Angry in the Great White North

The Liberal Party wants Jennifer Wright's lawsuit to go away.  The Liberals are arguing that Jennifer Wright's fundamental argument, that her business is being confused with Stephane Dion's carbon tax grab, is without merit:

The Liberal party's statement of defence in an $8.5-million trademark suit by Green Shift Inc. claims "no reasonable possibility of confusion" between the party's Green Shift policy and the company's business.

No reasonable possibility?

Liberal candidate Claudette Roy was confused.

Liberal MP and environment critic David McGuinty was confused.

Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion himself was confused.

And since we're piling on, how about this one?  From the website of Liberal Party candidate Indira Saroya (who replaced disgraced Liberal Party candidate Farhan Chak), we have a page in which people are clearly directed to visit Jennifer Wright's website GreenShift.ca to find out more about the Stephane Dion's carbon tax plan (whose website is at the URL thegreenshift.ca):

Click to enlarge the screengrab.  I've added some helpful arrows to highlight how these mistakes are establishing a connection in the mind of the person visiting the site that Jennifer Wright's GreenShift.ca is associated with Stephane Dion and the Liberal Party.

Indira Saroya joins Claudette Roy and David McGuinty as exhibits in Jennifer Wright's lawsuit.

How did this mistake happen?  When you read the copy on the screen, you'll notice the definite article "the" does precede GREENSHIFT.CA.  But it is separated by a space, and rendered in lower case font, intended to belong (contextually) to the "Come Meet..." portion of the sentence.  The URL is rendered in capital letters to isolate it from the rest of the sentence and to draw the eye to it.

Unfortunately, whoever did this page got confused and didn't include the "the" with the rest of the URL, assigning it to the rest of the sentence instead of with the URL.

The result is that this Liberal Party website identifies Jennifer Wright's website as the place to go to learn more about Liberal Party policy.

Of course, no one did this on purpose.  This is likely an innocent mistake by someone who got confused.

But that's the basis of Jennifer Wright's case.  Everyone is getting confused about which site is which, and whether the URLs are different, and whether the company is connected to the Liberals, and so and so forth.  Soon no one will know what Green Shift is.

And this confusion crops up over and over and over again with the Liberals themselves, the people who:

1. Ought to know better.
2. Ought to be hyper-vigilant because every time they make a mistake, it makes Jennifer Wright's case so much stronger.

Credit:  Thanks to this comment from Jooge for pointing me in the right direction:

Last week our Community League was visited by the Liberal candidate for Mike Lake's ridiing here in Edmonton. I challenged them on the impact of the Green Shift on league's like ours who will receive no benefits / tax breaks yet still get dinged with higher utility and operating costs. Besides saying that our residents will have extra money in their pockets to offset the higher program costs (laughable), she also directed me to use the calculator at http://www.greenshift.ca.  So she got the web site wrong AND directed us to a calculator that was not relevant to a not for profit organization. 

According to Jooge, Indira Saroya was getting confused while speaking, and not just on her website.  Perhaps it's more than just a typo, then, but a sign of yet another person (a Liberal candidate, no less) who is hopelessly confused.