Month: July 2015

Friday, 24 July, 2015 -( 78˚F / 26˚C with a few  clouds overhead @ 6:30 pm near Ithaca, New York )-

What’s Happenin in Canada? I’ll give ya a hint: The ‘sitting’ Conservative ‘government’ is spamming most teevee channels up there with painfully annoying campaign style propaganda months ahead of their scheduled election in the fall: Their television ads are full of nauseating hints, false logic and innuendos – implying that the candidate the Prime Minister fears the most hates all Canadian tax payers, has his head up (*) you know where, and will pull back on all the sudden ‘entitlements’ the ‘government’ is trying to bribe potential voters with, and then strip older Canadians of their pensions and take the food out of starving babies mouths.

There are a couple ‘commercials’ in this barrage. They show people who are supposed to look intelligent discussing the head of the Liberal Party’s non-qualifications for the job of Prime Minister, his ‘lack of maturity’, his ‘clue-less-ness’ in how to defend Canada against the terrorists the Conservatives want everyone to believe are hiding under everybody’s beds, ready to pounce, torture and ‘brutally murder’ everyone and everything you hold dear.

In the second commercial in this barrage, which is aimed at senior citizens as well as the financially second class citizens who were not going to get any benefit worth noting from the Conservatives’ ‘Income Splitting’ scheme to begin with – the actors sit around and complain about the head of the Liberal Party and his campaign to cheat growing families out of the magical windfalls that have suddenly materialized ( sending the projected budget surplus into a budget shortfall bigger than the earlier projected surplus- ) and assure each other that his agenda will certainly try to cheat retirees out of their pensions and claw back every law passed or proposed by the Conservatives that would supposedly make average retirees’ lives a little more comfortable – which is a blatant lie – nothing the Conservatives have proposed was aimed at making anyone but the top couple percent of mega-millionaires more comfortable. – And the actors want to make the television viewing public believe that the Liberal Leader has made public speeches outlining his plot to take any possible advantages away from average and low income senior citizens, which is absolutely not the case. I am not endorsing the Liberal Leader, or anyone in this upcoming election, but I will say that this form of implicational propaganda looks to me like the smug Leaders of the Conservative Party up there have sunk to new lows. In the U.S.A. there is a saying: “The Republican Party has never lost an election by underestimating the intelligence of the voting public.” In Canada, it looks to me like the Conservatives have embraced a policy that can be summed up as, “Tell them anything, and they’ll believe it.”

– The biggest problem I have with these commercials is that the actors never answer the questions they ask each other, they follow those questions with unsupported accusations, off the wall implications and private suppositions which are supposed to look like the gospel truth because they’re coming from actors? – who, in the most often spammed commercial are pretending to be a board of directors for something like a respectable company. [Let me tell you, in my world there is no such thing as a respectable corporation.] Those actors’ snide comments are probably pretested on guinea pig audiences and calculated to make everybody want to throw up at the mention of the Liberal Candidates’ names. Of course, the test audiences are probably entirely made up of Conservative Party shills and I’m hoping they will be shocked senseless when the actual vote is counted and they find out how badly they misjudged the viewing public and the Canadian Citizenry whether they can stomach any main stream television or not.

– The second biggest problem I have with these commercials is the fact that the campaign has not officially begun up there yet so the rules governing fairness in campaigns do not apply yet. The incumbents can hammer everyone with lies and innuendos and call it ‘information’ and get away with that.

It also looks like *’all three’ of  the ‘major’ parties want to streamline their government by removing the Senate, that ‘House of sober second thought’ which should be an effective check and balance on their House of Commons – but has been used by every ruling party to stack the decks in their favour – Canadian Senators are ‘Appointed’ by the Prime Minister, for an indefinite length of time. [ If “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried” as Winston Churchill observed, you better realize that this is not Democracy, The Prime Ministerial type of government is whatcha call a “Republic” Sometimes referred to as a ‘Parliamentary Republic’, or since they still give lip service to the monarchy in England, ‘A Parliamentary Monarchy’,  ( *’all three’ = Nobody seems to be taking the Green Party or the Party Quebecois seriously – which I hope comes back to bite them where it hurts. )

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-And then today- there is email from an organization that is trying to defend the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) from the Conservative Prime Minister’s campaign to unfund them and take away the potential threat that Stephen Harper feels when confronted with the possibility that quality journalism might undo his efforts to institute corporate fascism as the ultimate form of government in Canada.

-I actually signed up for ‘news & updates’ about the Canadian Prime Minister’s campaign to gut the best news service in North America. Today they sent out this message in email. I’ll mess with their ‘donate’ messages (they were links) to make them even more painfully obvious:-

Everything below this line is copied and pasted from today’s email, it probably went out with ‘default’ font and I’ve colorized the ‘please send us money’ stuff.

