The flyer fight

Elaine Bander is sitting in her bright kitchen in Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood.

"So this is what I found in the mail," she says, looking at a piece of paper sent to her house by Calgary Conservative MP Rob Anders.

It's a special flyer known as a "ten-percenter", so named because Parliament allows MPs to send only a certain number of them outside their own ridings. That number is 10 per cent of the total households in the MP's own riding.

This particular flyer has generated a lot of controversy.

"It's got two columns," Bander reads. "One side says 'Conservatives', the other side says 'Liberals', with big titles: 'on fighting anti Semitism abroad'...'on fighting terrorism abroad'...'on support for Israel.'"

Like many in this riding, Bander  is Jewish. She's also a retired teacher from Dawson College. She doesn't buy any of the pamphlet's assertions -- for example, that the Liberals willingly participated in an anti-Semitic conference in South Africa.

"The Liberals went to Durban One and played a strong role in condemning what happened when the meeting was hijacked," she says. "It wasn't that they wrung their hands in delight, saying 'Oh goody, we get to trash Israel.'"

Bander has never been a Liberal supporter. But she says the so-called facts in this pamphlet are not fairly presented.

"These are extremely unnuanced statements," she says. "I would say they're distortions bordering on outright lies. I would expect to see something like that in a campaign, and I would treat it with the respect it deserves. But this is not a campaign period and this came as an official communication."

That communication was widely distributed last week to predominantly Jewish ridings in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. It's provoked outrage not least among the Liberal MPs whose ridings were targeted.

"This accusation as set forth in the ten-percenters is absolutely abhorrent," Liberal MP Irwin Cotler told the House of Commons this week. He argued the ten-percenter has damaged his reputation. He presented evidence from his Montreal riding of Mount Royal.

"Indeed, Mr Speaker, (my constituents) have asked how I could remain with a party that is anti-Semitic, or how as a Jew I could be engaging in such self-hatred."

The Conservatives responded by accusing the Liberals of doing the same thing in the past.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney told the House "...the identical communications tactic (is) being used by members of the official Opposition. So apparently for them what's good for the goose is not good for the gander."

But, in the end, Speaker Peter Milliken ruled in Cotler's favour, paving the way for the issue to be reviewed by the Procedure and House Affairs Committee. Parliament will decide that in a vote on Monday.

Last week Parliament asked the same committee to look into another complaint about ten-percenters -- this time from NDP MP Peter Stoffer.

His riding was targeted by flyers from Saskatchewan Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott. The flyers claimed that Stoffer supported the long gun registry -- something Stoffer has never done.

Vellacott apologized for the flyer last week.

The week before, Tom Lukiwski, Vellacott's Saskatchewan benchmate, also apologized to Liberal MP Larry Bagnell for misrepresenting his voting record on the gun registry.

Conservatives aren't the only ones apologizing.

Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett recently said she was sorry for a flyer she sent to First Nations communities criticizing the government's policies on H1N1. It featured a picture of body bags on the cover.

But bad taste aside, the Speaker of the House of Commons has not been asked to rule on any opposition flyers lately -- only the government's.

Elaine Bander thinks the problem with flinging dirt at other MPs is that some of it sticks.

"If you spread fear strongly enough, it can sway voters. And that's very scary and very dangerous," she says. "And the fact that my taxes are paying for this is just a double outrage."

Liberal  Leader Michael Ignatieff weighed in last week, calling for a ban on sending mailings outside an MP's riding. But so far, the New Democrats and the Conservatives say they aren't on board.

Last year, the mailings cost taxpayers $10 million. Conservatives are far and away the biggest users of the system.

Tom Flanagan was a campaign manager for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He was also one of the architects behind the Conservatives' increasingly aggressive use of ten-percenters. Flanagan argues the flyers were originally meant as a concession to opposition parties who don't have the same communications advantages as the government.

"And this is one of the things that's peculiar to me, why the Liberals keep whining about this," he says. "Don't they understand this is one of their chances to go around the government, Which has all the advantages as the government and far more seats and far more money and all the things governments have? Opposition parties have a chance to do these mailings to other ridings and make their case to voters there."

Flanagan does believe there should be a cap on what is spent on the flyers by Parliament.

As for the content -- he argues that mistakes and distortions are par for the course in federal politics.

"They're not done at the highest levels of the prime minister's office," he says. "They're done by lower-level staff, and they take them around to MPs' offices."

Still, it's hard to believe there isn't an organized strategy at play. The Conservative party targeted Jewish voters with similar messages in the last election.

Jonathan Goldbloom is a Liberal organizer in Montreal and he managed Bob Rae's campaign for the leadership.

"It's been the strategy of the Conservative party since it's been elected to try to make Israel a wedge issue," argues Goldbloom. "And their goal is to try and create division and support within the Jewish communities mainly in urban centres across Canada, to succeed in penetrating ridings where they've had difficulty getting in.  Our perspective is that Israel should not be a wedge issue."

Goldbloom recently signed a letter calling on Harper to retract the message of the flyer. It was signed by more than a hundred people, many drawn from Liberal party ranks.

Bernie Farber, the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says he's reluctant to wade in to what he calls a political bun fight.

"As far as we are concerned as a community, fighting anti-Semitism and terrorism and supporting Israel have been and should continue to be a unifying theme in Canadian politics."

Perhaps the Conservative party has calculated that it can afford some of the flack it's getting, if it can just sway enough votes. The question is, is it working?

According to Flanagan, attack ads and flyers work if a party can successfully skirt the line between truth and distortion.

"If an attack is totally fictional, it will backfire if there's not truth in it at all," he says. "Canadians will tolerate attacks based on half-truths, misstatements, partial misstatements and distortions. As long as there is some basis there it becomes a matter of debate. If there's no basis it will backfire."

Flanagan thinks the Liberals are mounting an effective counter to the flyer in question. But quietly, some people in the Jewish community acknowledge the attacks are swaying some voters.

Elaine Bander isn't one of them. She remains unmoved by the flyer, and not just because the tone is nasty or the information misleading.

"The message offends me as a Jew who also has other identities," she says. "I was a Dawson College teacher when the shooting started. So gun control is at least as important an issue for me in choosing a leader as policies on Israel would be."

Bander's feelings are just one argument against wedge politics as an effective strategy. The Conservatives have missed the mark before in trying to divide the Liberal base on hot button issues: for example, young offenders, or arts funding in the last election.

And yet, the Conservatives continue to bet on this strategy doing them more good than harm at election time.

Listen to the audio of this documentary feature: