I want him to win. Really I do, but in a land where my fellows prefer stability to almost everything else, I'm starting to wonder. Here's some zingers from the latest Conservative Mailouts: “[CONFIDENTIAL] Team Pierre's letter to you.”In this one, I am told that this is for my eyes only. And I am a VERIFIED Canada First Patriot. I can click for the memo. And I am not supposed to show my screen to any Canada Last Liberals.Ooh, I'm in the group. This is clearly clandestine. So exciting.You can imagine how dispirited I was when I did click the memo and didn't see anything new. Each paragraph has the same cliches: A Common Sense Conservative government will...; The Bring It Home Tax Cut; After Ten Years, the Carney-Trudeau Liberals...; Rebuild pride; End cancel culture. Yada, yada, yada...In short, I couldn't find “the BIG secret”.No one likes to be hosed. Now, I'm not the most intellectual guy around, but even when I'm picturing the most stereotypical redneck neanderthal, sixth-grade educated, knee-jerk ultra right-wing dimwit -- the worst that a CBC cartoonist could conjure, I still can't picture the guy who would buy this stuff. Just like every time they send me “a message from Stephen Harper directly to Trevor Tucker”!There must be a point in all this, I assume. If the point is not what the mailout says it is (ie. Sharing a memo just between close friends on important information I could not get anywhere else,) then what is the point? Is it to make me feel part of a group? Well, tell me something new then. Tell me specifics about the group. Give me stories. Introduce me to my peeps.I'm thinking that the point must be at all costs, to get the same information out there. Hammer it home. Surely there must be a statute of limitations or a sort on this? Diminishing returns? How many times must one hear “Bring it Home” before one wants to say, “No, actually...just leave it where it is”.And what's the 'it?' I no longer know. Now, I'm no big political PR consultant either (though what qualifies one for that gel-slicked shmoozy crew I'll never know,, but I remember from teenage-hood always wondering who was giving these guys —Liberal or Conservative — their advice. The same Canadian palaver never ends: cliches. Demonizing. And WAY overly scripted. So please, man. We all feel immense uncertainty right now, and so little from the Conservative camp seems to be addressing it. I want evidence that things will get cheaper. I want to know that we will never have the same brainless, hyper-bureaucratic tyrannical response to a health emergency ever again. Are you truly more like us than the bureaucracy we have come to loathe?What institutions do you value? What is it about Canada that you love and that we've lost? Find a way to bring the voice from those Jordan Peterson-type interviews into these otherwise inane soundbites. And if you must do these mailouts, ask us questions, real questions that seek answers rather than the kind that fit into four tabs at the bottom.People are more likely to be persuaded by someone who sounds like them. You can't sound like everyone. You have some great people around you who sound like the rest of Canadians. Free them up. Why not share their voices? And for heavens' sake, admit where you have some ambiguity. For many, this would be music to our ears — especially the ears of a younger generation that is increasingly willing to simply spoil their ballot, because they see little to no value in their vote. You don't have all the answers. You don't have the truth by the tail. We all know it. Will you be the first politician to admit it?Not every issue has to be a polarizing one, a dichotomy. Sure, Trudeau failed with letting in so many immigrants, but like with every college and university scrambling for foreign dollars, the problem wasn't the numbers, the problem was infrastructure. Why not at least empower individual communities such as faith groups who want to help refugees?Water on indigenous reserves. Getting to the bottom of this 'mass graves' business. Surely we can both try to protect kids who are struggling with their sexuality and make sure parents are in the loop? Why not fund the arts, and for everyone not just the CBC pets. Make the CBC local again.Of course, the list is endless. But the point is, the same old is...old. And if there were ever a time that calls us to do better its now.
