The Conservatives were in more of a hurry to kill the wheat board than the gun registry.
Bill C-18, the wheat board bill, received royal assent on Thursday. C-19, the gun registry bill, won't get through the House of Commons before February.
It might be, as the Tories say, that the government had to kill the wheat board first to give farmers time to get ready for the 2012 wheat-marketing season, or it could be that the gun registry is more useful for the Conservatives as a cash cow.
The party started running an ad on radio stations across Canada on Monday.
It starts with a woman's voice: "Hey honey," she says. "So, it's almost gone."
"What is?" says a man.
"The wasteful long-gun registry," she says.
"That's great news," says the man.
"Yeah, the Conservative government has been given a strong mandate from Canadians to scrap it," she says.
"Great," says the man. "Now hunters and farmers won't be treated as criminals anymore."
The ad suggests listeners visit a website, www.scrappedtheregistry.ca, a domain name the party registered in October. If you click on the main art — a father and son walking along with light shotguns and a couple of dead partridges — you get to a petition. Sign the petition, and you are brought to a page where they ask if you would like to join the party or, ahem, make a donation.
The Conservatives are way better at raising money than the other parties because they are so good at this kind of thing.
They find issues that resonate, find out who cares about them, find ways to reach those people, send them emotionally charged messages asking for money, use that money to find out what issues resonate, and so on.
There may be political organizations in the world that are better at this than the Conservative Party of Canada, but there can't be many of them, and they can't be much better.
From 2007 to 2010, the Conservatives raised $73 million. In the same period, the Liberals raised $25.7 million and the NDP raised $17.7 million.
The party has used this money to devastating effect, running attack ads that branded Stephane Dion as Not a Leader and Michael Ignatieff as Just In It For Himself, which is all fair.
The Tories learned this stuff from the Liberals, who saved their party's bacon at the end of 2004 election with vicious attack ads that ended with a gun being fired at the viewer.
But since 2006, when the Tories took over, the Liberals have been bad at fundraising and advertising.
The Tories are choking off the Liberals' ability to raise cash, by removing corporate money, lowering the individual donation limit and killing the per-vote subsidy, and neither the Liberals nor the NDP have found veins of public opinion they can mine as effectively as the Tories do.
In a lot of political campaigns in the United States, the negative attack ads are excellent. When two fast-responding, well-funded campaigns go at it, the ads become a kind of electronic debate, like a good boxing match.
In Canada, the Liberals have been too poor to buy enough ads, and the ads they did buy didn't respond effectively to Conservative attacks. As a result, the last two elections were like one-sided boxing matches, until the Liberals were on the canvas and the NDP, who had pretty good ads, managed to come second.
The powerful Conservative advertising-fundraising machine seems to influence the government to the point that it is timing legislation and tailoring messages to maximize fundraising potential.
The clearest example of that was a 2007 letter from then-Conservative campaign director Doug Finley, which warned Tory supporters that a CBC reporter had been caught writing committee questions for a Liberal MP.
"We may not have the support of the Liberals' powerful allies," he wrote. "But we do have the support of people like you. Proud Canadians who work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules."
It was a classic us-versus-them pitch, the kind of thing that sends supporters reaching for their chequebooks. But the CBC reporter was Krista Erickson, who dated a Conservative MP, and now hosts a show on Sun TV, which is much more intimately linked to the Conservative Party than the CBC has ever been linked to any party. She shouldn't have written questions for an MP, but it was hardly a dangerous conspiracy.
The party is ready to crank up the rhetoric to provoke emotions among donors, which makes our national political conversation even more dim-witted than it needs to be.
Heritage Minister James Moore offers a nuanced message on the CBC, but Dean Del Mastro, the prime minister's parliamentary secretary, seems to get his scripts from the anti-CBC types at Sun TV, who seem to be motivated by the commercial interests of Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau.
He may be doing that to crank up the base for a fundraising pitch, and the government may have delayed the gun-registry bill to squeeze more cash from gun enthusiasts.
