Conservatives sentence Tom Mulcair to death by talking point

OTTAWA—The Conservatives have apparently sentenced Tom Mulcair to death by talking point.

As a means of dragging him to the political gallows, the talking points can be absurd or disingenuous, but they must be ubiquitous.

The opposition leader and his caucus have, in the past months, been called “job killers’’ in the country and, in a golden oldie trotted out Tuesday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, subversives who have headed south of the border to undermine the Canadian economy.

Mulcair’s comments on environmental sustainability and the Alberta oilsands have been deemed by the Conservatives to be a threat to national unity, and now he and his gang are labelled a bunch of carbon taxers.

The one constant to the attacks is repetition.

In the two days since the Commons returned, MPs, ministers and the prime minister himself have popped up from their seats, all of them resembling a message track Jack-in-the-Box, spouting “carbon tax.”

Tuesday, they planted a backbencher to ask Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz about the perils of the phantom NDP carbon “tax,” other backbenchers jumped to their feet to make statements in both official languages on the carbon tax, with one, Scott Armstrong from Nova Scotia, virtually coughing up his party’s emailed talking points whole before question period.

Harper even took the unusual step of switching from French to English in answer to a question from Mulcair so he could blurt out “carbon tax” in English.

Why?

No one outside this bubble is talking about a carbon tax, the government is not the opposition and we are still three years from an election.

The answer is, of course, it is has worked for Conservatives in the past, and they are, frankly very good at an attack strategy that can be described as shoot, reload, shoot, repeat until the landscape is scorched.

It has worked on the Liberals in the past, but we have now moved into untilled fields.

The NDP has never formed a government at the federal level, but it has also never had to fight back against attacks to this extent.

This is a test for both government and opposition and it all boils down to a battle over whether New Democrats can ever convince Canadians that they should have a turn overseeing the public purse.

From the Conservative perspective, why does it work?

It plants a characterization in the minds of voters — not the minority of voters who have the time and inclination to read or watch a number of media sources, take their politics unfiltered, or do their own research to come to an informed decision.

It works on those whose lives consist of early mornings, packing school lunches, long work days, sprints to the after-care program at the school, then an evening on the soccer pitch or at dance class.

They absorb their politics in snippets, by osmosis and repeated talking points, television ads played over and over until a perception sticks.

It works because it gives the party so-called “free media,’’ by engaging journalists who write about a non-issue because it fills a void, it creates debate because it has been injected into the national dialogue by the governing party.

It energizes the base that will work to keep the tax-and-spend hordes from the gates, and, as we are watching south of the border, the era of a polarized, largely disengaged voter makes it an imperative that voting bases remain sufficiently motivated to head to the polls.

And it works, if the NDP allows it, by keeping the leader and the caucus off balance, responding to charges, baseless or otherwise, forcing a leader who promises to be “proactive,” into a “reactive” mode.

In this case, Mulcair had to characterize the charges as “lies,’’ the day before Parliament resumed and that became the news of the day on the political stories that made it to national television, not his comments on what the NDP had planned for the coming session.

The NDP may be here at the federal level for the first time, but they appear to have learned the first lesson when dodging such volleys — respond.

No charge is too ridiculous or over-the-top to be ignored.

The term Swiftboating entered the North American political lexicon because John Kerry took a holiday in 2004 rather than respond to Vietnam Swiftboat vets who questioned his war record.

So far, New Democrats have been up to the task, but when facing a government that never stops campaigning, the opposition will have to use a lot of its time in the spotlight parrying rather than proposing.

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Tim Harper