Party platforms online

This post has been updated. Again.

With less than a week to go before election day, the Conservatives are releasing their party platform - it was to be released following leader Stephen Harper's speech to the Empire Club of Canada and the Canadian Club in Toronto - but so far, no sign of it, and now the Conservative.ca website seems to be experiencing some trouble, so watch this space. - called The True North Strong and Free - is now available here in PDF form - but caution that the site is still having trouble.

As the prime minister has alluded to recently, the platform does not represent a major departure from the "modest" announcements of the past few weeks. But there are some new items: more money for technology and innovation funds that will help hard-hit manufacturers, and a decision to drop controversial changes to the television and film tax credits that had brought accusations of censorship from filmmakers.

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The Liberals released their full election platform Sept. 22. The previously announced Green Shift is still there, along with details on the party's other major campaign announcements: increased infrastructure spending; plans to increase day care funding to the provinces; extending coverage for drugs for catostrophic illness; changes to funding for post-secondary students; and increased funding for arts and women's groups. The platform, titled Richer, Fairer, Greener, costs out the Liberal promises within a balanced budget. The full 72-page platform document is here - though demand must be high (among media?) because the Liberals' site has slowed significantly.

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The NDP released their platform Sept. 28, a Sunday, and received a good amount of Monday-morning press for the platform's previously-unannounced promise of a new child benefit for low-income families - up to $400 a month per child for children under 18. The 46-page platform document - which by the cover could be called the "Orange Book" - vows to return the corporate tax rate to 22.12% (the level before the Martin government) and recover unpaid corporate taxes in order to increase social spending while maintaining a balanced buget.

The platform touches on many of the issues that have played out in headlines leading up to the election: food safety, regulation of the banking and finance sector, consumer protection and the doctor shortage, as well as the NDP's core values: affordable housing, supports for workers and income supports. The party includes "explanatory tables" to support its math.

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The Greens released their "Looking Forward" platform online Sept. 17. The platform, which goes well beyond the party's environmental image, includes a promise to raise the GST by one cent and pass that money on to cities; a plan for investment in "green" industries; plus policy on health care and measures to address poverty. The Greens' platform launch included a separate website called www.votefortomorrow.ca that lays out the highlights of the platform, and the full 160-page platform document as a PDF. The party has also released a budget plan (both a snapshot PDF version and a longer, detailed document). The Green budget promises a balanced budget but no reduction in the federal debt over the next four years.

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Blogger makes new plagiarism charge

Liberal blogger Jerad Gallinger (j-rad.ca) digs up another 2003 speech by then-Opposition Leader Stephen Harper that allegedly borrowed lines from another right-wing political leader. Only this time, the right-wing leader was former Ontario premier Mike Harris, and the borrowed lines constitute less than a paragraph.

The Harper speech was a response to the federal budget, hardly a hot-button issue such as supporting the war in Iraq.

Anti-Harper groups organizing online

An online "Anyone but Harper" movement is underway on Facebook groups, left-leaning blogs and websites such as, wait for it, anyonebutharper.ca. In addition to creating and hosting satirical videos attacking Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, this site is attempting to coordinate strategic voting to defeat Conservative candidates - and has a widget on its site that tells you which party has the best chance to do that for a given postal code, based on the results of the previous election.

Video: Harper's 'bubble' campaign

A Liberal supporter (at the very least) has posted a satirical video take on the view that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is conducting a "bubble campaign" - that is, a tightly scripted and controlled campaign that keeps him from contact with regular people.

Free advice to politicians, part II

Political journalists have long been accused of the "gotcha" - blindsiding a politician with an ambush question to get a sexy story. Whether that's a fair accusation or not, it hardly seems necessary these days: the politician are getting themselves, with a little help from partisan bloggers.

Week 3 of the campaign is just underway and past Internet musings have claimed two more candidates (a second one from the NDP and one from the Tories) and forced another (a Liberal) to defend herself for her onine essays. The Conservative and NDP candidates resigned before the mainstream press even had much of a chance to pounce, so that new candidates could take their place.

Things get a bit more serious now though. With the passing of the candidate nomination filing deadline, the parties are locked in to their current slate of candidates - they can drop out but can't be replaced.

P.S. HE'S BAAAACK: The former Conservative candidate, Chris Reid, has returned to the pologosphere following his exit from the campaign. His first return post puts to rest earlier claims that he quit the race because he didn't want to commit to four years in Ottawa:

This is where political correctness has gotten in this country - a Conservative Party that is affraid to proudly be conservative, and a media that can't be bothered to analyze anything. The media is simply focused on the "gaffe" this caused the campaign, with no analysis of what I actually said. So don't worry liberals, there is no hidden agenda to the Conservative Party, because it has sold it's soul to the MSM, you can freely vote Conservative and still have your ever expanding nanny state!

Update: The parties' social networking

Time to update our site audit chart, listing the social networking offerings of the four major national parties.

The Liberals got their online act together in the second week, adding Twitter and MySpace pages and expanding their use of Flickr and YouTube. But it is the NDP that reaping the greatest rewards from these tools, adding more than 2,600 "supporters" in Facebook in the past week to the Conservatives 1,550. The Liberals and the Greens each gained about 650 supporters over the same period.

The NDP also gained about 350 Twitter "followers" to the Conservatives' 240. The Liberals are new to the Twitter game, adding 292 followers in their first week. Based on those numbers, I suspect that most (for all the parties) are insiders.

