The first was an ad campaign earlier this year promoting the Canada Job Grant — a program that was not, and is still not, accessible to a single Canadian worker.
The second is the $9-million being spent currently on television and print ads targeting Canada’s cellphone companies — the first time that anyone can remember the government of Canada trying to knee-cap an industry that employs 300,000 of its citizens.
This government claims to be Conservative — staffed by devotees of Milton Friedman, who noted that nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully he spends his own.
How can any Conservative advocate spending millions promoting programs that don’t exist or on campaigns that attack an industry that is pumping billions into the economy every year?
The government argues the money spent on advertising — estimated by the Liberals at $548-million in six years — is legitimate. The campaigns alert Canadians about government policy, it says.
Yet even when the programs exist, many of the campaigns are ineffectual.
The responses to the Economic Action Plan ads this year were pretty dismal, even according to the government’s own monitoring. One Harris Decima poll found only six people of the 2,000 they surveyed had visited the government’s Action Plan website and no one had called the toll-free number.
But that misses the point. These ads are designed for the benefits to flow through to the Conservative Party. By definition, then, they should not be funded by taxpayers.
“Conservatives would be lighting their hair on fire, were it not for the fact that it’s a Conservative government doing it,” said Gregory Thomas, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.
The solution to this gouge is pretty straightforward — do what Dalton did. It’s not often this newspaper points to the record of the McGuinty government in Ontario for lessons learned, but in 2004 the provincial Liberals brought in a bill banning government advertising that veered into partisan territory. A panel within the provincial auditor-general’s office vets ads before they run.
In order to qualify for taxpayer funding, ads must inform the public of government policies; inform them of their rights and responsibilities; encourage or discourage specific social behaviour; or, promote the province as a good place to work, invest or visit.
They cannot promote the governing party’s partisan political interests or have the primary objective of fostering a positive impression of that party (or a negative impression of a person or party critical of the government).
The principles of the act have been adopted federally by Dalton McGuinty’s brother, David, the Ottawa Liberal MP, who has a private members’ bill that would elimate partisan government advertising.
“The reason these guys do it is to curry favour with consumers with our dollars…. This is cheating — it’s not a level playing field. And to use $9-million of taxpayers’ money to attack Canada’s three largest telcos is despicable,” said Mr. McGuinty.
Bernard Lord, the former Conservative premier of New Brunswick and current executive director of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, has said the current campaign is “unprecedented.”
You don’t need to be a fan of the wireless industry to agree with him that it’s a poor use of taxpayers’ dollars.
Mr. McGuinty’s bill is way down the list of private members’ business, so it will not reach the House of Commons for a while, unless he can persuade a colleague higher up the list to adopt it.
But Jim Flaherty could yet restore the pride of fiscal conservatives. The finance minister is looking for low cost to no cost proposals to put in his 2014 budget. By introducing legislation that would cut out the millions of dollars of bootleg party advertising, he would remind Canadians why so many voted for them in the first place.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: John Ivison
No comments:
Post a Comment