While I’ve pretty much said my piece on the Manning Conference, one last headline caught my eye yesterday, which was the “Traditional campaigns dead! It’s a digital world now!” variety, which made me roll my eyes a bit, but here it is. The “experts” – all American – talk about how Facebook and digital ads are where it’s at instead of TV advertising, but it seems to me like they missed entirely what happened during the last federal election – you know, something that the Conservatives might have a vested interest in actually learning from their mistakes in, rather than what is going on south of the border, with their utterly insane primary season and unlimited corporate and private money. Because seriously, if they paid attention to what the Liberals did here, it was actually a lot of traditional campaigning, which was door-knocking. Yes, they flooded social media with their “days of action,” which featured candidates and their teams – wait for it – door-knocking. There wasn’t a series of YouTube or Facebook ads that won the election for the Liberals – in fact, the only commercial that anyone remembers is the one with Trudeau on the escalator, and mostly because everyone tried to mock it (not all of it effectively). How often in the last decade did we hear about the Conservatives’ fearsome electoral machine with their CIMS database, and how that was helping them cut swaths though campaigns based on the smiley and frowney faces of voter identification? It didn’t win them the election. Yes, the Liberals rebuilt their own voter identification database (“Liberalist”), but again, what was it used for? Door-knocking, and canvassing donations, but it also bears noting that the Liberals did not spend the most money, disproving that money is what wins elections. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take the words of these American “experts” that the Conservatives enlisted with a grain of salt, while the traditional shoe-leather method of direct voter engagement and going from door-to-door is putting in the hard work that won a majority of seats.

Good reads:

• Rob Oliphant talks about his 30 years as a United Church minister and the insights that gave him in chairing the doctor-assisted dying committee.
• Brad Wall wants an “economic assessment” of carbon pricing. Perhaps he should read the some economic assessments of the costs of climate change.
• Before a budget has been tabled, and before reforms to the Estimates have happened, Kevin Page complains the Liberals aren’t transparent enough.
• Justin Trudeau is considering issuing pardons to gay men convicted under laws that criminalised homosexuality before 1969.
• Kevin O’Leary muses that there may be a Liberal leadership contest in the next four years, so he might run in that as well. Because he’s serious about politics.
• More MPs talking about a four-day workweek, with only one MP cautioning about the terrible optics, and no discussion about compensation. Okay then.
• VICE Media continues to fight with the RCMP to keep from having to turn over notes on a story related to a terror suspect.
• The Canadian Forces are quietly shopping for drones, not only for surveillance and reconnaissance, but also for strike capabilities.
• Grr! Argh! Cheap outrage over MPs getting an increase to their office budgets!
• Here is Aaron Wherry’s recap of the Manning Conference speeches.

Odds and ends:

The government reached their (revised) goal of 25,000 Syrian refugees this weekend. Obviously not all government sponsored, but we’ll see going forward.

Justin Trudeau was in Whistler to snowboard ahead of the First Ministers’ Meeting in Vancouver this week.

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