Natural Resources Canada‘s deputy minister Serge Dupont approved the $4-million cash advance for the advertising in July 2012, according to the memo obtained by Postmedia News through access to information legislation.
The memo said that the Privy Council Office approved increasing the ad campaign’s budget by $4 million one month earlier, on June 19. But Dupont had to sign off on using his own reserve fund for the cash because, according to the memo, the department wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the ads for a few months until Parliament approved the spending.
The Privy Council Office is the central department in the federal government that supports the office of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“The advertising campaign is designed to demonstrate the tremendous opportunity for Canada to capitalize on its resource potential, to create jobs and growth in a period of global economic uncertainty while maintaining high environmental protection standards,” said the memo to Dupont, dated July 12, 2012, from a senior official in charge of communications and marketing. “Without the $4M repayable cash advance, (the marketing division) will be unable to proceed contractually with a portion of the advertising campaign.”
The ads began running after environmental groups and opposition parties criticized the 2012 budget and its supporting legislation for rewriting several Canadian conservation laws, eliminating about 3,000environmental assessments of industrial projects and cutting hundreds of jobs related to scientific monitoring of industrial air and water pollution.
The $9.5 million marketing budget included $7.5 million for commercials to run on national television, as well as $1 million for Internet advertising on search engines and other websites.
Natural Resources also spent about $135,000 on polling and research to test the advertising before and after it ran. That research, conducted by Leger Marketing, initially found that Canadians felt the adswere lacking “hard” facts.
The federal government is required, under Canada’s access to information legislation, to release records upon request from anyone who pays the $5.00 fee. But the department censored several lines of the memo based on provisions of the law that allow it to protect secret files of the prime minister’s cabinet. One of those secrets included a section of the memo that appears to explain who had ensured that the “funds for the campaign” were “essentially guaranteed.”
A recent analysis of public spending records by Postmedia News found that the Harper government spent about $50 million on advertising touting its own policies in the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2013.
Joanne John, a director at the Natural Resources Canada’s communications and marketing branch, also wrote in the memo that a “timely approval and transfer of funds would ensure more affordable rates and lower expenses” for the advertising campaign.
Officials from the Privy Council Office and Natural Resources Canada didn’t immediately respond to questions from Postmedia News about the cash advance and the campaign.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Mike De Souza
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