This year there was an extra reason to celebrate July 1, beyond the fact that our sometimes troubled Confederation made it through another year intact. I refer to the coming into effect of the federal government’s new anti-spam legislation.
If you’re like me, you’ve been getting emails from organizations asking permission to continue sending unsolicited email. It has been great fun saying no. Or not answering, which is supposed to be the same: From July 1 on, if they don’t have my explicit permission to send me email, they’re not supposed to do it.
I have my doubts about how effective it will be, though.
So far I haven’t got any spam clearance messages from Nigeria, from where I get more than weekly notices that someone either has died and left me millions of dollars or is looking to get their own money out of the country but for some reason needs my banking information to do so.
I don’t know: If I were trying to sneak millions of dollars out of Nigeria, I think I’d look for a helpful Swiss banker rather than a Canadian college teacher.
One spam clearance message I went back and forth on before finally giving a thumbs-up (mainly for journalistic reasons) was the one from the Conservative Party of Canada, which sends me almost daily messages about the evils of the Liberals and NDP and the urgency that we all give more money so the party can meet its quarterly fundraising objectives.
On Monday, which he acknowledged many Canadians were taking off, the party’s director of fundraising was pleading with email recipients to give $5 or whatever so the party could meet its second-quarter objective of enrolling 2,000 new donors. As of the mailing, they were only a few hundred short.
(Funny, on June 28 their email had said: “We’re so close!”)
The urgency apparently is that if contributions didn’t come in Monday, they couldn’t be counted toward the second-quarter total, which meant there was a danger one of the other parties would raise more money in the quarter.
As pitches go, it’s not quite as compelling as: “We won’t be able to finish the children’s wing of the hospital unless everyone gives generously.”
I wonder if they’ve tried asking in Nigeria, where there seems to be lots of money.
On June 25, the Tories’ email gave more detail on why it was important to give: “The Liberals and NDP are proposing expensive tax and spend schemes that would reverse all the progress we’ve made together. And having learned their lesson from past election losses, we believe that they will aggressively attack us as we approach the campaign in 2015.”
Now how do you suppose the NDP and Liberals learned that aggressive attack pays off electorally?
Maybe from watching the aggressive attack campaigns the Tories ran against previous Liberal leaders? I realize it’s unfair to single out the Tories here. The other parties do this kind of thing, too, especially since the Tories showed how successful it could be.
But the rah-rah partisan boosterism of our politics is extremely off-putting. The rhetoric of these things is that of a hockey fan club.
Now, in real life when we devoted Habs fans chant things such as “Bru-ins su-uck!” it’s all done in good fun. We understand that many fans of the Boston Bruins are reasonable, civilized people such as ourselves who have simply made a grave error of judgment.
But with the Tory emails, it’s us against them and good-natured joshing has nothing at all to do with it.
We’re at the stage now where half of Canadians have some form of higher education. Upward of a quarter of us have university degrees. If there was one thing to be regretful over this Canada Day, it’s that our politics aren’t more intelligent.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University in Montreal.