Lawn sign graffiti fuels innuendo
But both Liberals and NDP targeted
What happened: Did Liberal Leader Christy Clark suggest the NDP might be behind a swastika painted on a campaign sign belonging to Liberal Naomi Yamamoto, running for re-election in North Vancouver-Lonsdale? Later Monday, the riding’s NDP candidate, Bowinn Ma, discovered her signs had also been defaced with the Nazi symbol. When asked by the media about the hate-filled graffiti on Yamamoto’s sign, Clark said people do “dumb stuff ” during election campaigns.
Quote: “There’s always lots of people damaging signs, you know. So, I guess I try not to think about what all the other guys are doing, what all the negative people are doing, because I’m thinking a lot about a really positive bright future for our kids. I know this is going to be an ugly, dirty mean campaign. That is what the NDP has promised us again and again.” — Liberal Leader Christy Clark
Reality check: On Twitter, people questioned whether Clark, a nimble campaigner, used the incident as an opportunity to suggest the NDP were the “negative people” behind the graffiti.
It is impossible to say who was responsible, as the identity of the spray-painter is unknown, but it looks unlikely it was the NDP since the opposition party’s candidate was also targeted.
And was it fair to say the NDP has promised “again and again” to fight an “ugly, dirty, mean” campaign? An NDP post-mortem from the last election concluded that previous leader Adrian Dix lost because he insisted on remaining positive during the hard-fought campaign. “Positive did not work,” the report said.
Former NDP president Moe Sihota has said recently that the party should have “gone for the jugular” in 2013 instead of trying to woo voters by being nice.
Indeed, party leader John Horgan is on the record saying recently that the NDP is “going to be aggressive on the government’s record.” And their gloves-off ads bear the tag line: “Christy Clark: Not working for you.”
It is the Liberals, though, through former mines minister Bill Bennett, who publicly predicted “the ugliest campaign we’ve ever seen — and the ugliness will come from the NDP.”
The Liberals used very negative ads effectively in 2013, and have launched many so far this campaign.
“We will run ads on the missing pieces of (the NDP) platform,” Mike McDonald, a senior Liberal campaign adviser, recently told Postmedia.
“They’re making a lot of big, expensive promises. But there’s no way they can pay for them without massive tax increases, and not just on high-income earners.”
It is not just the NDP that is promising to go negative “again and again” in this campaign.