

The Canadian Conservative Party has sent out direct-mail flyers boasting about the party's track record on initiatives to help people with disabilities. The flyer has some of the text rendered in fake Braille — a picture of raised dots that are not, themselves, raised at all.

Nicolas snapped a photo of the flyer and put it on Twitter this week, saying the "mailer about accessibility has a PICTURE of Braille on it. How very sensitive and supportive."

Some of Nicolas's friends in Winnipeg told her the flyer was also sent around Elmwood-Transcona, riding of Conservative MP Lawrence Toet. It also surfaced in Peterborough, home to MP Dean Del Mastro, and in Ottawa West-Nepean, home riding of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

"It's shocking to me that a party that big, and that well-funded, could be putting out something so ignorant," Nicolas said in an email to the Star.

Jim Tokos, a vice-president at the Canadian Council of the Blind, said he found the flyers simply "baffling" — especially since the whole purpose of the pamphlet was to boast about how much the Conservatives were doing to make life easier for disabled people in Canada.