The tail seems to be wagging the dog.
Origin
Source: Canada.com
Bill C-18, the wheat board bill, received royal assent on Thursday. C-19, the gun registry bill, won't get through the House of Commons before February.
It might be, as the Tories say, that the government had to kill the wheat board first to give farmers time to get ready for the 2012 wheat-marketing season, or it could be that the gun registry is more useful for the Conservatives as a cash cow.
The party started running an ad on radio stations across Canada on Monday.
It starts with a woman's voice: "Hey honey," she says. "So, it's almost gone."
"What is?" says a man.
"The wasteful long-gun registry," she says.
"That's great news," says the man.
"Great," says the man. "Now hunters and farmers won't be treated as criminals anymore."
The ad suggests listeners visit a website, www.scrappedtheregistry.ca, a domain name the party registered in October. If you click on the main art — a father and son walking along with light shotguns and a couple of dead partridges — you get to a petition. Sign the petition, and you are brought to a page where they ask if you would like to join the party or, ahem, make a donation.
The Conservatives are way better at raising money than the other parties because they are so good at this kind of thing.
They find issues that resonate, find out who cares about them, find ways to reach those people, send them emotionally charged messages asking for money, use that money to find out what issues resonate, and so on.
There may be political organizations in the world that are better at this than the Conservative Party of Canada, but there can't be many of them, and they can't be much better.
From 2007 to 2010, the Conservatives raised $73 million. In the same period, the Liberals raised $25.7 million and the NDP raised $17.7 million.
The party has used this money to devastating effect, running attack ads that branded Stephane Dion as Not a Leader and Michael Ignatieff as Just In It For Himself, which is all fair.
The Tories learned this stuff from the Liberals, who saved their party's bacon at the end of 2004 election with vicious attack ads that ended with a gun being fired at the viewer.
But since 2006, when the Tories took over, the Liberals have been bad at fundraising and advertising.
The Tories are choking off the Liberals' ability to raise cash, by removing corporate money, lowering the individual donation limit and killing the per-vote subsidy, and neither the Liberals nor the NDP have found veins of public opinion they can mine as effectively as the Tories do.
In a lot of political campaigns in the United States, the negative attack ads are excellent. When two fast-responding, well-funded campaigns go at it, the ads become a kind of electronic debate, like a good boxing match.
In Canada, the Liberals have been too poor to buy enough ads, and the ads they did buy didn't respond effectively to Conservative attacks. As a result, the last two elections were like one-sided boxing matches, until the Liberals were on the canvas and the NDP, who had pretty good ads, managed to come second.
The powerful Conservative advertising-fundraising machine seems to influence the government to the point that it is timing legislation and tailoring messages to maximize fundraising potential.
The clearest example of that was a 2007 letter from then-Conservative campaign director Doug Finley, which warned Tory supporters that a CBC reporter had been caught writing committee questions for a Liberal MP.
"We may not have the support of the Liberals' powerful allies," he wrote. "But we do have the support of people like you. Proud Canadians who work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules."
It was a classic us-versus-them pitch, the kind of thing that sends supporters reaching for their chequebooks. But the CBC reporter was Krista Erickson, who dated a Conservative MP, and now hosts a show on Sun TV, which is much more intimately linked to the Conservative Party than the CBC has ever been linked to any party. She shouldn't have written questions for an MP, but it was hardly a dangerous conspiracy.
The party is ready to crank up the rhetoric to provoke emotions among donors, which makes our national political conversation even more dim-witted than it needs to be.
Heritage Minister James Moore offers a nuanced message on the CBC, but Dean Del Mastro, the prime minister's parliamentary secretary, seems to get his scripts from the anti-CBC types at Sun TV, who seem to be motivated by the commercial interests of Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau.
He may be doing that to crank up the base for a fundraising pitch, and the government may have delayed the gun-registry bill to squeeze more cash from gun enthusiasts.
The tail seems to be wagging the dog.
Origin
Source: Canada.com
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