I am a public affairs specialist, with both client-side and consulting experience in public policy, government relations, media relations, community outreach, and event planning.
Consultant working on industry awareness events, media relations, community outreach and advertising.
o Project manager of six awareness days in Ottawa and provincial capitals for a national small business coalition
• Coordinated receptions for provincial members of the legislature
• Developed policy positions and messaging
• Preparing speaking notes, press releases and other collateral material
• Booking meetings with ministers and parliamentarians
• Conducting regional media outreach prior to events
• Briefing and training industry delegates prior to meetings with elected officials
• Our client won an award for Best Public Affairs/Government Relations” from the Canadian Association of Society Executives
o Managed a community relations project for the Pacific region of a national human rights and international relations advocacy association
• Conducted a community audit to identify community supporters for the association
• Developed an online customer relationship management database
• Provided event outreach and support
o Government relations and media support for an Ottawa-based public affairs agency:
• Writing and editing advocacy materials for clients, including government submissions and advertising
• Writing and editing articles for a national trade magazine
• Advising clients on the use of social media
• Media outreach for a national tourism client, leading to featured stories in major media markets
o Advisor to non-profits about digital strategy and voter mobilization
o Government relations and policy training for other clients
Coordinating media relations for Get On Board BC, a diverse coalition of business groups, unions, students, resident groups, and transportation advocates pushing Victoria to fix the broken funding model for Translink.
• Wrote and distributed press releases
• Arranged interviews in response to media requests
• Organized press availabilities and wrote speeches
I was contracted to be the acting communications manager during a paternal leave. The role was responsible for managing a team of two, as well as providing strategic communications advice to elected and appointed student executives, and providing overall responsibility for managing business and event advertising, member communications, and brand management. Over a six month period, some of my successes were:
• Coordinating a referendum campaign that resulted in 96% voting in favour, with the highest student voter turnout in Canadian history
• Introducing experiment-based communications to a 40,000 person email list
• Creating content for, and designing, a monthly email newsletter design.
• Achieving 1,000,000 individual impressions through earned media
I conducted government relations and policy development on behalf of 320,000 students at 26 colleges, universities and technical institutes from across the country. I have experience organizing advocacy weeks, writing government submissions, writing speeches and coaching public speaking, and helping student leaders craft policy positions.
• Drafted and edited government submissions, briefing documents, lobby documents and press releases for government departments, parliamentarians, non-governmental stakeholders, members and the general public.
• Direct advocacy in public and private meetings
• Organized advocacy weeks on Parliament Hill for members
• Member relations: Managed client expectations, trained clients for lobbying activities, and captured client priorities to inform CASA's advocacy
• Designed and facilitated CASA's policy development process, integrating it with government relations and communications priorities.
• Gathered, evaluated, interpreted and synthesized information from diverse sources, including government reports, stakeholders, statutes and regulations.
• Statutory and regulatory analysis
• Management of a research contract for a 21,000 person survey
• Provided administrative support to committees
Research analyst for the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development, working for Campus 2020 and the Colleges and University Branch.
• Drafting a cross-ministry student engagement strategy
• Gathering, evaluating, interpreting and synthesizing information from diverse sources, including government reports, stakeholders, statutes and regulations.
• Drafting briefing documents and reports intended for senior management
• Managing research projects
• Updating issue profiles
• Identifying and consulting stakeholder groups
• Providing administrative support to committees
Managed a provincial policy outreach program, reporting to the BC Young Liberals executive.
• Manager of the largest student organization in Atlantic Canada
• Direct advocacy in public and private meetings
• Research and policy development
• Budget management
• Event planning
• Strategic-planning exercises using Open Space Technology
• Media and public relations
• Television advertising design and production
Member of the Board of Directors
Ex-Officio Member of the Board of Directors
• Senior elected official of a 45,000 member non-profit society with over 700 employees (including more than 50 unionized staff) and operating revenues of over $21 million.
