OTTAWA—The Conservative government wants to spend another $4 million on an advertising campaign to promote its interpretation of changes to the environmental assessment process for natural resources development.

“Preserving our heritage, now and for future generations,” a narrator says at the end of a television commercial featuring beautiful Canadian vistas and a list of measures the federal government says it has taken to protect the environment.

New Democrat MP Mathieu Ravignat, the treasury board critic for his party, said the goal of government advertising should be to inform citizens of services available, not promote a legislative agenda.

“It’s selling a product and often, until you get to the logo at the end of the advertisement, you don’t know whether or not the sustainable resource development ads are about selling petrol,” Ravignat said in an interview Thursday.

One advertisement that was aimed at informing citizens — about changes to Old Age Security — actually ended up being more successful than originally planned and so the government cancelled a second round that would have cost $4.5 million, said Amélie Maisonneuve, a spokeswoman for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.

The additional spending on the so-called “responsible resource development” advertising campaign, plus another $200,000 for a vignette on the War of 1812, means the federal government is now officially asking Parliament to approve $55.2 million in planned spending on advertising campaigns this fiscal year.

That is the cumulative total mentioned in the second set of supplementary estimates tabled to the House of Commons on Thursday, but other Treasury Board documents show the approved spending has already surpassed that amount.

Those documents show cabinet approved a total of nearly $63.6 million in spending on advertising in the first two quarters of fiscal 2012-13 alone.

The second-quarter figures show some advertising campaigns were scaled back, including one meant to promoting safe travel abroad that will now cost $1 million instead of $4 million.

“Funds initially allocated have been reduced in line with a targeted, cost effective campaign,” Ian Trites, a spokesman for the foreign affairs department wrote in an emailed statement Thursday.

It is difficult to forecast what the total planned amount for this year will be, because the main estimates tabled shortly after the March 29 budget did not break out advertising from other operating expenditures.

Canadian Heritage said in an email that the total War of 1812 advertising campaign is $6.7 million over three years and the extra amount contained in the supplementary estimates was to increase its reach over the summer.

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The latest year for which the annual report on government advertising activities is available is 2010-11, when they spent $83.3 million.

The advertising budget for fiscal 2005-06, which represents the final year the Liberals were in power, was $41.3 million, and the Conservatives have spent at least twice that amount annually for all but one of the years since forming government.