NORMALLY, a changing of the guard in the prime minister’s communications bureaucracy would hold as much importance for Canadian farmers as, say, the addition of a new member to the Chinese politburo.
A change July 7 may be different.
That was the day Kory Teneycke, a longtime Reform and Conservative activist, joined the PMO as Harper’s director of communications. He replaces the not-much-missed Sandra Buckler, whose idea of media relations was to treat reporters like uninvited and unwanted guests at the Conservative government block party.
Teneycke smiles when he talks to reporters and seems to understand that a message without a carrier tends not to get delivered.
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In Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, this is a novel idea, media being the enemy and all.
But the new communications director also brings to his job a better appreciation of the importance of rural Canada. In a capital and a government preoccupied with the political issue of how to break into the seat-rich urban centres of downtown Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, a communications director with a sense that all that space between the urban centres actually matters is a refreshing change.
Teneycke is a former executive director of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association and as an effective and personable lobbyist, is widely credited with building a political base of support on Parliament Hill for creation of the ethanol and biodiesel mandate that was part of Bill C-33, approved with Conservative and Liberal support in June.
In political Ottawa, there is much chatter about the close connection between the renewable fuels lobby and the Conservatives. Teneycke’s flitting between the Reform party, Mike Harris’s controversial Conservative Ontario government, the CRFA and most recently the Conservative research department in Ottawa has been part of the evidence.
Once Harper’s Conservatives announced support for a biofuel mandate and then was resolute in supporting it despite growing criticism about use of food stocks for fuel, the CRFA posted advertisements around Ottawa thanking Harper and the Conservatives for their support.
Teneycke’s elevation to leadership of Harper’s communication’s shop will solidify the skeptics’ assumption that the ethanol crowd and the Conservative crowd are joined at the hip.
But beyond that, his appointment to a very senior position in Harper’s inner circle means that rural issues should become a greater part of the strategic balance.
He understands and has talked often about the issue of farm income and commodity price volatility.
There has been a tendency within the ranks of senior Conservative strategists to take rural Canada and rural voters for granted. It is not healthy for any constituency to be taken for granted.
Teneycke should add a bit of that sensibility to the deep thinkers who surround Harper.
The fact that on his first day on the job, he called The Western Producer to say that communication to rural prairie readers will be a bigger priority can only be a good thing. Prairie readers, of course, will decide if they really want to hear more from this government.
But Sandra Buckler would have de-loused her phone after a call like that.
