Government Operations committee  I'm glad you raised this. My point is simply that we need to know how much money is being spent on these. I'm not passing a value judgment that says we shouldn't have elected officials communicating with members of the public. That's obviously an essential role of the job. What I'm saying is that incredible amounts of resources are put into these events, many of which we don't even know about.

Government Operations committee  I'm thinking. That's an example of something that I would want to follow up with.

Government Operations committee  It's funny, because if somebody were asking this question, I would immediately say to pick up the phone and call Dr. Rose. He's definitely—

Government Operations committee  I'll just express my opinion that I think an awful lot of Canadians put a lot of faith in an Auditor General. They believe that the Auditor General, whoever happens to occupy that office, is somebody who can look at things objectively, so generally speaking, I would say that's a good move.

Government Operations committee  You need both, right? I agree that proactive disclosure means that hopefully somebody like me or others would not need to use access to information, but I would still want to use access to information for all sorts of things that I'm looking at, asking, “Well, how do I know everything they're presenting to me is exactly the entirety of it?”

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  I thought about that, too, because of course we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it's also really important to make sure that people can communicate things. We don't want too much regulation. My suggestion has to do, again, with funding. If you go back to thinking about how money is returned to parties and to election campaigns from the government, then if there is a provision that says you're unable to receive this money if your colour scheme happens to be that of the government, for me that creates an incentive to say, “Well, gee, we have to try to figure this out for ourselves.”

Government Operations committee  My answer is proactive disclosure.

Government Operations committee  In some ways I would bring it back to my comment before, about how we need to also think about photo ops. To help get to an answer to your question, if you think about the fact that the government on a regular basis is putting all this time and money into preparing events for the cameras—events that are also ending up in the news—that is a level of monitoring that is really important.

Government Operations committee  It's a good question. When I was writing that recommendation in Brand Command, I really gave a lot of thought to all the research I had done, and a lot of it was under the previous government. I didn't want to come across as somehow conveying an opinion about a given political party.

Government Operations committee  I would add that I find in some ways it's actually helpful for Canadians themselves to be able to arrive at these judgments. As I mentioned, I often find it's journalists who struggle. If we think about journalists, they're often the ones who are telling stories of Canadians and acting as that fourth estate.

Government Operations committee  Sure. I should probably preface it by saying that negative information isn't necessarily inherently bad. It is actually useful for Canadians to hear things, even if they're not always positive. The thing that concerns me is the fact that you can spend advertising dollars during an election campaign, and a fair bit of that money is essentially subsidized by taxpayers, either through the fact that donations to political parties are tax deductible, or because a portion of the spending is returned after the fact if you meet certain thresholds.

Government Operations committee  Sure. For me, the big difference is that social media is very efficient in that it allows you to focus on a certain cohort. You target people who will see the message, but some people will not see that message. The issue for me is that when you have television advertising, it's relatively open.

Government Operations committee  I'll just make a quick comment. We should look at the high-level principle, which is.... Yes, certain things you might click on might take you to different places. We should also consider that you can have two identical computers next to each other, and you're exposed to information on one that you're not on the other, even though you're on the exact same website, just because of your browsing history, for example.

Government Operations committee  Yes, I can, thank you.