Angry in the Great White North

In my last post, I was considering the mail sent ahead of Garth Turner's speaking tour. Here's what we know.

• The mail cames from 16 different MPs, including Garth Turner.
• These MPs sent mail, in envelopes, directly to specific addresses, addressed by family name.
• The envelope contained information about where Garth Turner would be speaking.

I had thought that these were 10 percenters, a special form of mail that MPs can be send to 10% of the households in a riding.

I think I was wrong, and here's why.

The point of a 10 percenter is that it is cheap. It consists of a flyer or a reply card. The flyers are not individually addressed but instead are delivered to every household in a postal code, or some other generic means of identification. Since they don't need to be sorted individually, they enjoy bulk rates from Canada Post -- about five or ten cents a card.

That's good to know, since they are paid out of the House of Commons budget.

The intention of a 10 percenter is to give the MP of a riding the ability to survey his constituents on a particular matter.

There is another kind of mail that comes from an MP, and that is franked mail. This is no different than a letter you write to someone. You write it, you put it in an envelope, you individually address the envelope, you put a stamp on it, and off it goes.

[There is also something called a householder, but this doesn't fit the criteria so I'm going to skip that altogether.]

The only difference between the mail I put in the mailbox and franked mail is the stamp. The MP puts his name in the place where a stamp would go, and Canada Post delivers it anyway (frankus means "free" in Latin). But being an individually delivered message, it must be sorted, put on a truck to another sorting facility, sorted and sorted again, and finally given to a mail carrier (who sorts again) for delivery right to the recipient's house or mail box.

Because of all the sorting, Canada Post charges the full amount, but the cost is covered by the House of Commons. It works the other way too. If I want to write to my MP, or to the Prime Minister, or to a Senator, and so on, I just put the name on the envelope (with some details, Canada Post explains the required form of the envelope), and the charge for delivering the mail is covered by the House as well.

And when I say by the House of Commons, I mean all us through taxes, of course.

Franked mail is much more expensive than a 10 percenter but then franked mail is supposed to be sent far less often.

Or maybe not. One of the recipients of the Garth Turner ad sent me a scan of the delivered material.

Now the material looks like a highly partisan 10 percenter. It's not a personal letter but a cheaply made flyer for mass-distribution.

But it came stuffed in a franked envelope and delivered to a specific residence to a family name.

So why pay 50 cents per envelope to send it franked mail in favour of a nickel a sheet with a 10 percenter?

Assuming I understand the difference correctly, and this is franked mail, this is what I think is going on:

• Because 10 percenters are printed and mailed by House of Commons staff, the material is checked first, and grossly partisan mailings are rejected. Maybe there was concern this flyer would not stand up under scrutiny.
• A 10 percenter can only go to 10% of the households in a riding, while you can send as many franked mails you can address, but remembering that abusing franked mail privileges are taken seriously by the Speaker.
• A 10 percenter, as a form of bulk mail, can only be targeted to broad areas, while franked mail is directly addressed.

The last point is important. The person who sent me this sample is a 60-year-old retiree. Are these MPs working with Garth Turner using mailing lists skewed toward retirees? Is Garth Turner trying to drum up a greying audience to fan anger over income trusts?

Why does this matter? Franked mail is expensive. That would explain, in part, why fifteen Liberal MPs are helping Garth Turner out. Besides the administrative simplicity of each MP targeting one city and so only handling one of fifteen styles of flyer, spreading it around helps hide the spike in franked mail charges attributed to Garth Turner.

But it is taxpayer's money. And that much franked mail would cost quite a bit of money.

This no-cost-to-taxpayer tour is sounding a lot more expensive than I thought.

And then there is the acceptability of this sort of thing. Some people recognize just how powerful these free mail privileges are for sending out a partisan party messages without dipping into party funds:

One of the advantages of incumbency is the ability to get your message across.

By way of comparison, our campaign is planning to send correspondence to all the homes in Halton in a few weeks, and for that we have to budget at least $15,000.

So, by using his free "ten-percenter," plus the "householders" he can send to every home several times a year, plus his government-funded web site, and his free personal mailings [ed, franked mail], upon which there are no limits, the Liberal MP can become a communications machine, without spending a single dime of his campaign funds.

But, this power does not mean squat when a sitting member can't tell the difference between effectively communicating, and trying to trick and deceive the voters.

Halton? Yes, that was Garth Turner writing in 2005, challenging the Liberal incumbent Gary Carr. Well, despite Carr's free mail, Turner won for the Conservatives. Now Turner is a Liberal, and using those same services (actually much more, since 16 MPs are pooling together) to get his partisan party message across without spending "a single dime" of Liberal Party funds.

And what about the practise of sending partisan messages using taxpayer-funded mail services? Garth Turner again, in 2005:

As the days before the next election shorten, and as the Liberal contemplates that I will convincingly defeat him, his one-size-fits-all, government-funded communications strategy grows increasingly partisan. While this is against House of Commons guidelines, it is common Liberal practice - using taxpayers' money to tell the taxpayers what to think.

Wow, this stuff just writes itself!

Ironic how Garth Turner sneers at common Liberal practise. I guess that makes him a most common Liberal today.

And if this sort of thing is against House of Commons guidelines, then shouldn't the Speaker get involved?

The bottom line is this. It looks like this no-cost-to-taxpayer tour had an advertising budget of thousands, perhaps many thousands, of taxpayer dollars, spent on printed material and individually addressed franked mail shared across 16 MPs' offices, either to share the administrative pain or to hide the size of the outlay, or both.

The strange code above the addressee's name on the envelope makes me wonder if the mailing list was extracted from a database that identified retirees in the ridings near the locations of Garth Turner's stops, in order to push the income trust story (the first bullet on the front side of the flyer, you'll note).

A side benefit of used franked mail is that the material would not be vetted by the House of Commons, even as the taxpayer footed the bill for the Canada Post charge.

But the real problem is that using franked mail like this is wrong, as Garth Turner wrote in 2005. There is no limit to the amount of franked mail an MP can send, but it is intended for one-to-one correspondence with constituents. Franked mail can be sent anywhere in the country, but even then the intent is that an MP is answering a question or otherwise dealing with a particular matter that involves a specific person from outside his riding.

Expensive franked mail is not supposed to be used as a free spam system.

Literally, that's what 10 percenters are for. But to keep the spam level low, 10 percenters are held to certain guidelines and standards, and House staff will reject material that does stay within the guidelines and meet those standards.

So why are 16 Liberal MPs sending unsolicited franked mail from one end of the country to the other, containing nothing but a highly partisan flyer for Garth Turner's speaking tour at great expense?

And is Garth Turner going to list his MP friends (we know John McCallum and Massimo Pacetti are two of them) and then tell us how many franked envelopes left each of their offices so we can determine just how much this no-cost-to-taxpayer tour is costing the taxpayer?

Note: A key element to the "no cost" argument that has been put forth is that Garth Turner is using resources that are already paid for services allocated to each MP for his or her use. So he has sometimes said that there was no additional cost to the taxpayer. Franked mail, as I understand it, doesn't work like that. It is charged as it is sent. For the sake of argument, say $50,000 was spent on these mailings. That $50,000 was a new expense created only when the franked mail was sent. It is an additional cost to the taxpayer created by this tour and the related decision to use franked mail to promote it. It is $50,000 not being spent by the Liberal Party. And that's why it's important to figure out just what sort of mail campaign this was, and how large it was.

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