Angry in the Great White North

In my last post, I decided that it looked like Garth Turner and over a dozen other Liberal MPs were using franked mail to send generic flyers ahead of Turner's appearances on his western speaking tour (the Lost Tory Tour).

Garth Turner had said that this tour was not going to cost the taxpayer anything. But franked mail is quite expensive (same as first class mail). There is a cheaper alternative called a 10 percenter that costs maybe a nickel per sheet, but the material can only be distributed to broad areas as defined by postal code, and not to more than 10% of the households in a riding.

The content of the Garth Turner mail is a generic flyer -- essentially a 10 percenter being delivered at full postal rates instead of bulk.

I wondered why he would be doing this. In the mean time, I received another scan of another franked mail. This mail came from Liberal MP Massimo Pacetti in Quebec, and contained a Garth Turner flyer sent by first class mail to Calgary, with you and me picking up the cost of the stamp:

Another delivery to a particular household in an addressed envelope, but containing a generic flyer.

A grocery store would go broke in a week if it was required to pay 50 cents for every flyer it delivered.

But here's the thing that isn't apparent. The images in the last post were from a flyer delivered to a 60-year-old woman. The flyer pictured above was sent (by mail) to a 67-year-old man.

If you send a 10 percenter, the flyers go to each household in an area, and there is nothing you can do about it. But then 10 percenters were envisioned to be surveys anyway.

But if want the material to go to specific people only, let's say predominantly seniors who might be susceptible to claims that the new income trust taxation rules were going to cripple their retirement plans, then you need to get mailing lists and start individually addressing envelopes. And that means you have to pay Canada Post the full cost to get those envelopes to their specific destinations.

That could be very expensive.

Unless of course you're one of a bunch of MPs. Your franking privileges allow you to just let the taxpayer pick up the tab.

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