Great moments in reverse advertising

The Conservatives continue their cross Canada advertising campaign. Clearly this party is flush with cash, and driving towards the election as they seek your personal information for their databases.

This week, Daveberta has received a Conservatives Party householder courtesy of Rahim Jaffer. Unlike the two I received last week, at least Daveberta's were from his own M.P., even if my ears on the ground in Edmonton Strathcona refers to Jaffer as the invisible man (the reference is to how much time he actually spends in his constituency. As Harper's poster boy for diversity he is always prominently displayed standing silently behind the big boss.)

In the bastion of Conservatives, where even a dead-brain Conservative party can walk to power provincially, Jaffer is attacking the left. To give Jaffer some credit, this demonstrates that he is smart enough to know that the NDP is the real threat to him in Edmonton-Strathcona (okay, to be honest - someone either working for him or for the Conservative Party is smart enough to realize this). In an election where the Conservative vote went up 6.6% nationally, Jaffer only saw his vote increase by 2.3%, while the NDP's Linda Duncan vote shot up by 8.7% to finish 9% back from him. In 2006, the Liberals were a viable force shooting for a return to power. In 2008, the Liberals have yet to prove themselves forceful. A swing from Liberal voters to the NDP in that riding could spell trouble for Jaffer.

So how does the householder attack the NDP? By attacking the NDP on the very constituency that the NDP reaches out to - the working family. The householder appeals to anti-Toronto/anti-special interest groups sentiment of those fiercely independent Albertans. After all, it is not like the Conservatives are beholden to Bay Street or special interest groups.

The householder's claim to helping working families is that the Conservatives have cut taxes thereby putting more money in your pocket. The Conservatives have nominally cut personal income tax, but even then it is the wealthy that have benefited more than those in the middle to lower income brackets. Most of the tax cuts have come in the way of corporate tax cuts and the GST. Working families do benefit from the GST cut, but only marginally because it is those with more income and savings who tend to spend more. Furthermore, by cutting taxes like the GST, the government has handicapped itself from providing real services to Canadians. Obviously this Conservative government is idealistically opposed to the idea that a government should do anything but send people to war or to prison. However, if this government wanted to really help working families, they would tackled such issues as: housing (especially in places like Calgary where young people are forced to sleep in shelters with drug addicts), health care availability and wait times, the absent of competitive pricing in the banking industry, tackling the payday loan industry that feeds on the poorest in society, the affordability and accessibility of education, domestic transportation costs, increased holidays for workers, increased minimum wage, improved unemployment benefits and retraining, protection of workers pensions, pollution that harms the health of everyone and without putting the entire blame on the consumer.

In short, there is plethora of ways that this government could help working families. But, as this ad points out, the Conservatives only idea is to cut taxes.

On a related point, shouldn't householders from an M.P.'s office be focused on what the M.P. and their party is doing and not attacking another party? It is telling that this mail-out is completely silent on what Jaffer has been doing in Edmonton-Strathcona.