• Chair of the executive committee and supervisor of nine direct reports
• Spokesperson with on-the-record media experience, as well as experience in live interviews on television and radio
• Primary liaison between students and the university leadership
• Direct advocacy in public and private meetings
• Designed and implemented advocacy campaigns
• Led business-to-business negotiations between the AMS and the University involving agreements regarding land-use and service provision
Long time, no Tumbls. Anyway, I saw this today and thought it’s a useful video to think about not only when designing a website or application, but almost any communication piece that is intended to leverage an action out of a (perhaps fleeting) interest in your product (whatever or whoever that may be).
(Translated from this blog: Alex Aka JJ LJ. Originally, this story was published by Alex in Russian. The translation is mine, sorry for any inaccuracies. Suggestions for improvements are very appreciated.)
Smith attended the meeting on Tuesday. There, he himself and his brain both died a slow and painful death, brought onto them by the other attendees, with Smith’s manager Lehare as leading murderer.
“Gentlemen,” said mrs. Redroot, “Our organization is facing a major challenge. We’re dealing with a project, for which we must depict several red lines. Are you willing to take on this assignment?”
“Of course”, Lehare said. As the company’s CEO he was always willing to take on problems that would be solved by someone else of the team. However, he instantly clarified: “We can do that, can’t we?”
The manager of the drawing department, Greyskin, quickly nodded: “Yes, definitely. This is Smith, our best specialist on the drawing of red lines. We’ve invited him to this meeting for exactly this reason, to hear his competent opinion on the subject.”
“Nice to meet you,” mrs. Redroot threw him a smile. “Well, you all know me. And this is Lily, our company’s specialist in the area of design.” Lily blushed and smiled self-consciously. She just obtained her economics degree and knew about as much of design as a platypus knows of the design of airships.
“In short,” Mrs. Redroot continued, “we must draw seven straight red lines. They must all be strictly perpendicular. Furthermore, some of them must be green and some transparent. What do you think, would that be realistic?”
Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
Also worth noting: They both discussed their mutual love of Kit Kat bars.
WHAT NOT TO DO: Create fake Facebook accounts to counter criticism online. But if you really, really, really, really have to (*you don’t), create them months in advance.
http://mashable.com/2012/07/25/chick-fil-a-accused-of-setting-up-fake-facebook-account/
Premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, and Premier of Alberta, Alison Redford, silently judge Premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall.
From ilovelibraries.org:
The city of Troy, Michigan was facing a budget shortfall, and was considering closing the Troy Public Library for lack of funds. Even though the necessary revenues could be raised through a miniscule tax increase, powerful anti-tax groups in the area were organized against it. A vote was scheduled amongst the city’s residents, to shut the library or accept the tax increase, and Leo Burnett Detroit decided to support the library by creating a reverse psychology campaign. Yard signs began appearing that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd - Book Burning Party on August 5th.” No one wants to be a part of a town that burns books, and the outraged citizens of Troy pushed back against the “idiotic book burners” and ultimately supported the tax increase, thus ensuring the library’s survival.
I have learned three things in the past 24-hours:
1) Writing a blog post about Justin Trudeau will get you more views than anything else you write about policy and politics.
2) There is something deeply dissatisfying about getting love only by Facebook, where political interest level seems, to me at least, to be a mile wide and an inch deep.
3) When you do manage to get that Facebook love, it is even more dissatisfying to know that people are sharing your link, but you have no idea who they are, what they’re saying to contextualize the piece, or whether people are liking it there.
On Monday, the National Post’s John Ivison wrote a critical piece on Justin Trudeau, arguing that he doesn’t have what it takes to be Liberal leader. Initially I was going to put the column down to filler and a means of increasing web traffic, especially given Trudeau’s clear statements that he does not want to be leader, but the interesting piece was this throwaway line:
A Trudeau leadership team is being quietly assembled, even while their man continues to insist that he will sit out to spend more time with his family.
