Juno News - March 05, 2019


Justin Trudeau has rigged political advertising rules


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

173.50885

Word count

703

Sentence count

6


Summary

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

In the lead-up to the 2019 federal election, Google announced that no political candidates or parties will be allowed to advertise on the company's website. Andrew Lutton explains why this is bad news for the Trudeau Liberals and the political advertising industry in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 The international multi-billion dollar corporation Google which has had to
00:00:06.240 navigate the laws and regulations of countries around the world has found
00:00:11.160 that it just can't deal with the burdens put on it by the federal government in
00:00:15.320 Canada so has decided it will not allow political advertisers to well advertise
00:00:21.000 in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election. Now this is a significant
00:00:26.100 decision. Google stands to lose a lot of money by its announcement made this week
00:00:30.040 that no political candidates or political parties will be allowed to
00:00:33.940 advertise once Bill C-76 goes into effect. This is a bill put forward by the
00:00:39.480 Liberals as a way to apparently safeguard Canada's elections but a lot of what's
00:00:44.320 in there has been a knee-jerk reaction to the whole Russia collusion boogeyman
00:00:48.700 discussion emanating from the United States. One of the major regulations put
00:00:53.580 on any advertisers under C-76 is that they must have a complete inventory of
00:00:58.860 pretty much every political ad imaginable and every political advertiser and this
00:01:03.720 must be made available and made transparent but with how much of Google's
00:01:07.560 process is automated the company said it just would not be able to comply with
00:01:11.680 this and as such it's needing to say farewell to a lot of ad money and when we
00:01:16.480 talk about how significant a player Google is in political advertising we have
00:01:20.820 to look at one study that was published in 2016 that found about 48% of all
00:01:25.980 advertising in Canada takes place with Google all online advertising takes place
00:01:31.780 with Google 48% so even Facebook and Twitter which so far have not made a
00:01:36.660 similar decision are significantly smaller players than Google is. Now Google
00:01:43.120 made a decision and the government has said it was a business decision but Google
00:01:47.160 for its part has said it's actually very disappointed you see Google warned the
00:01:51.660 government during the C-76 discussions that it would not be able to comply with
00:01:56.580 these regulations and the government did nothing about it the government didn't
00:02:00.540 heed these concerns and as much as Google may not be the most sympathetic player we
00:02:05.640 have to look at who this impacts the candidates and parties that would be
00:02:09.180 trying to advertise on Google and who is it that typically relies more on
00:02:13.440 political advertising opposition parties and candidates which means that the
00:02:18.680 Justin Trudeau Liberals have in many respects made it easier for themselves as
00:02:23.400 incumbents to campaign because governments are still allowed to advertise the
00:02:28.220 government can still advertise on Google the government can still advertise on
00:02:31.920 YouTube government MPs can still advertise if it's related to their role as
00:02:36.420 members of Parliament but political candidates and parties cannot advertise as
00:02:41.640 such so what's gonna happen here is we're going to see a lot more government
00:02:46.800 advertising ads saying the government of Canada is doing this for you MPs saying
00:02:51.180 hey my office is over here if you have any questions and the Conservatives the NDP
00:02:56.400 and the Green Party to some extent will have a harder time getting their
00:03:00.580 message in front of the eyes that need to see it for them to effectively
00:03:04.080 campaign but there's another dimension to this you see one of the things
00:03:08.440 Justin Trudeau has done to help buy himself reelection has been to put 595
00:03:13.680 million dollars into the mainstream media a payoff of the newspaper industry well
00:03:18.880 in the absence of Google as an advertising platform that means a lot more
00:03:23.320 people are going to have to start looking at traditional media which makes me
00:03:27.100 wonder if a part of this has been almost a deliberate sabotage so that even more
00:03:32.080 money will have to be funneled into mainstream media even if politicians and
00:03:36.460 political parties feel that that is not the best way to spend their ad dollars
00:03:40.660 well now there are just fewer options because of this so Justin Trudeau which
00:03:45.040 claims it's opening up Canada for business has managed to regulate one of
00:03:49.360 the largest companies out of one of the largest industries which is online
00:03:53.320 advertising and we're supposed to believe that he won't do that with other
00:03:56.680 sectors well color me surprised for true north I'm Andrew Lutton