Michael Davis

Want to understand how the political system works? Ask a tow-boater-turned-pilot-turned-bus driver. Michael Davis has done it all, including having led multiple, award-winning public relation firms and managing political campaigns since the late 1990s. His work in municipal, provincial and federal politics has included running the campaign of the BC Green Party and working as the director of communications for former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Judy Wilson-Raybould (during a particularly curious time in Canadian political history, if we might add). Throughout it all, Michael’s passion for authentic public dialogue has never wavered. He joined us in conversation to help us better understand how to navigate the political process to advance a good idea and why perseverance can pay off.

Why does nature matter to you?

I’ve always felt very connected to it. Every now and then you get a glimpse of a killer whale or a bear and just the interaction of the mountains with the ocean. I’ve always felt very close to nature, very connected to it since I was very young.

You’re a communication specialist – helping political parties and business clients get their message out to the public. What’s your advice to students who hope to make nature more relevant to more people?

I think a lot of the time, we end up preaching to the converted, not just on environmental stuff, but on most issues. We surround ourselves and take advice from people who have already bought in, so we are not hearing the other side. We need to make a lot more effort to hear and understand the people that we are trying to speak to.

When you helped run the Green Party’s election campaign, was that also your message to them? Because traditionally, the Greens have struggled to expand their base beyond the converted.

You are essentially translating policy, because the BC Greens had a really well-developed policy platform. It was very complicated; it was very long. So, we took that and translated it into something immediately relevant to individuals. Why does the soccer mom care about this? What does it mean to them? So, you’re trying to take complicated policy and translate it into something that is immediately relevant to people.

When it comes to making policy for nature more relevant to more people, do we need the big ideas, like Nature Needs Half, or smaller, community-level ideas that people can see and feel?

I don’t think it matters. But if you come in stuck with one particular way of getting things done, I think that’s very challenging. If you come in and say “I want to fight for the environment”, you can find ways to move that agenda forward so long as you’re open to the ways and means. Politics is the art of the possible. There is a seed change that is happening there, it’s painfully slow, but we are seeing change. We are seeing the rise of the Greens; we are seeing a lot of change happening. It’s just very, very slow.

You’ve worked municipally, provincially and federally. Where can you best affect change?

All three systems are completely different; they have their advantages and disadvantages. The federal system has more impact on some of the bigger issues that the environmental movement needs to deal with, but it’s hard to access. There’s a lot of players. It’s very complex. It’s very expensive to get involved. The municipal system: you can get involved in a lot of places very easily – in some places, they can’t even get a mayoral candidate, so you could be mayor if you wanted to! If you step up, you can participate and you can have a lot of impact from the municipal level. And the province is somewhere in between. The municipal system is much more open; is less partisan in most cases. It’s often a collective of interested individuals as opposed to parties. As soon as you have the party system, you have party discipline and caucus discipline. Even though you can have impact on a bigger scale, advancing change on individual issues is much harder and much slower.

When advocating for new ideas, what’s a more useful tool: elections or the four years when a party is in power?

I think it’s much easier to advance or even get elected on a single issue. So, when you are talking about elections, you need to be very simplified, with good soundbites, focused on one issue. Those things work very well for getting elected and advancing a good idea can be easier if a party or a candidate latches on to your idea to help get themselves elected. In power, it’s all about working with a large group of people within a lot of constraints, and trying to find what is possible; what can you move. You need to advance an idea both during and after an election, but you can get your idea traction during an election.

You’ve been the political staffer – on the inside, working for cabinet – helping take election promises and create lasting legislation. What was the biggest lesson learned from the inside?

That it’s a very different environment. The biggest surprise getting there was the sheer volume of issues that are constantly coming at you. I was in a director of communications role (for former federal Minister of Justice, Judy Wilson-Raybould) and really, you’re just triaging the 100 issues that go by every single day, hoping that one of them doesn’t catch fire. It was quite overwhelming. The other surprise is the complexity of how many different parties you’re dealing with. You have the bureaucracy of the ministry, the prime minister’s office, the caucus, the party itself, the opposition, and then all the stakeholders involved in every single issue. It’s incredibly complicated to work with all of those different groups and to advance a particular agenda.

