As I was leaving Oromocto on Friday I noticed two ladies at one corner of a busy turning circle holding signs. I had just enough time to catch the print on one. It read “5 men, 1 woman, 0 charges”. My curiosity was piqued so I pulled into the nearby parking lot and had a chat with the ladies.

The lady pictured above is Jenn. Jenn lives in New Maryland and is a mother and a cub scout volunteer. Jenn was assaulted by three Oromocto RCMP officers and two hospital security staff while at the Oromocto hospital. Within the space of a minute she was thrown to the ground and had all of her clothes stripped off. Since then she’s been trying to have the incident investigated, all to no avail. She says she’s never even been asked to give a formal statement about the issue.

Her friend carries a sign covered in pamplets about coping with abuse and sexual assault. “These are useless for her” she says “until someone finally does an investigation. They just want to pretend nothing happened.”

I know there are two sides to every story and I’ve only heard one, but unless she had a bomb strapped to her chest I cannot think of any legitamate reason why five men would have to strip a woman. She’s not asking for charges or penalties for those who are involved, just an investigation. As I was leaving a car honked and a young man leaned out an open window and yelled “woohoo” at the ladies with his fist pumping the air.

I thought about being in a situation like that. Being in a situation of abuse brought on my an authority like the RCMP, and how hopeless it must feel to want some recognition that it even happened. I thought about how much strength it must have taken for Jenn to be there that day. I told Jenn I would post this on my blog and twitter even though my readership is small at least a few local people follow it. You can help Jenn too, by retweeting this or sharing the link. Maybe if it gets enough attention something can be done.

I hope the rally today motivates more people to speak out – it’s really important that MLAs hear from their constituents. It only takes a minute to send an email. It doesn’t have to be formal or wordy; just tell them who you are and what your stance is on the issue. My MLA replied to my email and asked for my contact information but didn’t indicate why he wanted it. I’m pretty sure he won’t send any goons to my house, so maybe he wants to discuss the concerns I brought up?

To: greg.byrne@gnb.ca
Good Day Mr Byrne;

Amy Tompkins
Fredericton

On Thursday, September 25, students will have the opportunity to represent -name of school omitted- at the “I walked with my Premier and MLAs” event organized by the New Brunswick Provincial Capital Commission.
Approximately 2000 students from schools in Districts 17 and 18 (within the capitcal region) are to meet at the Legistlative Assembly, and walk from there with the government officials across the Old Train Bridge, and return to the starting point. Once there, students will be given a light snack and a commemorative button.
The walk will provide the students with the unique opportunity of meeting with the Premier and other elected officials of our government.

Isn’t it funny that in all the years Jasmin has been in school I never remember anything like this being run, but now that there’s an election happening my kid suddenly has this “opportunity”. Like I’m stupid enough to see this as an opportunity for anyone other than the politicians. How exactly is every child of the 2000 supposed to “meet” with the elected officials at all? It’s a blatant photo opportunity, which they make a very brief mention of later in the note:

Students will need permission to have their pictures taken as this will be a media event.

(emphasis mine)

This whole event is supposed to take from 9AM to 1PM – practically the whole school day. We sat down as a family yesterday and explained what “photo op” meant to Jasmin, and expressed our opinion that this “field trip” was exactly that. We gave her the choice to stay home today, and she is.

Conservative: There is one picture of Stephen Harper and THREE pictures of Stephane Dion on the front page of the conservative website? Looking for information about their platform or policies (specifically a pdf policy document) I ended up clicking on a link called “Just the Facts”, and it’s nothing but a big long page of smears against the other parties! Design-wise the site is grey and boxy. I had to go two clicks into the site to find information on an issue (child care), and instead of speaking about what they WILL do, they again smear the competition while talking about what they DID do. This is an ugly, uninformative site for a party that wants to run my country.

Green Party: The first thing I see on the front page is smiling green candidates. Recent news along the left is all about things the green party is doing. Issues make the front page with images and rollover effects; it takes just ONE CLICK to get to the issues. When you look at the summary of an issue, there is only mention of the Green Party, and nothing about the other parties. I can find a PDF download of their entire platform in two clicks. This site rates top points with me because it looks good and I can find the information I’m looking for easily.

Liberal: Another grey and boxy site. Very little imagery. There are several pictures, but they’re too small to make out. At least the content on the main site is about the party and not the competing parties. Like the conservative site, I can’t find a PDF of the party platform or policies. Under the “newsroom” is “Reality Check”, just an aggregated list of bashing against the other parties. They even have a “Conservative Broken Promises” section. I thought I could at least find the green shift document quickly, but I get ushered off to another website (clicks before I finally get a download: 3). Oddly enough, the problems I have with this site are exactly the same as with the Conservative site; ugly and uninformative.

NDP: The first time I hit the site I got a splash page asking me for a donation. Repeat visits didn’t give me that, but still it felt kind of iffy because I’m just looking for information. The site itself is bright and clean with good use of graphics. There is a newsletter sign-up ‘above the fold’. Four out of five of the ‘top stories’ are about the NDP instead of other parties. I like the twitter bar; that and the facebook button show an interesting use of social networking in the campaign. Looking for a platform/policy information I needed two clicks, and again I was shown information about the two other parties WAY BEFORE I found out what the NDP stance is. I couldn’t find a PDF download of the policies here either. I like this site best for design and use of technology.

Bloc Quebecois: All I can speak for regarding the Bloc Quebecois website is design because my French sucks. It’s bright, graphically rich, and looks like it has a very readable layout if you know the language. The front page is a big looong. Even having a weak grasp of the language I managed to find a policy document just one click away from the homepage, so that says a lot about navigation.

On the whole, the Greens and NDP seem ahead in terms of comfort level with the internet as media. This makes sense because I believe their audience is younger and more tuned in to the WWW. The Liberals and Conservatives are going to have to get more with the times; maybe not in this election but certainly moving forward. My generation is doing everything on the web these days, and even boomers like my parents are doing more online all the time.

The other big thing that I gleaned from this is that the major parties are carrying over their partisan politics to the web, something that I think shows they don’t really grasp the audience well at all. If we go to a party website, most likely we’re looking for information about that party. An internet audience really doesn’t want to take the time to sift through a bunch of bashing about the other parties - if we want to know what they’re up to, we know we can hit their website or google around if we want to fact-check. Us interwebers are savvy like that.