Fed up with Harper, Liberals launch social-media cri du coeur

Posted on Monday, February 7, 2011 12:51PM EST49 comments

Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals have launched a new campaign attacking the Conservative government that Justin Trudeau hopes will become “a viral cry from the heart.”

The Facebook-driven effort is built around the phrase “pucapab” – a contraction of “plus capable.” It’s aimed at telling Tories that Quebeckers and other francophone Canadians are “fed up” with Stephen Harper’s leadership.

“It’s designed more to be a rallying cry to sort of pull people together with the facts,” Mr. Trudeau told The Globe. “Listen, it’s not personality attacks. It’s highlighting the fighter jets, Harper’s musings about the death penalty, money for prisons rather than families, the shutting down of democratic discourse.”

Mr. Trudeau said these Harper policies are anathema to many Quebeckers. “That’s one of the reasons we didn’t brand it with the Liberal logo anywhere. .... It’s not designed to be a big partisan attack.”

The Liberal Party only merits mention at the end of the pencil-sketch YouTube video the campaign is built around. It’s meant, Mr. Trudeau added to be a “highlight of a whole lot of people fed up with a Canada being run by someone who does not reflect values French-speaking Canadians.”

The video is set to a bouncy pop song illustrated by drawings of fighter jets, a gallows, the padlocked Parliament and a sketch of the Prime Minister that resembles a Most Wanted picture from the Wild West. The lyrics were penned by Turbo Marketing's Marc-André Rivard with music by Serge Laforest.

“It’s basically just something we want people to be sharing with each other, emailing each other, developing a sort of catchy sense of ‘Okay we’re all in this together, that we’re just fed up, that we can’t do this anymore with Harper’,” Mr. Trudeu said.

The key to good advertising, he suggested, is not always trying to sell someone something new. “You’re trying to respond to something they already feel ... and that’s exactly what this campaign is doing.”

The campaign has been in the works for several weeks, and Mr. Trudeau noted the expression “pucapab” has come up not only in focus groups but and in MPs’ conversations with constituents.

“Fundamentally, Gilles Duceppe’s message in the last election, in 2008, was, ‘Vote for us and we’ll keep Harper to a minority.’ Well, that’s exactly what happened,” Mr. Trudeau said. “But now what we’re saying to Quebeckers yeah, but you know what? Harper as a minority is still Harper as Prime Minister and that does not reflect Quebeckers/ values.”

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