In first post-Obama election, Internet plays ho-hum role in Quebec campaign

The web's most memorable contribution to the current provincial election might wind up being the site of an Action democratique candidate that offered liquor-store gift certificates in exchange for a campaign contribution.

He was ordered by party leader Mario Dumont to halt the so-called booze-for-bucks scheme after it attracted unwanted publicity.

Newspapers also published pictures of Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois in a bathing suit, lounging in a mud bath, after they were lifted from her daughter's Facebook site.

That booze coupons and bathing suits would be the Internet's most cutting-edge contribution to this election is particularly ironic, given its timing.

The campaign was launched exactly one day after the U.S. election, following a race that saw Barack Obama transform cyberspace into his own personal money-gobbling, grassroots-motivating machine that propelled him into the history books as the first black president.

While no Canadian campaign war room has used the Internet as extensively as Obama, political hopefuls across Canada have previously found innovative ways to extol their virtues, embarrass their opponents and communicate directly with the electorate through the web.

But experts say not one of the party leaders seeking the top job in Quebec this time out has effectively harnessed the power of the information superhighway.

"It doesn't seem like they're engaging in the same manner that we would expect in a political campaign, certainly in this era," said Mathew Bertin, an Internet expert who worked on a number of Liberal party web campaigns across Canada, as well as the Obama campaign in the U.S.

But he suggests Internet campaigns at the provincial level have generally been the most innovative in the country. Starting with Quebec.

One year before Bill Clinton, in his second run for office, became the first politician to truly embrace the Internet as a means of reaching out to the electorate, both the Yes and No camps in Quebec had launched websites in the run up to the 1995 referendum.

"The official committees, political parties, organizations and even individuals turned to the Internet to share their views on the implications of the Oct. 30th vote," wrote Philippe Launaz, then a Universite de Montreal masters' student whose study of the referendum cyber-campaign was published in a 1996 book entitled "La bataille du Quebec."

According to Launaz, the official web pages of each campaign were launched 26 days before the vote and were very basic, containing just text and images.

The No camp gave site visitors the chance to send messages and both sides contained links to supporting organizations, like the Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste for the Yes side and the Council for Canadian Unity for the No side.

Universite de Laval communications professor Thierry Giasson blames the spartan Internet campaigns in Quebec's current election on the haste with which it was called. He said the opposition was caught off-guard, ill-prepared, and with little money in their coffers.

But even the web campaign for the incumbent Liberals is a disappointment, he said.

"It looks like a business website and there's not a whole lot of interactivity proposed," he said of the Liberal home page which, in 2007, sought to engage voters through blogs and web forums with ministers.

Of course Jean Charest emerged from that election with a minority government. Giasson suggests he may be trying to better control the message this time out.

Despite promises a year ago that the ADQ would invest more heavily in the web, he said it took the party 10 days to launch its site after the election was called.

Little more than a revamp of the party's regular website, Giasson said the ADQ overlooked the fact that the site still contained hyper-partisan attack videos of Marois which created all sorts of controversy for Dumont.

"The funny thing is that these videos have been on their website for a long time, it wasn't put there for the election campaign," Giasson said.

"When you switch to the electoral context you will have other Internet users accessing your website... This is where you need to kind of clean or clear some of the very militant, partisan material you have on there if you don't want to create a commotion."

The videos were eventually pulled down - as were the Tories' infamous pooping-puffin graphic during the federal election. The ADQ videos, which poked fun at Marois's English and her snobbish reputation, are not unlike the mud dished out in other campaigns.

During the 2007 Ontario election, for example, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty's war room posted attack ads on YouTube that made fun of Conservative rival John Tory's French.

As for the Parti Quebecois, Giasson said Marois made the decision early on to keep bloggers - of which the majority in Quebec are social democrats and separatists - off her campaign website and has leaned more towards social networking.

The strategy is quite the opposite of the party's youthful former leader Andre Boisclair, who embraced the Internet during the 2007 campaign and encouraged blogging and web chats on the party website. He also had a disappointing result - a third-place PQ finish.

PQ spokeswoman Veronique Martel agreed Marois' website is much more information-based than interactive and she attributes that to demographics.

"We noticed in the last campaign that most of the bloggers on the PQ web site were youth," she said, noting blogging is still very popular on the party's youth wing site.

"The strategy was to shift all those areas of discussion to Facebook or other such 2.0 web tools in order to be present where they are and where they interact."

While she insisted the party was ready when the writ was dropped, Bertin said that's not often the case across Canada.

Despite a minority government situation both federally and in Quebec - which should effectively keep all parties in perpetual election mode - many still find themselves having to redevelop their websites and email lists every time.

"The time in between elections is when you have to be doing those fundamentals to make your web campaign work. It's about collecting content, it's about engaging the grassroots," Bertin said.

"The candidates that will be successful going forward will be the candidates that can use this kind of inter-campaign period to engage in a meaningful way with that community because that's the broadest, fastest cheapest way to reach a mass audience."