——— djo ———

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Subject: The truth about Harper’s Child Care “Benefit”

This week millions of child “benefit” cheques arrived in Canadian families’ mail boxes, but there’s one thing Harper hasn’t told people — it’s taxable, and only worth about $13 per month for the average person. It’s a massive trick to try to buy Canadians’ votes with our own money.

Please donate today so we can counter Harper’s re-election strategy with hard-hitting ads to let Canadians know the truth about the Harper Conservative’s child care benefit.

Donate Today

Dear Doug,

This week the Harper Conservatives hit a new low. Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre raced around the country in an election-style campaign to promote Harper’s child care cheques, but there’s one thing he hasn’t told families: the new child “benefit” is taxable.

That’s right. Taxable. Which means that the Harper Conservatives are not only trying to buy our votes with our own money, they also plan to take BACK a hefty chunk in April – after the election.

Most benefits are taxable, but here’s the catch — while bringing in the new child “benefit” the Conservatives also just quietly axed our $2,225 child tax credit. After all’s said and done, that means a typical working parent will receive just $13 a month to cover skyrocketing child care costs.[1]

Thirteen dollars. Not a single child care space, not affordable care and nowhere near an actual plan – just $13. That’s not even enough to buy a pack of diapers.

The scary thing is this could work – millions of cheques are arriving in people’s mailboxes right now, and most of the Canadians Harper is targeting simply don’t know that this is a cheap trick to try to buy their votes with their own money and leave them with little to show for it. They’ll see the hundreds of dollars in their bank account, not realising it’s going to get clawed back at tax time, leaving them barely better off overall.

Together, we can counter Harper’s election ploy with hard-hitting, highly targeted ads to let people know the truth about the Harper Conservative’s child benefit, but we have to act fast, and get the ads online and into print while this is still top of mind for millions of Canadians.

Click here to chip in $10, $20 or $50 towards hard-hitting facebook and newspaper ads to warn parents who might get burned by this come tax time.

While outrageously claiming Harper’s new child care cheques mean “Christmas in coming early in July”, Poilievre forgot to mention that Santa will be taking your presents back in the next tax season.

To add insult to injury, Poilievre was also sporting a partisan Conservative Party shirt during his vote-buy – err, promotion tour, which – surprise surprise! – centred on swing ridings the Conservatives need to win the next election.[2]

Not only are the Conservatives deceiving families about how much we can spend, they’re promoting a government program to lock down a partisan vote – in the ridings where vote-splitting gave them a majority in 2011.

It’s a cheap election ploy. We know you won’t fall for it, but we need your help to warn parents about the actual worth of these cheques and how the Harper Conservatives think they can buy their votes.

If we raise $10,000 we’ll blast facebook with a series of highly targeted ads
If we raise $30,000 we’ll run print ads in local newspapers, broadcasting our warning across the country to the families that need to hear them most.

Can you chip in now to send a powerful message to hundreds of thousands of Canadians in battleground ridings across the country?

Advertising is all about volume. The more of us who chip in, the more ads we can run, and the more effective this will be. If thousands of us chip in what we can, we can blanket Conservative Swing Ridings with high-impact ads and make sure Canadians hear the truth about the Conservatives’ plan.

The Leadnow community takes childcare seriously. Thousands of us have listed the creation of a national childcare system as one of our top priorities, but we know that any progress towards building one depends on cooperation across party lines and a Conservative defeat in October. We’ll be there to keep pushing right after the election, but right now, we need to get the message out to Canadians.

Donate to fund powerful ads in the ridings Harper needs most to win again, and counter the Conservatives’ child care spin.

Thanks for all you do.

https://www.leadnow.ca/uccb

With hope and respect,
Brittany, Jamie, Matthew, Katelynn and Amara on behalf of the Leadnow team

P.S. If you prefer to donate by cheque, please send your cheque payable to “Leadnow” to:

Leadnow.ca
PO Box 2091, Stn Terminal
Vancouver, BC
V6B 3T2

Please include a note with your cheque, so we know who it’s from.

To donate by phone you can call us toll-free at 1‑855‑LEADN0W (1‑855‑532‑3609) ext 2.

We also accept donations by PayPal, Interac e-Transfer, Vancity Credit Union instant transfer, or pre-authorized payment from your bank account. See here for details: http://www.leadnow.ca/2015#donateoffline

Sources:

[1] Three things to know about the UCCB payments impact: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/3-things-to-know-about-the-uccb-payments-impact-1.3161108

[2] Pierre Poilievre’s hunt to hand out 3 billion in child care cheques: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pierre-poilievre-s-hunt-to-hand-out-3b-in-child-care-cheques-1.3145203