They defined Dion before the Liberals could and now the Tories have set out to define Dion’s carbon tax before the Liberals can. Which is fair enough since Dion has yet to announce the specifics of his plan.
Yesterday, the Conservatives showed typical governing party maturity with this online story, which I can only assume was dreamed up by a few summer interns smoking some…uhh…”lettuce” (woah…dude…what if we turned Dion’s head into a lettuce…cool):
In the story they quote Peter A. Nelson (yes, THE Peter A. Nelson), executive director of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association and self-proclaimed amateur economist. In it, Mr. Nelson predicts Dion’s carbon tax will lead to $8 a head lettuce prices. Now, I noticed lettuce was $1.69 a head at Dominion on Saturday. Let’s just say $2 to keep the numbers even. So, even if we forget about the portion of that cost that comes from growing the lettuce and store profits, transportation costs would have to quadruple in order for Nelson’s prediction to come to pass. Of course, like I said – no details so I guess it’s possible there’s a $5.20 a litre gas tax in the plan, but I doubt it.
But, whatever – no need to dwell on the juvenille antics of the official Tory website. More important is the mainstream ad campaign, which has a lot more meat on it (no pun intended). The ads will be running on gas pumps which is just freakin’ brilliant in my opinion, with gas prices soaring. The ads themselves are a bit tacky, but should be effective at getting across the message the Tories want to get across.
There will also be radio ads (the “Darren” one being the best), and the campaign got some bonus earned media from the left-wing anti-Conservative media today:
Also launched today was the viral campaign. Some of the site highlights include:
-Slamming (Mulroney’s) “revenue neutral” GST.
-A “tax tag” game which is, truth be told, pretty funny. They even tossed Cherniak on, ensuring the site will get a few more links.
-“Do you think it’s easy to load websites?” shows up on the screen as the site loads. I’ll admit I laughed out loud at that one.
