Following is the complete text of a speech I prepared for delivery at the June 15, 2013 Alberta Liberal Party Annual General Meeting. I regret that I was unaware of a 2-minute time limit for speeches. I had been given to understand I had longer.
First, I want to say something about communications in the high-tech era.
It’s easy to get sidetracked by the technology….you know, twitter, facebook, email blasts, data-based micro-targeting and, God help us all…robo-calling.
Anyway, all those are just tools to deliver messages to identified target groups.
What people too often ignore is that all the technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the right MESSAGE to deliver in the first place.
Getting the MESSAGE right is the brainpower-and-experience part of communications. The technology? Hey, lots of people know how to access the toolbox.
But finding the message – the one that gets deep into people’s emotions, that penetrates and fills their hearts …makes them wake up and say YES!!! I LIKE that! That’s what I want for me, for my kids, for my society…convincing people to BELIEVE…THAT’S the TOUGH part of communications.
Government USED to be exciting, creative, enlightened. When Peter Lougheed was fresh, I remember hearing about new government programs and saying WOW, what a GREAT idea!
It was a time when the civil service (in which I was a communications director) was respected.
It was a time when government was THIRSTY for fresh ideas and innovative people.
It was a time when the government said YES…not NO all the time!
It was a time when people BELIEVED.
Now, my wife calls me Mr. Happy-Face, because I’m so painfully optimistic.
So when Raj asked me to join him as an advisor, I was elated at the opportunity, once again, to help build our party from scratch into a real powerhouse, just like I had the honour of doing with Laurence Decore.
Raj’s call gave me one more shot at helping to create the kind of enlightened government I always dreamed of.
What we needed to do was pretty basic.
We needed the Leader first to focus INSIDE the party…reaching out to develop a closer mutual relationship with us.
We needed to develop a clear, powerful, long-term VISION of what kind of Alberta we want.
This vision had to be creative, enlightened and very LI-BER-AL!!. It had to be BOLD enough to attract Red Tories, turn on people who had quit voting, and appeal to a big chunk of the NDs.
We needed newly-motivated Liberals, fueled by their BELIEF in this vision, to then reach out to their neighbours, to spread the word, and in the process pull in tens of thousands of new people.
What we needed was simple, actually – an internal focus to re-energize ourselves, a powerful LIBERAL vision for marketing, and a secondary strategy to market our vision outside the party to people who are hungry as heck for something FRESH to BELIEVE in.
Well, friends, I have learned a lot during the last couple of years – and I’m no longer Mr. Happy-Face.
The conditions that we enjoyed when I worked with Laurence to help achieve a budget of $2 million in today’s dollars just aren’t here in today’s ALP.
We have been stymied in focusing internally to reach out to our members, explain our plans and get comfortable with each other.
Our leadership has ordered us to stop trying to define a big-picture core vision that we can use to get into the HEARTS of Albertans, and they’ve ordered us instead to stick to simple administration.
Our leaders, in the Caucus and the Party, have in too many ways ignored the advice and the wisdom of our incredibly competent Executive Director.
Our leaders have demeaned more than 1,500 volunteer hours of excellent work that Gerald’s wife Sharon did on our website renewal, and the integration of our database with the web and our financial system.
But the biggest warning sign to me given my experience in building parties – is that there is still no REAL, ACTUAL BUY-IN by our leadership to the need to define a core LIBERAL…VISION for the Alberta we want to create.
Without that vision, we can’t sell ourselves, no matter how well we use twitter and blogs, no matter how hard we ask members to get out there and sell memberships.
Without the vision, there’s no message.
You see, in the end, a party grows on BELIEF, not on tweets and robocalls.
Relationships, feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams…THEY’RE the essential fuel.
Early this morning, I realized that my most valuable communications skills – which focus on stimulating emotions and building relationships with people and which absolutely depend on that core message…are NOT skills that our leadership is ready to use.
By now you will have deduced that I am withdrawing from candidacy for the VP Communications position on our executive.
This is a decision I agonized over until early this morning, when I re-wrote my speech.
If I failed so completely in the last couple of years to convince our party’s leadership of the critical need for a core VISION, for a bold message we can SELL, the reality is that there’s no way that I could succeed between now and the next election.
The wise thing to do is step aside, and clear the path for a new VP Comms who can give the leadership what it will accept.
Thank you so much Karen Sevcik for nominating me. You’ve hung in faithfully for so many years, through so many Leaders, because you are a true Liberal.
Thank you Michael Dawe for seconding my nomination. Hang in there, my friend, for next time you’ll become a truly great MLA for Red Deer North.
Thank you, Gerald. I hate to pull away as you keep trying..and trying…and trying to wake everyone up to the inescapable realities and the urgent needs.
Thank you Sharon McEachern for your light-hearted, POSITIVE spirit, and for all those hours of brilliant, critically-important web and IT work that have made you the Alberta Liberal Party’s largest single personal donor. And please convey my thanks to your children.
Spencer, Chuck, Keegan, Jane, Rick, Dave Biltek and so many others, thank you for the pleasure I have found in working together with you.
This is MY party.
It’s the LIBERAL party!
I’ll never stop working for liberal principles…to keep them alive.
I’ll just have to find other ways to do that than seeking re-election as VP Comms.
Thanks, everybody.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
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