident since the Conservatives won their first minority in 2006. His government has tried to keep a tight rein on information.

Including his time in opposition, Harper has had five communications directors in five years.

Dimitri Soudas, a longtime Harper aide, was appointed to the post earlier this month, heading a staff of more than two dozen.

He's promised to ease the stranglehold on information and access. The PMO now inundates reporters with emailed news releases and photos and has plunged into social networking. Harper has a Facebook page, though it refers to him in the third person.

After taking office, Harper centralized control of information in part because most incoming Tories were new to government, says Tom Flanagan, Harper's former campaign manager and chief of staff.

"Under the circumstances, you could argue that it was wise to have a very centralized policy for communications," says Flanagan, a political scientist at the University of Calgary.

"But now that they've been in power for four years and people have accumulated some information, maybe it's time to relax it a little bit."

But the strategy to reach out to regional and ethnic media predates any recent slackening of the leash.

On one level it gives reporters outside Ottawa a chance to deal with local issues not necessarily on the press gallery's agenda. But it also allows the Tories to reach around the gallery while keeping a level of control over ministers through the PMO.

"In this government there are no freelancers out there," says Flanagan.

"So whether you work for a minister or in the minister's office in Calgary or whether you work for the PMO in Vancouver you're still ultimately going to be part of the same organization under the same command and control."

In that context the PMO outposts make sense, says Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communications.

"One of the things they have been pretty aggressive in doing is trying to reach out and get a lot more contact and a lot more access for ethnic and non-English-language media," he says.

"On the one hand you're talking about the prime minister, and you're letting these other papers have greater access to the prime minister and to cabinet ministers than they would otherwise get -- which is probably zero. That's good.

"But there's a political dynamic there too in terms of trying to build support for the Conservatives."

It's a shrewd strategy that appears to be paying off, Waddell says.

"They certainly did better in the last election than they did in the election before in some of those areas around Toronto, and I think in Vancouver too," he says.

Much of the ethnic media's audience is in the suburbs of Metropolitan Toronto and Vancouver, areas where the Tories seem to be making gains with newer Canadians who embrace fiscal and social conservatism.

In the 2008 election, the Conservatives' share of the popular vote in B.C. reached 44.5 per cent, up from 37.3 per cent in 2006. In Ontario, they out-polled the Liberals after finishing behind them in 2006, though in Quebec they lost ground.

There'll be even more to play for when Ontario and British Columbia see their representation in the House of Commons expanded by 18 and seven seats respectively, mostly in those vote-rich suburbs.

The expansion is expected by 2012.