The auditor general’s office released its annual report on Wednesday, and, true to expectations, the Ford government comes off as inept and dodgy. The assessment outlines the government’s failings in a handful of areas, including health care, the plans for the science centre and Ontario Place, land use, energy planning, and even driver training. But one of the most cynical abuses of power outlined in the report involves the government’s advertising strategy.
Acting auditor general Nick Stavropoulos finds that two ad campaigns totalling nearly $25 million — or just under three-quarters of the government’s entire ad spending in the past fiscal year — were partisan. In essence, the Ford government devoted millions of dollars to promoting itself while emergency rooms closed, homeless residents froze in the streets, Ontario Disability Support Program recipients struggled to make rent and feed themselves, and the province’s infrastructure crumbled.
Changes the Liberal government made in 2015 to the Government Advertising Act of 2004 narrowed the scope of what is considered partisan advertising to an effectively useless definition. As a result, the auditor general is no longer empowered to veto advertising campaigns that are, by any reasonable definition of the word, partisan. Yet the auditor general’s office “continues to identify those advertisements that would not have passed [its] review under the original version of the Act” and did so in this year’s annual report.
It identified two such ad campaigns: one by the Ministry of Finance and the other by the Ministry of Education. As the report puts it, “We were required to find both campaigns in compliance, due to the narrow definition of ‘partisan’ in the current Act. When we issued our compliance opinions, however, we noted our reservations to both submitting ministries. The report notes that “the primary objective of these ads … was to foster a positive impression of the government.”
One of the ad campaigns the auditor general’s office takes issue with is “Building a Better Health Care System.” This campaign pushes the boundaries of the human capacity for cynicism. The Ford government used public money to try to convince Ontarians (without context, as the report notes) that it was improving health care in the province by reducing surgery wait times, building hospital beds, and upgrading long-term-care beds. The campaign cost $20.8 million — roughly 62 per cent of the government’s ad spending.
The government’s use of advertising for partisan purposes is antithetical to healthy democratic governance. It will lower trust and the bar for good behaviour for future governments. It’s also perverse, given that the majority of partisan ad spending was used to support a fiction: as the auditor general found, the Progressive Conservatives, have, in fact, failed to properly staff hospitals — a failure that led to emergency-room closures. Moreover, the report found that 20 per cent of visits to the ER were thanks to patients lacking access to a family doctor.
It's outrageous that the government has failed on health care, causing or contributing to unnecessary suffering and death. It’s outrageous that this same government has turned around and spent public funds trying to spin some of its most consequential failures. It’s no wonder this government is under police investigation for its Greenbelt shenanigans — a crisis that also led the government to launch an ad campaign that will likely be scrutinized in the next annual report.
Governments use ads to communicate with those they govern. This method of communication is essential to reaching residents and sharing important information about public policy and programs meant to serve them. This is a relationship of trust. By using ads for partisan purposes, the government has breached that trust and misled the public. It’s not the first government to do so, and it won’t be the last. But that’s no excuse.
In penance for its sins, and in the spirit of rebuilding at least some trust in the government, Ford’s side ought to revisit the Government Advertising Act and reintroduce the more stringent pre-2015 rules that gave the auditor general’s office power to veto ads it found to be partisan. The government ought to bind itself and future ministries to a higher standard — one that’s independent and enforceable — because, plainly, we can’t trust politicians such as those in the Ford government to make sound judgments on their own. And we have the advertisements to prove it.
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