Team Mar volunteer: " ...a donor is paying for student memberships"

We get letters (and emails), lot and lots of letters...  And look what showed up in one of them.




  " a donor is paying for student memberships"      

Spin that.

Audio clip taken from a video taken Sept 7, 2011 at that very same Gary Mar table at the U of A where this picture was taken.  I decided to use audio only and not full video because the identity of this hard working volunteer is not important and I am not here to toss her under a bus. Team Mar seems to be doing a good enough job of that already.


Background: Last Friday I posted a picture of the Team Gary Mar table at the University of Alberta where it was quite obvious that they were giving away free memberships.

The response was quick from Mar spinners and supporters: "Complete fabrication guys." was the first, but seeing that the free membership sign was so prominently displayed in the photo, that line was going to go nowhere. Next up came what would become the main spin from Team Mar: "it was a mistake by a volunteer, nobody was instructed to do this. Problem was corrected right away."  Which was to be repeated, almost word for word many more times throughout the day. They were in the 'nothing to see here' mode and were only too happy to blame one poor volunteer ( there were at least 3 volunteers there, all of which could see the sign on the table and NONE doing anything about it )  hoping it would all go away. Honestly I have lost more respect for Team Mar over how they tried to spin their way out than I did about some 'free memberships' that were given out.


So what do you think?

An improperly trained volunteer, who knew enough about the memberships to say that they normally cost $5, who on the spur of the moment just happened to come up with this 'donor paying for student memberships' idea on her own, or perhaps is there is more to the story than what Team Mar is telling us? Personally I think that there is more to the story*, but given what we have already seen from Team Mar, I don't expect that we will really ever find out the full story and all I expect to see is more spin and damage control.


As I said in my original post: I guess ethics left the PCAA a long time ago.




*There may indeed be much more to the story but in the end it really doesn't matter; which is the real elephant in the room that nobody is yet talking about.

More on that elephant tomorrow.  (BTW and it isn't the 'donor'.)

UPDATE: More spin from Team Mar: 'campaign advisor Mark Kastner said the incident was a mistake.
“A new volunteer did put the sign down. It was corrected quickly and we don’t think any memberships were given away,” said Kastner in an email.'   To put it simply, BS!  Memberships WERE given away and in case there is doubt about this, there is a certain video...