Angry in the Great White North

The Liberal Party has had a serious problem on their hands.  They decided to call Stephane Dion's carbon tax plan "The Green Shift", and that was a big mistake.

Jennifer Wright runs Green Shift Inc, an environmental consultancy firm with no political affiliations.  She was contacted hours before the launch by Liberals who laughed that she would benefit from confused Canadians going to her site looking for information on the carbon tax scheme.

Jennifer Wright was not amused, and told the Liberals as much.  Not they they cared, and they launched their plan.

A short time later, Jennifer Wright launched her lawsuit, for $8.5 million.

Now with an election starting only days away, the lawsuit is taking another turn, with Jennifer Wright applying for an injunction against the Liberal Party:

A Toronto-based environmental consulting firm has asked the courts to keep the Liberal Party of Canada and its candidates from using the name Green Shift for its policy platform.

Jennifer Wright, owner of Green Shift Inc., first accused the Liberals of infringing on the trademarked name of her company in July, but speculation of an imminent federal election moved her to get the case in front a judge as soon as possible.

"Basically I'm hoping to stop them from destroying our name because if it goes through an election we're forced with re-branding our entire company," Wright told CTV.ca in a phone interview Thursday. "We're just fighting to do everything we can to keep our name intact and to keep it associated with the environmental company and the integrity that it upholds and not have it politicized."

She added: "They are taking more and more of the ownership of the name every day, even in the way the media reports on them it becomes almost synonymous with the Liberal party."

And it's not just "ownership".  There is the blowback from people arrayed against the Liberals that is catching Green Shift Inc in the crossfire:

The name of the company had never been slandered in its 10-year history until being linked to the Liberal platform, Wright alleged, adding that parodies of the trademarked name, like "Green Shaft," are just one of the negative consequences of being placed in the crossfire of political mudslinging.

That is the reason I refuse to call Stephane Dion's plan anything other than a "carbon tax".  I won't be party to wrecking Jennifer Wright's company, even it is hurts my ability to benefit from search engine queries.

It's the same reason I won't use any of the gag names (usually involving the word "shaft").  It might be a harmless poke at the Liberal Party, but it damages Green Shift Inc every time these variants appear online.

So with an election likely to kick off on Sunday, the Liberals face a real possibility that they'll be muzzled, and forced to come up with another name for their carbon tax plan.

As I have already revealed, just days after realizing that Jennifer Wright would not acquiesce to the Liberal Party desire to call their plan "The Green Shift", the Liberal Party registered a number of alternative site names:

• thegreentaxshift.ca
• liberalgreenshift.ca
• liberalgreentaxshift.ca
• diongreenshift.ca

Lawyer bills continue to mount, and now there is a chance the Liberals will have to reprint all their material, update all their websites, and lose face over this.

With polling suggesting that Canadians are not buying into the Stephane Dion's carbon tax, I wonder if Liberals would prefer "diongreenshift.ca", since it ties this losing idea to Stephane Dion personally, and not to the Liberal Party in general.

Ironically, that is exactly the sort of argument Jennifer Wright is making.