May 8, 2002
by Barry Stagg
Our federal Liberals have managed to bungle their essential task of convincing us that their advertising business is worthy of our consent. In other words, Chomsky has a kindergarten level example of government misfeasance to use in one of his regular lectures/sermons. The subject is the Quebec advertising or so-called sponsorship program of our worthy executives running things from the banks of the Rideau Canal. The complaints of phony invoices and double billing are seemingly a foil to disguise the plain fact that the whole process of spending money in Quebec to "brand" the federal government is a scandalous waste of taxpayers money even in the absence of criminality. An honest program of this sort is a perfect example of statist profiteering gone mad.
When the ordinary deeds of government cannot speak for themselves and must be supplanted by flyers, brochures and brand labelling nonsense, one thing is clear: The instructing advertising client, the Liberal government has reached the end of its useful life. It has mutated into a caricature of government not unlike the unintended self-parodies that characterized the last days of the Trudeau and Mulroney regimes:Enough, enough, the end.
It remains for the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives to get over their dating frigidity syndromes and form a coalition government in waiting. The voters are ready to provide the ballot box antidote to almost ten years of Liberal smugness for profit.