If the Greens have started using Flickr, Twitter or Friendfeed to get their message across, they aren't effectively promoting that on their website, hence all that white space under the Greens. But they are making effective use of YouTube now to share videos of Elizabeth May's campaign speeches on their party website, adding five new videos in the past day. And if you search hard enough on YouTube, you'll find their page.

Finally, the Conservatives show no signs of stopping on the electronic campaign trail, adding a Digg page to their site links this week. No friends there yet, but the campaign is still young.

Site or tool	Conservative	Liberal	NDP	Green
Facebook (# of supporters)	14,673	13,155	17,277	3,158
Flickr	Yes	Yes	Yes
Friendfeed	Yes		Yes
MySpace (# of friends)	Yes (45)	Yes (37)
RSS feeds	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Twitter (# of followers)	Yes (693)	Yes (292)	Yes (786)*
YouTube (# of videos)	Yes (16)	Yes (51)	Yes (55)	Yes (17)

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There's a bluebird on your shoulder

  For those of you still blissfully unaware of the "micro-blogging" site Twitter, think of it as an Internet-age telex service for the personal details of your life - or Facebook's status update without all that other stuff. (For all you need to know about Twitter, read their FAQ. Icon at right by AODDesign)

With a Twitter account, you can send out 140-letter messages that answer the question "What you are doing?" Other Twitter users who have chosen to "follow" you will get your messages on their Twitter page, or on their mobile phone.

Predictably, what started out a couple of years ago as popular site for 14-year-old girls has become a compulsory part of any company's or political party's (or newspaper's!) online marketing campaign.

Here's a sampling of yesterday's "tweets" from Canada's three largest political parties:

pmharper At the Halton campaign rally with our Halton candidate Lisa Raitt.

jacklayton LIVE on CKTB 610am (Niagara Falls), at 5:20pm or shortly after. Listen at http://www.610cktb.com/

LiberalTour Stéphane Dion joined by all NS candidates, Bob Rae, and provincial leader, Stephen MacNeil, at lunchtime meeting. 250 Liberals to boot.

The Harper and Layton campaign are so far making the most effective use of Twitter, by including weblinks to coverage of events, campaign videos etc. Barack Obama's campaign does this in nearly every Twitter post, case in point:

BarackObama Speaking in Golden, CO. Watch the event live at http://my.barackobama.com/livestream

There is a viral aspect of Twitter in that when you choose to follow someone on Twitter, they'll likely return the favour. Which leads to rather creepy notification emails like this in your inbox:

Stephen Harper is now following you on Twitter!

For the record: Jack Layton now has 718 Twitter "followers" (up from 439 last week); Stephen Harper has 633 (452 last week) and Stephane Dion 241 (in his first week as a tweeter). Compare that to 79,980 followers for Barack Obama.

AND: If you think that this is all just the meaningless fluff of a silly era, consider this post from the Twitter blog showing the volume peaks in tweets during Sarah Palin's address to the Republican National Convention, and a follow-up post comparing the volume of tweets mentioning the U.S. political candidates by name during their acceptance speeches. These analyses don't reveal how people feel about the candidates, but they sure illustrate what (or who) is drawing attention.

More shiny Internet baubles

With the self-inflicted demise of the Conservatives' Dionbook Facebook parody, let's take a quick look at the Liberals' entry in the parody website game: Scandalpedia, a Wikipedia-like "free encyclopedia" of supposed Conservative scandals.

In addition to a rather pleasing design, the site is surprisingly deep, which says something either about the extent of Liberal nitpicking or alleged Conservative malfeasance. The site includes "biographies" of Conservative figures like Environment Minister (or "former Treasury Board secretary") John Baird, campaign chair Doug Finley and former foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, and such well-worn "scandals" as the Chuck Cadman Affair and the "In-and-Out" election spending spat with Elections Canada - as well as more obscure ones (what's the "Convention fee boondoggle"?) and promises of more to come.

Truthfully, it is hard to believe that attack sites like Scandalpedia or the Conservatives' notaleader.ca really affect voter behaviour - or even attract many viewers. The site-ranking website Alexa.com reports that notaleader.ca ranks 26,960th among websites in Canada, while scandalpedia.ca sits in 51,368th spot.

But in terms of the style, maybe it's revealing that the Liberals chose to go with an encyclopedia while the Conservatives went with cartoons.

Dionbook, gonebook

Overshadowed by the fooferaw caused by a pooping puffin last week was another part of the Conservatives' notaleader.ca Dion attack site. Called Dionbook, it claimed to be "A satirical look at the Liberal Party, Ottawa and Federal politics." And it went suspiciously missing late last week in the wake of Puffingate, as several bloggers and newspapers noted.

In addition to including parodies of Liberal bloggers among Dion's "supporters," the site listed "Let's bring the Taliban to Canada" and "I eat my hot dog with a knife and fork" among Dion's subscribed "groups." (See a jpeg of Google's last cached version of the site at right, minus the images, which were not captured by the cache - and click for a larger image.)

Hard to tell exactly which of the above attempts at humour was enough to cause second thoughts among the overseers of the Conservative war room. And if you're puzzling over the hot dog reference, mabye there's a clue in this interesting bit of Quebec election ephemera from a note on the CBC Digital Archives Facebook page, explaining why you won't see Quebec politicians eating hot dogs on the campaign trail.

Liberals turning on, too

Since last week's post tallying the social networking tools offered by the major parties' websites, the Liberals have added Twitter (187 followers), Flickr and MySpace (13 friends) links to their main site.

And as commenter CHM noted, the Conservatives, like the NDP, offer a french-language Twitter feed. The Liberals' Twitter feed is bilingual.