They teem over the top of the blue boxes. They spill from the letter slots. They blow down the suburban cul-de-sacs in the late winter wind. They struggle, half-frozen but unyielding, to escape from the icy grip of the discoloured and trampled snow surrounding the super mailboxes. They saturate the lives of the people; cause them to despair. And yet, they keep coming.
These are the ten percenters. We are the ten percentees. Assaulted as never before, alas, we are assailed with our own money. It’s not pretty.
Over the last month, by our best count, the riding of Halton (containing about 60,000 homes) has been blanketed with at least 240,000 pieces of direct mail from the Harper Conservatives. They have come under the postage-free frank of MPs Pierre Poilievre, John Baird, Kevin Sorenson, Rona Ambrose, Stephen Harper, and others, and also directly and illegally from the Conservative Research Group, the information and propaganda arm of the Conservative Party of Canada.
One says that Liberals, under Stephane Dion, will raise the GST from 5% back to 7%. Another claims the Liberals and Dion “will take away” the $1,200 annual child care benefit that parents receive. Yet another claims Liberals would keep “arsonists and burglars” out of jail and living at home, “right next door” to “local families.”
They’d be laughable if they weren’t so obscenely incorrect and misleading. And if so many trees did not have to die such needless sawtoothed deaths to fill so many landfills. But still, they keep coming.
In fact, scores of my colleagues will attest to the taxpayer-funded infoslaught which is now happening in non-Conservative-held ridings across the country. It’s reasonable to believe that since the beginning of this year thirty or forty million pieces of Tory-authored, direct household mail have come off the House of Commons printing presses, through Canada Post and repeatedly into the homes of the citizens who are unwittingly paying for them.
And how could this be? Simply because the rules allow MPs to dig into their own office budgets and use their allocated funds to send promotional and political material into other constituencies. In fact, it’s common. Before I traveled across the western provinces last autumn for 15 Town Hall meetings, a dozen Liberal colleagues chipped in their mailers to send notices to people living in affected cities and towns.
But long-time Hill staffers tell me they have never seen the likes of the current Conservative blitz, In fact, Tory MPs admit they are not even asked if their names can be pasted on anti-Dion missives destined for distant ridings, since it’s all coordinated by the daunting machine called the Conservative Research Group. Meanwhile that same group stands accused under House rules of pumping out untold numbers of ten percenters (so called since each one can be sent to 10% of the homes in a riding) without the sponsorship of any MPs – a serious breach to which the Cons have fessed up.
How much is this costing? Beats me. But to mail out 30,000,000 pieces of Harper mail at the bulk rate of eight cents each would cost $2.4 million, and then there is the cost of paper and printing. It’s enough to get some people more than irritated, like a constituent of mine who today received a ten percenter from Ottawa-area MP Pierre Poilievre.
“Just wondering,” he says, “…who is Pierre Poilievre? And, why are we, in Halton, receiving the propaganda (i.e., sensationalism – junk) that from him that I’ve found in my mailbox twice in the last week or so??? Have you seen this garbage?”
I have. But I want to see more. Lots more.
In fact, I want to know as much about this publicly-funded, caucus-wide, nationally-coordinated political blitz as I can. Strikes me our open, honest and accountable government is using millions of dollars of Parliament’s money in a manner than was never envisioned, never intended and would never be allowed by an administration that was, say, open, honest and accountable.
So, have you been ten percented? Then scan it, and email it to me at garth@garth.ca. Or fax it to Esther at (905) 693-0704, or mail it (postage-free, heh, heh) to me at House of Commons, Ottawa K1A 0A6.
Say, do you think this is worth suing over?