It does sound complicated. Is that why the pace of change can feel slow?

Yes. That’s part of it. I think from the outside it looks very simple because you have a very strong idea of how the world should be and you think that everybody will agree with you, and you will just move forward. But the reality is that the two of us just can’t sit down and agree on every particular issue. And so, when you’re talking about the entire country, and all of these different interlocking systems, it becomes very challenging. I do think that a party, or a leader, or a minister or even a single MP can make a difference, but they have to be very focused and really know what they want to achieve and have a plan on how they’re going to get there.

How important is momentum to policy change? Even for someone working inside the government, do you need to have the small wins to stay motivated and keep moving forward?

Yes, it’s important. Advocating for policy change from the outside is convincing politicians that they have permission to make the changes that you want to see. With all of the issues politicians have going on, if they start to run into resistance on one issue and they aren’t seeing any wins – especially if they don’t see a win before the next election – they will lose steam. We see that over and over again. It’s why it’s so important not just to go to politicians with an ask, but when you start to see success, give feedback to the politician; give them the win that they need. They need the permission to make that change.

At the end of the day, politicians are still human, right?

Absolutely.

What is the human toll of political hate?

We love to slag politicians. The reality is, most of the politicians I’ve worked with have been very principled. They’re certainly not there for the money, or the hours – which are horrible. The ones that I’ve worked with have all been very good people. I mean, there’s bad apples in all of it, but I think one of the things that’s really challenging is that no matter what decision a politician makes, there are six other ways they could have gone, and the media can always go and find five other people who will say ‘that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of’. So, no matter which decision you make as a politician, you’re never going to satisfy everybody.

Is thoughtful policy – good decision making – even possible in this cut and thrust world you just described?

I think that the discourse, the conversation has become more volatile; more us against them. There’s very little nuance; we’re not prepared to give the other side any benefit of the doubt. That makes it very hard to find the kind of compromise that is required for our political system to work.

So, what is the solution? Change the system or help the public better understand the system we have?

I think it’s a horrible system, until you consider the alternatives. Name me a better system. It is a hard system to understand from the outside. It’s very easy to protest and to be destructive. But at some point, somebody has to build something new, and that can only be done within the political process. That’s why I encourage people to get involved in the process. That’s how you build. You can’t just destruct, you have to construct something.

Yet building takes time. Can it be frustrating?

Very.

But you keep going. Why?

I find the process itself fascinating. I do find, if you are talking about the environment, the pace of change is incredibly frustrating. But the process is interesting.

How do we get more politicians from all parties to put a higher priority on nature?

The more people that are involved in the conversation, the more pressure there is on politicians to create change. The pressure that’s being put on politicians by young people to help nature is being countered by, let’s call them the “status quo”. This group has a lot of money and influence that pays to have people constantly pushing their agenda within the halls of parliament and in the provincial legislatures. Politicians love to talk to real people that are not paid to bring their point of view into the halls of power. There are people that are listening, but it’s challenging to counter lobbyists if people with different perspectives aren’t talking to politicians and making their case.

A student reading this might say, well, the system is rigged. But we’ve both been in political backrooms where maybe ten people are crafting the entire agenda for a political party because that’s the sum total of who bothered to show up. Decisions are determined by who participates, right?

Absolutely. We’ve sat on municipal party boards where it was impossible to get people involved. And you have a lot of influence in the backrooms, in policy, on the direction of a party. Step up. Don’t just assume that all you can do is protest. You can be part of creating something new. And that can be exciting.

What is the one thing you know now that you wish you knew at 15?

That what you are saying has to be short, relevant to the audience. It’s got to connect with them emotionally, or it doesn’t go anywhere. I wish I knew that then and if I did, I would have been able to have more impact earlier.

Different Perspectives