The Conservative Party's well-publicized legal hassle with Elections Canada has put the spotlight on the role money plays in politics.
And it does play a role. For one thing, political parties use money to buy advertisments so they can sway public opinion.
Nothing wrong with that, so long as they are using their own money.
But when they use my money to buy ads to sway public opinion, that's wrong.
For instance, the federal government has a half-page ad in today's National Post featuring the headline: "Your Family's Safey-- our Government's Priority."
The rest of the ad then goes on to extol the government's "Food and Consumer Safey Action Plan."
Clearly, this ad is nothing less than Conservative Party partisan propaganda masquerading as government information.
No political party should use tax dollars to promote itself. To do so is essentially forcing Canadians, through their taxes, to financially support a political party. That's undemocratic.
Now I don't mean to single out the Conservative Party here. All governments, of all political stripes, engage in this dubious practice.
It's time to put an end to it.
This isn't the first example of this. They're also doing it to promote the changes they want to make to the immigration act.
ReplyDeleteAll governments, of all political stripes, engage in this dubious practice.
Really? I haven't seen any other government do this type of thing before. All governments do use tax dollars to advertise changes that have been made but I can't recall a single instance of a government using tax dollars to advertise a change they want to make. Do you have examples of this?
When you take such extreme position any form of public anouncement that promotes public policy of current govenment could be considered CPC propaganda. Any poster calling on Canadian youth to join Canadian Armed Forces - is just CPC propaganda because it happens to agree with policy of CPC.
ReplyDeleteMr. Nicolls you do not make sense CPC is a governing party. They were elected to carry out their policy.
By your way of thinking if CPC governs Canada then they should finance operation of whole government out of CPC coffers just to avoid accusation that they might derive political benefit from the way they govern and spend taxpayers' money.