Scott Reid and baiting the left

Jeff Green | Apr 29, 2015

It never fails. Whenever I see one the Scott Reid’s postcards in the mail, I think there will be a couple of extra letters to the editor to pick from next week, and I am rarely disappointed. After running the response letters there is the inevitable response from the pro-Scott Reid camp.
Often Scott Reid’s information is on a controversial social topic and it takes a strong ideological position - the Conservative Party stance expressed in rather stark terms. It being an election year this year, and the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, the message this month was about Justin
Trudeau and his widely reported response to the bombing from a year ago. At that time, Conservative politicians attacked Trudeau for being “soft on terrorism”. With all that has happened over the last year, that soft on terrorism label is one that the Conservatives are particularly keen on attaching
to Mr. Trudeau these days.
The Scott Reid newsletters include content that Mr. Reid’s office generates, but the hard core message that acts as the attention grabber most often is a party-generated missive, and it goes to a number of ridings.
Those ridings are generally strong Conservative ridings, and the messages are directed at party supporters. It is not so much that these ridings are of concern to the party, but the idea is to keep them from becoming a concern. While only a few people write in about the messages, the people who react in disgust to them represent a genuine Liberal left constituency within the region, and are not Conservative voters in the first place.
The only risk the Conservatives take with these newsletters is to alienate fiscal conservatives who may be offended by some of the language, the brash partisanship, and the hard core social messages that are sometimes included.
As those who have met Mr. Reid or attended one of the allcandidates meetings during federal elections can attest, his persona is nothing at all like the tone of the post cards.
The calculation that the Conservative Party makes is that of shoring up the base, scaring people who may not vote or who may waver in their vote because of the inevitable scandals that parties in power face, into turning out at the polls to prevent the opposition from having any chance of winning
and veering the country into a left-leaning abyss. And perhaps the letters to the editor, the anger of the opposition over these statements, is part of the calculation as well. The Conservative party supporters might be lukewarm to the party message or they may have not even looked at it. They may even question why the MP mailing privileges are being used to deliver party election messages instead of public information.
But when letter writers take a strong, righteously left-leaning position towards the messages, the Conservative voters will recoil at that, and be sent scurrying to the polls to prevent the socialist overthrow of the free market economy, bargaining with Al Qaeda, and the return to the bad old days of wild men like Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien.
Maybe the letter writers are the real targets of Scott Reid’s post-cards.
Politics is a game of bait and switch after all.
More talk about whether it is fair to attack Justin Trudeau over a single statement, whether public money is being misused for that purpose, and less talk about Mike Duffy’s cousins, make-up artists and personal trainers, can only good for Conservative electoral chances.