Recently, I received an e-mail link to a really slick, highly personalized Conservative Party election campaign video. It's wonderful what these guys can do with modern computer technology. It's almost enough to make you think they care about you. Almost, but not quite.

The link features Atlantic Canada's newest Senator, former broadcaster Mike Duffy, seeming to interact personally with each voter.

The salary of this senator-$130,400 a year-comes from all taxpayers… not to mention the cost of his office and staff, plus his transportation and other tax-free allowances. But here he is shilling for the Conservative Party that appointed him to the job. Hmmm!

It's also an interesting reflection on the Tories' long-standing promise to "reform" the Senate-just one of 96 promises they have broken. The longer they're in office, the more they look like the scandal-ridden Liberals.

Some of the other broken promises (all of which Senator Duffy ignores in his fulsome praise for this Tory government):

• The Prime Minister campaigned on a promise not to tax income trusts; that broken promise has been estimated to gut $30 billion from Canadian seniors' retirement funds—before the global credit crunch took billions more from them.
• They promised to defend traditional marriage—just as the preceding Liberal government had promised, in the House: "This government will never legalize same-sex marriage." (Attorney-General Anne McLellan, 1999) The Prime Minister promised to have Parliament review Bill C-38 (which a respected professor of law and ethics had written "Canadians must reject.") But that promise was killed in Parliament.
• This Prime Minister has fulfilled one major promise, though: his government has become the defender of the abortion industry-he won't allow Parliament to even consider whether it is immoral to kill 110,000 Canadian babies a year.

Those offences against common sense, plus borrowing money future generations will have to repay to fund the most lavish budgets in Canadian history, are betrayals Senator Duffy does not address in his sophisticated use of computer technology.

They are issues that only the CHP has the courage to raise. That's a good reason to elect a CHP candidate to Parliament at the earliest opportunity.