Here is the registration information for thegreentaxshift.ca:
Domain name:
thegreentaxshift.caDomain name status:
EXISTDomain number:
2362412Approval date:
2008/06/20Renewal date:
2009/06/20Registrar name:
DomainsAtCost Corp.Registrar number:
45Registrant name:
Liberal Party of Canaada
[The variation greentaxshift.ca was registered at the same time. And the misspelling of "Canaada" appears in the registration of thegreenshift.ca, so it is not indicative of someone faking a registration.]
Now thegreenshift.ca was registered by the Liberal Party on Monday, June 9. The carbon tax plan itself was launched by Stephane Dion on Thursday, June 19. According to Garth Turner, a number of domain names were registered ahead of the June 19 launch:
Actually, here’s the story: Over the months that we worked on this concept of tax shifting, various names were used for the project, the “Green Shift” being decided upon relatively late in the process. Once that happened, a lot of branding quickly took place. One obvious key element was the URL.
Within minutes, the existing greenshift.ca site was located, and a strategy discussed for dealing with the commercial company operating it. They would be contacted in advance (which happened). I was in the meeting that dealt with this, as well as the raft of domain names which the party snapped up surrounding this name. All of them were legally registered, of course.
So it looks like thegreentaxshift.ca was registered after the launch, and four days after Jennifer Wright of Green Shift Inc made it clear on Monday, June 16, that she would not approve of the use the name for the carbon tax plan:
A Liberal spokesman confirmed the party knew of the Green Shift company before Dion's announcement, saying someone contacted Green Shift before Dion announced the scheme last week.
"A courtesy call was made last Monday in advance of (the) launch to let them know they might get increased traffic," said Mark Dunn, Dion's communications director.
Here's the funny thing. Garth Turner mentions the "raft of domain names which the party snapped up surrounding this name" before the call to Jennifer Wright. I haven't spotted any. The domain greenshifting.ca is already owned by Jennifer Wright (registered back in February of 2006).
Other than thegreentaxshift.ca, there isn't any evidence of one of these "surrounding" domain names. And believe me, I've checked. I should have been able to spot one or two of the names registered simultaneously with thegreenshift.ca.
Did I miss each and every one of them, except for this outlier, thegreentaxshift.ca?
[Apparently I did, so see More names and a strange date below. But this discovery doesn't clear things up. It does the opposite. All the alternate names were registered after the launch and after the call to Jennifer Wright.]
Remember that thegreentaxshift.ca was registered well after thegreenshift.ca, and not, it seems, as of part of an effort to secure the "raft" of names ahead of the launch on June 19. In terms of the timeline, the registration of thegreentaxshift.ca came after it became clear that Jennifer Wright and Green Shift Inc was going to be a problem for the Liberal Party.
Actually, there is a little bit of confusion on this point. The Liberals say they called Jennifer Wright on Monday, June 16. Jennifer Wright says she got the call on Wednesday, June 18:
Wright, however, said the call came on Wednesday and it was unclear exactly what the Liberal representative who called intended by the conversation.
So either the Liberals had 4 days notice, or 2 days notice, that Jennifer Wright was going to cause trouble for them, when someone decided to register thegreentaxshift.ca. But either way, the new name was registered after contacting Jennifer Wright.
By the way, the URL itself takes you to an innocuous link page -- no hint that this is a Liberal Party domain.
If the Liberals had registered this domain after being told by Jennifer Wright that she was going to fight them on the name, doesn't that suggest a guilty conscience? Or at the very least, some nervousness? Doesn't that suggest the people in the Liberal Party realized that there might be a problem, and then moved to grab an alternate name?
Then why not use the new name? Of course it would have been inconvenient. Yes, some printed material would have had to have been destroyed and reprinted.
But if on June 21, the day after registering thegreentaxshift.ca, and two days after launching the carbon tax plan, the Liberals had announced a name change to "The Green Tax Shift", there would have been a few columns written about the error made, a fair amount of praise for moving quickly to put out the fire, and no ongoing news about $8.5 million lawsuits aimed at a party that is essentially broke.
It looks like the Liberals had made initial preparations to shift the name.
So why didn't they? The inconvenience could not have been seen to be that bad, and certainly someone must have guessed that there would be far more inconvenience if the name didn't change -- the inconvenience the Liberals are suffering right now. They had already spoken to Jennifer Wright. She had left no doubt that she was going to be trouble.
Did the Liberals keep the name just to punish Jennifer Wright? To crush her under legal bills?
Or is it merely that the Liberals really want to avoid using the word "tax" anywhere near their carbon tax plan?
More names and a strange date: I might have found some parts of the "raft" of names, all registered by the Liberal Party:
- liberalgreenshift.ca: Registered June 20
- liberalgreentaxshift.ca: Registered June 20
- diongreenshift.ca: Registered June 20
Notice the pattern? Unlike thegreenshift.ca, which was registered on June 9, all these names were registered on June 20.
That's weird, because Garth Turner definitely implied that the Liberals registered their "raft" of names before calling Jennifer Wright, which happened either on June 16 or June 18.
He speaks of these names being "legally registered" as the branding "quickly took place". So why the delay to register these names until after the launch?
Based on what I'm seeing, the Liberals intended only to use thegreenshift.ca and nothing else. The alternate names were registered only after the contact with Jennifer Wright and after the launch of the carbon tax plan on June 19.
Or perhaps I still haven't found Garth Turner's "raft" of names after all. What I've found instead is a list of alternates to be used in case the fight against Jennifer Wright goes badly.
