Sarcasm can be a potent rhetorical tool, and on April 19, 2004, then-Official Opposition Leader Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons to wield it. Condemning a Liberal government ad campaign that was reportedly going to cost $120-million as partisan pork, he acerbically noted, “This advertising, this information just happens to be the same as the government’s own election platform.” Mr. Harper’s criticism was direct, principled – an election would be called a few weeks later – and spot-on. It was also quickly forgotten once he rose to power 20 months later. Ever since, the Harper government has indulged its unfortunate habit of using federal dollars for partisan ends – from ads touting a post-recession economic plan that continued to air years into the recovery, to the attack ads aimed at the country’s biggest telecommunications companies. Even by those low standards, a just-launched series of ads trumpeting a child-care tax credit regime that has yet to be approved by Parliament – incidentally, a practice Mr. Harper threw in the Liberals’ faces in Question Period in November, 2002 – is an egregious misallocation of public funds. The ads, which trumpet a proposal that will almost certainly form the basis of the Conservative platform in the 2015 election campaign, are transparently partisan.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 20:43:51 +0000
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