To: Premier Pasloski
From: Premierbunker
Special Ops Unit
Re: Operation Frackalicious
Dear Premier,
Everyone bought it. They are convinced the fracking documents we sent CBC were genuine and released “accidentally.”
The operation went according to plan, despite your worries that no one would believe our caucus could sit through a 12-page PowerPoint presentation with so many three-syllable words in it.
First, more people ended up reading Minister Kent’s speech than ever would have heard it, if he gave it normally. You remember how many people were awake when you last spoke at the chamber of commerce.
We should think about accidentally leaving your next campaign platform in the Dirty Northern pub.
Second, it smoked out Sandy Silver, the Liberal guy. On Monday he was quoted in the paper sounding a lot like Liz and reminding everyone he is against the safe-carefully-regulated-job-generating-tax-money-for-healthcare non-conventional energy industry. Now we can lump the NDP and Liberals together in the election campaign and say they hate jobs and we are the only party that is pro-job.
Best of all, we ruined the weekend of some of those CBC journalists who wrote mean stories about you last year. Surveillance teams report they spent the weekend at the office trying to upload the PDFs to their website’s clunky e-reader format.
Our agents report an unexpected bonus benefit: consultants love us! The fracking documents listed so many economic, environmental and public relations studies that they all can see dollar signs. We have to get those projects underway before the election. Then we can tell everyone that if Liz wins she will cancel their Liard Basin Red Squirrel Psychological Baseline contract.
We still don’t know if the final part of our plan will work: putting subliminal messages in the leaked documents. It took us forever to figure out the “watermark” feature in PowerPoint and to line up the first letter of every sentence to say “Join the Yukon Party. Resistance is Useless.”
I have high hopes that everyone at the Yukon Conservation Society will soon be wandering into the cabinet office with that zombie look in their eyes asking for membership forms.
Edna at the front desk has instructions to charge them double.
It was an especially nice touch, if I may say so myself, to send out an urgent government press release on the weekend saying the documents were released inadvertently. Sorry about that long word, but the focus group thought “by mistake” sounded bad.
The press release was great since it made us look panicky, which totally camouflages the rest of our operation. No one will ever guess the Chinese are already fracking in the Peel by drilling into the bottom of it from China. If we can figure out how to get all those yuan changed into dollars without the anti-money-laundering killjoys at the bank figuring it out, our election war chest will be full. We can put home-made radio ads on CKRW around the clock!
In terms of future operations, we should do the accidental leak strategy again. It worked well.
Much better than the other way around. You know, when Brad accidentally killed that affordable housing plan, and we pretended it was on purpose. That made us look like a party that hated housing and the middle class. Whereas really we love housing as much as we love fracking. In fact, maybe our slogan could be “a well under every home!”
Note to the reader: this memo is fiction. Any resemblance to reality is entirely coincidental.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and author of the MacBride Museum’s Aurore of the Yukon series of historical children’s adventure novels. You can follow him on Channel 9’s “Yukonomist” show or Twitter @hallidaykeith