I have been working in political communications for over twenty years, and the environment I work in now is unrecognizable from the one I started in. When I launched stephentaylor.ca in the early 2000s, political communications in Canada still operated through a handful of gatekeepers — newspaper editors, television producers, and wire service reporters. A political operation’s core task was managing relationships with those gatekeepers and hoping for favorable coverage through message discipline and media relations.
I watched that model collapse from the inside.
The gatekeepers lost control#
In December 2004, Craig Smith and I co-founded the Blogging Tories — the first Canadian political blogroll. As Susan Delacourt wrote in Shopping for Votes, I was building online communities for the party in the early 2000s, “before, as he says, anyone had heard of phrases like ‘social media.’” The Blogging Tories grew to roughly 300 blogs and directly inspired the creation of Progressive Bloggers, Liblogs, and other partisan counterparts across the political spectrum. What we built was not a media organization. It was a distributed network of independent voices that collectively shaped the conservative online conversation in Canada, outside the control of any editor or producer. IRPP’s Policy Options called me “one of the most prominent political bloggers in Canada.” The network became a subject of peer-reviewed academic study — researchers at the Journal of Information Technology & Politics found that the Blogging Tories exhibited the most cohesive ideological network of any Canadian partisan blogroll, and a study in Social Science Computer Review used it as a primary research object for democratic deliberation online. The Fraser Institute described me as “Canada’s leading conservative blogger.” What had started as a blogroll had become infrastructure.
In his book Harper’s Team, Tom Flanagan — Stephen Harper’s campaign manager — described the blogosphere as an “innovation” that the party had not even considered in 2004. Flanagan wrote that he called me directly to get things started. Doug Finley subsequently appointed people to monitor the blogosphere and to distribute stories that were not yet ready for the mainstream media. The party’s campaign infrastructure had formally incorporated what we had built independently.
The traditional media did not know what to do with us. In 2007, I was physically removed from a media scrum on Parliament Hill by the Parliamentary Press Gallery — a landmark incident in the debate over whether digital publishing constituted legitimate journalism. I had a Hill pass granted by the Speaker of the House. The Press Gallery, with no constitutional or statutory authority, had security escort me out of the Rotunda for carrying a camera without Gallery membership — membership that required having no outside partisan interests, a standard that several Gallery members did not meet themselves. The Ryerson Review of Journalism later cited the incident as an example of the Gallery’s problematic exclusion practices. The gatekeepers were defending a perimeter that had already been breached. Stories were breaking on blogs before they reached newsrooms. Political actors could communicate directly with large audiences. The pace of the news cycle had compressed from daily to hourly, and the people who understood this had an asymmetric advantage over those who did not.
Breaking stories the gatekeepers would not#
The power of operating outside the traditional media structure was that you could publish what editors could not — or would not. In 2005, Justice Gomery imposed a publication ban on explosive testimony from the Sponsorship Scandal inquiry to protect upcoming criminal proceedings. The Canadian media complied. An anonymous source leaked transcripts of the banned testimony to American blogger Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters, who was not bound by Canadian law. The Blogging Tories network amplified it — members linked directly to Morrissey’s site, routing around the ban. Within days, Gomery acknowledged that the “genie had been let out of the bottle” and lifted the ban. The testimony was devastating for the Liberal government. The network we had built eighteen months earlier had played a direct role in making it public.
During the 2006 election campaign, I published leaked storyboards from the Liberal war room — photocopied attack ad plans that had arrived in a brown envelope — previewing the party’s negative ad campaign against Harper before it launched. Mike Duffy and the Globe and Mail’s Gloria Galloway confirmed the documents were authentic. The Liberals dropped two of the ads before they ever aired.
In August 2006, CBC’s The National aired a report that juxtaposed footage from a Harper press conference in Cornwall with an anti-Israel protest to make the Prime Minister appear dismissive of concerns about the Israel-Hezbollah war. I pulled the live feeds of the press conference and put together a seven-minute film demonstrating that the reporter’s editing had reversed the meaning of Harper’s remarks. The video was seen tens of thousands of times. CBC expressed regret for the report. In his book The War Room, Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella wrote that my film “attracted national attention” including in his own National Post column, and that “it had a big impact.” He noted that the CBC reporter left the network shortly after.
That kind of media accountability work was not possible within the old gatekeeping model. It required an independent platform, a direct audience, and the willingness to publish without waiting for permission.
My commentary was eventually featured in Maclean’s, the National Post, and the Financial Post. CTV recruited me to produce their 2004 election website. When Margaret Atwood signed a petition against Sun News Network, I challenged her on Twitter over what I saw as an anti-free-speech position — and she called me “naughty”. Toronto Life covered the exchange. So did the Globe and Mail.
