Did you get that mailer about provincial budget 2017-18 this week?
Did yours include a personal “note” from Sydney-Whitney Pier MLA Derek Mombourquette? Mine did. He told me about the budget but he also told me that Sydney-Whitney Pier was a “vibrant melting pot of culture, optimism and most importantly, opportunity.”
(That, I must admit, alarmed me. I thought Canada was known for allowing citizens to be fully Canadian while preserving their own cultural identities — the famous cultural “mosaic” — as opposed to the US style “melting pot,” which takes people from all over the world and turns them into straight-up Americans. Even the US isn’t ruthless enough to throw people’s optimism and opportunity into the pot, though. Clearly Sydney-Whitney Pier is hard core.)
Budget_2017_18
Image problem
Strangely, for me, it’s actually not the text in the flyer I want to talk about (full disclosure: I didn’t actually read most of it) — it’s the photographs.
Perhaps I’m just being too sensitive, but when the Nova Scotia government sends you a shiny, full-color, photo-rich flyer about issues that really matter in your area — doctor recruitment, mental healthcare, jobs for youth, home care — wouldn’t you expect at least one of those photos to contain, say, an actual Nova Scotian?
It’s not like the Liberals were sending out a flyer about fjords or wallabies or the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in any of which cases, a reliance on stock photos would be entirely understandable. No, they sent out a flyer about the issues outlined above and still they resorted to stock photos.
How do I know they’re stock photos? Well, the first hint is that no person or institution is identified in any of them. But the real giveaway is that when I plugged each of them into TinEye — a “reverse image search” which lets you find instances of an image online — I found all of them. Take our happy healthcare professionals, standing in front of what could be a hospital or could be an International House of Pancakes:
If these three are actually working somewhere in Nova Scotia, then I think I know why wait times are so long — they’re also working in a lot of other places, including this company, which wants to help diagnose your “Factitious disorder, formerly Munchausen syndrome“:
Tower of life
The government’s budget mailer also talks about “a future for youth,” illustrated with this photo:
These particular youth are real go-getters — the image turned up 235 times on the web. Besides attending some unnamed Nova Scotia institution of higher learning, they are also involved in something called “Genetic Test”:
I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but it seems to be some sort of test that identifies your personal style of learning. According to the inventors:
- We all have same mental energy; let say 100%. All of our Brains are wired differently and we use them differently according to our Genetics. The key to access our maximum potential is by identifying the way how our natural mental energy is distributed and using it for our advantage. And knowing, what works best for us.
- Genetics can help you attain more Success in lesser time.
- Knowledge of Genetics will act as a firm foundations, where tower of life should be built.
These youth clearly have a future.
Seniors
While resorting to stock photos of healthcare professionals and students seems unnecessary in Nova Scotia, it’s nothing compared to resorting to stock photos of seniors.
If we know anything about this province, we know that we have lots of seniors. Why, then, would a government choose to illustrate a discussion of its services to seniors with this:
This particular stock photo is so bad it only turns up two results in TinEye — both on a stock photo site, where it is identified as “Rear view of diverse senior women standing together at the beach” and “Group of senior women friends arm around on the beach.” (In the government’s defense, perhaps this was all that turned up when it searched for “Group of senior women unable to find a doctor, long-term care bed and/or new hip.”)
Stock pol
Using stock photos in a flyer whose sole purpose is to convince citizens you care about them seems really tone deaf. I was trying to think of a way to express this to the government in general (and my MLA in particular) when it came to me in a blinding flash of trite clarity: a stock photo is worth a thousand words.
Imagine if Mombourquette’s own photo were replaced with a stock photo of a politician.
I searched the web for an appropriate picture and this is the best I could do (it’s labeled “Businessman or politician making speech from behind the pulpit”).
The results are all the more “impactful,” as political types like to say, because most of the stock photos of politicians I found were headless. (Were I willing to pay $50, I could have a fully-headed “Caucasian politician making a speech at a podium” but I’m not willing).
And before you say, “That’s not fair — it’s not like the government used photos of headless people in its flyer,” let me remind you that the government did, in fact, use a photo of headless people in its flyer:
So I think my doctored version is completely fair. And it makes my point so succinctly, I really don’t need to say anymore about it:
[signoff]
