Kenney’s spam list

Be careful what you send to Ottawa.

Gay Canadians were shocked last week to receive an email letter from Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney trumpeting his government’s protection of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) refugees from Iran. Their first question: How does he know I’m gay? The next question: How did he get my email address? “None of us have ever signed up to receive email from your office and we wonder how our names ended up on your propaganda spam list,” Johannah May Black of Toronto shot back in an open letter to Kenney. Other recipients called the electronic missive scary, invasive and disrespectful.

A spokesman for Kenney insisted nothing was amiss. The email, said Alexis Pavlich, “was sent in response to individuals who have communicated with our office about gay refugee issues.” But several baffled recipients said they had never contacted the minister.

What they had done, however, was sign an online petition supporting a gay artist from Nicaragua who was facing deportation. Ten thousand people — some heterosexual — put their names on it. This automatically generated a form letter to Kenney’s office with their name and email address on it. Conservative strategists harvested the emails for a database of voters interested in gay issues.

Former New Democratic party candidate Michael Erickson, who launched the petition, found it odd that the minister did not respond to the mass appeal in the first place, but targeted the unsuspecting signatories later. “As a government that has not been very friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered rights, they could have saved themselves from causing some concern.”

This wasn’t Kenney’s first clumsy attempt to target specific groups of voters. In last year’s election, he attempted to target “ethnic voters” by recruiting volunteers in folkloric costumes to sit behind Stephen Harper at a campaign rally. A coalition of non-Caucasian groups known as the Colour of Poverty responded with a very funny — but devastating — video telling the minister to “Beat it. Don’t want to be an ethnic. Want to be Canadian.”

Kenney has a habit of making his targets feel like victims and making others wonder: Will I be next?