Green candidate posts acceptance speech online

TRURO DAILY NEWS

ADVOCATE HARBOUR - New Internet technology may change the way politicians reach out to rural Nova Scotians.

The days of buying votes with a pint of rum are supposedly long gone, so budding politicians are looking to the Web to attract new voters.

Darryl Whetter, the newly elected federal Green Party candidate for Cumberland Colchester Musquodoboit Valley, has posted his acceptance speech to YouTube and expects to campaign extensively on the Internet when an election is finally called.

"We're trying to match our message delivery to the message which is that there's a digital revolution and an opportunity for a knowledge-based economy here in Nova Scotia," he said.

In a large, sparsely populated riding, technology allows politicians to reach voters without bringing them together for a speech.

Besides saving on postage and printing costs and being more environmentally sound, it also reaches out to younger voters - a prime audience for the Green Party.

"Twenty-year-olds have lived with the Web for more than a decade, it's absolutely part of their lives," said Whetter.

"So if we want to meet those young voters, if we want to engage them ... we have to, in part, talk their language."

Tim Currie, the online instructor at The University of King's College, said more people are finding ways to use the Internet to get their message out.

"It allows them to reach a broad audience," he said.

"And it's a heckuva lot cheaper than to put it out in print."

Currie said online campaigning is more frequent in larger ridings and more prevalent in federal elections than municipal contests.

Advances in technology, especially the advent of YouTube about two years ago, has changed the way people can use the Net.

In the past, it was expensive and complicated to post video on the Web.

"It's definitely a sign of the times," said Stephen Kimber, chairman of journalism at the University of King's College. "I think this is the way we're going, as weird as it may seem."

But this new technology also allows anonymous users to post misleading messages.

"With YouTube it's easy to post stuff, but sometimes hard to find out who's doing the posting ... so you can put up attack ads and use it to undermine a candidate without taking responsibility. So there's some danger to it."

He also noted it allows politicians to get their message out "without being filtered by the media."

That's something Whetter has already noticed.

"Users get to determine content and popularity more than broadcasters," he said.

Interest is generated from bottom up "and that's the kind of politics we want to encourage with the Green Party."

To see Whetter's video, go to youtube.com and search his name.



jchristianson@trurodaily.com