Dear editor,
Reporting in from Royston, the reality down here is that we love our political masters in the RD.
The taxes, not so much, but we are happy enough to skip the election fever gripping the urban centres of Happy Valley. This leaves me with little to comment on, other than election signs.
As a card carrying member of the sign and specialty printing industry, it warms my cynical heart to see that even in the face of bylaws and outrage over political signage, our candidates in the 2011 elections have outdone themselves in terms of quantity, quality, and support of the coroplast industry.
Some facts — Coroplast, that fluted, plastic cardboard — is a Canadian invention that revolutionized the sign industry. You know it’s good when Jimmy Pattison buys the company.
Sign producers are part of the printing industry, the fourth-largest manufacturing sector in North America, and represented in the Valley by a number of shops who actually make a product here. Signage as an advertising media, v.s. its sexier sisters — TV, newspaper, radio, and the latest starlet, Thee Interwebz — still delivers the biggest bang for the advertising buck.
Lastly, from an ecological viewpoint, signage fulfills two of the 3Rs — recycle and reuse. Although I no longer print political work, I see signs that we did years back on their third or fourth campaign.
Taking all the above into consideration, political signage should be encouraged and supported, as it delivers jobs to our sputtering economy, value to the purchaser and the consumer, and colour to our dismal fall landscape.
It also forces candidates to boil their campaigns down to as few words as possible. You gotta like that!
Andy MacDougall,
Royston