The Great Canadian Wish List Contest
A pro-life victory won on the battlefield of online forums
Suzanne Fortin

On July 1st, Canadian pro-lifers scored an important moral victory in the fight for the rights of unborn children when they won CBC’s The Great Canadian Wish List contest on Facebook, the social networking site. Pro-life supporters managed to obtain about 9,500 votes, while pro-choice voters placed second with 8,000 votes.

The secret to our success was our perseverance and our newly emerging online network. More and more pro-lifers are keeping lists of pro-life email addresses, publishing on blogs and using Facebook to find kindred spirits. The internet is emerging as the battleground where a new generation of determined, tech-savvy pro-lifers can confront the pro-abortion philosophy on an even playing field, without the censorship or control of the pro-choice establishment.

My experience with the Wish List contest began one night in the dying days of May. I was browsing on Facebook.com, when I noticed that a friend had joined a group called “The Great Canadian Wish List”. The CBC had organized a contest where users suggest a wish and try to get as many people as possible to vote on it. The wish with the most votes would get coverage by the CBC on Canada Day.

That sparked visions of Peters Mansbridge on Parliament Hill on Canada Day being forced to talk about the pro-life issue.

I thought: Wouldn’t that be delicious?

Then I was skeptical: As if the CBC would honour that vote.

As I browsed through the wishes, I realized that someone had already started a pro-life wish to “Abolish Abortion”. Dave Gilbert, a fourth-year economics student at Wilfred Laurier University, launched the pro-life wish early on in the contest. And it was in third place!

I said to myself: We could win this. We have to do it. We have to show Canada that there are still a lot of people who care about the rights of unborn children.

I felt some anxiety at the outset. I expected the pro-choice forces to strike back, and the numbers were against us. Their network of contacts, websites, message boards and email lists is far more extensive than those of social conservatives, and their influence is far more penetrating.

We had to maintain as strong a lead as possible as a buffer against their counter-attack.

As I had foreseen, our opponents quickly launched their own wish: that “Canada would remain pro-choice”. Still, the “Abolish Abortion” wish had garnered enough votes to climb to number one, and it maintained a strong 2 to 1 lead over the pro-choicers. There were two other social conservative wishes dealing with marriage and spiritual revival that were also doing well. Our pro-life, promarriage and pro-faith wishes took three of the top five spots. The social conservative tone of the Wish List angered many on the left. I knew their surge was coming. It was only a matter of time.

The discussions on the message boards were predictably nasty. Many people were exasperated that we had the gall to “ruin” such a nice contest with the suggestion that we respect unborn children. To their credit, the contest organizers were very even-handed. They drove home the message that this was the people’s contest, and they were going to respect their wishes. The socialists gnashed their teeth at the lack of censorship. They tried a variety of tactics to de-legitimize the contest and our pro-life message. They mocked us and insulted us. They made a lot of joke wishes directed at us and they started bogus discussions. In fact, pro-abortion activist Joyce Arthur wished that Canada would “abolish the religious right”, saying that it would be just as ridiculous to wish for that as it would be to wish for abortion to be abolished.

Nevertheless, our opponents did not succeed in discrediting us. We never let their derision cool our determination and we kept hammering out our prolife message in a diplomatic fashion.

All went relatively well for the first two weeks. I spent my free time posting on forums, messaging contacts and tracking down potential voters. I also posted a step by step guide to voting on my blog, Big Blue Wave, which LifesiteNews.com linked to.

Then the mainstream media began to pay
attention.

The Globe and Mail published an article on the contest and mentioned that “Abolish Abortion” was the top wish. That by itself made all our effort worth the trouble because it showed that the prolife issue was still alive. Then the CBC featured a segment on Dave Gilbert, the man who launched the “Abolish Abortion” wish. It was broadcast in several cities across Canada during the supper hour news. My goal of getting mainstream media attention was already accomplished.

The downside was that this motivated prochoicers to act. When this contest was just reserved to Facebook and only promised a lowly segment on the CBC on Canada Day, it was tolerable for them to ignore it. But now that this pro-life movement was gaining traction, they couldn’t stand it. As leftwing activist Audra Williams blogged: the optics were bad. She called on all her readers, including non-Canadians, to vote for the pro-abortion wish. Joyce Arthur posted her own call to action on babble, the socialist message board. Her attitude was: it’s a stupid contest, but we have to make sure pro-lifers don’t win (and make pro-choicers look bad).

The pro-life lead began to evaporate by a few hundred votes a day until the pro-choicers pulled ahead. It was very disheartening. One of my acquaintances wondered if we should bring in the Americans to vote, but in my circle of friends, the opinion was decidedly against this. LifesiteNews.com then published another link to my directions on how to vote, and that seemed to have saved us.

Then a poster came clean on the Wish List message board, showing how vote cheating was going on. There was a glitch in the Facebook program that made it very easy to increase the vote count. The organizers of the contest decided to expunge all the suspicious votes and reset the count to the level it was at before the pro-choice surge. Now pro-lifers were ahead by 200 votes. That lifted our spirits.

With the revelation of cheating, and the vote reset, many pro-choicers thought the contest was so flawed that it wasn’t worth their time any more.

So they gave up.

After that, it was a fairly easy sail to victory. Like many pro-lifers, I couldn’t savour the victory to the fullest. I was on vacation on Canada Day and didn’t see the broadcast about our wish. But even if I had waited around to watch the segment, I would have missed it. The CBC showed the promised coverage—a three-minute report—at 7:30 in the morning. Eastern.

The reporter who created the contest—Mike Wise—was kind enough to post a video of the segment on YouTube. Pro-lifers were then able to show the video on their blogs and message boards.

But the coverage went beyond that. Dozens of blogs and news sites from Canada and around the world mentioned the contest—and the pro-life issue—especially after the victory.

I’ve retained two lessons from this contest. One is that if pro-lifers want to win, they have to want it more than the other side. The other side gave up, so we won. It was a marathon of worry, anxiety and exhausting late nights, but that’s how you win marathons. The second lesson to take from the contest is that pro-lifers must become more plugged in and technologically savvy. If nothing else, every active pro-lifer should have a list of pro-life email contacts. I predict that this is the first of many online confrontations. The internet seems to offer the best terms of engagement for the culture war. When Canadian pro-lifers take advantage of the tools of cyberspace, it gives them a decisive advantage.

For the first time since I can remember, prolifers were on the offensive, and it was pro-choicers who were reacting. We earned our media by being pro-active, and we got our message out. If we have the courage to raise the issue and the technological know-how to keep it alive, we can keep up this trend in the future.

Suzanne Fortin is a pro-life activist and writer based in Ottawa, Ontario. Her blog can be found at
BigBlueWave.ca.