New Conservative Party Ad Cheers On Russian Jets Heading for Ukraine
'Mistakes happen' sez Tory spox.
The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has had an embarrassing month.
A couple of weeks ago people pointed their fingers and laughed after they accused the Liberals of being “lavish” for holding an Ontario caucus meeting at a “swanky” Holiday Inn like the three-star Sudbury hotel was some sort of nickel-plated Mar-a-Lago. And they’re still denying having anything to do with a sketchy bot campaign where hundreds of accounts based overseas relayed identical excitement after allegedly attending a recent CPC rally held in the middle of nowhere.
But their clown car found a new gear after putting out a three-minute video last week with the chef’s kiss title “Canada: Our Home” imagining just how goshdarn great the Great White North could be under Conservative majority rule featuring footage shot mostly outside the country.
“It’s easy to forget what home and hope look like so let me paint the picture,” declared party leader Pierre Poilievre at the start of the campaign ad, which added a variety of clips and photos to a speech he gave earlier this summer at the Calgary Stampede, and it almost seems like a mea culpa given all the Canadiana cosplay that comes next. The video has since disappeared from the party’s YouTube channel but the Internet never forgets:
The schoolchildren seen attending class would presumably be learning how to read and write in their native Serbian rather than French or English, the “Canadian dad” who had just dropped them off was rolling through suburbs somewhere in North Dakota, the “newly built and affordable Canadian homes” were under construction at an undisclosed location in Slovenia, and the happy family enjoying “a wonderful venison that was shot with totally legal Canadian firearms” were instead dining al fresco somewhere in Tuscany.
They even outsourced the mighty frickin Rockies to foothills in Utah! Canada literally has TONS of Rocky Mountains to choose from. Including the second highest peak on the continent after Denali, Mount Logan, which I’m sorry to say isn’t named after national treasure Wolverine. (It would’ve been weird since he’s meant to be a short guy in the comics.) But this is the same crack campaign that used what appears to be Switzerland’s famous Matterhorn for the “Common Sense Conservatives” hockey jerseys they’re hawking online.
The closing shot of a purplish evening sky with “We’re Home” emblazoned across was filmed somewhere in Venezuela. Maybe this was meant as a weird romantic gesture to his Venezuelan wife. The oil-rich South American nation at least has a town named La Cañada although it lacks a hockey rink or the weaponized politeness.
But at least the Petro-Canada gas station where his patriotic protagonist filled his pickup truck up with “affordable and lower-taxed Canadian-made energy” was filmed domestically since no other country has them.
People might not have noticed if he hadn’t also made his main character look up and proudly see fighter jets “doing a training mission in the sky, getting ready to defend our home and native land.” Which turned out to be Russian Su-17 and Su-27 military planes, which we only learned after it somehow made it across the Department of National Defence’s radar.
“Shockingly, Mr. Poilievre’s dream for Canada includes Russian fighter jets flying over our glorious prairies on a ‘training mission’,” said DNC spokesperson Daniel Minden. “This comes as Russia continues its illegal, unprovoked war of choice against Ukraine and the international rules that keep us all safe.”
The discovery that Peewee was using a geopolitical adversary’s military apparatus for hypernationalist propaganda was what led a still-Twitter user in Calgary to track down some of other shit used, and the unexpected Red Dawn homage wasn’t even the worst part.
Poilievre continued:
The same plane is soon seen from the university campus, where kids are hustling off to class, maybe a bit late, having just procrastinated on that university essay, knowing that when they get to class they will have the chance to debate freely and fearlessly without worry about being censored.
And what specific post-secondary school was used as an example of where students might look up to see Russkie jets flying overhead, you ask? One where this is a very real and terrifying possibility: Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine.
They found “young Caucasian handsome man closing laptop, sighing, and looking away at sundown” on Adobe and then used Google Maps to pinpoint the location. Hopefully Russian special military operation forces won’t be pinpointing it themselves.
There’s poetic justice the party who make a big fuss about representing the values of “old stock Canadians” — meaning white, self-described Christians — has shot itself in the foot for using old stock images. The Conservatives, caught with their pants down, at least didn’t try to spin this as the biased fake news industry trying to make them look stupid and/or sneaky for a change.
"The video was removed — mistakes happen," fishy comms director Sarah Fischer told the CBC while gamely baiting the bothsidesism hook claiming the Liberals did something similar back in 2011 with a commercial using stock footage of aspiring actors rather than actual card-carrying supporters.
Writing this post reminded me I took part in a Getty Images shoot a million years ago working as a whitewater guide in British Columbia and I’d never bothered to check what became of the photos. Turns out my more youthful and vigorous self has been used to help sell a range of products from rafting trips in Oregon and Northern California to Nicorette gum.
Which I’m taking as a sign I finally need to kick the nasty vape-huffing habit I picked up during the pandemic. I’d hate to mislead people like a common Common Sense Conservative.
[CBC]
Last night the Empire State Building was in yellow and blue in honor of Ukrainian Independence Day.
https://substack.com/profile/155618292-ziggywiggy/note/c-66672453?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Headline at ArsTechnica: It's rare, but your EV's lithium battery can actually catch fire!
Not at headline at ArsTechnica: It's rare, but your ICE car's gasoline can actually catch fire!
I mean, I should be whatevs, because as good as they are about some things, they're still owned by Condé Nast and they're still in it for the clicks. But they're pretty terrible about EV coverage. The other day they wrote a whole article about "slumping" EV sales.
Yeah, it turns out that every single major manufacturer of EVs is experiencing sales growth except Tesla, and every nation is experiencing growth in their national EV markets, and the world as a whole is experiencing growth in the EV market, but the growth in EV sales in 2022 and 2023 wasn't as significant as the growth in 2019 in percentage terms -- sure it was more in absolute terms, but not in % terms -- because of pandemic effects on supply chains that temporarily raised the costs of batteries.
Sure, projecting compounded growth is tricky, but VW also just announced that in 2030 it might only manufacture 85% of the batteries it was thinking 2 years ago it might manufacture because of a combination of uncertainty in projected total sales (which would still be hugely higher in 2030 than they are this year, even using the lower number) and an uncertainty in which battery chemistry will be optimal in 2030. In other words, they're not even saying that their total growth is only going to be 85% of what they thought it was going to be. They're just saying that their total growth in one particular battery chemistry is only guaranteed to be 85% of what they thought it would be, and they're fine with adding capacity later if that turns out to be an underestimate.
This -- worldwide growth that was slightly slower than expected worldwide growth because of a known problem that was fully resolved by late last year combined with a single company rejiggering their plans for building their own batteries so that that capacity increases massively, but also not quite as massively as they thought they might increase it two years ago -- is the "EV slump" of the ArsTechnica article.
Seriously, I don't know how humanity is going to survive.