[BRIEF NOTE] On Canada's Tea Party

[rfmcdonald]

I've blogged in the past about my concerns that the populist conservatism of the United States' Tea Party might make it up into Canada, but those parts were somewhat--well--misguided. Iin truth Canada had a very popular Tea Party in the 1990s. The Canadian band of that name, fairly described as a CanCon equivalent to The Doors right down to the brooding handsome dark-haired singer, had a fair number of hits in that decade (like "Temptation", below) before attenuating and disbanding six years ago.

The band still has the domain name teaparty.com, however, and this name could make the band quite, quite rich.

For the last two years, the Tea Party has been the most talked about movement in American conservative politics, and a nearly forgotten band from Windsor, Ontario have been the accidental benefactors. Every time anybody searches for "tea party", one of the top results has nothing to do with pork barrel spending, the federal reserve, or, er, "Obamacare". Instead, teaparty.com is the website for the Tea Party, a Middle Eastern-tinged band whose last charting single was in 2001. In anticipation of traffic from supporters of the political movement, the band's website proclaims: "No Politics … Just Rock and Roll."

"So much damage has been done to our name by the political movement that we're considering selling [the website]," Tea Party bassist Stuart Chatwood recently told BusinessWeek. The band do not support Tea Party politics: "As Canadians, we're sensitive to all the criticism of socialised medicine," he said. Although the Tea Party would rather sell their domain name to a liberal satirist such as Jon Stewart or a Democratic fundraiser such as George Soros, Chatwood said the URL will probably go to the highest bidder. "We've got families," he said.

In this political climate, a website at teaparty.com could be a valuable portal for either fundraising or satire. As BusinessWeek pointed out, it could also be a canny business opportunity for Lipton tea. But high demand for the web address means it won't come cheap – domain names such as vodka.com and sex.com sold for millions.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Tea Party plan tokeep making music. They released seven albums between 1991 and 2004, selling 1.6m copies – mostly in Canada. After breaking up in 2005, they reunited for several dates this year.

Hee.