In May’s upcoming elections, many are calling for the B.C. Liberals’ defeat in the wake of multiple political “scandals”. However,  the Liberal’s track record is on par with the majority of political parties who are in power. Instead, it’s their handling of such scandals that has given them their poor reputation.

In his blog, Christopher Penn outlines the 3 key components of crisis communications using the metaphor of putting out a fire. If political parties learned to use these strategies to their advantage, perhaps they would be better off.

1) Knowledge: BC politicians’ track record for sharing information with voting constituents has never been great, but seems to have fallen to new lows in recent years. In turn, this makes scandals even greater as nobody is quite sure what the real story is or why decisions were made the way they were. In the case of the HST introduction, an advertising campaign educating users as to the benefits of an HST system would have silenced a significant portion of the objections.

2) Speed: As much as typically very little information is shared, the speed at which information is released tends to be extremely slow as well. Returning to the HST example, there was no major attempt to promote the HST as a positive thing until months after anti-HST campaigns had started gaining momentum. The initial lack of reaction ended up being a critical PR error.

3) Ownership: Politics is possibly the last place where anybody expects to find an organisation taking ownership for a mistake – typically any wrongs are blamed on the opposition or on a convenient scapegoat. However, it is exactly this lack of ownership that gives politics and political parties a bad reputation. For parties to develop a credible image, they also need to be willing to admit to their own shortcomings (and then explain how they are working to strengthen these areas).

So there you have it – some PR recommendations for whichever party is elected come May. Unfortunately this election actual issues are going to be eclipsed by the mishandling of these communications crises, but hopefully with some careful PR in the future we can focus on which party actually has the best policies for B.C.