[calgarygeologist]

Get ready for some partisan advertising from the federal government.

The Liberals can now toot their own horn and use their own political slogans in taxpayer-funded ads because of changes the Carney government has made to long-standing ad rules.

The Carney government gave itself that latitude with tweaks to advertising review criteria first established under former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government in 2016. Since then, any government ad costing more than $250,000 has had to go through a review process with an outside group, which checks ads against the government’s criteria and can demand changes before the ad goes into production.

Those criteria included a requirement that any government advertisements “are not self congratulatory or self praising in nature,” but that requirement has been pulled in the new rules the government quietly introduced last year.

The old rules also prohibited any advertisement that referenced a political slogan, but the new rules have a carveout that allows for references to slogans if those slogans are “later incorporated into the official name of a Government of Canada program, policy or initiative.” There is still a prohibition on the prime minister or any other elected official appearing in government funded ads.

The rules also used to prohibit the government from advertising any program that had not yet been approved by Parliament, but that has been removed from the criteria.

Interim NDP leader Don Davies said watering down the advertising rules is wrong.

“They’ve blurred the distinction between government and Liberal party, and it’s inappropriate and unethical,” he said. “We’re in an economic crisis. We’re in a there’s a global security crisis. We have housing crises. We’ve got serious threats to the border and this government is taking the time to change rules, to loosen the rules, on partisan advertising and that’s worrying to me.”

https://www.thestar.com/politics/fed...eafb4eabf.html