In my opinion the list of what’s wrong with what they’re doing is a long one.

I’m personally offended by the content of these flyers (see for yourself). But offending me isn’t wrong.

What’s wrong with it, is that they’re sending clearly partisan material and they’re using taxpayer money to pay for it. And it’s not just partisan – it’s also clearly a pre-campaign tactic.

It’s no surprise that the volume of these flyers has been escalating for the past 2 months, now that the Conservatives have all but announced an election in the coming months.

That escalation has reached the point where I have received 3 flyers in the past 8 days. (When I first started this blog on August 21 I had only 15 flyers. Later that day I received number 16. In the week since then I have received 2 more.)

So, the Conservatives are clearly using these flyers as a pre-election campaign tool and since they are the ones planning to pull the plug and start the election, it’s obvious that this is premeditated.

Ignoring the premeditated electioneering of the flyers, they’re also violating the spirit of the law which allows MPs to send flyers into ridings other than their own. The spirit of this allowance is to permit MPs to reach out and inform Canadians in other constituencies about issues that may affect them.

I’ll leave it to you to determine for yourself whether these flyers are “informational” or “promotional.” But in my opinion, they’re nothing but propaganda.

It may need to be determined by a judicial process whether this violates the rules that permit MPs free production and postage of such flyers, but the rules clearly indicate that the flyers should not solicit re-election support and many of the flyers you can see on this blog provide explicit images of ballots with the names of party leaders.

Also, the rules explicitly state that each flyer must indicate the name of the MP responsible for the mailing, but I’ve got one flyer that clearly violates that rule.

So, in a nutshell, I believe it’s wrong for ANY political party to abuse the MP’s privilege of sending taxpayer funded mailings. This should stop. No matter who sends it, it’s wrong.