Newspaper delivery

Every now and then, I check in on this blog to see what one of the Prime Minister's closest friends is thinking.

He's John Weissenberger, an old Calgary friend of Stephen Harper, now chief of staff to Immigration Minister Diane Finley. He and Harper go way back. When Harper was being sworn in as Prime Minister, Weissenberger flew to Ottawa to spend the weekend with the future PM and his family.

Weissenberger doesn't write about immigration or his Harper friendship on his blog, though - he and co-blogger George Koch write about an eclectic variety of things on their minds.

The latest installment is about newspapers - delivery, to be precise, and a question about why adults, not kids, are delivering the papers these days. (A little known fact - a young kid named Stephen Harper used to deliver the Star in Toronto about four decades ago.)

Weissenberger's not the first to pose the question. The excellent Freakonomic blog at the New York Times wondered the same thing a couple of years ago.

Well, as it turns out, I work at a newspaper. I might as well ask, right?

And here's what I was told.

"The main reason is that in this day and age, too many parents did not want their kids out on the streets unaccompanied in the dark, and thus it was too hard to find enough kids to do the job, the turnover was tremendous," one manager told me in an email.

"Circulation people found adult carriers more reliable and available."

A couple of other colleagues told me, as well, that the trend away from child delivery really began when newspapers moved to early-morning delivery - as opposed to the afternoon kind that you saw on Leave it to Beaver or in Mayberry.

It just wasn't safe or practical to expect kids to be up at 4 a.m., papers delivered by 6 a.m.

Copyright clashes

It's now clear that if you want to be a savvy political operator in Canada, you better take a course in intellectual-property law.   Once upon a time, it helped to know the constitution when Canadian politics was all about national unity. Nowadays,  copyright and trademark law seem to be the weapons of choice in the information age. 

The little fracas over the Green Shift - is it a Liberal program or a Toronto company? - is just the current example. Given how things are going, I'm not sure why we haven't heard yet from Green Shift Music and Comics in Florida,  or Richard Underhill, a Canadian saxophonist who put a song called Green Shift on his album, Kensington Suite. And, as someone pointed out to me today, what about this "Shifty" bag from North Face (available in Green). Isn't it offended too?

Before this latest copyright/trademark fray,  let's not forget, we had the Conservatives in hot water for using the name Eco-Trust and using the O'Jay's tune For the Love of Money in one of their attack ads. 

And just yesterday, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor strayed into copyright peril at his new "shifty green" website, which we mentioned in this blog a few days ago.

As Taylor describes his mostly good-natured dispute with the Liberals, he also explains: "In knocking-off the Liberal website, I neglected to "knock-off" the Liberal logo enough to satisfy the legal concerns of the Liberal Party. I received a call from their lawyer letting me know that my use of their logo poses trademark concerns and we very amicably agreed that the solution to their dilemma would be to create a derivative work of their logo."

If all of this isn't enough to send would-be political operatives back to the intellectual-property books, it should also be pointed out that copyright law itself may be the sleeper political issue of the season. The proposed changes by the Conservative government recently announced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice have whipped up a storm on the Net. The Facebook group formed to oppose the changes  now stands at roughly 78,000 members - about 30,000 more than it had before the Prentice changes were announced.

 

Green battle continues online

Since we've linked to the Conservatives' attack ads on the carbon tax, it seems only fair to link to the new Liberal ads promoting it.

Here's one featuring caucus members clapping, an ad probably inspired by this Make Poverty History  campaign video featuring finger-snapping celebrities.

Here's another of the video that was shown just before Dion announced the green-shift plan last Thursday. This one reminds me a little of the film footage that Liberals were showing at their leadership convention in between votes in December, 2007.

 

Out, out damn spot

Stephen Taylor, of the Blogging Tories, has a must-read entry on his own blog -- the back story of the Conservatives' grease-spot attack ads on the carbon tax.

It explains the strategy as an all-out  response to research on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Liberals and Conservatives.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion, for instance, has some credibility on the environment front, so the carbon-tax idea had to be framed as a tax. And then, as Taylor writes:

"In focus groups and telephone-based market research, Conservative planners came to understand that a carbon tax in the abstract is a well-received concept to most Canadians. What they also found, however, that when the details of achieving such a policy objective are understood, a broad majority of Canadians don’t think of it as feasible. Words like “tax-shifting” and “revenue neutral” were panned and uncomfortably rejected by focus groups when polled and the general distrust of politicians regarding new tax became a palatable conclusion for Conservative strategists. Conservative-Liberal switchers, a group that holds victory for either party, was found to have a distrust for any politician with a plan for creative tax manipulation."

Liberals and Conservatives should have a read of Taylor's post. It's well-written, well-researched and contains some foreshadowing of how things could unfold in the next election campaign.

Here's a little cartoon (Liberal-produced, you can assume) that has the little grease spot explaining how he's come to be out of work. 

Lost and found

Those young-Liberal pranksters are at it again, circulating this photo as something spotted in the lost and found at Pier 21, a local Ottawa nightclub.

The Great Communicator

After a long hiatus, Bob Rae is back to blogging - in the voice of Stephen Harper. Seriously. This morning, deadpan, Rae posted a letter he says he got through Access to Information - from the PM to the president of Tim Horton's.

The letter praises the decision to fire an employee for giving away a Timbit, because "it's really just the beginning of the end."

It also contains some communication advice for any negative fallout: "Stick by your original plan. The bad publicity will come and go. Don't answer questions. Attack the questioner. Challenge their credibility. Smear Coffee Time."

UPDATE: The blog entry has been "disappeared." Apparently Rae's sense of humour isn't universally shared and he voluntarily took it down after someone didn't find his fake letter funny. It's one thing, I guess, to call Tim Horton's cruel and heartless for firing an employee, but it's just going too far to compare the doughnut empire to the Harper regime.

Backlash on gas tax holiday

A debate is raging in the U.S.  -- one with strong echoes of the debate we didn't seem to have here in Canada over cutting the GST by two percentage points.

In the U.S., it's something called the "gas tax holiday" -- a proposal to suspend the federal tax on gas this summer; an idea first floated by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, but also endorsed by Democratic contender Senator Hillary Clinton.

The general view on this idea, just like the GST cut in Canada, seems to be: good retail politics, bad policy.

Unlike Canada, however, the economists are getting vocal with their opposition. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution has found 150 of them to sign this letter.

Political novel wins Leacock award

As reported a while back on this blog, politics can be funny and a political book has indeed won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

The winner is Terry Fallis, for his book, The Best Laid Plans.

The announcement came at the awards lunch today in Orillia.

(MICHAEL STUPARYK PHOTO/TORONTO STAR)

Does Gordon Brown's plight sound familiar?

Well, here's a bit of history repeating itself.

Gordon Brown and Paul Martin spent years as their parties' dauphins. They even talked from time to time about their parallel political existences, in charge of their nations' finances, heirs-apparent to their respective prime ministers, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien.

And now, Brown seems to be finding, as Martin did, that power is not an easy thing to keep.

Take a look at this bit of a Telegraph article from yesterday:

There is not a single thing that has taken a sledgehammer to party unity - as the war in Iraq did during Mr Blair's time in charge - but there are lots of small pebbles popping on to the political windscreen and no over-arching message to prevent the glass shattering.

In private, ministers who were once in awe of Mr. Brown have started complaining about their boss. "It's dither, dither, dither," sighs one. An aide claims, blithely: "It's like a Shakespearean tragedy. Gordon's not up to the job."

 

Action man

And now, for your viewing pleasure, Defence Minister Peter MacKay - as an action figure (From 22 Minutes, via YouTube).