Will you be tricked, National Post?

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 8:57 AM - 0 Comments

Apparently so:

Liberal MPs urge review of party’s carbon tax plan
Tories claim it shows split within Dion’s caucusThree Liberal MPs have voted for a motion calling for a review of the effects of a carbon tax on agriculture and seeking protection for farmers, just days before the party plans to unveil a policy it hopes will be key to winning the next election.

As anyone who was up last night reading ITQ after midnight already knows, I’ve already devoted far too much time to unspooling the spin on this story – follow those links for background  – but here are a few quick notes on the Post’s version of events:
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UPDATED: If you're going to spin, at least get your facts straight: Ryan Sparrow Mistweets. Again.

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

UPDATED: NEW MATERIAL IN BOLD

More lessons in how not to score political points and rebuild your credibility with the media, courtesy of Conservative misspokesperson Ryan Sparrow, with extraneous internal dialogue as imagined by ITQ, not that there’s much chance you’d mistake it for anything else:

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You say goodbye, I say 'Yoo hoo': Was Oily the Splot meant to damage Dion, or just do damage control?

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 16, 2008 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Last week, Stephen Taylor published a behind-the-scenes account of the life and death of Oily the Splot, the now-silenced spokestain for the Conservative Party’s anti-carbon tax campaign. In it, he suggests that the decision to release Oily into the wild was a deliberate attempt to get out ahead of the Liberals – who were still dillydallying over the launch of the plan – by pre-defining Dion’s “green shift” as a “permanent tax on everything” – a simplistic, cartoon-like approach to a substantial policy debate; but one that, they hoped, would poison the waters before the Liberal plan had even been announced:

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Well, that about wraps it up for Oily

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 3:54 PM - 0 Comments

UPDATE – Wells has the details of the contract – which does exist, although it is between the Conservatives and Retail Media Inc., Fuelcast and Retail Media Inc., which, presumably, would have bought the ads on behalf of its client, and which apparently was informed by Fuelcast this morning that the network doesn’t run political ads.

In a curious confluence of events, it was Retail Media Inc. that disassociated itself from certain receipts that the Conservative Party claimed had been submitted for regional ad buys.

From the Globe and Mail:

For instance, one invoice in the amount of $39,999.91, filed on behalf of Steve Halicki, candidate for the Ontario riding of York South-Weston, was on Retail Media letterhead, the affidavit states.

When executives with the company were shown the invoice, one said “the invoice must have been altered or created by someone, because it did not conform to the appearance of invoices sent by Retail Media to the Conservative Party of Canada with respect to the media buy,” the affidavit states.

Will Oily be freed from the bonds of video screen advertising, to live out the rest of his days as a virtual spokesblob on the campaign website? Or will the Conservatives force Fuelcast to air party ads against its will? Tune in tomorrow! Or possibly later tonight.

From the latest CTV update:
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Alas, poor Oily, we knew him …

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 2:15 PM - 0 Comments

… actually, not all that well at all, and now it looks like we may not even get the chance. Not in Toronto, anyway, where Oily doesn’t seem to be welcome — not when he shows up on a gas pump video screen.

From Spacing Toronto:

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have tried over and over to brand itself the chief defender of law and order in this country. But yesterday, when it launched its latest round of attack ads on the Liberals, the Conservative Party used illegal advertising space to get its message out, according to the co-ordinator of IllegalSigns.ca.

The Conservatives didn’t just use a single illegal video screen to play the fiercely partisan advertisement. IllegalSigns.ca co-ordinator Rami Tabello told Spacing that every single screen that the spot is playing on at Toronto gas stations is illegal. According to media reports, gas station video screens are the primary vehicle for reaching Torontonians.

ITQ spoke to Rami Tabello earlier today.
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The gas-station gambit having collapsed into yet another lamentable cock-up…

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

…teams of Tory kids in yellow T-shirts have fanned out across downtown Ottawa to hand out post cards critiquing the Dion carbon tax thingie. How old-fashioned. We will have more shortly.

Nearly Instant Update on Oily: Ryan Sparrow clarifies. Sort of.

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

UPDATE (But read the whole post if you’ve not done so already, or it won’t make any sense): If Fuelcast isn’t involved in the Conservatives’ advertising campaign, why are the commercials described as “fuelcasts” on the website? Given that “fuelcast” is a registered servicemark owned by Daktronics (which co-owns Fuelcast.com), it would seem likely to perpetuate the confusion over just what gas pump network is running the ads.

