Tag Archives: Political Ads

Roundup: Your Conservative Earth Day present

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In order to mark Earth Day this year, the Conservatives will be launching their public access portal to oilsands monitoring data. It won’t be entirely populated with data, mind you, and last I checked, the governance structure still hadn’t been entirely decided (which is kind of a big thing), but hey, they’re actually putting it out there, right? Meanwhile, the National Energy Board is putting out stronger pipeline regulations going forward.

Vic Toews says that lessons can be learned from the Boston bombings as far as Canadian security and law enforcement is concerned, and he’s sure that our police forces are re-examining their own plans to see what best practices they can employ. And hey, they’re pushing ahead with the anti-terrorism bill, so that means something – right?

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Roundup: Gross partisanship over a tragic incident

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It was another day of gross partisanship yesterday as Stephen Harper decided to begin the day by, apropos of nothing while attending the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, calling out Justin Trudeau for not being equivocal enough in his condemnation of terrorism and saying that trying to understand the root causes – so as to prevent it – was somehow “rationalizing” or “excusing” it. And then, just before Question Period, one of his faithful backbenchers repeated the same point for the benefit of the House. Well, that went over well, and after Trudeau called him out over the politicisation, the NDP decided to pile on during the evening political shows and moaned that Trudeau didn’t focus enough on the victims and the first responders. No, seriously. Because apparently a tragic incident can’t escape the narrow partisanship on either side of the aisle. The various statements that were made are collected here. Susan Delacourt, meanwhile, has a fantastic blog post about where narrow partisanship and sarcasm meet over Twitter, and all reason is lost.

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Roundup: Attacked for helping out charities

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The Conservatives launched their attack ads against Justin Trudeau this morning, poking fun at his “striptease” for charity, his Movember moustache – for charity – and using a carefully edited clip in which he says that “Quebeckers are better” – err, except that the actual context of the clip was that he was quoting his father. The Canadian Liver Foundation put out a statement to thank Trudeau for the thousands of dollars he helped as part of the “striptease” segment. Paul Wells muses about attack ads, and the Liberal tendency to promise not to use them – until they do. Jon Kay ridicules the amateurish ads for being just that – amateurish, nothing like a genuine attack ad, and opens up the Conservatives for worse counterattack.

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Roundup: Attack ads and shadow MPs

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The NDP are launching anti-Conservative attack ads in Quebec. Because they’re the party that wants to raise the tone of debate and end the politics of division! They’ve also declared that MP Dany Morin will act as a kind of “shadow MP” for Claude Patry’s riding, to ensure that his constituents can still get their voices hear. Um, okay – remember when people were up in arms that the Conservatives had defeated candidates as “shadow MPs” in opposition ridings? How is this any different, really?

The government is going to scale back on their Arctic operations, as well as some training operations in other environments, because of budget cuts. Also being scaled back are plans for a naval base in the North. Remember the whole “use it or lose it” mentality that the government was applying to Arctic sovereignty? Yeah, what ever happened to that?

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Roundup: 50 officials, few answers

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For his one-hour appearance at Finance Committee last night, Jim Flaherty brought along fifty – yes, fifty – department officials to help him answer questions on Omnibus Budget Bill 2: The Revenge. Because they were so concerned about the cost of answering Order Paper questions that this exercise was perfectly justified. What made it worse is that the sole hour seemed to be eaten up with either fulsome praise for Flaherty from the government side, and attempts to get him to talk about a future stimulus programme if the US goes off the “fiscal cliff” from the NDP. Nice to see that everyone is taking this seriously.

Here is everything you need to know about Harper’s trip to India, and why our trade deals are stalling.

Despite the strange firing of that local reporter in his riding, Conservative MP James Bezan stands behind his criticism of the CNOOC-Nexen deal. Good to know.

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Roundup: Security warnings

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The US House Intelligence Committee is warning that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is a threat to national security and wants Canada to “find other vendors,” even though Huawei is already doing work with companies like Telus and Bell here in Canada, and the report is apparently short on details. The Canadian government hints that Huawei won’t be allowed to bid on any secure government telecom network projects.

XL Foods says all of their problems are fixed and they should be able to reopen in a few days. But as Martin Patriquin notes, unless we start making some serious structural changes to the way we slaughter and process beef – by making it smaller scale – we can pretty much guarantee that this is going to happen again.

Hey, look – we’ve officially joined the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks! Let’s all begin a new round of supply management angst, everyone!

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Roundup: Clerical errors and attack ads

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The Supreme Court heard arguments about the Etobicoke Centre election yesterday, and the crux seem to hang on whether “clerical errors” are enough to overturn votes and “disenfranchise” Canadians. But how many errors are too many and how many should we let slide before it becomes “fatal” to the integrity of the election? It’s actually a weighty issue to ponder, and they have reserved judgement. While it’s supposed to be handled expeditiously, the point was also made that the remedy – a by-election – is time-sensitive, and so one can hope that the Court will be swift in its ruling. (I offered some of my own thoughts as to the arguments here).

The NDP launched their own attack ads in response to those the Conservatives launched against Thomas Mulcair. The crux of the message: Harper created the recession, the deficit, and is now making cuts to the vulnerable. It’s all pretty much demonstrably untrue and contradictory, but since when were attack ads supposed to be entirely factual when the intent is to cast doubt on your opponent? James Moore was quick to respond via the Twitter Machine: “Hope is better than fear.” Touché.

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Roundup: The inefficient drive for efficiencies

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Remember how the government was going to offer cash rewards to employees who could make implementable money-saving solutions? Here’s how the process turned out – byzantine, bloated, inefficient, and no one getting any money in the end.

The Conservatives have finally launched a couple of weak sauce attack ads against Thomas Mulcair.

It was the Conservatives versus the Council of Canadians at the Federal Court yesterday arguing about those seven ridings the Council is fighting to get the election results overturned in.

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