Liberal attack ad angers military
Jan. 11, 2006. 02:32 PM
CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA — Soldiers past and present say they are insulted and outraged by a "despicable" and "incredibly stupid" Liberal campaign ad suggesting Canadian cities would be subject to military occupation under a Conservative government.
"It's pretty dumb to use soldiers as a wedge issue," said retired general Lewis MacKenzie, who ran for the Tories and lost in 1997. "It took my breath away; I just couldn't believe anybody could be that dumb."
The ad, which Liberals say was pulled before it ever ran on television (although it's been seen on news programs), opens with the ominous sound of a military drumbeat and the Conservative leader's blurred face in the background.
As the face comes slowly into focus, a concerned, measured voice speaks behind the words on the screen: "Stephen Harper actually announced he wants to increase military presence in our cities.
"Canadian cities. Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada.
"We did not make this up. Choose your Canada."
The ad was pulled from the Liberal party's English website but was still playing this afternoon on the party's French website.
Liberal spokesman Steve McKinnon said the ad was never approved and was included on a DVD distributed to the media and on the Liberal website in error. He said it was not run as a paid commercial and will not be run.
The Tories, who have proposed a permanent military presence in major Canadian cities as a ready aid in emergencies, said the ad implies that they are advocating some form of martial law.
The issue is particularly sensitive in Quebec, where long-held mistrust and resentment of the military was exacerbated in 1970 when the Liberal government of the day ordered martial law amid the FLQ crisis.
Soldiers, sailors and aircrew are formally prohibited from making public political comment or responding to political policy. But that didn't stop some from e-mailing expressions of outrage to advocacy and veterans' groups.
"People I work with echo my disgust that Canadian politicians are now using Canadian Forces personnel, past and present, to threaten people into voting Liberal," said one airman from Cold Lake, Alta.
The airman, who has served for 26 years, wrote in the e-mail to a national veterans' group that the ad appears directed at least partly at immigrants whose experience with militaries are almost invariably negative.
"We can only see this as a desperate attempt to win a few votes from what some would call the ethnic minority," he said.
"We have been honoured to walk Canadian streets. We have gone to the aid of municipalities in ice storms and the odd snow flurry in Toronto. If a city asked us for armed help during a crisis (as in the Oka or FLQ incidents, both a Quebec problem), I hope we would serve Canada well."
Retired colonel Alain Pellerin called the ad an act of desperation that is particularly "despicable" since CF members — even the chief of defence staff — are muzzled and cannot publicly respond.
"To use the Armed Forces for a purely crass political aim, to me is despicable," said Pellerin, a former infantryman who heads the Conference of Defence Associations, a lobby group and think tank.
He said it's even more offensive given that it's virtually the only reference the Liberals have made to the military in the entire campaign.
The Conservatives are not proposing anything new, Pellerin added.
"The army with guns in the city — we've been there since the foundation of the colony. Most of the time they were there to help . . . like the Winnipeg floods, the floods in the Saguenay, the ice storm in Ontario."
In an online blog, former navy seaman Lance Levsen of Delisle, Sask., said he was angered by the ad.
"That ad doesn't attack Harper and the (Conservatives). It attacks me," Levsen wrote. "The group of people that this ad targets are suggested to be a threat to peace in our Home and Native Land. That was me. ME!
"That ad targets my comrades who had the courage to join a profession whose job description includes death. That ad targets the heroic people of the UN peacekeeping missions who stand between warring factions defending peace."
