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Economic Action Plan questions dropped from Conservative public opinion poll

I woke up this morning, weary-eyed, to check-out the top political stories of the day on my smartphone.

The first headline I saw included the words “Economic Action Plan ads” and “dropped.”

“Could it be?” I asked myself.

Did the Harper government finally come to their senses and nix those expensive, tiresome and useless ads?

Alas, it was not to be.

The headline was actually from a Canadian Press story which indicated that the Feds were just dropping questions from their bi-annual survey about the controversial campaign. Specifically, the Department of Finance will no longer ask Canadians whether they took any action as a result of seeing the EAP ads.

"The common measurement tool is periodically revised and was most recently modified last fall, in order to streamline data collection to questions most useful in assessing a campaign's objectives — notably recall, recognition and message retention," department spokesman Jack Aubry said in an email to CP while defending the move.

Regardless, it’s a curious decision: Doesn’t the government want to know if their ads actually led to any action? Excluding that question lends credence to the theory that the whole campaign is simply political.

[ Related: Feds pull questions about Economic Action Plan ads from opinion polls ]

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks the ads are a good idea. Even small-c conservatives don’t like them.

“Please stop running all those economic action plan ads that brag about how spending $64 billion in taxpayer dollars saved Canada from the recession,” noted a recent Fraser Institute op-ed penned by Mark Milke.

“The recession ended almost five years ago. Isn’t it time to pull the plug on all this expensive advertising?”

Last year – on the two-year anniversary of the Harper majority government -- we asked right-leaning pundit Gerry Nicholls to name the good, the bad and ugly of the first half of the Tory mandate. As part of his ‘bad,’ Nicholls took aim at the EAP ads:

“The Harper government’s using tax dollars pay for a hugely expensive Conservative propaganda campaign, otherwise known as Economic Action Plan advertising is definitely bad,” Nicholls said.

[ More Politics: Should we cut Alison Redford some slack for poor attendance? ]

And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has also been critical.

“Harper has pumped out $670 million in advertising buys since taking office, including $113 million to promote five different iterations of the Economic Action Plan – Harper-speak for what we once called the federal budget,” CTF Federal Director Gregory Thomas recently wrote in a commentary:

“The government's own polls show fewer and fewer Canadians paying attention to these kind of ads: the latest ones exhorted Canadians to phone a toll-free number for more information. Nobody called the number.

“There's something a little bit sick about companies and the people who work for them, sending their taxes into the Canada Revenue Agency so that a bunch of political hacks in Ottawa can spend millions buying TV advertising to tell Canadians how terrible they are.”

Sure, retire the questions in the survey.

But what most Canadians really want is for the government is to retire those pesky ads.

(Photo courtesy The Canadian Press )

 

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