Ivison bizarrely buried the lede - to my knowledge, this had previously been reported nowhere before. Since then, on-again, off-again Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella has said this is more than a rumour and, according to unnamed sources, Trudeau is running.
I moved from Ottawa, back to Vancouver, almost a year ago so I have no special insight on the scuttlebutt in the capital, but the story provides an interesting opportunity to draw parallels between Canadian and American leadership politics, and visit an oft-cited 2006 piece, “Declaring for President is a Dance of Seven Veils”, where NPR’s Senior Washington Editor, Ron Elving, argued there is a process presidential candidates go through to show they are serious about running for president, including:
The reasons for this drawn out process are, in my estimation, three-fold:
Some of the parallels between American presidential politics and Canadian party leadership races are obvious, and some don’t hold. For instance, Canadian electoral rules do not incent the creation of exploratory committees and there is no vice-presidency, but there are alternatives to getting the message out. In particular, utilizing the rumour mill of Ottawa’s very small community can achieve some of the same ends, as John Ivison’s column shows.
There is also the ability, through surrogates with prominent commentary platforms in the media, to publicly hypothesize about a candidacy and allow journalists and other activists to glom onto the idea of the candidacy and publicly evaluate it without getting the candidate’s hands dirty.
In Trudeau’s case, it seems to have all started coincidentally, because of a boxing match.
Recognizing the different context of Canadian politics, I propose a Canadian Dance of the Seven Veils:
Assuming Ivison and Kinsella are both correct, Trudeau has already been conducting the “testing the waters” phase for some time. As Paul Wells noted in his glowing piece on Trudeau in Maclean’s, he is a fundraising machine that travels the country constantly, visiting ridings everywhere. If the Liberal Party of Canada’s website can be relied upon as a definitive schedule of LPC events, he is by far the party’s most active headliner – even moreso than Bob Rae.
Following Trudeau’s surprise defeat of Tory Senator Patrick Brazeau, Lawrence Martin provided the clearest example of the call to leadership, concluding, “If the party is to rise again, it may well be that it needs someone of daunting name and spirit to remind the country of its daunting ways.”
A month later, Paul Wells produced the profile that gave him ample opportunity to both deny his leadership ambitions while simultaneously expand on his views of the country and his party.
And now it is being stated with certainty in the media that the campaign team is in place and that Trudeau intends to run.
Stephane Dion’s more direct line to running for Liberal leadership (if I recall there was little advanced fanfare) shows that the Dance is not a requirement of winning the position, but it is helpful, and maybe necessary in Trudeau’s case. As somebody who has frequently been touted as a leadership candidate, on the basis of his name and charisma alone, he has needed the time to reset the relationship between himself, the media, and the Liberal Party at large, so he can be seen as a person of greater substance that’s answering a call to run, rather than appearing to feel entitled to the position.
If Trudeau is following the path as I have set out, the next stage will be a surprise announcement that he’s about to decide whether or not to announce. Given that Bob Rae has already dropped the fifth veil, Trudeau will be pressured to announce quickly before Rae runs away with it all. However, as the very nature of the Dance allows, he may drop out at any time with his dignity intact.
