City
Cloudy with a Chance of Partisan Ads?
It was unseasonably warm today. As I write this it's already gotten dark out, and it's 17 degrees in Toronto. The average temperature for October is typically around 9 degrees.
But that's not the only strange thing about today's Environment Canada weather map. Looking above the map of the country I saw a banner ad.
A banner ad? On a government website? Yes. And not only is it a banner ad but it reads "Speech from the Throne - Strong Leadership. A Better Canada." Okay, if the government is going to put ads on the weather website the Speech from the Throne is a good thing to advertise about. More Canadians should be knowledgeable about what is announced in the Speech from the Throne. But look closer at it. It's blue. And white. And that slogan seems familiar. Of course, that's the slogan of the Conservatives' "election campaign before there's an election" campaign.
A partisan banner ad on a government website?
Is it just me, or does anyone else consider this crossing the line? The Environment Canada website is meant to be a source of information for all Canadians. People come to this site to find out what it will be like outside today. They don't come to the site to be told who to vote for. There isn't even an election going on. In fact, since there isn't an election going on, it seems that this ad is perfectly acceptable - at least in the eyes of the law.
In February Elections Canada spokesperson Stephane Bechand told the Toronto Star that "election advertising means the transmission to the public by any means during an election period of an advertising message that promotes or opposes a registered party or the election of a candidate." Of course, at this point there is nothing to prove that this advertisement was paid for by the Conservative party of Canada, but it seems awfully unlikely that anyone else would have asked for the ad to be placed there. However, since there isn't an election campaign going on no one needs to declare where the funding came from - so we will likely never know.
Could it be that the Stephen Harper's office realised that the Environment Canada Weatheroffice website is frequently visited by all Canadians and placed an ad there? There's no way to prove that either. However, regardless of how the ad got there or who paid for it the fact remains that it's quite blatantly advertising the Conservative Party. And I think that's wrong.
It's at least as bad as using a penny in an ad.
Image: "What the hell?" by blogTO Flickr Pooler Jamuudsen
Discussion
14 Comments
Sort By Oldest First / Newest First
Subscribe
Point taken, but I'm still not a fan.
This is just a shameless party political just like most of the governemnt's website since the election.
Let's get Harper out and common sense back in.
Whenever you get Liberals in power (at any level) then the colour tone of all government materials changes to red tones, and with the conservatives blue.
Take a look at the current www.gov.on.ca (click through to your language of choice) - lots of red highlights. A red background with white text link to the budget and a button below it labelled "Fairness. It's time for fairness for all" sounds pretty marketing-ish to me. Hell they even changed the provinces logo this time around to look more like their own.
None of this crap is new. They all do it and it's equally as shameless.
For more proof that the Nonsense Revolution is open for business as usual, consider the posturing around the Speech from the Throne and particularly the blustery "tough on crime" omnibus bill. One of the first moves of the Harris government in Ontario was the introduction of an omnibus bill that shoved through plenty of the odious policies that many voters no doubt thought were going to disappear once the election was over. The federal Conservatives' omnibus bill is nowhere nearly as "revolutionary," but the attitude to compromise -- which is to say, the belief that there must be none, ever -- is the same.
These people hate government. The very idea of it revolts them. There should be cops, of course, to beat down the scum, but the rest of the state is not so much useless as actively bad. Their mission is to ruin things badly enough that the rest of us agree.
I'd say more, except Jerrold has firmly stated that he will, in fact, decapitate me and feed my severed head to wild dogs.
the throne speech is "insert whatever" on the weather page. The throne
speech itself should be advertising that it is "insert whatever".
Whether it's the governing party's stance on war or
kittens or strong throne speeches using the weather page to spread propaganda is just wrong, IMO.
And I agree with Anna C. that we should be dissecting the political messages imbedded within our narrow national media- but thinking that we can expect some sort of objective fact in any media is very naive (consider BlogTo for instance).
People assume that THE NATIONAL WEATHER OFFICE will be. It's a website that gives us weather, that's it. It shouldn't be throwing in a political message alongside today's highs.