Hard for Government to Claim $800Gs Ad Buy Wasn't Partisan

This column was published in in the Toronto Sun. How much of your money should the government spend telling you what they didn't do? Common sense and respect for taxpayer money would say not a single penny. But the Ontario government seems to have neither of these virtues. Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation through a freedom of information request reveal that the Ontario government spent nearly $800,000 on a brand-new ad buy from the budget of the Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP) after they had cancelled the plan.

The documents reveal that this wasn't a situation where the government had committed to an ad purchase and were stuck with a contract--they went out and contracted for new advertising after they cancelled the plan. The radio ads promoted changes to Canada Pension Plan (CPP), an area of federal responsibility. It makes little sense for the province to spend $800,000 promoting changes to a federal program, especially when the province is constantly crying poor to the feds. But then when you consider that the premier has claimed political credit for the changes to CPP, things start adding up. The auditor general even commented on the ads when they were running, stating that they were "self congratulatory," and that they would not have been approved under the old law, which gave the auditor general the power to review government advertising for partisan content. Of course, the ads did run, because the government changed the law to remove the auditor general"s power to protect taxpayers from self-promoting governments. The government will undoubtedly claim that the ad buy was not partisan, and was the necessary conclusion to their $8.2 million ad campaign promoting the scrapped ORPP.

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But a look at who produced the ads quickly discredits this claim. The ads were produced by Liberal favourite ad-house Bensimon Byrne, the same agency that produced the ads for Premier Wynne's election campaign. Bensimon Byrne is one of the few commercial ad agencies that does extensive political work. They have done Liberal political work for more than 10 years. Not only did they produce the most recent election ads for Premier Wynne, but they also produced ads for Dalton McGuinty, Paul Martin, and the recent campaign for Justin Trudeau. And why would the agency shun political work? After all, once their candidates are in government, they get handed $800,000 taxpayer funded contracts for things like the cancelled ORPP ads. It makes business sense for them to butter the bread for the politicians who butter theirs. This kind of contract is in keeping with the style we've come to expect in Ontario. Recall the nearly $3 million in taxpayer funded polling contracts were awarded to the Gandalf Group, a firm led by David Herle, the head of Wynne's 2018 re-election campaign. Or the $163 million in taxpayer funded subsidies given to the Liberal party"s largest donor, GreenField Speciality Alcohols. Quid pro quo is the name of the game in Ontario. But taxpayers should be up in arms. It"s bad enough for the government to spend $70 million on a program that never saw the light of day. But to continue spending taxpayer money promoting their program after they cancelled it by giving taxpayer funded contracts to crony friends, and removing the auditor general"s power to stop them? Those are the makings of a scandal. For more information: Ontario Director Christine Van Geyn email: cvangeyn@taxpayer.com