FREDERICTON — The Internet is playing a central role in national party election campaigns this year, but it's also being brought to bear on the electorate at the grassroots level -- with mixed results.
In Fredericton, for example, the on-line battle for votes is heated. Local incumbent Andy Scott (Liberal, andyscott.ca) provides a daily Web log or "blog" of campaign activities, including visits to a coffee shop or an elementary school, a church breakfast and yard sale. It's part of his strategy to keep in touch with voters and fend off challenger Kent Fox (Conservative, kentfox.ca), who uses his site to pound away at what he considers the Grit's soft underbelly in this traditionally Tory riding: The sponsorship scandal, the gun registry fiasco and support for same-sex marriage.
An e-mail to andyscott.ca generates an auto-response three minutes later, and a personalized reply within the hour. An e-mail to kentfox.ca results in a phone call from the candidate soon after: "If you knew how many e-mails I get, it would shock you," Mr. Fox says. "I answer each one personally, but I'd rather talk to people."
Others aren't so personal. Many NDP candidates are using cookie-cutter mini-sites set up inside the party's national website at ndp.ca. But with more than two weeks gone in the campaign, detailed information for only a few of the 10 New Brunswick candidates was listed on the site (and one riding has no link at all). The standardized links on many of the mini-sites led to blank pages.
The Green Party, greenparty.ca, is offering sites for its candidates in a bit more free-form style, with seven of the 10 have more than simply contact information.
What's surprising in Election 2004, however, isn't who's on the Web, but who isn't. Unless you count their one-page bios on the national Liberal party website at liberal.ca, incumbents Claudette Bradshaw (Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe), Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour), Andy Savoy (Tobique-Mactaquac) and Charles Hubbard (Miramichi) are missing in action on-line. E-mail inquiries remained unanswered after more than a week.
And then there are the inevitable missteps. The domain name sergerousselle.ca (Serge Rousselle, Liberal, Acadie-Bathurst) wasn't registered until a few hours after the address was announced to the public. More than a week after the address jimdunlap.ca (James Dunlap, Liberal, St. Croix-Belleisle) was sent to the media, the domain name was still up for grabs.
Supporting local -- or even Canadian -- business doesn't seem to be a big issue when it comes to an electoral Web presence. For those candidates with their own websites, the choice of hosting locations is literally all over the map. Jeanleblanc.ca (Jean LeBlanc, Conservative, Moncton) is hosted in Phoenix, Ariz., while herron4mp.ca (John Herron, Liberal, Fundy) is hosted in Menlo Park, Calif. Meanwhile, bobmcvicar.com (Bob McVicar, Conservative, Saint John) is hosted in San Antonio, Tex., in a chunk of commercial Net space blocked by some servers because it is known as a source of spam.
Security often leaves something to be desired on candidates' political sites, too. Mr. Herron's site, for example, included a link (no longer available this afternoon) to make a campaign donation "using your credit card online." The link led to a simple e-mail form, an insecure way of conducting an on-line transaction. Mr. Herron's campaign office said in an e-mail reply to the reporter Thursday that the link was meant to allow people to apply for a fax-in donation form that would be e-mailed to them.
Then there's content. Visit paulzed.com (Paul Zed, Liberal, Saint John) and download an article in Microsoft Word format published in the May 25 edition of the Irving-owned Telegraph Journal. And until yesterday, you could surf over to atrueconservative.ca (Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy) to hit the media mother lode: Articles from a half-dozen publications in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Asked if any candidates have permission to use the Irving chain's material on their websites, Telegraph-Journal publisher Jonathan Franklin responded with an emphatic "No. And if they are, they shouldn't be."
And some websites are about garnering more than just votes. The kindest, gentlest and most enterprising site belongs to the Green Party's Moncton candidate Judith Hamel. The usual political biography quickly morphs into a pitch for the massage therapy, relaxation sessions and mud baths offered at the spa she runs with her husband.
