Government Operations committee  Thanks very much for the opportunity to explain this. Advertising is, obviously, a very effective way to increase awareness of—

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. It's $49.5 million, as you know, and the first bit within that is $10 million for an extension of the $30-million Public Health Agency campaign that is currently out on COVID-19; $12 million will be used for an extension of the $10-million Finance Canada campaign that

Government Operations committee  At this particular time, that's correct.

Government Operations committee  I absolutely can. As you know, the virus is unprecedented, and our communication efforts need to remain flexible. You will have seen the ads for Dr. Tam, who has been on TV. You've seen ads encouraging physical distancing. You've seen Chris Hadfield and Hayley Wickenheiser out th

Government Operations committee  Well, you know, you're not wrong. People know about it because we advertised.

Government Operations committee  I do think it's worth the money to advertise to Canadians on health and safety and on what we are asking them to do. Again, the virus has been unpredictable, so we are advertising. For instance, back when Dr. Tam came out and was advertising about social distancing, we did all th

Government Operations committee  I could. I can tell you the fact that, out of what they've spent this year, more than 80% of the placements were in Canadian media, including 16% in print: dailies, weeklies, ethnic and aboriginal newspapers.

Government Operations committee  As stated a little earlier on the communications and advertising piece, the $49.5 million, the first portion of it we've allocated to the Public Health Agency of Canada to continue their successful public health campaign. Of that $49.5 million, $10 million will go to Public Healt

Government Operations committee  No. That part didn't come through. I apologize. I'm with the PCO.

Government Operations committee  I don't have a breakdown for you. I can get that to the committee. I will say that $2.9 million of the funding goes toward the PCO COVID response team. As part of that team, we work with our behavioural science folks in PCO. We work with our own in-house team to be able to work w

Government Operations committee  Yes, you're correct. The $250,000 threshold is the threshold above which they have to go to the ASC, but many departments can use the ASC for ad campaigns that are below that threshold as well, and quite often we find that happening. I would submit that for the Public Health Agen

Government Operations committee  —[Inaudible—Editor] to do that for the campaigns.

Government Operations committee  We are mandated to do evaluations of all the campaigns that we put out using what's called the ACET process. All departments use this. I did mention the metric earlier that the recall rate on the advertising was 85%. Just to give you an idea of what that means, it means that when

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry. I don't have the breakdown of that 85% and what was specific to the public health campaign or the Finance campaign, but I can certainly get that to you and give you a little bit of the evaluation of the Finance campaign to date. We do know that Finance has already co

Government Operations committee  That's an excellent question because it raises the very good point that paid advertising is only one way we communicate with Canadians. In using the paid advertising, we do use.... For instance, early on, the Public Health Agency of Canada had a mail-out that we sent to all Cana