NEW TORY FLYERS SPREADING FALSEHOODS, NDP SAYS
Flyers falsely claim New Democrats plan to end income-splitting tax break for seniors
Former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts, who caused a stir this week by releasing campaign flyers warning Canadians about the dangers of Islamic terrorism, isn’t the only candidate being accused of trying to scare Canadians into voting Conservative.
Pro- Stephen Harper flyers have also surfaced in several ridings suggesting that the New Democratic Party plans to end the income-splitting tax break for senior citizens.
“It’s fearmongering and it’s dishonest,” said NDP candidate Bill Sundhu, who is challenging Tory incumbent Cathy McLeod in Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo. “We’ve been very clear we support income- splitting for seniors. This smacks of desperation and it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
He said senior citizens in particular would be frightened to see that kind of propaganda involving a party that has a chance to form government.
Such incidents show Canada needs an honesty in politics law, with an independent watchdog empowered to investigate and penalize parties found guilty of misleading advertising, said Duff Conacher, a co-founder of Democracy Watch and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa. “The watchdog must be fully resourced and required to make decisions quickly so misleading statements can be penalized, and corrected, before election day,” he said in an emailed statement.
Mulcair issued a string of promises relating to seniors’ income security on Sept. 3, and one of them was a pledge that his party would be “protecting pension-income splitting for seniors.” Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has made the same promise.
Watts was slammed by opposition parties who say she was trying to scare voters with a flyer warning Canadians they are directly threatened in their homes by Islamic terrorists, and that only the Tories are fighting them in the Middle East.
Both the terrorist and the income-splitting flyers have been distributed in other ridings, indicating that they were generated by the party head office rather than local campaign offices.
Watts told The Sun the flyer is intended to remind voters that only the Conservatives support the bombing mission against ISIS. “There are hundreds of thousands of people that are fleeing a country because they’re faced with dealing with the violence and brutality, and we want to partner with the other coalition countries to ensure that these people are supported, and that’s the message. … There’s no intent to be fearmongering.”
Sundhu said both flyers may be a reflection of hardball tactics being pushed by Australian campaign guru Lynton Crosby, the so-called Wizard of Oz.
“The federal Conservatives are playing from the Republican playbook and that means fear and division, us-and-them wedge politics, and it’s destructive to our democratic system,” Sundhu said. “It engenders division and apathy and fear.”