We started receiving these a couple of years ago. When we lived in Yaletown, I think they came from the NDP. Over the past week, we’ve received two from Conservative MPs Jay Hill and Ed Fast (do Tory MPs only get issued two syllables for their names?).
If you haven’t gotten these, they’re cheap-and-cheerful fliers (the graphic design work is sophmoric) focusing on a particular issue. They feature ridiculously heightened language (”many thugs, hoodlums and organized crime rings view these same cars as easy cash”) and a ballot, asking you to pick a party leader based on the issue. As you can see if you look at the larger version, these fliers ask “who do you think is on the right track on crime?” You fill in your details and send them back to ‘CRG-Government Caucus Services’.
I confess to being rather baffled by this particular direct marketing practice. I have a bunch of questions:
Do politicos have a particular name for this kind of direct mail piece?
Why does it originate from seemingly random Members of Parliament? I live in neither Peace River or Abbotsford–the two constituencies Mr. Hill and Mr. Fast represent.
This isn’t, in any scientific way, an actual poll or survey. These fliers feature specific criticism of the Liberals and prominent photos of Prime Minister Harper. Are they just trying to collect my name, contact details and an issue about which I care, so that they can follow up with more targeted mail? That seems to be the case.
Why is the execution so crappy? Because the parties are distributing millions of these around the country, in a kind of giant fishing expedition for more detailed information?
To me, these fliers have always seemed silly and wasteful. The rate of return must be abysmally low, and skews to the kind of people who have the time and inclination to complete and return the form. I’m guessing that that’s older supporters of the featured party.
Can some clueful, politically-minded sort explain the rationale and results associated with this old-school marketing?
UPDATE: This is why I ask questions around here–I tend to get fast and accurate answers from you, my dear readers. Wandering Coyote pointed me to his own partisan writings on the topic, as well as a Times Colonist article about these so-called ‘ten percenters’.
UPDATE #2: The Hill Times explains precisely what these fliers are:
The House spends about $7.8-million a year on printing services for MPs. MPs send out Householders four times a year into their constituencies. But they can also send an unlimited amount of “Ten Percenters,” or flyers to households across the country up to 10 per cent of their voters.
They are single page photocopied black and white flyers that the House Board of Internal Economy allows MPs to send to constituents in their own riding or in any other riding. Each Ten Percenter must be 50 per cent different from each other and, according to the Member’s Manual of Allowances and Services the MP’s name “must appear prominently on all Ten Percenters.” Once a month, however, MPs can participate in a “regrouping” where any number of MPs from the same party can send the same Ten Percenter to households anywhere in the country. The total number of Ten Percenters are not allowed to exceed 10 per cent of voters in each of the members participating in the regrouping and are coordinated through the parties whips’ offices.
John recently wrote a post and made a video demonstrating a specialized power strip that can eliminate standby or ‘vampire power’. This refers to electricity consumed by appliances and electronics which are apparently off, but are actually in an energy-leeching sleep mode.
John is Irish, so bonus points for the (Waterford? Wexford? I can never remember) accent.
In 2006, John’s neighbours in the UK banned standby power, which allegedly accounts for 8% of all domestic usage. I went looking for similar news from Canada, but all I could dig up was this FAQ about toothless ’standards’.
Here’s a chart that shows the worst culprits–plasma TVs, computers and game consoles.
We don’t have a TV, so I’ve hardly watched any Olympics. I’m surprised to say that I missed watching them a little. I’ve caught the highlights on the CBC’s website (live streaming still very dodgy on my MacBook), but that’s been it.
So, I have a lousy sense of Canada’s achievements at these games. They’ve won 19 medals, which sounds good, but how about a little context? How does 19 medals today compare to winning 19 medals in, say, 1968? How have the Olympics changed in the past 40 years?
I did some research on Wikipedia, and assembled this spreadsheet. In doing so, I learned some interesting stuff:
At the 2008 Olympics, Canada ended up ranking 19th in the medal standings. That’s its best performance since 1992, and (ignoring the heavily-boycotted 1984 Games) its second best performance in the last 40 years. The Canadian Olympic Committee had set a goal of a top-16 finish, which seems pretty unrealistic given history and the competition.
We can also look at the portion of the total medal pot that Canada won. They won 1.98% of these year’s medals.
I looked at some other factors, like how many medals Canada won per event or attending athlete, but I’m not sure that they’re germane.
I also discovered a couple of general Olympic stats:
Since 1968, the number of athletes attending the Games has doubled.
Since 1968, the number of events has increased by 76%, and the total number of events by 82%. I guess we can attribute the greater increase in athletes to new team sports or larger pools of qualifying athletes?
I know, I’m a big nerd. But I think we can celebrate Canada’s medal haul as a very good result. They’ve done better, but 2008 counts as above average.
To those who would accuse me of focusing too much on the medal count, I’d point you to this Globe and Mail article. In it, two-time gold medal winner and executive director of the Road to Excellence Alex Baumann talks about how much their emphasis is on winning, and funding those sports where Canadian athletes are likely to medal.
First, read about Travis’s odyssey to get an iPhone on Friday. He was tenacious, and it took most of the day, but (despite Rogers’ best efforts) he took one home. Travis cites ten problems with the iPhone launch in Canada:
So yeah, basically, from the biggest, most important factors, to the smallest details, they were simply unprepared—which is bad enough—but they were also dumb about process and shoddy and careless.
