Roundup: Gearing up the political advertising

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As we move closer to an election, there is going to be a lot of talk about political ads. An awful lot of talk. One of those talks is going to be about third-party advertising, and how much we’ll see because the federal spending limits are low as to render them fairly marginal, not that it’s stopped groups like Unifor or the National Citizens Coalition from grousing that the limits are too small for them to be of any good. Curiously, Stephen Harper used to be against these kinds of limits but he’s been in power for nine years and has done nothing about it, but you’ll have to guess as to why he’s had such a change of heart. Another thing we’ll see more of are social media ads which are cheap to produce and distribute, and can be used to refine and retool until they are considered “ready” to go for a major national buy – assuming that they don’t already get “earned” attention from news outlets without them having to actually pay for them to get wide distribution. Of course, we can look forward to being bombarded by ads outside of the writ period over the summer, so we should all be thoroughly sick of it by the time the election rolls around in October.

Good reads:

  • Martin Patriquin writes about Harper finding success using politics of fear around the niqab in Quebec.
  • Paul Wells writes about the aura of inevitability around Trudeau that is starting to wear off the closer we get to the election.
  • Laura Stone has lunch with Stephen Fletcher and talks about doctor-assisted dying.
  • Our military predicted chaos in Libya if we helped to depose Gadhafi, and lo and behold, there has been, and now we are ruling out sending any new military intervention to the region.
  • The government is examining using “gamification” in the public service.

Odds and ends:

Former Progressive Conservative-turned-Conservative-turned-Independent MP Bill Casey is now officially the Liberal candidate in Cumberland–Colchester.

Justin Trudeau again makes the point that the Liberals are not opposed to some form of Iraq mission extension – but it seems unlikely that it would be extending the current one.

Here’s a look at how the new prostitution law is impacting (or not) erotic massage parlours in Montreal.