ELECTION 2019: A Very Busy Campaign!

For the CSSA, our Election 2019 efforts were tightly focused on one thing – getting the firearms community out to vote.

 

At last year’s SHOT Show in Las Vegas, we met with Keith and Paul Beasley (Canada in the Rough – Canada’s BEST outdoors show!) and discussed how to leverage our partnership to reach more gun owners prior to the election.

 

As always, the Beasley brothers didn’t hesitate, and we came up with a plan and executed it.

We drafted a series of ten scripts for commercials urging people to vote.

 

We sent a camera crew to Saskatchewan to film these commercials with Garry Breitkreuz (former Conservative MP) and Robert Freberg (former president of the Saskatoon Wildlife Federation) in their home province. 

 

We filmed commercials in Mandarin with Wellen Wang, one of the awesome people at Tenda Canada, to directly appeal to this segment of our membership in their native tongue. 

 

Paul and Chrissy Beasley and their beautiful children delivered an impassioned plea for gun owners to vote.

 

Kevin Beasley delivered another powerful message, as did Tony Bernardo, our Executive Director.

 

All these ads ran on multiple television networks before and during the campaign. Many thanks to our friends at the Alberta Arms & Cartridge Collectors Association.

 

Our CSSA volunteers manned campaign teams across Canada, coast to coast. CSSA members worked tirelessly – and mostly successfully – performing the myriad of tasks that election campaigns demand. Thank you all!

 

Our communications team mounted a campaign using our weekly CSSA commentaries to highlight the peril our shooting community faced from a re-elected Trudeau Liberal government. 

 

We outlined many of the unintended consequences Trudeau’s ill-thought plan would bear – consequences nobody in government seems willing to consider yet.

 

We urged our members NOT to vote for Maxime Bernier’s PPC party for two reasons: first, because the PPC candidate was not electable; and second, because doing so would cost Conservative seats and elect Liberals in their place.

 

Unfortunately, we were correct.

 

Voting PPC cost the Conservative Party a total of seven seats – six ridings elected a Liberal when they could have elected a Conservative MP, and another elected an NDP. Had PPC voters supported an electable candidate, the Conservatives would have seven more seats in Parliament.

 

Finally, we crafted a “Get Out The Vote” email campaign designed to motivate our members to cast their ballot during the Advance Polls and on Election Day. 

 

All in all, our email and social media networks carried over 3.1 million messages of updates, dangers and insightful guidance to our many members regarding the 2019 election.

 

This was the most important election in a generation for gun owners and, despite our community’s tremendous efforts to remove Trudeau from power, he has prevailed – albeit with a minority government. With great trepidation, we will see just how many of our predictions made prior to Election Day will come true over the months ahead.

 

Stay tuned. It’s going to be a rough ride…

 

We’ll need all the help you can give. Please consider donating.