Angry in the Great White North

Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion released his carbon tax plan today, and the handbook available at the website has his signature on page 4.  Here is a grab of the signature:

Now here is a screen grab of Stephane Dion's signature from his riding website:

Now you would think that with the investment Stephane Dion has made into his carbon tax, he might be bothered to sign the darn thing himself with a green pen.

But no, it's just a copy.

Here are the two signatures super-imposed.  I lined them up to start at the same point.  They've been scaled symmetrically to have the same height.  The signature from the riding website finishes first:

Almost the same but not quite.  Maybe he did sign the carbon tax plan after all.

Still, the lines seemed to match up so well, so I stretched the image from the riding association.  This time I stretched only along the x-axis.  This is a distorting transformation.  Here are the two signatures, slightly offset:

And finally, the two signatures, again with the riding website signature stretched asymmetrically along the x-axis only, overlayed.  You can only see one signature:

To me it seems clear that whoever authored the document grabbed an image of Stephane Dion's signature, fiddled with the colour balance to render it green, then for some reason stretched it horizontally, distorting it.

Why the stretching?  Could have been an accident.  Could have been done to make the signature fill the page better.  Could have been done to make the signature look different, so that it would not be spotted to be the same signature image copied.

But I do know that Stephane Dion didn't grab a green pen and sign a paper so that it could be scanned into the handbook PDF.  That's slightly disappointing, I think.

Not that it matters.  I just found it vaguely interesting.