Originally posted to George Hoberg’s Green Policy Prof blog: http://greenpolicyprof.org/wordpress/?p=825
Spencer Keys and George Hoberg Today the Pembina Institute released astudy contributing to the growing expert consensus that Canada has a mild case of Dutch disease. Later this week, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is travelling to Western Canada to further argue his own unique form of Dutch disease. What a difference a month can make. Six weeks ago we argued that there is a political narrative available to environmental advocates looking to find a coalition between themselves and the labour movement, which can also drive a wedge in Stephen Harper’s Western Canada-and-Ontario coalition that gave him a majority in the 2011 election: the Dutch disease argument that a rising petrodollar makes Canadian manufacturing exports more expensive and has created a decline in Ontario’s manufacturing sector. Since then several events, both extraordinary and coincidental, have turned Dutch disease into the most significant policy debate the country is facing. It began with Mulcair, on CBC’s The House: “It’s by definition the Dutch disease: the Canadian dollar is being held artificially high, which is fine if you’re going to Walt Disney World; not so good if you want to sell your manufactured product because the American client, most of the time, can no longer afford to buy it. We’ve hollowed out the manufacturing sector. In six years since the Conservatives have arrived we’ve lost 500,000 good-paying, manufacturing jobs; more than half of them because we’re not internalizing the environmental costs.” Mulcair’s comments set off a firestorm of controversy, putting him on the opposite of most political pundits, many economists, the government, and the Western premiers. IRPP Report Coincidentally, little more than a week after Mulcair’s interview on The House, the Institute for Research on Public Policy released a report evaluating the significance of the Dutch disease. Specifically, the authors noted there has been “little rigorous analysis of the linkages between energy prices, the exchange rate and manufacturing output in Canada.” The authors used a two-step process, first determining the relationship between energy prices and the Canada-US exchange rate, and secondly determining the role of the Canada-US exchange rate on manufacturing output. The first conclusion was that, since 2003, “a 1 percent increase in energy prices was associated with a 0.54 percent decrease in the value of the US dollar relative to the Canadian dollar,” which is much larger than the 0.15 percent decrease in the preceding 1992-2003 period. By comparison, non-energy commodity prices were associated with a 0.73 percent decrease over the same post-2003 period. For the second conclusion, an analysis of 80 manufacturing industries was conducted and, while 53 out of 80 indicated some level of Dutch disease, only 25 were statistically significant while the rest were functionally the equivalent of no relationship as all. Interestingly, while there was no negative relationship for automotive manufacturing, the biggest negative effects were in textiles, apparel, and leather, “which together account for less than 2 percent of manufacturing output.” Industry Canada Study Inconveniently for the Harper Government, it was also revealed recently that an Industry Canada sponsored study being published in the journal Resource and Energy Economics, found some support for loss in manufacturing unemployment due to Dutch Disease. Unlike the IRPP study, the Industry Canada study looked at losses in manufacturing employment. It concluded that, of those jobs lost to exchange rate fluctuations, 33-39% is due to increases in energy commodity prices. However, given the results of the IRPP study, we can reasonably assume that this constitutes a much lower loss of employment than the headline numbers suggest. Today’s Pembina and MacDonald-Laurier Reports Using regional economic impact models produced by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the Pembina Institute argues that large regional disparities are occurring as a result of the oil sands boom. In fact, the authors of the Pembina study reject the Dutch disease label as inadequate to capture what is happening in Canada today. Instead, they argue the distribution of benefits and rapid growth is “a uniquely Canadian strain of the Dutch Disease that could be called “oilsands fever” – a strain that is beginning to create clear winners and losers in Canada’s economy and could pose a significant risk to Canada’s competitiveness in the emerging clean energy economy.” The authors emphasize the challenges facing provinces without significant natural resource production in attracting and retaining skilled labour in, the overwhelming hold on the economic benefit from oil sands production (94%) by Alberta alone, and the inflationary effects. Their prescriptive elements include establishing a federal savings fund, eliminating preferential tax treatment for the oil and gas sector, convening an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada to continue study of the problem, have a federal committee study regional competitiveness, and establish a Canadian energy strategy. However, the waters of the Pembina report have already been muddied by a MacDonald-Laurier Institute report arguing the opposite conclusion from the same data by the Canadian Energy Research Institute. MLI finds a significant positive impact from the oil sands, in absolute terms, for