Apparently their’s someone impersonating Doug McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition on Twitter and YouTube. I’m not buying it. There are 2 Twitter accounts called “Safe Surrey”. The official one is @Safe_Surrey and the alleged imposter is @safesurrey. The alleged imposter is quite active on Twitter, has 1100 more followers than the “real” Safe Surrey account, they quite aggressively show crime and homelessness on their feed, and according to CTV they’ve had the Twitter name @safesurrey for far longer than the “official” one has existed. The other account is pretty bland as you’d expect a political social media account to be. Safe Surrey’s campaign is based around crime and fear, coincidence? Here’s a video the “fake” Safe Surrey released that made it all the way to this evenings 6 o’clock news on CTV Vancouver.
Someone put A LOT of time and effort into this video, it’s actually better than most other candidates videos as far as production goes. Why would an imposter go to this kind of trouble? Simple, they’re not an imposter. Doug McCallum and his merry band of fear mongers at Safe Surrey want you to be afraid of Surrey. They want you to vote for them based on their tough talk on crime and homelessness. This video puts real pictures of Surrey’s darkest places out into the public. If you live in Surrey you’ve seen these places. McCallum can only benefit from this publicity. It gets his message out while simultaneously making him look like the victim.
The media has jumped on this and it has McCallum’s name front an centre saying Safe Surrey didn’t release the video. Here’s a story from CBC Vancouver. Here’s another from The Huffington Post. There’s also this little gem of a website that popped up out of nowhere showing subliminal messages in the YouTube video. Someone wants you to feel sorry for McCallum while you cower in your home afraid to go where “no god fearing man would dare to step”. That’s a pretty awful way to scrounge up votes.
The only thing that makes me question my theory? I’m not sure McCallum or anyone in his camp are intelligent enough to pull this off. From what I’ve seen over the past few weeks I wonder how their shoes get tied every morning. Either way it’s another twist in an already bizarre civic election.