Next, read Seth’s post about scarcity and how to handle high demand and low supply:
Imagine what the Apple and AT&T stores would have been like this weekend if they were filled with happy customers who had pre-paid, pre-registered and were just dropping in for three minutes to pick up their (very coveted) phones, walking up the VIP line, past all the others just waiting for a chance to buy one…
Both posts have lots of lessons about how Apple, Rogers, Fido et al could have better managed their iPhone campaign. There’s enough material in the last six months for an MBA thesis.
You know the story–they really dropped the ball from day one. They pretty much made every error possible, from exorbitant initial pricing to promising breakfast to the early birds. Travis reports (at one of Rogers’ six national flagship stores) that “The only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people.” Now that’s some sweet customer service.
Come Back on Monday or Tuesday
As both Travis and Seth more or less point out, why didn’t Rogers just hand out tickets to those in line, like wristbands for a concert? They could easily have predicted excessive demand, and they knew how many phones each store was getting. I can guess why: nobody who works at a Rogers store wants to get up early to go meet and greet the alpha fans that have queued up half the night.
I went into a Fido store in Victoria yesterday, and asked about the ratio of supply to demand. They said they had 26 iPhones, and easily had 100 enquiries on the first day. Then I asked how I could buy one, and they told me to “come back on Monday or Tuesday”. No waiting list, no deposit, no nothing. They genuinely didn’t want to take my money.
If I was Bell Canada or another mobility provider, I’d be offering killer deals over the next few weeks, to try to entice iPhone enthusiasts away. You wouldn’t get the hardcore fanboys, but there would probably be some low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking.
At my high school in West Vancouver, we never had anything called ‘prom’. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what prom is. From Wikipedia:
In the United States and Canada a prom, short for promenade, is used to describe a formal dance held at the end of an academic year…
While proms at smaller schools may hold a school prom open to the entire student body, large high schools may hold two proms, a junior prom for those finishing their 11th grade year and a senior prom for those who are finishing their high school years. The name is derived from the late nineteenth century practice of a promenade ball. The end of year tradition stemmed from the graduation ball tradition.
At Sentinel Secondary (holy crap, high school classes are now 80 minutes?) in West Vancouver, we had three or four dances each year, and then a year end event called ‘grad’. Grad involved the graduation ceremony, a dinner, dancing and the usual after-grad mayhem.
If memory serves, by 6:00am on the morning following grad, I ended up in my friend Lincoln’s hot tub. In a classic high school gaffe, Lincoln, myself and another guy, Ryan, all had grad dates that weren’t our girlfriends. I was taking Lincoln’s girlfriend, Ryan was taking mine, and Lincoln was taking a third young woman (their relationship status is entirely fuzzy in my memory).
If you went to high school in Canada, did you have something called ‘prom’? Is this, maybe, a regional preference?
DJs or Live Bands?
On a related note, did you have DJs or live bands at your high school dances? I ask because on the TAL broadcast, they visit a few proms, and they always seem to have DJs. At my high school, we almost always had live bands.
Was this commonplace back in the late eighties? Is it common now, or are all high school dances now DJ-powered?
I’ve been to Moscone Center in San Francisco a few times. I only learned a couple of weeks ago that it was named after George Moscone, former mayor of San Francisco. Along with city supervisor Harvey Milk, he was killed by a former, disgruntled employee.
I was talking to somebody about Moscone at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. During our conversation, I wondered out loud whether a Canadian government official had ever been assassinated on domestic soil. I did a little searching, and couldn’t find anything. Can you think of anybody?
UPDATE: D’oh. How could I forget the October Crisis? Thanks to Andre for reminding me. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever studied this bit of history in high school. And I took no Canadian history courses in university. Still, I hang my head in shame, eh?
On the CBC’s Ideas podcast, I’m currently listening to “Canada: Nation or Notion” (MP3, 25 MB, 53:46), a debate between two Canadians who live in the US: Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. They’re both very smart, eloquent speakers, and it makes for an hour of enjoyable listening:
I thought I would begin by drawing on an example that may seem a little far fetched. But trust me, I will circle around and make it make sense. And that is to talk about the success of ethnic Chinese immigrants throughout the world.
Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.
I gather this is just one in a number of discussions that Gopnik and Gladwell have been having over the years. Here’s the text from a 2000 debate about American vs. Canadian healthcare systems.
If you haven’t read Gopnik’s beautiful book Paris to the Moon, I highly recommend it.
Blogging will be slow to nonexistent over the next couple of days as I head back to Vancouver and get settled in. If you’re in search of diversion, there’s always my page o’ links or my favourite meta-aggregator.
The percentage of Canadians who’d consider giving up their beloved system consistently languishes in the single digits. A few years ago, a TV show asked Canadians to name the Greatest Canadian in history; and in a broad national consensus, they gave the honor to Tommy Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier who is considered the father of the country’s health care system. (And no, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was also Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather.).
The argument and the writing are both quality. I’d like to read an equally well thought-out article from the other camp.
There is one fundamental problem with these articles: their total lack of citations and references. Both articles are full of facts, figures and claims, but there’s barely a hyperlink to be seen. This lack of transparency really undercuts Robinson’s argument, and it’s a shame.
