DarrenBarefoot.com

Earlier this week, I read about a new initiative to attract young voters to the political process. Through a program called Youth Text 2004, Canadian cellphone users can communicate with four of Canada’s largest parties via text message. The parties will reply within 48 hours and, in theory, open a dialogue with otherwise ambivalent young Canadians.

While voter turn-out among young Canadians is awful, this idea is deeply misguided. In an era of soundbyte politics, we’re actually encouraging Canada’s young people to think only in 100 characters or less? Do the parties really think they’ll be able to convert the young electorate using SMS?

However, I had to try it out. On Monday at 14:00 PST, I sent out two messages to each of the four participating parties. The questions were ‘What is your party leader’s position on legalization of pot?’ and ‘[Party leader] - boxers or briefs?’ What follows are the responses I got, entered exactly as I received them (errors and all):

A brief analysis:

• Greens: They reflect their hipness and youth awareness with the timely reply and lack of capitalization. They also tried to extend the dialogue to other subjects. Some points for their lame attempt at a humourous reply to the second question.
• Liberals: The quote from Martin is almost dadaist in its obtuseness. The ‘we did not understand…’ message appears to be the standard reply for whack-jobs and inappropriate questions.
• NDP: They offered a terse and cogent reply that was capitalized and punctuated correctly (not sure if that’s good or bad in the world of texting). Extra points for their response to the underwear issue.
• Conservatives: As if we need any more verification that this is an old boys’ party. Not only did they not answer either of my questions, but they sent the same reply five times, followed by a blank message.