Even if money grows on trees, eventually Fall always comes

This blog post by The KD:

So the Little Shop of Tories isn’t good enough for you anymore, huh?

could be put to any number of uses and I am sure thinking bloggers will point the silliness of it out. I would like to use it to refer to a subject that has long interested me. The Conservative Burn Rate. (My emphasis in bold).

...But what she’s really curious about is what this means for the denizens of the Little Shop of Tories — the sprawling, 17,000 square foot compound in Ottawa’s east end of which the party was so proud that, on two separate occasions, they flung open the doors to reporters to show off the vast array of state of the art multimedia wonders housed within.

Armed with every conceivable electoral amenity, from an in-house broadcast studio to a sea of flat-screened monitors set up for voter outreach and candidate support, it was supposed to be the future of political campaigning in Canada. Of course, as it turned out, even the promise of bearing witness to the dawn of a new generation of electioneering wasn’t enough to get those same reporters to show up at 6am every morning to watch Jason Kenney deliver whatever the message of the day happened to be, but still. It was darned impressive, and — let’s be honest, here — provided us all with considerable entertainment, some of which was even intentional, during the last election.

But now, we find out that the party is planning to outsource something that you’d think the masters of the pixelverse out on Lancaster Road would be able to do in their sleep? Unless spamming the inboxes of hapless party supporters with cunningly “personalized” video clips of Mike Duffy is trickier than it sounds, which is distinctly possible, of course.

I googled around some commercial real estate sites for the Ottawa area and it appears that $10/square foot is a reasonable number to apply to this. So the rent alone on this complex is $170,000 a month. Never mind the utilities, salaries, hardware and software costs. Look at it this way, if the average born every minute Conservative donor gives $25 per donation, they need ~6,800 donations a month for the rent alone.

As much as I regret every day Harper remains in office, it seems to me that a good strategy would be to find ways to hinder their fundraising and let the bleeding continue.

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