By this: 

HuffPo doesn’t like what my former boss did. Poor babies. 

The above image, from February 1996, is of one Jean Chretien throttling a protester, natch, who had gotten too close at a Flag Day celebration. 

When that image – the fabled Shawinigan Handshake – started to circulate, the tall foreheads in the press gallery (and, much later, HuffPo) started to write Chretien’s political obituary. Former Conservative leader Joe Clark demanded Chretien apologize, as I recall, and Reform Party MPs denounced him. The crypto-separatist media attacked him, too, and Amnesty International even condemned him. I’m not making this up. 

So Chretien called an aide to ask what pollsters had to say about the effect the Shawinigan Handshake had on public opinion. “We won’t tell you,” the aide told Chretien. “We’re worried that, when you see how positive the effect was, you’ll go out and strangle someone else.”

What do you think, Dear Reader? I think it was awesome.  You?

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Quote:

Jennifer Hollett, the former MuchMusic VJ and now digital strategist, and Linda McQuaig, journalist and author, are the NDP candidates in the two federal ridings located in the heart of downtown Toronto – and right now, they are basking in an orange glow emanating from Rachel Notley’s Alberta.  

Canvassing in their ridings of Toronto Centre and University-Rosedale, both women have noticed a change in the reception at the door since the New Democrats’ upset win in the Prairie province in May.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Jen during the (rather unpleasurable) Chow campaign a year ago. She was smart, classy and professional. As such, some of our Daisy colleagues have been working hard on her campaign.  

I don’t know her Liberal opponent, at all, but I found it revealing that she regards her regular “international” opinion pieces in U.S. newsoaoers as what her constituents want. I think she’s wrong about that. Like Tip O’Neill, I believe that all politics are still local.

That aside, the good people of Toronto could do a lot worse than Jen Hollett. She would make a terrific Member of Parliament.

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It’s WestJet, however, so the chances of actually getting there are somewhere between slim and none. Happy Canada Day anyway, eh?

  

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Good. But why not the pro-the pro-Nazi rag distributed by Canada Post, as well?

Sickening images from Your Ward News, and the Twitter feed of its convicted-of-sexual-assault editor, below. 

  

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Liberals still wince, a little bit, when reminded of Stephane Dion’s Green Shift. Some of them even attempt to rewrite history, and suggest they never supported it when it was party policy in 2008.

But everyone did, including Justin Trudeau, who – like a good soldier – came out to Vancouver in October 2008 to stump for votes for Dion. News reports of their rally at Science World make no mention of Trudeau attempting to shift away from the Green Shift. None. Given how successfully the CPC demonized the Green Shift in 2008 – and how they have campaigned against carbon taxes, for years – that is significant.

And, perhaps, that’s why Trudeau’s environmental policy announcement yesterday – in Vancouver, again – was also significant. The Green Shift is referenced in the headline over Akin’s column, but I can’t fund any other reference to it in the coverage of yesterday. Did the media ask Trudeau about Dion’s plan? Did it come up at all? We don’t know. But the NDP and Tory responses to what he said, I thought, were desultory – they seemed to be phoning it in.

It’s still early, of course, and attack ads may be in the works as I write this. But perhaps things have changed, in the intervening years, and carbon taxes/green shifts aren’t as radioactive as they once were. We shall see. In the meantime, here’s an amazing (and revealing) photo of Trudeau and Dion on that day back in October 2008.

Caption contest!

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In this, the NDP leader frankly looks not unlike a megalomaniac without a shred of principle. But, then again, the main source is Dimitri Pseudas (a guy who allegedly has been investigated by the Mounties for stuff like this, according to the Globe), and the author is Martin Patriquin (a guy who trades in inaccuracy and prejudice, according to the Quebec Press Council).

So NDP stalwarts will likely shrug it off. Should they?

UPDATE: Mulcair is denying it all, pretty categorically. Will Pseudas and Patriquin’s anonymous sources now pony up real evidence? Doubt it. Looks like an LPC war room fail until they do.

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He’ll beat her.

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There has been a ton of commentary about what the ad is. There hasn’t been a lot of commentary about what it isn’t.

It isn’t:

1. Proprietary: The CBC has tried to claim it is, but the CBC is mistaken.  There is no copyright in news.  Geist slices and dices Mother Corp., here: “The CBC is simply wrong. Its guiding principle is wrong and its attempt to use copyright to take down an offensive advertisement is wrong.”
2. Ubiquitous: I don’t know about you, but the only place I have actually seen that ad is online.  All the stories say that – and the 45-second length of the spot makes me wonder if it can be effectively broadcast, too. There’s an excellent chance, therefore, it’s a classic political bait-and-switch – drive some critical attention to a story that is unhelpful to your opponent, but do it without spending a cent.
3. Effective: It overstates its case.  It’s like those toxic abortion leaflets landing in mailboxes all over Canada in recent days – to make their point, they rely on horrific images of the very thing (fetuses) they profess to be concerned about (fetuses). A better design of the ad could have made the same point without using ISIS’ own imagery.

That all said, the spot reminds me of Willie Horton.  That, too, enraged the chattering classes and progressives.  But those weren’t the folks Willie Horton was aimed at – and, in the end, Willie Horton worked with the American voters the GOP were courting.

Bottom line: most of the job in politics, now, is simply getting people to pay attention.  My hunch is that the hue and cry about that CPC/ISIS/JT ad has helped to achieve the mission’s key objective: i.e., to get the electorate to pay attention in the sleepy Summer months and agree, yet again, that Justin Trudeau “just isn’t ready” to deal with the horrors that seemingly occur daily in this world.

That may make you mad.  But it’s unlikely you were ever part of the audience the CPC had in mind when they did the thing up on some staffer’s computer, for about ten bucks.

 

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Smart. (Shows what I know.)

UPDATE: My former North Van pal Shahriar Shahabi has invented a name for it – it’s the Mulcair Hair!

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So:

1. If you’ve got the dough, and the NDP does;
2. If you have achieved historic levels of popularity due to the other parties’ spending scandals, and the NDP has; and
3. If you want to campaign against the Senate, and the NDP does…

Would you make this issue a hill to die on? From The Hill Times:

With MPs’ expenses still accumulating in their ridings during the summer recess and the House administration reportedly set to reject claims starting July 1, sources say the Board of Internal Economy’s battle with the NDP could hurt the party’s finances as well as its messaging in the upcoming election campaign.

“If the Board of Internal Economy starts pulling those funds back from a large number of NDP members, that’s hitting them at a really unhelpful time. They’re popular in the polls … they’re competitive in a way that they’ve never been before, and now they’re going to have [the] Board of Internal Economy sticking a spoke in their wheel?” said Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella, president of Daisy Consulting Group, in an interview last week.

“[It would] affect their ability to pay for all kinds of things at exactly the wrong time,” he said.

Can someone explain the strategy to me, here? As I’ve written before, this is the kind of issue that could seriously derail the NDP’s upward ascent.  Why the Hell didn’t they just pay the money back when they had the chance?

 

 

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