Procedure and House Affairs committee  The more debates you have, the less attention will be paid to the debates, because instead of focusing events that everybody is looking at, all of a sudden, another debate is occurring. How do you reasonably control what's going on? I think what Mr. Wells said is absolutely right.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll just pick up on what I was saying about how a debate about debates takes away attention that should be paid to public policy. Really, one of the messages I'd like to convey is that we shouldn't be thinking that strategic games would magically vanish. With any such commissioner, we have to be concerned about how that person is appointed, and we have to be sure the person is truly independent.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak. I have to say I'm envious of what you're doing. Legislative committees are an essential role in our parliamentary system, and I really want to thank everyone for their service. Just to situate my ability to offer comment, committee members should be aware that my area of research is Canadian political communication and political marketing.

Government Operations committee  I think for me the big challenge—and it's not something that's easily solved—is, if all we do is we have vanilla advertising because we have all this regulation, it's going to be terrible advertising. We just have to balance that sense of having to be able to communicate with people and cut through the clutter, yet sometimes that requires something that's a bit more provocative and simple.

Government Operations committee  I would add to that. Maybe a good way to think about it is the word “policy”. If you think about something like a health pandemic, getting information out to Canadians through advertising such as, “Here's what we're going to do, and this is what you need to do”, is not really about debating policy; whereas other types of government advertising are possibly about informing Canadians about policy, something that was a political decision.

Government Operations committee  I can speak to that very quickly. Yes, you're definitely on the right track. Crown corporations, obviously, are acting in a competitive marketplace. It would be kind of foolhardy to suggest that they have to oblige in the same manner as perhaps some other units of government. The thing that comes to mind for me right away is that the Canada Revenue Agency has been held up as a high standard.

Government Operations committee  Yes, it's more than advertising. Exactly.

Government Operations committee  I think that would be a wonderful resource. I'll give you one good example: people like Professor Rose and me could then use it in the classroom. That's not the real reason, though. I think it's about transparency.

Government Operations committee  The key thing for me is historical record. Just because it's there now, somebody may say that we need to get rid of it later. I think it's important to have it there over a long period of time.

Government Operations committee  I have made some comments that involve elections, and to some extent that would be outside the Government of Canada's communications policy in respect of the actual public service and how it's communicating things. Notwithstanding that particular distinction, yes, I'm somebody who pays attention to this, definitely.

Government Operations committee  I'll just get back to my point that I know the focus is on advertising, but I would simply repeat that in my view, we need to think more broadly than that, and we need to think about other forms of communication. Let's say there are rules which say that you're not able to advertise, but in the meantime the prime minister and others are able to use government resources to get their message out through the news media because they're using government employees to help them do that, for example.

Government Operations committee  Yes, I would like to build on that. I don't really understand how it is that we would need to ban all sorts of government advertising, much of which potentially is innocuous, but in the meantime, the governing party and the cabinet can go in and make all these announcements and say they're going to be spending all this money.

Government Operations committee  Sure. I think I'll provide an example. Before I was in academia I worked in communications in the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. I can distinctly remember editors of small community papers sometimes phoning and saying they'd noticed we'd taken out advertising in these places, and why we were not advertising in theirs.

Government Operations committee  No, it's good.

Government Operations committee  I would think it would be useful to have advertising that promotes the fact that you can find information through the Government of Canada's information portal—just generic, very high level, basic advertising that runs on a regular basis. If we can think of “Good things grow in Ontario”, why is it that we can't have some sort of a campaign that runs year after year—hopefully outlasting whichever government happens to be in power at any given time—that becomes a slogan that we can all identify with and allows us to think that if we need information, here is a good place to get it?