Harper issues 'attack ad kits' to his MPs

[ConsƦcons]

How low can they go? 'Just watch them.'

And yeah, they're very worried about Justin Trudeau.
________________________________________________

thestar.com - Wednesday, May 1, 2013


Conservative MPs received a kit last week instructing them how to use
taxpayer-financed mail privileges to send anti-Trudeau mail to Canadian
households.


Some Conservative MPs tell Trudeau about their unease with attack ads
New Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is hearing from Conservatives uneasy
with attack ads.


OTTAWA—Conservative MPs have been quietly approaching Justin Trudeau to
tell him they’re refusing to take part in their party’s planned
mass-mail attack against the new Liberal leader.

“Already a number of Conservatives have mentioned to me privately that
they’re not particularly appreciative of it and they don’t intend to use
them,” Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday.

Some have been saying so publicly as well, such as Eastern Ontario
Conservative MP Daryl Kramp, who told a local radio station in his
Prince Edward—Hastings riding: “The day it becomes personal that’s the
day I’m not involved with that.”

As well, The Canadian Press has been tracking Conservative MPs who are
dissenters on the ads and at least eight have registered disapproval so
far. And there could be more. “I haven’t heard from anyone who’s going
to (use the ads,)” Alberta MP Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot) told CP.

Conservative MPs received a kit last week instructing them how to use
taxpayer-financed mail privileges to send anti-Trudeau mail to Canadian
households.

Trudeau didn’t name the Conservatives who have talked to him about their
distaste for the kits, but one Conservative who has definitely not
spoken to Trudeau is Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Though there is an unwritten tradition of prime ministers phoning new
party leaders to convey private congratulations, Harper has not done so
with the man who became Liberal leader on April 14. Beyond brief words
of congratulation in the House the next day, Harper eschewed the
protocol that usually is extended from prime ministers to their newest
rivals across the floor of the Commons, and vice-versa.

The prime minister’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall,
confirms the two have not spoken privately yet. In the Commons on
Wednesday, Harper said he had been listening to the new Liberal leader
and had heard “nothing of substance whatsoever” so far.

Harper did phone Thomas Mulcair a couple of days after he won the NDP
leadership last year, and Harper himself received a call from
then-prime-minister Paul Martin in 2004, when he became leader of the
Conservative party — a gesture his staff called “gracious” at the time.

Mulcair reportedly made a few attempts to get through to Trudeau right
after he won on April 14 and left a message, but the two men didn’t
connect until they saw each other before question period in the Commons
the next day, and had a brief, private chat. Harper expressed his
congratulations more publicly, in his reply to Trudeau’s first question
as Liberal leader.

That same day, the Conservative party unleashed a wave of ads
questioning Trudeau’s fitness to govern — a saturation-coverage TV
campaign that is supposed to be accompanied by the mass mail-out in June.

Trudeau said he’s not surprised that some Conservatives are balking at
the idea of the attack ads, because he believes that many people in the
public are repelled by them, too.

“I do know that we have a bit of a self-regulating system, in the
response that I’ve seen right across the country, of people who are fed
up with the negativity, the malicious, personal attacks that this
government is engaged in,” Trudeau told reporters.