No, this article is not about how the Conservative Party of Canada violated their own legislation by calling the election a year early. And it isn't about how they tried to deflect the blame for the 58% increase in gasoline prices that has occurred on their watch by running radio ads aimed at the brain-dead; that is covered elsewhere on this blog.
Instead, it is about the first piece of admail I have received during this election campaign.
The headline is "The Conservative Government is cracking down on car thieves", and you can see it for yourself by clicking here.
This headline is a lie. No, the Conservative government isn't cracking down on on car thieves at all, and this is a sore subject in my neighbourhood,
My son-in-law's Ford pickup was stolen in June. It turned up two months later, in the long-term parking lot at Vancouver International Airport. It wasn't found by the police. Instead, one of the parking lot employees simply noticed that the car had been there a long time. This shouldn't have come as a surprise, because police don't actively look for stolen vehicles. If the vehicle gets pulled over for running a red light or speeding through a school zone, sure, the police will catch it, but the usually scenario is that the car will be parked for a long time in one place, and somebody eventually reports it.
There's more: the black model behind the wheel is saying, "I'm tired of car thieves forcing the rest of us to pay higher insurance premiums." Any British Columbian who owns a car knows that insurance premiums are set by ICBC, which the Federal government has nothing whatsoever to do with. And why does ICBC charge higher insurance premiums? Well, one reason is, there was a scam operated by ICBC employees where they wrote off vehicles as total losses, then sold them to themselves at deep discounts. (See ICBC probes insider-info auction claims.) There have also been scams involving paying out claims for stolen vehicles that weren't actually stolen. (See ICBC uncovers alleged Total Theft Ring.) In both cases, it was ICBC that went after the culprits; the Conservative Party of Canada had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Now, let's stay on the subject of crime. This ad is very obviously a campaign ad (note the ballot facsimile that shows the names of Dion, Harper, etc. However, there is nothing in the ad that says that the Conservative Party of Canada paid for it. Instead, it says, "Compliments of Ken Epp, MP", and on the other side, there's a return address for "Ken Epp, MP"'s office in Ottawa. This Conservative campaign ad was paid for with taxpayers' money.
It also says on the other side, "The era of weak Liberal leadership is over." OK. I hope that the era of Conservative dishonesty is over, too, and since these Conservatives like to talk about "cracking down" on crime, I hope to read about Ken Epp getting a visit from the RCMP in the next couple of days.
