T-shirt rejection pumps up sales of pro-energy apparel
Rejection can be the mother of greater acceptance.
That’s the moral of the story involving repeated bans of proenergy T-shirts by security staff on Parliament Hill — temporary prohibitions that have led to a geyser of increased sales of the apparel, says its creator.
“It’s definitely skyrocketed with all of the national attention . . . . We saw an exponential increase from the first incident, and then there was the second one,” said Cody Battershill, head of Canada Action, which sells the I Love Canadian Oil and Gas shirts.
And he said the backlash has been expressed well beyond the country’s main oil- and gasproducing provinces.
“We’re getting as many orders from Ontario and the East as anywhere else,” Battershill, who’s also a Calgary realtor, said of the T-shirts.
“Some days, we get up to 100 orders from our online store.”
A week ago, Calgarian Chris Wollin said he and his partner, Mallory Hartvisken, were barred from entering the House of Commons by a security guard, who called the apparel too political.
Two weeks before that, another Calgarian, oilpatch executive William Lacey, said he was stopped from entering the Senate chamber during a tour and was told the T-shirt he was wearing was “offensive.”
Lacey complained and received an apology from the Parliamentary Protective Service, which said the officer wasn’t following regulations.
Postmedia’s attempts at clarifying if Wollin and Hartviksen’s clothing violated visitor rules was met with a generic response from the Parliamentary Protective Service, whose personnel manage the security of Parliament and its vicinity.
“Unfortunately for security reasons we do not comment on the specifics of any incident. We have initiated a review of practices and provided guidelines to our operational staff. Our internal communications and training continue. Our goal is to avoid such incidents from reoccurring,” the chief of staff of the service, Guillaume Vandal, said in an e-mailed statement.
Despite the repeated incidents of those shirts being rejected on Parliament Hill, Battershill said the news surrounding them has created a dialogue that exposes more Canadians to the benefits of the country’s oil and gas sector.
“It starts a conversation — it’s really become one of hope and positivity,” he said.
“We import a lot of foreign oil and nobody protests those oil tankers.”
The Calgarians halted by security guards on Parliament Hill said they were treated respectfully elsewhere in Ottawa while wearing the T-shirts.
Battershill said Canada Action over several years has sold thousands of the T-shirts and other articles of clothing, along with such items as coffee mugs, patches and decals.