No recent precedent for a major party barring reporters from accompanying campaign
The Conservative national campaign director told media outlets Tuesday their journalists won’t be allowed to travel with leader Pierre Poilievre on his campaign plane and bus during the upcoming election, ending a decades-old tradition of reporters embedding with a prospective candidate to lead the country.
There is no recent precedent for a major federal party barring reporters, producers, camera operators and broadcast technicians from travelling with a leader during a national election campaign.
In the most recent federal campaigns in 2019 and 2021, for example, major broadcasters, including CBC/Radio-Canada, CTV and Global, a number of print outlets and the wire service, The Canadian Press, had journalists with past Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole throughout the campaign.
An election hasn’t even been called yet but I’ve already seen a Conservative attack ad. In it, they refer to “Carbon Tax Carney” as being a sneaky character with conflicts of interest.
I mean wth. Carney ended the carbon tax as one of his first acts in office. (Not that I had anything against it, but whatever.)
And let’s talk about conflicts of interest for a moment. Pollievre refuses to get a security clearance to get briefed on foreign meddling in Canadian political campaigns which was deemed urgent by CSIS. They decided to make an exception for him and offered the briefing regardless but he basically screamed LA-LA-LA I don’t have to listen to this!
The only conclusion I’ve been able to draw from all this is that he and/or his party are the beneficiaries of said foreign interference and he wants plausible deniability in case it surfaces. It would also explain his reluctance to have embedded press following him around digging into things.
I mean, if you listen to any of his speeches, he does nothing but blatantly lie constantly. The carbon tax, Carney’s “hidden funds”, his secret hidden tax plan, and countless attacks that are obviously lies if you actually looked into them for even a second. His entire scheme is to outdo the FSB’s disinformation campaigns to the point that it feels like he’s actually a recipient of Russia’s #1 propogandist award.
I’m not sure if it’s plausible deniability or the desire to attack his opponents with insinuation that he wouldn’t be able to use if he had security clearance, and it doesn’t matter to me. Both are putting party over country, and we’ve seen where that leads.
We’re about one year into a constant deluge of off-season CPC-sponsored attack ads everywhere.
Well, apparently.
I need to go give the team behind uBlock Origin a hug, or a beer.
That just gave me an interesting thought. I wonder what the Venn diagram looks of Trump/Poppinfresh supporters and people who don’t use adblockers…
Yeah I have not seen an CPC-sponsored ad anywhere either, I wish I could give the pi-hole team a hug as well. Not happy with there new update and how it has made it not work with homebridge but I still would be happy to hug them!
It’s a TV ad.
Those ads work. My 60yo mother told me, “I don’t know much about him but he just seems sneaky to me for some reason.”
And then I later saw the intentionally sinister red-washed ads and it all made sense.
Yeah my Dad who spends all his time on Facebook is already bashing him with every point brought up in that dumb attack ad…
I gotta hand it to them, they are very good at marketing to potential voters. All I’ve learned is that the average voter can only be reached with bright colours, 3 words or less, and constant repetition. People don’t have the attention span for much more than that.
Man that is depressing. I know people like this too, alas.