Kevin is one of Canada’s leading government relations providers and is a managing partner and co-founder of Sandstone Group. Prior to his work as a consultant, over a period of nineteen years, Kevin held senior roles in successive Liberal governments and opposition leaders’ offices including for Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Bill Graham, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae and Justin Trudeau. From 2015- 2017, Kevin was deputy director of the Liberal Research Bureau.

The Fumbled Election

By Kevin Bosch

If I asked you what Canadian political photo shaped an election more than any other, what would be your choice? Stockwell Day riding his jetski? Gilles Duceppe wearing his hairnet in the cheese factory? The photos of Jean Chrétien that the Conservatives used in their 1993 attack ads? Jack Layton raising his cane at his campaign rallies that built into the Orange Crush?

What if I said, football? Then most of you might think of what I consider the most iconic photo in political campaigning in Canada: Conservative Leader Robert Stanfield fumbling a football. Add in one of the most iconic political lines in Canadian election campaigns: “Zap! You’re frozen!” and you pretty much have the 1974 election in a nutshell.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of an election date that returned Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the head of a majority government, while at the same time effectively ending the careers of two political giants, Robert Stanfield and David Lewis.

Certainly, both the Conservatives and the NDP started the election with high hopes. They are the ones who prompted it, afterall, hauling down the minority Trudeau government with a non-confidence vote over Finance Minister John Turner’s budget only two years after the previous election.

High inflation was a serious problem and after his defeat in the Commons, Trudeau delivered a televised address to the nation bemoaning the rare summer vote and saying “this will be a July election that I am sure the country does not want” claiming that it was preventing the government from adopting concrete measures to help Canadians who were struggling with their household budgets.

The Conservatives started the election bullish on their prospects having come within two seats of winning the 1972 election. They were leading the polls at the start of the election campaign and promised a “90-day wage and price freeze" to cool inflation. Trudeau said that policy was intrusive on the rights of employers and employees, repeatedly mocking it on the campaign trail saying Stanfield was like a magician thinking he could just wave a wand and say “Zap! You're frozen!" (Trudeau would later have to eat those words when a year later his government was forced to counter 10% annual inflation by bringing in price and wage controls as part of the Anti-Inflation Act.)

The Conservatives seemed to be fumbling the election’s policy debate and then there was that photo.

On May 30th, Stanfield travelled from Halifax to Saskatoon for campaign events. During a refueling stop in North Bay, Conservative staffers and reporters started throwing around a football on the tarmac and suggested that Stanfield join in. Ironically, all of the images captured by photojournalist Doug Ball that day show him successfully catching or throwing the football every time.

Except once.

That one devastating image of a forlorn Stanfield in a white shirt and tie, knock-kneed and hunched forward with a fumbled football falling out of his hands ran on the cover of the Globe and Mail the next day with the headline “A political fumble?” When veteran journalist Charles Lynch saw the image he declared: “Trudeau just won the election.”

On election night, it turned out Lynch was right, the Conservatives ended up losing 12 of their seats. The NDP caucus was chopped in half from 31 to 16. Their leader, the venerable David Lewis, even lost his seat in York South. The Social Credit dropped from 15 to 11 seats losing official party status. And the Liberals gained 32 additional seats rising to a caucus of 141 and giving Trudeau back the majority he had squandered in 1972.

About a month later Stanfield announced his intention to resign as leader and to call a leadership convention. And his fumbled football became a Canadian icon and a cautionary tale for generations of politicians and imagemakers.