OTTAWA—The Broadbent Institute’s Progress Summit continues Sunday with a focus on a path forward for a progressive Canada. 

Panels on the concluding day of the Summit include developing winning campaigns and providing policy solutions to income inequality and good jobs in a green economy. 

Anastasia Khoo, Marketing Director of the Washington, DC-based Human Rights Campaign, will cap off the Summit with a keynote address about online engagement. Khoo was behind the groundbreaking online campaign to spread the now iconic red and pink marriage equality profile photo on behalf of the largest civil rights organization in the United States. That campaign is considered to be Facebook’s most viral ever. 

The summit will wrap up with closing remarks by Broadbent Institute Executive Director, Rick Smith, about seizing new momentum for the Canadian progressive movement.

WHAT: Progress Summit 

WHEN: March 30, 9:00 am to 12:30 pm 

WHERE: 
Delta City Centre
101 Lyon St. N, Ottawa 

For the full schedule: http://www.broadbentinstitute.ca/en/summit/schedule

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For more information, please contact:

Caitlin Kealey
[email protected] or 613-818-7956 

Karl Nerenberg / rabble.ca

When the founding leader of the Reform party, Preston Manning, retired from politics to start an Institute bearing his name, folks around him said the Manning Institute would not be a 'think tank' but a 'do tank.'

The Institute that bears the name of one-time NDP leader Ed Broadbent has similar 'do tank' ambitions and they were on display this past weekend.

From Friday to Sunday, the Broadbent Institute held what was, in effect, its inaugural major event, the Progress Summit, in Ottawa.

The Summit brought together Canadian progressives -- or, at least, people the Broadbent organizers consider to be progressive -- with activists and politicians from the United States, Australia, Great Britain and France.

There was significant discussion of policy, including indigenous rights, the green economy, youth employment, income inequality and the future of manufacturing.

But there was also a strong focus on strategy and tactics.

The Broadbent Institute, like its counterpart on the Right, is all about linking theory with practice, ideas with action. And so, there were workshops and panels on everything from Google campaigns to options for a beleaguered labour movement to "lessons from winning progressive campaigns in the U.S. and Canada.”

That last panel paired British Columbia environmental campaigner Tzeporah Berman and one time NDP Quebec organizer Ray Guardia with two Americans: Erik Peterson, of the strategy and training institute named after the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, and Ashley Pinedo, who worked at the grassroots level on the 2012 Obama campaign in the key swing state of Florida (which Obama carried, as he had in 2008).

Peterson talked about something he called the Wellstone triangle (the grassroots, electoral politics and public policy).

Guardia and Pinedo told generally upbeat stories about the winning campaigns in which they had been involved.

Berman, however, struck a more sombre note. She said pointedly that the Right is beating "us" in the tactics department.

"We have been too focused on the air war, on a core team that sends out messages, and not sufficiently focused on the ground war, working at the people-to-people and community level," she said.

The B.C. environmentalist advocated for smart and data-driven strategy.

"We should stop trying to talk to everyone," she said, and use good data to focus on those groups who can be convinced.

"The Right is good at message control." Berman sighed, "They know how to create an echo-chamber. We progressives are too invested in our own intellect. We become bored too quickly and move on to another topic."

On this point, Berman seemed to be speaking from a wealth of bitter experience.

"Winning campaigns is not a function of policy, it is about motivation," she noted, and then added that progressives are good at critiquing but "suck at proposing alternatives."

On Sunday evening, a half day after the Summit, one of those too-many-to-remember CBC-TV panels, this one call "Three to Watch," had a brief chat that brought Berman's comment to mind.

The three young up-and-comers and CBC Sunday night news host Wendy Mesley were discussing the still fairly feeble public opposition to what the three seemed to agree is frightful legislation -- the Harper government's Fair Elections Act.

One panelist almost echoed Berman's view when he observed that opponents of Fair Elections have not yet crafted effective messages.

They have not yet figured out how to motivate ordinary folks, he said, and that includes folks who might actually consider voting Conservative.

If the opponents of the Fair Elections Act want to have an impact, and maybe force major changes to the bill, they will have to campaign in a smarter and more effective way.

That, at least, is how this panel sees it.

It is also probably pretty close to what Tzeporah Berman would advise.

Laura Beaulne-Stuebing / iPolitics.ca

Progressives who gathered in Ottawa this weekend will not hesitate to say they’re on the right side of history on so many things – the environment, labour rights, gender equality. Some may not admit this as easily, but they’re also getting tired of, as they say, just being right all the time. They want to win.

That’s no secret, though — the first annual Progress Summit, put on by the left-leaning Broadbent Institute, was peppered with panel sessions and speeches about leading effective campaigns, with advice for organizers in how to build and improve a movement.

While the summit was open to everyone, and all political stripes were in attendance — Tories, Liberals and Greens included – the obvious subtext was an orange flag-waving one.

Tzeporah Berman, a Broadbent fellow and environmental campaigner, noted in one of the panel sessions Sunday that the left, in all its earnestness, wants to explain things — priorities and policies and ideas — with a lot of intellectual rigor.

But good campaigns have always been about simplifying a message and sticking to it. We have to stop assuming facts will win campaigns, she said.

This was an echo from keynote speaker Julia Gillard’s address the previous evening. The former Australian prime minister told a packed hall that progressives have leaned too long on facts, and expecting that facts are all that they need.

The weekend also featured policy-oriented sessions — opportunities to discuss and reflect on how a (potential future) progressive government would address things like resource development, manufacturing and jobs and the relationship between people and government through the tax system.

Broadbent Institute Executive Director Rick Smith, to close the Summit, delivered a campaign-style speech Sunday. He told the group it’s time for the left — the NDP, cough, cough — to go on the offence.

“We are the inheritors of the best country in the world. A country with a proud progressive tradition. But, a country that is moving in the wrong direction,” he said.

“So what are we going to do about that? Well, the best defence is a good offence.”

Citing bill C-23, the much-debated Fair Elections Act, his speech painted a stark picture between the progressive movement and the Conservative government — that the two are in opposition to each other.

So, Smith said, here’s what the Broadbent Institute is going to do, to deal with what almost everyone in the main hall of the Delta Hotel would call the government’s regressive policies: work with a team of Broadbent fellows to streamline a ”practical agenda for change” and train activists to take that agenda to peoples’ doorsteps.

“Continue working with us and with each other on a set of common priorities,” he appealed to the group, “to make our great country even greater.”

Delegates, volunteers and organizers were all-smiles for much of the weekend — interested in the conversations taking place, eager to get to work and hopeful their work will bear some political fruit in the future.

Earnest and hopeful and optimistic, for what will be an uphill battle towards 2015.

Chris Plecash / Hill Times

The federal government sees the public isn’t interested or engaged in its controversial elections overhaul bill and is using that to “demotivate and demoralize” political opponents, says Jamie Biggar, executive director of Leadnow.

Asked what could be done to mobilize the public against Bill C-23, Mr. Biggar suggested that Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre (Nepean-Carleton, Ont.) recently “lied” when he said that only academics and journalists, but not the general public, oppose the legislation.