Will try to give a precis of Heather's piece. While attempting that, here's a piece from the days when she broke with Rabble and we lost a marvelously honest voice (although had she not gone public with the break, perhaps we would not still be reading her stuff in the Star ? )
Life's a slice of demographic pie
Wanted: Married white females with children
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 | 4:38 PM ET
By Heather Mallick CBC News
Heather Mallick
Stephen Harper's Conservatives yearn for me. It was a shock to find out that I am part of their target demographic.
The Toronto Star ran a novella recently on Harper's failure to win a majority. In a piece headlined "How Harper Let It Slip Away," reporter Kenneth Kidd recited the prime minister's yearnings for particular slices of the Canadian people pie, based on socio-economic data and dressed up by marketing experts to breathe life into social segments.
"The Tories knew, for instance that they had an opening with married women who have children, but it was [a marketer] who dubbed them 'Heather,' as in 'Steve and Heather,' a married Protestant couple with three kids."
My name is Heather. But how did Steve Harper know I'm married? To a guy named Steve, no less? And that we have kids and are nominally Protestant?
How did he know that I am politically vulnerable in the sense that, as the years pass, I have come to despise the hard left (to be fair, the Canadian hard left despises me as well) and am a bit of a drifting voter? I haven't even told My Steve that yet.