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In response to my email on the Fuelcast/fuelcast confusion, Conservative spokesperson Ryan Sparrow has this to say about the CanWest story, in which he reportedly told reporter Becky Rynor that the ads were purchased through fuelcast.com, which I’ve reproduced in full so as not to commit metamisquotage:

Misquote all of our ads are bought through a media buyer

To which I replied with:

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Introducing Oily the Splot: Because who didn't love being ambushed by the ever-helpful Clippy?

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

Okay, so I’m probably not exactly the target demographic for the new Conservative ad campaign – which is given far more thoughtful consideration by Colleagues Wells and Wherry. But really, how many undecided voters out there are going to give serious consideration to what an anthropomorphized glob of fossil fuel has to say about environmental policy?

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Sunday, buffoonish Sunday…

By kadyomalley - Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 7:04 PM - 0 Comments

A quick hit, while frantically to put together today’s committee lookahead -

The Hill Times’ take on last Sunday, and the Conservative Party’s not-quite-as-secret-as-originally-hoped-for briefings, otherwise known as Ryan Sparrow and the Very Bad Idea, with interviews from journalists on both sides of that now iconic hotel room door, including ITQ.

In case y'all were wondering

By kadyomalley - Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 8:16 PM - 0 Comments

Yes. And leave it to Steve to include the “sekrit”. For anyone who missed my account of the day’s events, the original post is still available here.

A note of warning: that link takes you back to the haunting grounds of the Ghost of ITQ Past, which means there’s a fairly good chance that it will eventually stop working. Don’t worry, at some point, I believe the plan is to ensure that all the archives, from the dawn of macleans.ca history until last week, make it onto the new platform.

They certainly are resourceful, that's for sure

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 3:08 PM - 0 Comments

Going through this list of staffers at the Conservative research bureau (which the Tories have, somewhat inexplicably, rebranded as the Conservative Resource Group) can you spot anyone who has recently been in the news in connection with the party’s questionably legal contentious in-and-out advertising expense accounting scheme? (Hint: Look between “Shibata” and “Stewart”.)

There are, of course, any number of perfectly reasonable explanations for someone ostensibly employed by the party to be listed in GEDS. For one thing, the information in the online directory is notorious for being out of date, although usually, in the opposite direction. It can take months for a new employee to show up in the database; it’s not often the case that a former bureaucrat remains on file months after moving to a new position.

According to The Globe and Mail, Sparrow worked for the party during the last election, and then did a stint as communications director for then-Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, back when she was still considered a potential breakout star in the Conservative cabinet. (Oh, those were the days, weren’t they, Rona?)

He then shows up in – of all places – London North, in November 2006, during a hotly contested byelection, as the campaign spokesman for the Conservative candidate, Diane Haskett, who is probably best remembered for her refusal to speak to reporters, or participate in local debates.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well with the local media, which led to frequent frustrated back and forth bickering between Sparrow and various reporters, as they tried to get Haskett to comment on the issues of the day – or, really, any issues at all – and he pretended that it was perfectly normal for a political candidate to eschew any and all public exposure. (Why, could that be a pattern taking shape?)

As it turned out, the voters evidently weren’t all that impressed either; Pearson, a former firefighter, romped to an easy victory; Haskett, on the other hand, placed second to the Green Party – who, in fairness, were represented by party leader Elizabeth May.

At that point, Sparrow dropped out of sight, at least as far as news coverage. The Globe doesn’t mention exactly when he took up his post at party headquarters, but I’m fairly sure that he was working there last fall, when the in-and-out scandal first broke (thanks to the Ottawa Citizen), and the opposition started agitating for the Procedure and House Affairs committee to investigate the Conservative Party’s advertising expenses during the last elections. As recently as last January, Sparrow still had access to a working parliamentary email address.

All of which raises a few questions as to exactly which spokeshat he may be wearing at any given time. Is he still employed by the Conservative research bureau, or is this just a case of bad info in the online directory? Does he split his time between the two positions? Does the party go halfsies on his salary? And finally, I can’t help but ask: has he learned nothing from past experience, as far as handling the press?

The Commons: So it goes

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 12:12 AM - 0 Comments