The mainstream media was not ignoring digital publishing anymore — they were trying to absorb it. But the structural shift had already happened. The audience no longer needed to go through the gatekeepers to find political analysis, and the gatekeepers no longer controlled which narratives reached the public.
From blogging to institutional strategy#
The Manning Centre for Building Democracy made me their first fellow, and I addressed the Centre’s inaugural meeting on the floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange on the role of blogs in conservative political organizing. What had started as a blog had become a model for how distributed digital networks could reshape political communications.
I went on to serve as Federal Director of the National Citizens Coalition — the advocacy organization previously led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Delacourt wrote that with my help, the NCC “started to pay a lot of attention, just like marketers, to micro-targeting and to custom-designing its product appeal.” I was mining online data to find who supported conservative and libertarian issues, what data-based characteristics they had in common, and what online methods worked best in getting people to vote, speak out, or donate. Delacourt drew a direct comparison to Martin Goldfarb — Pierre Trudeau’s pollster — and Allan Gregg — the strategist behind Mulroney’s election victories — describing me as the digital-era equivalent: someone with “a foot in both worlds — the political world and the consumer world.”
The challenge was not convincing people that digital mattered — by then, everyone could see it. The challenge was building the operational infrastructure to do it well: real-time media monitoring across platforms, pre-prepared response frameworks for predictable attack vectors, distributed communication capacity that could activate quickly, and an understanding of platform-specific dynamics for message delivery.
A damaging narrative can consolidate within hours now. The window for effective counter-messaging is narrow and getting narrower. The organizations that have this infrastructure have a decisive advantage. The ones that do not are always reacting too late.
Mobilizing a country in a week#
In December 2008, when the Liberal-NDP coalition backed by the Bloc Québécois moved to replace the newly re-elected Conservative government, I launched RallyforCanada.ca and organized nationwide protests in under a week. Rallies were held in over twenty cities from Halifax to Victoria — Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, and surprises like Brandon and London. The Ottawa Citizen reported 3,500 people on Parliament Hill on a chilly December day. Total attendance across all cities exceeded ten thousand. I spoke on the Hill that afternoon.
That week demonstrated something I had been arguing since 2004: the infrastructure for political mobilization had moved online, and the people who understood how to use it could organize faster than any traditional political operation. A distributed network of bloggers, email lists, and social media could put thousands of people on the street in cities across the country within days — something that would have taken a national organization weeks to accomplish through conventional means.
Setting the national agenda from a single tweet#
In 2015, when Tim Hortons pulled Enbridge oil sands advertisements from its in-store screens, I tweeted about it at 10:26 in the morning. Within minutes, I had recruited cabinet ministers — Michelle Rempel, Jason Kenney, Pierre Poilievre — to join the #BoycottTims hashtag. By the afternoon it was the number one trending topic in Canada. By evening it was being covered by CTV, the Toronto Star, the Sun papers, Rogers Radio, and Global News. The Narwhal called me “the de facto leader of the movement.” The Vancouver Observer documented what it described as “a virtually instantaneous domino effect within Harper’s cabinet” triggered by strategic coordination through social media.
That episode was not an accident. It was the mature expression of everything I had been building since the Blogging Tories — the network, the relationships, the understanding of how platforms amplify messages, and the instinct for when a moment is ready to be seized.
Building the data infrastructure#
The strategic fundamentals of political communications have not changed — you still need a clear understanding of the target audience, a compelling narrative framework, and the discipline to reinforce key messages over time. What has changed is that the feedback loops are immediate. You can observe in real time how messages land, how they are interpreted and reframed by different audiences, and how adversarial actors attempt to counter or co-opt them. Delacourt described me as “one of the most ardent advocates of digital politicking among Canadian Conservatives.” At a Manning Centre panel with Sasha Issenberg, I argued that data brings politicians closer to an accurate mirror of the electorate — and that connecting with people directly on the issues they care about is closer to the ideal of democracy than anything the old gatekeeping model could offer.
I built the Stephen Taylor Data Project to make that kind of analysis possible at the riding level — interactive maps with poll-by-poll resolution across eight federal general elections and provincial elections in Ontario and Alberta, historical streamgraphs, and polling trend visualizations. The tools are built with React, D3.js, MapLibre GL, GraphQL, and MongoDB. Political communications is becoming as much a technical discipline as a rhetorical one, and I have been building the technical side of it for as long as I have been writing about the rhetorical side.
Twenty years of the same thesis#
I have been making the same argument since 2004: technology is not a channel for political communications — it is the infrastructure. The campaigns and organizations that treat it as core infrastructure will have a decisive advantage over those that treat it as an afterthought. That was true when blogs were the disruption. It was true when social media replaced blogs. It will be true for whatever replaces social media.
stephentaylor.ca has been my platform for two decades of that argument — and the proof that one person with the right tools and the right instincts can shape a national political conversation.
