Government Operations Committee on June 15th, 2017

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I misinformed you, Mr. McCauley. It is a seven-minute round, so you do have time left.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thank you.

Who decided on the $500,000 limit? Was it PSPC or was it a directive? Is that still valid? I notice we are pushing so much more to Facebook, and Facebook is very inexpensive. Quite frankly we could be pushing a large amount under the $500,000 limit and therefore not be scrutinized.

[Louise Baird]

I gave you the stats for the previous three years. For this year, or last year that just wrapped up, we don't have the final numbers, but it was tracking about the same. Because we have to have quite a broad reach in our campaign, we have to use multiple tools, and because the ad campaign is the total of all the placements, it includes radio, TV, and some of the traditional ones, which cost a little bit more. We find that the vast majority get captured through ASC.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

As a ballpark estimate, how many campaigns are below the 500, and how many are above, as a percentage?

[Louise Baird]

Do you mean numbers or dollar value?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I mean the number of campaigns that are below the 500 as a percentage.

[Louise Baird]

The number of campaigns that were not reviewed this past year is around 50. We don't have the final numbers.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

So it's about half.

[Louise Baird]

No, it's 50 campaigns. As a percentage, less than 20% were not reviewed.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I want to stick with the Facebook bit. How are we deciding what gets broken up into traditional Canadian-owned media versus Facebook? Is that being decided by the ad campaign managers? Is there any direction from the government on how much should stay here?

[Louise Baird]

I think Chris touched on it a little bit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I think because of the essence of time we'll have to ask you to answer Mr. McCauley's question in written form.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Are you sure I'm out of time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I'm positive this time. I double-checked. I made my list and checked it twice.

Mr. Weir, for seven minutes.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thank you.

I would like to pick up on this issue of the $500,000 threshold. If only 20% of government advertising campaigns fall below that threshold and are not being reviewed, why not just review all of them?

[Louise Baird]

In working on the process, we wanted to find a really good balance between having the third party oversight on as many as possible and taking into consideration cost, volume, and work. We thought the $500,000 was a good level since it is sort of the definition of “major” and it captures the vast majority.

Some of the lower-dollar campaigns include the digital ones because those are less expensive ways to advertise. Often they have multiple creatives because they're different sizes and have many different placements, so the volume is actually quite high for a similar creative. We thought that was a really good balance for catching the vast majority and the major campaigns that were probably the most “out there” and prevalent in society.

[Christiane Fox]

To add to that point, a lot of public notices are issued for specific, targeted.... If all of them had to go through the ASC, there might be a time delay that would not necessarily be required for a very localized public notice. That was part of the consideration as well.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Would those public notices be included in the 20%?

[Christiane Fox]

Yes.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I would have thought the reason for the threshold was that there were too many small campaigns that weren't really worth reviewing. But if it's only 20%, I wonder if it might make sense to review everything and avoid the potential pitfall of a department or an agency doing a campaign for $490,000 to avoid the review. Is that an issue?

[Louise Baird]

Because a lot of them are public notices and some are digital only, with less reach or less prominence in the market, we felt it was a good number. That was really what we based it on, as well as past trends.

[Marc Saint-Pierre]

Two years ago, we usually had between $4 million and $5 million in public notices every year. Most of them were under $2,000. It's not a big amount but it makes for a lot of material that would have to be reviewed. Public Works, for example, puts out a notice that a bridge is going to be closed, or Health Canada is looking for nurses in the north and they post a few public notices. It's a small amount but the volume is quite high.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Okay.

I want to bring up an example where I feel that the Government of Canada did an insufficient amount of advertising. The disability tax credit was not very well publicized by the former Conservative government, and it isn't being very well publicized by the current government. As a result, we now have a whole industry of consultants advertising this program to seniors and then charging them quite a hefty commission for helping them access the benefit. If the Government of Canada had properly promoted it, people wouldn't need to go through these consultants and wouldn't need to pay their fees. I wonder if a criterion that could be used in evaluating government advertising might be the presence of these consultants doing private advertising of government services.

[Christiane Fox]

Your point is noted. I think the CRA does have campaigns about tax credits more broadly. I've written down your comments, so thank you for that.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Is that something the government looks at in deciding where it makes sense to advertise, if some private entity is spending its own money to publicize a government program and charging fees to access it? To me that would be a fairly good indication that there's a lack of objective public information out there.