Liberals unveil new rules to crack down on partisan government advertising

Treasury Board President Scott Brison unveiled new rules Thursday that would require any government ad campaign over $500,000 to be reviewed by the independent Advertising Standards Canada.

Thestar.com
May 12, 2016
By Alex Boutilier

The Liberal government has introduced new rules to prevent the use of public funds for partisan advertising.

Treasury Board President Scott Brison unveiled new rules Thursday that would require any government ad campaign over $500,000 to be reviewed by the independent Advertising Standards Canada.

But Brison said the rules stipulate all government advertising must be strictly non-partisan, including those that fall under the $500,000 threshold.

“The policy applies to all government advertising and communication,” Brison told reporters at a morning press conference.

“Ninety per cent of government advertising over the last several years has been through campaigns of over $500,000, but the policy applies to all our advertising and communication.

And we will be expecting and we’ll be governing ourselves, including social media campaigns, accordingly.”

Under the new rules all government communications and advertising is required to be non-partisan, defined by four points:

They must be factual and explanatory.

They must be free from political parties’ slogans, identifiers, or affiliation.

The primary colour used in the ads cannot be the primary colours used by the governing party - so no red for Liberals, or blue for Conservatives.

Advertising is devoid of any name, voice or image of federal politicians.

The directive announced Thursday comes into effect immediately, and legislation is expected later in the Liberals’ mandate to codify or even expand the measures.

Brison explicitly tied the measures to criticisms of the previous Conservative government’s use of public funds for advertising, such as the ubiquitous Economic Action Plan campaigns.

Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose said the Conservatives, who spent more than $500 million in public money on advertising between 2008-09 and 2014-15, always stuck to advertising government programs only.

“Well I haven’t seen (the new policy), but what I’ll say is we expect them to follow all the same rules that we followed,” Ambrose told reporters in Montreal Thursday, according to audio provided by the Conservative party. “If they’re going to do advertising, then the advertising that’s paid for by taxpayer dollars has to be used only for government programs.”

The rules also allow experts within the public service to speak freely about their areas of expertise, without getting official sanction from departments’ or ministers’ communications teams. While bureaucrats will still need to respect privacy law and government ethics rules, they’re now explicitly permitted to speak through the media to the public about their work.

Daniel Blaikie, the NDP’s Treasury Board critic, expressed cautious optimism for what he calls a “step in the right direction” toward reforming Ottawa’s communications rules.

“It doesn’t go quite as far as what they committed to in the election campaign, and it’s not what they were advocating as a solution in the last Parliament,” Blaikie said in an interview.

“It’ll just take some time to see what that means concretely ... I think we just need to wait and see and see if this affects the quality of government advertising.”

During the election campaign, the Liberals promised to create an advertising commissioner to vet government ads for partisan connections. Instead, the government is outsourcing that work with a $65,000 annual contract to the Advertising Standards Canada.

But Brison didn’t rule out creating a new watchdog in future legislation.

“We want to get this right, and we will be open to the report and the views of the auditor general and of parliamentarians,” Brison said.