What I got in the mail

I'm not usually one to write about politics as I don't follow elections as closely as others do. I do follow them and try to learn the different platforms and research a bit about the candidates who run in my riding. So when I receive mailings about platform policies and info pamphlets, I try to spend some time to read them.

The Conservative candidate sent a pretty slick looking info card and it starts promising with short, informative blurbs about himself. Although there are no platform type of promises on it, the card looks professional and the presentation gets high marks. The drawback is that he is trying way too hard to look cool in his pictures. It doesn't really work because a) he obviously has makeup on (and way too much at that) and b) his poses are too contrived (nobody stands like that). But, I must admit, these are not the most important things when you go vote for a person. I'm sure he looks and acts fine in real life.

On the same day, we received a general Liberal pamphlet that promotes Stephane Dion's Green Shift. It starts off with the following:

Dear Friends,
Today our planet faces the most serious environmental crisis in recorded human history. The global scientific community is agreed that climate change is caused by human activity and we much act now.

I had to do a double take on the last sentence - "we much act now." After chuckling and then laughing out loud, I wondered how this pamphlet got past the many proofreading editors in the Liberal campaign (well, I hope they have proofreaders for this kind of stuff). For, what I think, is a nationally distributed flyer, you would think that someone would have taken the time to fine-comb through the wordy text to make sure there were no mistakes (I can hear the jabs now, "He writes similar to how he speaks").

This is unfortunate and probably won't help Dion gain any more votes for the Liberal cause. Furthermore, the rest of the flyer is wordy, not attractive (printed in B&W and hardly any white space), and has no concrete explanation on how the Green Shift carbon tax works. They give two examples of how families can receive tax benefits from the carban tax, but does not give the exact calculation on how it arrives on those numbers. If you want, you have to go to their website for more information... which I did.

And to tell you the truth, it is quite confusing - on one hand you caculate what your tax benefit is for your family with a calculator provided ($650/year for our household), but it still does not give you the mathematics or the logic on how it arrived at the end number. When I clicked to get more info, it showed how the Green Shift carbon tax adds cost to a family. So what is it? A "benefit" or a cost? The extra info doesn't even talk about a "benefit" at all!

I don't think this Green Shift plan is going to go anywhere. If Dion is staking the whole election on this, we will see the Liberals go from Official Opposition to be the official laughing stalk of Election Canada 2008.