every province in the country. The two studies are using the same data. The different conclusions from the reports reflect the different perspectives of the groups. MLI emphasizes the absolute magnitude of the contributions of oil and gas to provinces outside of Alberta. Pembina doesn’t disagree, but emphasizes the economic and political effects of the unbalanced distribution of these benefits, an issue on which MLI is silent. Neither study can convincingly say whether the positive economic spillovers of the oil sands are more or less powerful than the negative dynamic of the Dutch disease. Even MLI’s concluding sentence reveals how incomplete our understanding of these competing forces is: “While the so-called “Dutch Disease” mechanism may operate, in practice it is partially (perhaps more than fully) offset by the gains to the overall Canadian economy documented by these studies.” Analysts will continue to differ about the magnitude of the Dutch disease dynamic and whether and how policy changes should be made to address it. Mulcair, Polluter Pays, and Gaps in the Research Returning to Mulcair’s comments on the CBC and elsewhere, in discussing the Dutch disease he continually emphasizes the critical importance of applying the polluter pays principle. In doing so, Mulcair is describing something that is similar to, but not exactly, Dutch disease, and calling it the same. He claims that Dutch disease occurs when you fail to internalize the environmental costs of resource extraction; specifically, because companies do not have to pay the full cost of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, they are able to develop resources at a faster rate than they would otherwise be able to do, and therefore putting more upward pressure on the dollar than would be the case if the costs were properly internalized. This argument about internalizing environmental costs is Mulcair’s own distinctive addition to the concept of Dutch disease. Unfortunately, none of the studies summarized above actually deal with the argument that Mulcair is making, leaving a giant hole in the current research. Climate Hawks and the Dutch Disease It is particularly surprising that the Pembina report does not address the polluter pays part of Mulcair’s argument because the environmental impact of the oil sands have been central to the group’s mission, and placing an effective economy-wide price on carbon seems to be the natural go-to recommendation in all the group’s reports on the topic. Why would Canada’s leading climate hawk environmental group pass up the chance to make the case for effective carbon pricing in another politically salient way? We can only speculate that they believed including it would produce an undesirable political backlash. They are already well-known for having that position, and when they have made the case for effective carbon pricing in the past they have been accused, like anyone else who mentions the idea in Canada, of advocating regional wealth distribution. And perhaps because Mulcair’s comments have been considered so incendiary, emphasizing the polluter pays component would have associated the group too closely with a divisive partisan argument. The dilemma faced by Pembina in this report is a dilemma for many climate hawks: does it make political sense to embrace the Dutch disease narrative? Analytically, it would seem preferable to keep the issues separate. Designing effective climate policy for Canada is an enormous task in its own right, why complicate it by including it in the same package of initiatives design to address Ontario’s struggling manufacturing sector. Even the strongest serious cases for the Dutch disease argument suggest that there are greater and more important forces at work in Canada’s manufacturing challenge than the explosive growth of the oil sands. But politically, climate advocates are not getting any meaningful traction in Canada, so aligning themselves with the Dutch disease argument makes sense if Mulcair’s political strategy can be a winning one. Nik Nanos, one of Canada’s preeminent pollsters, believes this is a high reward manoeuver for Mulcair, who is looking to shore up support in Quebec and expand into Ontario, for much of the same reasons as were previously discussed in this blog. Analysts vs Advocates, again While Mulcair’s rhetoric may be beyond what is well supported by economic analysis, as noted by John Ibbitson he probably does not have much to lose from adopting more extreme positions than the evidence warrants (yet). A sizeable portion of the public agrees with his viewpoint – enough to make a difference in key areas. According to Harris/Decima, 51% in Quebec agree with Mulcair in Quebec, while 47% in British Columbia and 37% in Ontario do. If the choice comes down to oil sands expansion with demonstrably inadequate environmental checks and balances, or a sketchy economic argument with powerful narrative potential, the choice seems pretty clear for climate hawks.
May 30, 2012
The best campaign counter-attack video I HAVE EVER SEEN. Obama 2012
”So we’re going to call their BS when we see it and we need your help to call them on it too and set the record straight. So share this, tweet it, facebook it, I keep hearing about tumblr and whatever that is…please use that too. Thank you.”
-Stephanie Cutter / Deputy Campaign Manager at Obama for America.
And a Tumblr shout-out.
This is really spectacular: short, authentic, direct, and it feels personal even though it’s clearly intended for tens of thousands of activists.