Stephen Harper's Government Is Wasting a Ton of Money on Crappy Advertising

Much of the news cycle earlier this week was dominated by the birth of a baby that has absolutely nothing to do with your life, apart from the fact that he'll be raised with an obscene amount of tax-provided resources. Meanwhile, actual things were happening that were worth talking about, even if it was hidden under an avalanche of headlines about baby names and the relevancy (or lack thereof) of the monarchy. For instance, the Canadian Press used the Access to Information Act to obtain the results of an internally-commissioned Harris-Decima poll on the government's Economic Action Plan advertising campaign. The results are pretty pathetic.

The Action Plan, in case you're wondering, was the stimulus package introduced by the Conservatives after the 2008 recession. The first Action Plan was in 2009, when the economy actually needed a boost, but since the Conservatives won a majority government in 2011 "Economic Action Plan" has been the official name of the annual budget. As Macleans' Paul Wells' explains, "Harper's Economic Action Plans, by contrast, are carnivals of fantasy," more useful as a way of hiding government spending than controlling it. As Wells points out, the Economic Action Plan 2013 doesn't even provide spending information for the Canadian military, let alone potentially harmful spending cuts.

Thus, the EAP ads are no longer informing Canadians of a stimulus package, they're simply spinning the budget itself. As the ad embedded at the top of this article shows—and by the way, it has less than 8,000 views on YouTube at the time of this writing, and a disabled comment section—the campaign promotes some of the government's more partisan policies. This includes developing "safe and responsible resource development" (or continuing the environmentally hazardous exploitation of the Alberta tar sands), finding "new markets for Canadian exports" (or opening up trade with countries that don't have a particularly good record of protecting human rights, like China), and creating "more efficient government, to keep taxes low" (Conservative talk for cutting services and programs).

In other words, those over-produced, utterly uninformative advertisements you've been seeing on TV and hearing on radio are propaganda, out there to convince Canadians that the government—the Conservative government—is doing stuff to make their lives better in this slowly recovering economic climate. Little do they know that the Action Plan isn't a specific program or service. It's just the government's own fanciful budget, dressed up in positive buzzwords. So it's a little ironic, and a little satisfying, that these ads have failed in capturing any sort of public mood.

The Harris-Decima survey obtained by the Canadian Press gathered responses from 2,003 participants about the cycle of advertisements that aired from February to April this year. It's important to mention the amount of participants, because some of the numbers here are embarrassingly small. The EAP ads prominently encouraged viewers to visit the Action Plan website at actionplan.gc.ca. Out of 2,003 people, only three survey participants actually followed through. The ads also encouraged viewers to call 1-800-O-CANADA. Zero participants called the number. Not just statistically zero percent, but zero participants in total. The margin of error on this survey is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points (19 times out of 20), but with results these small, only the plus seems to matter.

These dismal results continue a quantifiable decline in interest since the government began purchasing these ads in 2009. So far, they've spent a total of $113 million of Economic Action Plan advertising, but they're planning to keep rolling them out until at least 2016 (depending, of course, on the results of the next federal election). But the real reason these results are so low is because these ads are not meant to encourage feedback or action. They're meant to promote, not inform.

The website and the phone number aren't things that need to be called. They're an excuse, a made up purpose, invented by the Conservatives so they can fill airwaves with self-promoting advertisements purchased with taxpayer dollars. Even if hardly anyone responds to the Action Plan ads, the likelihood that someone approves of the government's performance is five percent higher from someone who has seen the ads than someone who has not.

When Liberal leader Justin Trudeau attacked the campaign in a parliamentary Question Period earlier this year, Stephen Harper defended the ads by saying "Canadians understand and are very proud of the fact that Canada's economy has performed so much better than other developed countries during these challenging times." This defense doesn't even try to claim that the ads are informing citizens about programs and services, which is a requirement of the Treasury Board. Instead they simply promote the government's intentions with a Conservative-blue colour scheme that sometimes has to contradict reality to stay consistent.

Of course, the government is required to occasionally spend money on advertising, but an unwarranted increase in spending has occurred across several agencies under Harper, often to accommodate the EAP campaign. Like the Albertan government spending $30 000 on a half-page New York Times ad to promote the Keystone XL, this is not an acceptable use of public funds. The government has taken their responsibility to inform Canadians, through advertising, of programs and services, but they've used the words "inform," "program," and "service" so loosely that they fail to have any meaning at all. Harper may as well be "informing" us—objectivity be damned—that he's a pretty good guy and government is doing a swell job. Sure, Treasury Board regulations and campaign laws don't technically bar advertising like this, but they damn well should.

Follow Alan on Twitter: @alanjonesxxxv

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