Tuesday, July 7, 2009

A more crowded middle or a Harper Loyalty test

This is intriguing and weird at the same time. (Original provenance, as far as I can tell Beaudine on Twitter).

Sure we are all tired of the extremism. But if you want to fight the Harper for King Party, why not join the Liberals? Given the election gridlock a slight shift back to the Liberals might be all it takes. Another party of the centre would only help the Conservatives. So if the people behind this website are sincere, why try and resurrect the PC Party? It would be a pretty obvious vote splitting ploy by the Conservatives to attempt this.

But splinter groups tend to come from the edges of a party not the mainstream component. Think of the Reform schism from the PCs. Now the current Conservatives might fragment differently. Perhaps the moderate faction is the minority.

It is a fairly minimalist website. Just the email address. Black white and gray. No colour. What gives? Why launch the website when it is obviously not ready for prime time? Where is the meat? Maybe it is another display of the ineptitude of the true conservative.

Three things come to mind regarding this:
  1. I seem to recall someone fairly adept at tracing IP addresses (Buckets?) was able to triangulate the likely source of a website. I may be mis-remembering but perhaps a more internet savvy blogger could have a go at this to look for a connection to the Harper "strategy" group.
  2. I recall a similar email address from the Reform/CRAP days that used "begin" as the user name as opposed to the more orthodox "info" or other such placeholder. Was this a sub-conscious recycling of that appellation? I haven't been able to confirm this yet.
  3. Assuming this is some sort of Conservative operation, it does not seem likely to be aimed as a vote splitter. But how about some sort of loyalty test? Perhaps as a way to fill the infamous database with information of soft former PC voters who might move to the other side. They can then be target ted to firm up the vote during a campaign. Or maybe, to complete the comparison to Stalin, they could be purged from the Party if Harper wants to turn hard right.

Perhaps I am way off the mark here but that is the best explanation I can come up with for this
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2 comments:

Robert McBean. said...

There's a huge privacy issue with an anonymous organization collecting personal data.

Constant Vigilance said...

No worries. Rules don't apply to conservatives. But I suppose it can claim to not be anonymous since they have given it a name.