Angry in the Great White North
Liberal Party candidate Claudette Roy names greenshift.ca as carbon tax website
Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 11:53 AM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post

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As I've posted before, there is something to Jennifer Wright's argument that when the Liberal Party decided to name Stephane Dion's carbon tax plan "The Green Shift", her company Green Shift Inc would suffer from the confusion that would result.

Nonsense, say the Liberals and their apologists.  People will be able to tell the two apart.

Apparently people can't tell them apart.  One such person is Claudette Roy.  She's the Liberal Party's candidate for the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona.


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I've noted two incidences in which people who should know better have had a hard time keeping straight which website is for the grab (thregreenshift.ca) and which is for 's Inc (greenshift.ca).

You can read about those occurrences here and here.

Well, I've got another.  This is screen shot from the French language version of 's website.  Claudette Roy is the Liberal Party candidate for , and she tells her readers to learn more about the carbon tax plan at Jennifer Wright's website:

greenshift-confusion

Click on the image to view it.  I've added arrows to highlight the connection being established between the Liberal Party and Jennifer Wright's private business, the very connection that Jennifer Wright does not want, and is suing to stop from happening.

Two points have to be made:

Nevertheless, the problem remains that people reading the page will think that by clicking, they are going to greenshift.ca which is exactly what Jennifer Wright does not want people to think, and exactly what the Liberals contend is not likely going to happen.

A second problem is that when search engine spiders index this page, they will note that the text "greenshift.ca" is associated with the Liberal website for the carbon tax scheme.  Fortunately for Jennifer Wright, this is one page that on its own is not likely to tip the calculation made by the search engine that "greenshift.ca" is about Green Shift Inc.  Nevertheless, as anyone in the search engine business will tell you, keeping these sorts of mistakes from happening is important in ensuring the search engines maintain the correct associations between phrases and websites.  Mistakes like these happen innocently enough.  But in this case, the Liberals deliberately ignored the possibility of errors, and then argued that Jennifer Wright would benefit from the confusion.

This is a case of an official Liberal Party website establishing an association between Jennifer Wright's company and the 's carbon tax trick.  It seems to me that the Liberals really don't Jennifer Wright all too seriously, and really have convinced themselves that they are entitled to "green shift".

Maybe some Liberal will tell Jennifer Wright that this mistake is actually a good thing.

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