UnseatHarper.ca
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Tax-Funded Self-Promotion by the Harper Government
Government expenditures should be used to benefit all Canadians, not to promote the party in power. How has the Harper Government performed on this measure? Not well. Consider the following evidence:
Economic Action Plan (EAP)
Whether or not you think that the Harper Government’s costly EAP stimulus program was a good idea, we can all agree that if it was to be undertaken then all of the money committed to it should have gone to stimulating the economy, not to promoting the Harper Government. But is that what happened? No, it is not.
As reported in The Hill Times Online, the Harper Government used “taxpayer-funded ads to gain a political advantage in anticipation of a fall [2009]election, and the federal government's $34-million advertising campaign for its Economic Action Plan would be in violation of Ontario's Government Advertising Act, says a leading government advertising expert.”
The EAP advertising dollars did not primarily go toward informing Canadians and their municipalities about how they could take advantage of the available funds to stimulate their local economies. Instead, those advertising expenditures were used to tell us what wonderful work the Harper Government was allegedly performing. In other words, rather than spending that $34-million to do a great job, the Harper Government spent it to tell us how great a job they supposedly were doing.
And it didn’t stop there.
Every single one of the projects funded by the program was required to erect a sign letting us know that the project was funded under the EAP. The upshot of that requirement was that more money spent on signs meant less money was available to support the real work of the funded projects.
Nevertheless, the cost of buying and erecting the signs wasn’t the most ludicrous aspect of this element of the Harper Government’s insistence on tax-funded self-promotion. According to a Canadian Press article published in the Toronto Star, to ensure that all of the EAP projects erected the signs as required, the Harper Government ordered civil servants across Canada to “document every single sign posted anywhere promoting the federal economic stimulus plan.”
According to the article, civil servants “spent countless hours tracking every one of more than 8,500 signs posted since last summer, when the urgent, weekly exercise was ordered by the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic support arm of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office.”
One federal crown corporation, CMHC, generated more than 3,000 pages of signage documentation, 500 of which were obtained by Canadian Press. And that’s only one of the many agencies and municipalities that undertook projects under the program. Nobody has a complete tally of how many hours and how many pages of documentation were wasted tracking signs meant to tout the government’s efforts.
It wasn’t just signs. It was also cheques. A number of Conservative MPs went into their ridings bearing props: much larger than life mock-ups of the cheques supposedly used to pay for some of the local EAP projects. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Wrong. Many of the cheques were altered to bear the Conservative MPs’ signature, making it appear as if the MPs were delivering the money personally.
In addition, some of the mock cheques used the Conservative Party’s colours and included a Conservative Party of Canada logo where a Government of Canada logo would normally appear on a real government cheque. Canadian taxpayers would, no doubt, be happy if the funding for the EAP—or for even just the Harper Government’s self-promotion surrounding the program—had indeed come out of the Conservative Party’s coffers and its MPs own pockets, as suggested by the mock cheques. Obviously, this was not the case.
Then there was the Web site that the Harper Government set up solely for the EAP. “A flashy government website plastered with photos of Prime Minister Stephen Harper was approved even though it violates federal rules,” according to a Canadian Press story published in the Star. Many of those photos were later removed after the government received complaints about them.
This wasn’t merely an oversight by someone who was not familiar with the rules governing the content of government Web sites. The article went on to say, “According to federal documents obtained by The Canadian Press, bureaucrats advised that the Economic Action Plan website didn’t meet rules — and didn’t merit an exemption from those rules.” Despite this advice, Treasury Board President Vic Toews, a member of Harper’s Cabinet, approved the Web site anyway. His justification was that, according to him, the rules were probably going to be changed at some point in the future.
The EAP-related government self-promotion expenditures are a pain that keeps on hurting Canadian taxpayers. On February 24, 2011, the Harper Government dispatched 80 Conservative MPs to fan out across the country at taxpayer expense to boast about the benefits that EAP projects had brought to local communities—benefits bought with the taxpayers’ own money, not the Conservative Party’s money. (See: A flurry of pre-election self-promotion, Geoff Stevens, The Record, February 28, 2011.)
If you think this was simply the work of some overly subservient, overzealous departmental civil servants, think again. According to a Canadian Press story carried in the Winnipeg Free Press, “A “memorandum for the prime minister" from April 2, 2009 — obtained by The Canadian Press after waiting 18 months on an Access to Information Act request that was supposed to take 30 days” showed that the EAP marketing program was planned by the Prime Minister’s Office right from the very start.
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Other Advertising
The Conservatives promised us that they would run a tight fiscal ship. That promise apparently didn’t include advertising expenditures. According to an article in the Globe and Mail on September 20, 2010, “The [government’s] advertising budget for 2009-2010 is a large increase of $50.5-million over the previous year’s budget of $79.5-million.”
That pushed the 2009-2010 government advertising budget up to $130-million—a 64 percent increase over the previous year at a time when, as the Globe and Mail noted, of unprecedented deficits.
As exorbitant as the 2009-2010 advertising budget might look compared to the previous year, consider the comparison to advertising expenditures before the Harper Government took office. The Globe and Mail article went on to point out that “the latest tally is more than three times higher than the advertising budget of $41.3-million in 2005-2006, when the Harper government took office.”
Far from all of those taxpayer-funded advertising dollars were spent on non-partisan ads. The Toronto Star evaluated some of the advertising the Harper Government bought to promote a renovation tax credit program. The Star found that “it was intended to promote the government along with the savings.”
The Star based this conclusion, in part, on the words of a report commissioned by the government. The government is required to submit a post-campaign evaluation of all publicity campaigns costing more than $1-million. The executive summary of the evaluation report for the renovation tax credit program, which was prepared by Ekos Research Associates at a cost of $28,000, stated, “The campaign is intended to ... increase the number of Canadians who believe that the (government of Canada) is committed to delivering tax relief to individuals and families.”
Promotion by Conservative Senators
Tax-funded Conservative self-promotion extended into the Senate, the supposed chamber of sober second thought. According to a November 11, 2010 article in the Toronto Star, some unelected Conservative senators—appointed by Stephen Harper after he told us he would not appoint unelected senators—used their office budgets to send out partisan advertising material.
The Star article went on to state that at least one of those unelected senators, Bob Runciman, sent out those mailers, “at the direction of the Conservative Party of Canada’s national campaign office.” This is yet another example of our tax dollars being put to work for the Conservatives’ benefit, not ours.
Existing tax incentives encourage people to contribute funds to the party of their choice and the parties receive subsidies from government funds. Beyond that, our tax dollars should not be used to serve the partisan political purposes of the party in power. The Harper Government seems to disagree. We need to tell them that they are wrong.
