Pierre Poilievre’s now infamous white-hat-and-white-T-shirt video was no sooner posted on Saturday than social media was lit up by mockers pointing out that almost none of the scenes used to illustrate the federal Conservative leader’s Calgary Stampede speechifying about Canada were recorded in Canada.
The Conservative Party yanked it down faster than you could say Sukhois over Sudbury – home of the swanky Holiday Inn where Justin Trudeau’s Liberals sometimes gather for lavish caucus meetings. But I digress.
Thanks to an account on X called @disorderedyyc for cataloguing most of the discoverable examples of non-Canadian scenes of Canada in the creepy Conservative Party of Canada video in a series of hilarious tweets: Canadian elementary classroom (Serbia), Canadian school bus (U.S.A.), new Canadian home (Solvenia), Canadian countryside (North Dakota), Canadian cattle (California), Canadian university campus (Ukraine), female Canadian hunter with Canadian firearm (U.S.A.), loveable Canadian grandma, grandpa and grandchild (London, England), Canadian Foothills (Indonesia), and Canadian Rockies (Utah)!
The video was called Canada, Our Home. Apparently not!
The irony was so delicious that even The Guardian, a British newspaper not known for treating Canada as very interesting except when things are on fire, quoted the unidentified Twitterist. So thanks to Poilievre, his incompetent video team, and @disorderedyyc, Canada is naff no more!
And @disorderedyyc didn’t even mention the two Russian Sukhoi military jets streaking through “Canadian” skies (including over that supposedly Canadian university, according to the story line) which seems to be what social media users noticed first. One turned out to be an ancient Soviet era ground attack aircraft, the other a somewhat newer and much prettier Su-27 fighter, both made by the aforementioned Sukhoi aircraft manufacturer.
Or that the image of a wagon full of straw bales was used to illustrate Poilievre’s ode to a combine harvester.
Surely the Conservative Party should be getting enough donations nowadays to afford a dramaturg or something to ensure their videos don’t make them look dumb!
Anyway, Albertans will be relieved to know this had nothing to do with the aide to premier Ed Stelmach who famously defended the use by his minions of video of a beach in Northumbria, England, to illustrate an advertising tagline that read, “Alberta: Freedom to Create. Spirit to Achieve.”
Well, the goal of the 2009 advertising campaign was to rebrand Alberta. But Tom Olsen probably shouldn’t have insisted to the media, which was still capable of reporting a story mildly critical of Conservatives in those long-gone days, that the Progressive Conservative government he worked for supported the use of the video because the scene was “symbolic of the future children and the world.”
More recently, in June, Olsen had to give up his executive role at the Alberta Energy War Room when the UCP Government, spooked by Ottawa’s new anti-greenwashing law, shut down the government-owned “private” anti-environmentalist propaganda corporation and moved some of its operations to the legal safety of the government fold.
A CEO no more, the former journalist and “alt-country” musician seems to have opened a new one-man public affairs business. Its website has now gone live. His appropriately named foursome, Tom Olsen and the Wreckage, is looking for gigs as well.
We can be confident that Olsen at least has learned the dangers of using commercial stock footage without looking at it really carefully.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
