New Conservative Party Ad Cheers On Russian Jets Heading for Ukraine

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has had an embarrassing month.

A couple of weeks ago people pointed their fingers and laughed after they accused the Liberals of being “lavish” for holding an Ontario caucus meeting at a “swanky” Holiday Inn like the three-star Sudbury hotel was some sort of nickel-plated Mar-a-Lago. And they’re still denying having anything to do with a sketchy bot campaign where hundreds of accounts based overseas relayed identical excitement after allegedly attending a recent CPC rally held in the middle of nowhere.

Conservative Rally Creates Totally Legit Online Buzz. Not Sus! Legit!

But their clown car found a new gear after putting out a three-minute video last week with the chef’s kiss title “Canada: Our Home” imagining just how goshdarn great the Great White North could be under Conservative majority rule featuring footage shot mostly outside the country.

“It’s easy to forget what home and hope look like so let me paint the picture,” declared party leader Pierre Poilievre at the start of the campaign ad, which added a variety of clips and photos to a speech he gave earlier this summer at the Calgary Stampede, and it almost seems like a mea culpa given all the Canadiana cosplay that comes next. The video has since disappeared from the party’s YouTube channel but the Internet never forgets:

The schoolchildren seen attending class would presumably be learning how to read and write in their native Serbian rather than French or English, the “Canadian dad” who had just dropped them off was rolling through suburbs somewhere in North Dakota, the “newly built and affordable Canadian homes” were under construction at an undisclosed location in Slovenia, and the happy family enjoying “a wonderful venison that was shot with totally legal Canadian firearms” were instead dining al fresco somewhere in Tuscany.

They even outsourced the mighty frickin Rockies to foothills in Utah! Canada literally has TONS of Rocky Mountains to choose from. Including the second highest peak on the continent after Denali, Mount Logan, which I’m sorry to say isn’t named after national treasure Wolverine. (It would’ve been weird since he’s meant to be a short guy in the comics.) But this is the same crack campaign that used what appears to be Switzerland’s famous Matterhorn for the “Common Sense Conservatives” hockey jerseys they’re hawking online.

The closing shot of a purplish evening sky with “We’re Home” emblazoned across was filmed somewhere in Venezuela. Maybe this was meant as a weird romantic gesture to his Venezuelan wife. The oil-rich South American nation at least has a town named La Cañada although it lacks a hockey rink or the weaponized politeness.

Hockey gear button

But at least the Petro-Canada gas station where his patriotic protagonist filled his pickup truck up with “affordable and lower-taxed Canadian-made energy” was filmed domestically since no other country has them.

People might not have noticed if he hadn’t also made his main character look up and proudly see fighter jets “doing a training mission in the sky, getting ready to defend our home and native land.” Which turned out to be Russian Su-17 and Su-27 military planes, which we only learned after it somehow made it across the Department of National Defence’s radar.

“Shockingly, Mr. Poilievre’s dream for Canada includes Russian fighter jets flying over our glorious prairies on a ‘training mission’,” said DNC spokesperson Daniel Minden. “This comes as Russia continues its illegal, unprovoked war of choice against Ukraine and the international rules that keep us all safe.”

The discovery that Peewee was using a geopolitical adversary’s military apparatus for hypernationalist propaganda was what led a still-Twitter user in Calgary to track down some of other shit used, and the unexpected Red Dawn homage wasn’t even the worst part.

Poilievre continued:

The same plane is soon seen from the university campus, where kids are hustling off to class, maybe a bit late, having just procrastinated on that university essay, knowing that when they get to class they will have the chance to debate freely and fearlessly without worry about being censored. 

And what specific post-secondary school was used as an example of where students might look up to see Russkie jets flying overhead, you ask? One where this is a very real and terrifying possibility: Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine.

They found “young Caucasian handsome man closing laptop, sighing, and looking away at sundown” on Adobe and then used Google Maps to pinpoint the location. Hopefully Russian special military operation forces won’t be pinpointing it themselves.

There’s poetic justice the party who make a big fuss about representing the values of “old stock Canadians” — meaning white, self-described Christians — has shot itself in the foot for using old stock images. The Conservatives, caught with their pants down, at least didn’t try to spin this as the biased fake news industry trying to make them look stupid and/or sneaky for a change.

“The video was removed — mistakes happen,” fishy comms director Sarah Fischer told the CBC while gamely baiting the bothsidesism hook claiming the Liberals did something similar back in 2011 with a commercial using stock footage of aspiring actors rather than actual card-carrying supporters.

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Writing this post reminded me I took part in a Getty Images shoot a million years ago working as a whitewater guide in British Columbia and I’d never bothered to check what became of the photos. Turns out my more youthful and vigorous self has been used to help sell a range of products from rafting trips in Oregon and Northern California to Nicorette gum.

Which I’m taking as a sign I finally need to kick the nasty vape-huffing habit I picked up during the pandemic. I’d hate to mislead people like a common Common Sense Conservative.

[CBC]