If they say it, they should be held accountable
Justin Trudeau dropped a couple of big hints about the coming budget in a video he released on social media this week.
It’s a transit-themed video. The prime minister appears at a variety of transit stops — including the GO station he visited in Milton just last week — to boast that his federal Liberals have kept their word on building infrastructure across Canada.
“This month we’ll be announcing everything we’ve done and announcing new projects to create good, middle-class jobs and build the infrastructure we need,” Trudeau says. So we learn two things from that one-minute video: Trudeau’s last budget before the election will likely land this month (bet on the last week of February); and it will include new announcements for infrastructure programs across the country.
Trudeau isn’t the only one doing videos, either.
Conservatives are also releasing — and retracting — video ads over this past week. One was a parody of Heritage Minutes, calling Liberal ethical lapses a part of Canadian history. The other was a Google ad in which the Conservatives alleged that “Justin Trudeau is letting a foreign entity take control of our borders.”
Both ads were withdrawn after a bit of a backlash, but one does wonder whether this is some kind of new publicity tactic on the part of the Conservatives. Retracting the ads, after all, may have yielded more attention to the attack ads than the Conservatives would have achieved without the outcry. If it happens a third time, assume that this is a new wrinkle in Canadian political-ad wars: advance, retreat, advance again.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Conservatives have blazed an advertising trail in Canada, either. When they were in government from 2006 to 2015, they were the first to make extensive use of attack ads against opponents in between official campaign peri- ods, with relentless waves of advertising against successive leaders Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff and Trudeau.
For the most part, Canadians have been spared that perpetual ad campaign over the past three and a half years.
But have the ad wars begun for the 2019 campaign? It would seem so, though Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has been out on the TV advertising circuit for a while now with mainly positive ads, introducing himself to Canadians as a guy who’s far more in touch with middle-class suburbanites than the prime minister is.
I couldn’t get an answer from the Liberals when I asked who paid for Trudeau’s new video — Liberal contributors or Cana- dian taxpayers? (Presumably they’ll be upping their game on promised ad “transparency” before the election.) But the focus on infrastructure and transit is very much linked to Liberal advertising of the past.
Back in the 2015 campaign, using data culled from the party’s massive voter outreach efforts, Trudeau walked into a studio one day and recorded 40 different ads, promising to fix individual infrastructure issues identified as the largest concerns in 40 different communities. You may even remember hearing them — Trudeau talking about water-quality issues in your town or gridlock you were encountering on your commute to work.
It would be a worthwhile exercise to measure this month’s announcements from Trudeau against those promises in the 40 radio ads. (Unfortunately, no archive seems to exist.) Perhaps the Trudeau government has already taken stock of its long-ago promises, and the infrastructure-themed video this week is a bid to tie up some loose ends from the 2015 campaign.
Ads are the most powerful tools the political parties have for communicating with the voters. More people will view ads than the relatively few who sift through the party platforms or who closely read the political news (sorry to have to acknowledge this).
On the question of ad accountability, however, we here in Canada are somewhat behind the times. We don’t require politicians to personally endorse the ad claims at the end of the spot, as they do in the United States, and we in the media tend to keep track more on what the parties are spending than on what they say or promise in those 20- to 30-second spots.
This election year is a good time to shift that approach; to hold the leaders and the parties accountable for the content of the advertising they’re now writing and filming to fill up the airwaves and our socialmedia feeds.
If the ad war is about to begin, complete with transit-stop videos and retracted claims, then that accountability effort should start now, too.