The difference is in the manner in which the ads are presented.
The provincial political world has weighed in on the B.C. Liberals’ decision to target B.C. NDP Leader Adrian Dix with 16 months between now and the May 2013 election. The governing party has created a website — riskydix.ca — where it lists everything that went wrong in B.C. during the NDP reign in the 1990s, when Dix was former premier Glen Clark’s right-hand man.
Some have accused the Liberals of showing their desperation in waging all-out war on Dix; the Grits argue they are simply laying out the facts for voters who might not be aware of Dix’s involvement in the NDP government of the 1990s.
The Liberal campaign is serious and shows the party is obviously extremely concerned about losing the next election to the NDP. The New Democrats, conversely, scored big-time with their clever, witty and wickedly funny TV commercial last year featuring “Christy Crunch” cereal. That may have been an attack ad, but at least it was one with panache and creativity. Now, about the riskydix.ca campaign. The Liberals claim they are simply stating the facts, based on statistics from independent sources. That may be so, but the real information may also lie in what the Liberals are not including on the website. For example, the home page declared that, during the 1990s, “taxes went up – a family earning $60,000 paid 60 per cent more income tax than they do today – that’s almost $2,000 a year.”
What the Liberals don’t mention is the crucial second part to that equation — that other taxes (what the B.C. Liberals prefer to call fees and tolls and recycling deposits and carbon-neutrality goals and MSP premiums and ICBC rates and ferry fares and BC Hydro costs) — have climbed to heights unimagined since they claimed power in 2001.
Dix may be risky. That remains to be seen. But, the past 10 years have not exactly resembled Shangri-La for the average family struggling to survive.
– Black Press
