I'll just say you started in the right order, because Professor Rose definitely has a lot of expertise in the area of government advertising. Just to prove that point, when you were asking the question, I was thinking back to my point about how we really need to be thinking about these photo ops.
It's very easy for a lot of us to think about advertising. Advertising is often a pejorative word, but as Dr. Rose has mentioned, there are actually quite a lot of good things about it. However, for somebody like me, I look at communications as a whole, and advertising is often just one component of all the different touch points that government will have with Canadians. So it's easy for the media to say there were this many million dollars spent on advertising, which in itself sounds kind of bad, right? We shouldn't be spending anything on advertising, because it's about mind control or propaganda. There's just this inherent sense that it's evil and wrong.
I would suggest that, in some ways, if we actually had the dollar amounts for how much money was being spent on these pseudo events, these photo ops where you have all sorts of government employees planning for an event, where you have people being potentially flown in, you have rooms being rented, you have signs being made.... You have all these things going on, and what's happening is you have very structured speaking notes and information going out to journalists. These events are not really designed for the public. These events are actually designed for the media, so the media can then take that information and go out to the public.
From my perspective, unless we have the dollar amounts for that, it's hard to put in perspective, really, the dollar amounts for advertising. All we hear is millions, and it's hard to understand whether that's good or bad.