Oshawa Speaks had a hit today (Feb. 1, 2008) from the Swedish Tax Administration in Stockholm, Sweden. I noted it to be a google search for "taxpayer + communication + strategy" and was intrigued to do a little investigation about the hit.
While our target is Oshawa taxpayers, we do get hits from all over the world spreading Oshawa’s fame that the politicians are so keen to promote…so we are being very helpful to them in spreading the word.
A google search on most anything to do with Oshawa will turn up a preponderance of Oshawa Speaks stories and videos that are cropping up everywhere on the web.
This particular hit was obviously from someone in the Swedish Tax Administration office doing detailed research on behalf of the Swedish Tax Department on outward communication strategies. His/her research had to be extensive because we were not listed until the 64th page (640th story) of google links until the search words turned up our site as:
VOTES--Vote To Eliminate Self-Serving PoliticiansThis link led to the story about our facebook “Oshawa Community Outreach Forums” which now number approximately 50 with some (not all) appearing as links under the pull down menu under the title of FORUMS on our site. While these sites have not taken off as yet because we have done no promotion on them, we have "reserved them" and they will be promoted and utilized as time goes on.
New "outreach" communication strategy---NEW LINKS! ..... As reported in an earlier post, Oshawa spent a reported $30000 of taxpayer money to enter the 2007 ...
oshawaspeaks.blogspot.com/ - Liknande sidor
The interesting point about this Swedish researcher's search was that he/she came across 640 entries of how governments attempt to enhance communications with their citizens before they came across the first example, Oshawa’s, that took deliberate and strategic action to avoid communicating or informing its citizens about an extremely important issue.
Why is Oshawa's local government so radically different from all other governments in the free world? All others want to communicate to citizens--Oshawa's wants to hide important information from the people!
As stated by Mayor Gray, City Council had no responsibility to communicate the plebiscite info and thus did not do so. He said this was the responsibility of community groups even though the Ontario Municipal Elections Act clearly prohibits such 3rd party campaigning. The law gives full and unencumbered spending freedom to municipalities to inform its citizens.
You’d think that when Oshawa politicians were asking a question of its citizens, that they’d be anxious to communicate as much information as possible even promoting citizen debate and discussion…but not in Oshawa, where the politicians worded a question in a confusing and backwards manner, used technical terms not understood by the people, and attempted as much as they could to catch voters “cold” in the voting booth to be confronted by a difficult and confusing question designed to produce a result the politicians wanted.
In some third world totalitarian countries run by despots, fascists and dictators, this kind of "secrecy" typifies the run-of-the mill vote if there is one. In Canada we call these tactics vote fixing—and it’s unquestionably contrary to the spirit of democracy.
Our Supreme Court says that voter information is a basic right of Canadians. What would they say about Oshawa’s City Council that denied the people information, manipulated the question to fool unwary voters, and designed a strategy to give the politicians a pre-conceived answer?
Was this democracy? Absolutely Not!
OSHAWA...YOU MUST STAND UP AND PROTEST! IF CITY COUNCIL IS ALLOWED TO PROCEED WITH THE GENERAL VOTE, YOU WILL HAVE NO POLITICIAN ELECTED BY YOU TO REPRESENT YOUR COMMUNITY INTERESTS AT CITY HALL.
