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Governments like to put their best spin forward. They employ communications directors, writers, strategists and ad agencies to craft a positive image of the state’s business. They feed MPs lines so they don’t veer off track, they refuse interviews that could prove unflattering, they grant better access to journalists deemed ‘friendly’ than to those who are ‘unfriendly’.

They make every effort to control the story, so voters believe their version rather than those of their opponents and critics.

But when controlling the story becomes the story, that’s a problem. And when it costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s an even bigger problem. Which is what happened this week, with the revelation that the Conservatives spent $113 million on ads promoting Canada’s Economic Action plan, as well as $23 million to monitor media, including $2.4 million to check the performance of its own MPs on radio, TV, print and the Internet.

First, the ads. According to the government, they were justified on the basis of national pride. Questioned on the subject by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “Canadians understand and are very proud of the fact that Canada’s economy has performed so much better than other developed countries during these challenging times.”

Perhaps, but to link said pride to those commercials is disingenuous in the extreme. If anything, the spots inspire far different emotions: irritation, anger, a desire to change the channel, mute the TV, refill the snack tray.

Ads touting the benefits of programs not accessible to citizens are nothing more than propaganda. They benefit not the government as an institution, but the party that forms the government.

The government’s Action Plan spending was questionable enough. Every time I passed a particular tennis court near my home, I wondered how such a facility qualified as ‘infrastructure’ in need of federal funding. The ads simply add insult to injury, reminding me of all the other dubious places my tax dollars have gone.

Unfortunately, it appears I will have to get used to them. Lavish self-promotion campaigns have become a sorry tradition for the Conservative government. In October 2012, an examination by the Canadian Press of ad budgets for the Tories’ first five years in office revealed overspending of $128 million, or 37 per cent. The same report revealed the previous Liberal government underspent its $58.5 million advertising budget in 2004-2005 by 15 per cent, albeit after dropping a whopping $111 million in 2002-2003, the last year it had a majority.

What can the government advertise? Treasury Board Guidelines stipulate that government self-promotion should inform citizens about programs and services — presumably programs they can use. But ads touting the benefits of programs not accessible to citizens are nothing more than propaganda. They benefit not the government as an institution, but the party that forms the government — and if anything, they should be paid for through party coffers, not public ones.

The government also should not be spending public funds to monitor the media activities of its MPs. In the past, some Conservative MPs have suffered from a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease, so one can understand the PMO’s desire to prevent this from recurring. But again, the benefit accrues not to the taxpayer who pays the bill, but to the Conservatives who avoid missteps. And it doesn’t even appear to have worked that well: Tory backbenchers are feeling their oats inside the House of Commons, if not outside of it.

Conservatives will say they need to get the good news out because the press is stacked against them. On some media platforms, they have a point: The CBC leans left, as does the Toronto Star. But on others, they don’t: Most talk radio and papers in the Sun and Postmedia chains take a more right-wing view of the world. As for the Internet, it’s a wild west of pro and con — impossible to tell who’s winning the propaganda war.

Just as it shouldn’t use public money to fund negative attack ads (something else the prime minister needs to explain), a party in power should not use it to fund positive feel-good ads. Because to taxpayers, it doesn’t feel good — no matter what the focus groups say.

Tasha Kheiriddin is a well-known political writer and broadcaster who frequently comments in both English and French. In her student days, Tasha was active in youth politics in her hometown of Montreal, eventually serving as national policy director and then president of the Progressive Conservative Youth Federation of Canada. After practising law and a stint in the government of Mike Harris, Tasha became the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and co-wrote the 2005 bestseller, Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution. Tasha moved back to Montreal in 2006 and served as vice-president of the Montreal Economic Institute, and later director for Quebec of the Fraser Institute, while also lecturing on conservative politics at McGill University. Tasha now lives in Whitby, Ontario with her daughter Zara, born in 2009.

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