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Lysyk worries now that the new system will damage her credibility, when the government produces ads with horn-tooting messages then says the auditor general approved them.

“If the government decides not to make substantive changes to the proposed amendments, I respectfully ask that it bring forth another amendment to relieve my office of its advertising review responsibilities and to assign the task of reviewing ads for partisanship to a government ministry or agency,” Lysyk’s report said Tuesday. If you make me do the job like this, I won’t do it at all, in other words.

That would actually be for the best. It’s not obvious that reviewing advertising content is a great assignment for an auditor general, anyway. Perhaps because they’re often the only institutional checks on governments outside the courts, we’ve developed a fetish for having them review things, regardless of whether they’re in an auditor general’s usual bailiwick. The partisan content of an ad isn’t a financial matter and it’s only sort of about meeting performance standards. Really, the auditor general and her staff are asked to make judgments according to an understanding of partisanship that it might never be possible to succeed in intelligibly defining.

When the Tories abused taxpayer money on self-serving ads, they got called on it, and told in no uncertain terms in 2003 that they had to cut it out.

An uproar is all the more likely now that we can dissect messages practically in real time. If the Liberals want to simplify the review system, they should, and leave the auditor general out of it. They can spend tax money on advertising without the help of a smart outsider doing what she can to save them from themselves, and we can all judge how it turns out.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/davidreevely