Juno News - August 03, 2019


Government advertising needs to stop

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Stephen Harper Justin Trudeau Joyce Murray Fareez Nathu
KNIGHT： It's everybody's fault except for Justin Trudeau's It's never Justin Trudeau's fault. No matter what.

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

143.99

Word count

489

Sentence count

25


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As of June 30th, in the lead up to the next federal election, the federal government has not allowed any government advertising to Canadians. But that didn t stop the Trudeau Liberal government from spending $17.7 million in the first quarter of 2019-2020.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As of June 30th, in the lead up to the next federal election, the federal government has not allowed to put forward any government advertising to Canadians.
00:00:12.000 Though that didn't stop the Trudeau Liberal government from spending $17.7 million in the first quarter of 2019-2020,
00:00:21.000 basically the period immediately preceding that June 30th cutoff.
00:00:26.000 Now, these numbers come from the National Post, which did a dive into how much the federal government is spending on advertising things like programs, tax credits, the budget,
00:00:36.000 all of these things that governments can advertise and spend money on that aren't expressly partisan.
00:00:42.000 The problem with it is that the government is promoting its agenda.
00:00:46.000 The government's promoting its own record, and the government is spending millions and millions of dollars in an election year
00:00:52.000 to tell Canadians all the things that it's doing for them.
00:00:56.000 Now, it's not a Liberal problem exclusively, and when asked about it, the Treasury Board's answer was,
00:01:02.000 well, Harper did it too. This is what they basically said.
00:01:05.000 Well, we're still two-thirds below what Stephen Harper's government was spending in the lead up to the 2015 election.
00:01:12.000 That may be so, but that doesn't make it right.
00:01:15.000 And remember, Justin Trudeau is the one who promised a different type of politics.
00:01:19.000 I think we should do away with government advertising altogether,
00:01:22.000 because it is only self-serving and ultimately serving a political purpose,
00:01:28.000 even though it's supposed to be doing the opposite.
00:01:30.000 Now, there are areas where government may need to get a message out,
00:01:33.000 but the Harper-era advertising the Economic Action Plan was self-serving,
00:01:38.000 just as it's self-serving when the Liberals talk about the carbon tax rebate that they're promoting,
00:01:43.000 because they're doing it to tell Canadians they're putting money in their pockets.
00:01:48.000 And in fact, Treasury Board President Joyce Murray's spokesperson said,
00:01:52.000 it's different when we do it than when they do it, referring to the Conservatives.
00:01:56.000 This is the quote from Fareez Nathu.
00:01:59.000 While the previous Conservative government used government advertising for political gain,
00:02:03.000 we have been giving Canadians the information they need in a responsible, nonpartisan fashion.
00:02:10.000 Even though it may be nonpartisan, this latest round of ads still is 20% more in cost than it was a year prior.
00:02:19.000 And when that period in 2018 happened, it came after three quarters of not spending any money on government advertising.
00:02:28.000 So for some reason, the government only needs to communicate in that so-called nonpartisan fashion in the lead up to an election.
00:02:35.000 Seems a little bit suspect to me.
00:02:38.000 If we do away with all government advertising, we don't have to split hairs over whether something is partisan or not,
00:02:44.000 political or not, self-serving or not.
00:02:46.000 We can allow the cynicism to reign and accept that it's always self-serving, which is why it has to end.
00:02:52.000 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
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