httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIza1amabkA

This ridiculous artifact is so not-Canadian that it would be laughably dismissible except for the very real intimidation tactics it reveals.  The message to Canadians in this and a whole string of other commercials is fear, fear, fear and still more fear.

Anyone living in Canada will know that the Harper government has deployed a battery of government funded television ads to tenderize the public for an upcoming election.  The ads have an unmistakable common theme: national emergency preparedness, kids taking drugs, elder abuse, victims’ rights — and, of course, bringing it all together, the military interception of a ship whose cargo is drugs: drugs that would otherwise be fed to our children and escalate crime (including attacks upon the elderly) to national emergency levels.

This not-so-subliminal advertising is particularly distasteful coming from a government that set the stage for unprovoked police violence against its own citizens last June.

It isn’t that the issues represented in these ads are not important — they most certainly are — but they are exaggerated, de-contextualized, and unrelenting.  They represent the only message this government wishes to relay to the public it is supposed to serve.

It’s ugly.  And it’s an abuse of the public trust to use tax dollars to promote propaganda calculated to demoralize citizens rather than enlighten them.

Here’s the whole lot.  Imagine being subjected to them around the clock every day.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR7jafdUvi4

“Is Your Family Prepared?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90rw7_6cUDE

“Anti-Drug Strategy”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP0sZB9jRlA

“Senior Abuse”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmYd1b_Nh10

“Victims Matter”