MONTREAL – The city of Cote Saint-Luc is using humour to get their point across.
A slick two-minute animated video spearheaded by Mayor Anthony Housefather has surfaced online in the latest effort to defeat the Quebec government’s controversial Bill 14.
Funded by the Association of Suburban Municipalities, Housefather estimates the video costbetween $3,000 and $4,000.
It pokes fun at the PQ government’s proposed legislation, which among other language-oriented reforms, would likely cause a clutch of traditionally bilingual cities to lose that status.
Housefather said he wrote the witty script for the video, hoping it will help people understand the facts.
“It’s a lot easier to make fun of something in an animated cartoon-like way.”
Ultimately, the goal is for the video to go viral and encourage people to tell their MNAs to vote against Bill 14.
But one digital marketer said it will be tough to break into the mainstream.
“Political videos are hard to go viral because the people you are trying inform about the message are already looking for it and the people who are sharing it are sharing it in their own circle,” said Mitch Joel, a national digital marketer based in Montreal.
A political analyst shared Joel’s sentiments. “A lot more people need to see the video and be aware of it,” said Concordia University politics professor Harold Chorney. “If they write letters, contact their politicians… then it’s possible the video will have an effect.”
In places like the Town of Mount Royal, a traditionally bilingual redoubt but with a robust immigrant population, the bill would almost certainly mean residents would get services in French only.
“TMR”s a good example,” said Mayor Philippe Roy. “We have a lot of people from cultural communities, on my town council we have someone from the Vietnamese community, Lebanese community and the Greek community.”
For Housefather, the mayor of another town with a high immigrant population, Bill 14 “should be defeated. We just need to keep the pressure on and the video is just another way of doing that.”
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