Mr. Speaker, I am sharing my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Labrador.
I am pleased to rise in support of the Liberal motion. We are calling upon the government to submit its advertising proposals to a dispassionate third party to ensure the advertisements are non-partisan. Under the Conservative government, experience has shown that this measure is urgently required. As has been pointed out, it has spent three-quarters of a billion dollars no less on largely partisan advertising since coming into power. We see this all the time if we watch the playoffs and other broadcasts. It is hard to avoid advertisements that are partisan Conservative ads relating to the economic action plan and other measures of this kind.
There are two principal areas on which I would like to focus.
The first is that as a government, it is sometimes nice to have free reign over the advertising it can do because then it can bend it to the partisan and help its own cause a little. However, the Ontario government, under the leadership of then premier Dalton McGuinty, took the lead on this. Even though for those reasons it might have been to the disadvantage of the Liberals, they proposed a law, which has been in place for some years now, with respect to a third party system that limited their ability to advertise to what was deemed non-partisan by this third party. Therefore, it is our view that it is high time that the federal government emulate what Dalton McGuinty did for Ontario and bring forward such an approach, even though it might limit its own freedom of action, just as it limited the freedom of action of the McGuinty government.
My colleague, the member for Ottawa South, has proposed a private member's bill, which would do just that, set out a third party that would have the ultimate say on what advertising was permitted and what advertising was not permitted.
We in the Liberal Party support this measure. Even though we may well become the next government, we are happy to be limited in our ability to do partisan advertising, just as we recognize the Conservatives should also be so limited. We should all agree that this is the right thing to do whether we are or are not the government. It is simply wrong to use taxpayer money to advance one's partisan interest through advertising. If the Liberal government in Ontario could do that, then the Conservative government in Ottawa should also do that. We, as the federal Liberal Party, are willing to do it even though it might cost us down the road should we become the government.
If we look at today's polls. it is roughly fifty-fifty as to whether the Conservatives or the Liberals will be the next government. Therefore, each of us should pass such legislation and agree to such a rule, even though going forward there is perhaps a 50% chance that one of us would be limited in our freedom of action, but at the same time doing what is right from the point of view of taxpayer funding.
The second issue I would like to address is that all this government advertising apparently does not work, according to the government's own findings.
They do not work.
Apparently, Canadians are not significantly influenced by all these Conservative ads.
The best example of that is something we would think no Canadian in the country could have escaped hearing about in the last several years, which is Canada's economic action plan. The government is more concerned about the signs than the action. No matter where we go, we cannot help seeing these things. It does not matter what TV or radio station we turn on, we cannot help hearing about these things. This is one of the prime examples of the government using taxpayer money for partisan advertising, which should be stopped.
The bad news for the government is that it does not work. According to polls commissioned by the government, when Canadians were asked if they had heard of Canada's economic action plan, one would have thought 100% would have said yes. In the Ottawa bubble, it is impossible not to have heard of it. I would have thought a high proportion of Canadians would have heard of it, 99% or around there. However, the proportion saying no, that they had never heard of Canada's economic action plan, was 41% in 2010.
Then the government did way more adverting, year after year. How did that number progress? Maybe it went from 41% to 81%? No. In 2011, it was 40%. In 2012, it was 42.6%. In 2013, it dipped down to 37%. Then it was 38%. Therefore, it is within the rounding error. However, 40% of Canadians have never heard of the economic action plan. Difficult as it is for parliamentarians to believe it, that is a fact.
The point is not only is the advertising a waste of taxpayer money for partisan purposes, but it does not even work very well. With all of this advertising, day in and day out, about the economic action plan, 40% of Canadians still do not have a clue what it is.
It is the wrong thing to do, and it does not work. Those are two good reasons for the government to stop it.
I have one more illustration of why it does not work. This is a survey. Again, it was a government appointed survey. I think these surveys were brought in by the Liberal government, and they have continued to this day. This is a survey about the home renovation tax credit conducted in 2009. The question was, “Did you do anything as a result of seeing or hearing this advertising about the home renovation tax credit?” The percentage of people who said that they did not do anything as a result of this advertising was 74%.
The major point is that partisan advertising is the wrong thing to do. We should put in place a legislative mechanism, as Ontario has done and as my colleague from Ottawa South has introduced in the House. We in the Liberal Party, should we become government, would be perfectly happy and content to be constrained by such legislation. We think this should similarly constrain the Conservative government of today. It should act even before this law is proclaimed, and go to a third party to limit its advertising to items being non-partisan.
We think there is a strong case for this, and we are putting our money where our mouth is and supporting this. As a by-product, I would also make the point that for all this waste of taxpayer money by government advertising, it does not even seem to work very well.
