By Alison@Creekside
The Elections Canada video above, promoting the youth vote, is exactly what the Cons intend their Fair Elections Act to put a stop to, an anonymous gov official told The Hill Times, providing them with a link to the video.
As you can see, it shows Xs representing ballot votes moving from a rock concert to a recycling symbol and industry emitters and ends in a quiet forest: “Vote. Shape your world.”
Interesting that the Cons would cop to admitting that a vid loosely advocating that youth exercise their vote for a cleaner environment in a better world is not in the Cons’ own best interests.
“. . . the official reiterated the government’s position that political parties and candidates, not Elections Canada, would be responsible for increasing voter turnout under Bill C-23.”
Right. So just for comparison, here is an example of the kind of “political parties and candidates” outreach the anon gov official is presumably referring to: the Con Party puffin poop election ad that came out at the same time as the EC vid [that never aired; see Update below]:
Galvanizing stuff really, except that six-year olds don’t have the vote.
A spokesperson for Minister of State for Democratic Reform Pierre Poilievre (Nepean Carleton, Ont.) said the government is addressing the content of Elections Canada voting promotion campaigns.
I’ll bet. Can’t be offending the industry dudes who wrote the Environmental Assessment Act 2012 for them.
And I’m way past fed up with this Con tripe about shutting down EC’s ads promoting the youth vote, supposedly on the grounds they are not successful because the youth vote hasn’t increased, in favour of having individual political parties do it instead. Party ads targeting youth have run concurrently with the EC ads so using the Cons’ correlation error logic, they’ve already proven they don’t work either.
You know what does keep the youth vote from dropping off the electoral map entirely? Vouching. The next election will presumably fall in October 2015. How many students who just moved to a new campus the previous month are going to have voter ID with a current address for that riding one month after they arrive in it.
Remember that scene in Annie Hall when some pompous pontificating blowhard in a theatre line-up is grandly interpreting Marshall McLuhan and McLuhan shows up and says he’s full of shit? If only life was like that, says Woody Allen.
Well that happened to the Cons this week when Harry Neufeld, the expert they’ve been heavily citing in support of their bid to kill off vouching and voter info cards due to widespread voter fraud, showed up and said they were full of shit.
Neufeld’s argument in favour of actually widening the use of vouching and on the dangers of the Cons’ new voter suppression bill is here.
Poilievre of course just shrugged it off. He likes his own pompous pontificating blowhard interpretation of Neufeld’s report better than he likes Neufeld’s.
The Cons don’t even care any more that the Fair Elections Act has been revealed to be a ploy to suppress the vote. They’re just counting on Team Con showing up to vote and as many other voters as possible becoming too disgusted to bother.
Update: Hill Times: “Elections Canada says a video ad the Conservative government cited as the type of advertising campaign it wants to prohibit the elections agency from using under the proposed new election law was never actually aired.”
The ad was uploaded to their own Youtube account in 2008 by FluoHill, the art collective that produced it.
Mayrand cancelled it before it aired in 2007.
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