Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!
I don’t know how I am going to keep up with this election. I just don’t.
Yesterday, I wrote a column about Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s hilariously awful and cringe worthy campaign launch. As I started to move to other issues, I got a crush of emails and tweets from people (who aren’t fans of Hudak’s to put all cards on the table here) essentially saying “Hey did you see this?”
So Hudak’s blunders keep on rolling. First, he took his anti-”corporate welfare” message to a manufacturing plant – a plant that received, happily, provincial and federal development money. Ooops.
As it was at the recording studio the day before, Hudak’s team apparently is not bothering to pay attention to where in the space-time continuum they are sending their dear leader.
Then where was the whole Tim Hudak commercial thing that the Ottawa Citizen uncovered. Its a typically forgettable campaign commercial with Hudak trying to sound heroic while we see typical pictures of Ontario citizens hard at work building the Ontario of tomorrow. Except they aren’t Ontario citizens. Rather than take little bit of time to film, I don’t know, actual people from Ontario doing things people from Ontario do, the Progressive Conservative party decided to buy stock footage of Russians. The footage was bought by a Russian film maker who sells stock images.
In the grand scheme of things it is not that massive a deal. Lets face it, our government and corporations farm out work that could be done in Ontario to people around the country and the globe all the time. It’s frustrating, it hurts our local economy and is the reality of a global economy. No reason to expect the PCs do anything different.
Still, there is just something galling about a political leader and political party that cannot be bothered to use actual images of people in this province when you are asking us to vote for you to run Ontario. It’s pathetic actually. The party is saying it’s no big deal, this is how commercials are made so shut up about it. But we know if the Liberals, who are doing their own fair share of stupid by the way, did it the Tories would be all over them like a fat kid on candy.
It smacks of an epic laziness and contempt for Ontario residents to a) not use footage from Ontario and b) then dismiss anyone who complains about it. For good measure, the Tories used the opportunity to complain about the Liberals outsourcing security for the Pan Am Games to a U.S. firm. Certainly it is something to talk about, but the thing is when you get caught doing something stupid, the correct response is not to point out how the other guy did something more stupid.
I can only hope the Tories pull their act together soon. Or this is going to be a long long month.
