Doug Ford — wasting taxpayer money to own the libs: Robyn Urback

Trigger warning: This is a CBC News column about using taxpayers’ money to fund partisan propaganda.

I recognize that certain heads will explode over the supposed irony. So in the interest of getting past this, do allow me to pre-emptively relieve the burden of my friends in the comment section:

This is rich coming from a CBC hack.

The CBC is the biggest waste of taxpayer money on the planet.

Hey, look! Another CBC writer with Ford Derangement Syndrome.

Apologies if I’ve missed anything, but after years of writing columns as a supposed Conservative puppet obsessed with Ontario Liberal waste, I’m struggling to embrace my new position as a Liberal stooge.

Indeed for years the misuse of taxpayer funds by the former Kathleen Wynne government has been documented by both me and, yes, my CBC colleagues.

Some of that waste — millions of dollars of public money, in fact — had gone toward thinly veiled partisan advertisements with little practical purpose other than making the Ontario Liberals look good.

There were the ads informing Ontarians about cuts to their hydro bills (imagine the panic that would have ensued if people suddenly started saving a couple of dollars on their electric bills without explanation!). And the ads touting the province’s short-lived Ontario Retirement Pension Plan — an $8-million marketing scheme that included advertisements for the enhanced federal Canada Pension Plan, which aired even after the ORPP was scrapped.

They were self-congratulatory ads, barely pretending to be non-partisan.

Gutting the Government Advertising Act

Why were the Liberals allowed to blatantly misuse public funds in this way? Simple: They kneecapped the province’s auditor general by amending the Government Advertising Act, eliminating the office’s ability to veto advertisements deemed to be partisan.

The Act — which was enacted in 2004, ironically in response to partisan advertising by the Harris Progressive Conservative government — placed strict guidelines on government-funded advertisements, allowing the auditor general the discretion to determine what constituted a partisan advertisement.

But Liberal tinkering with the Act in 2015, according to current Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk, “opened the door to publicly funded partisan and self-congratulatory government advertising on television and radio, in print and online.”

The AG was essentially powerless to stop them.

It was all pretty grotesque, and the Opposition Progressive Conservatives howled with disapproval. Rightfully so.

• Wynne Liberals spending millions more on ads: auditor
• Ontario still adjusting to Doug Ford’s fast and furious governing style

Now those same Progressive Conservatives — today in government and headed by a different leader — have embraced their own grotesque misuse of taxpayer dollars through an operation called “Ontario News Now.” It looks and sounds like a media outlet, but is actually a taxpayer-funded propaganda machine, where a PC staffer poses as a “reporter.”

(Yes, I know: Taxpayer-funded propaganda machine — you mean the CBC, right? Har!)

In a minute-long back rub to Doug Ford published Monday, Ontario News Now documented the new premier’s activities during his first month in office, including a meeting with the prime minister and handshakes with police college grads.

There is no purpose to the video other than to hail the congeniality of Ford — and the whole thing was paid for using taxpayer money, as the government confirmed to Global News.

Conservative partisans will insist that whatever money spent on this ad is trifling compared to the many millions wasted by the Liberals. And while that is certainly true (I’d be very impressed if the PCs could waste millions of dollars in ads in the first month of their governance), it is also beside the point.

Ford campaigned on a promise of respect for taxpayers; of rooting out every cent of government waste and putting it back in the pockets of everyday Ontarians.

This is not respect for each cent of taxpayers’ dollars — this is the PCs adopting the same abuse of taxpayers’ money they decried when the Liberals were in power.

But, OK, perhaps you think a counter-narrative is necessary — even a worthy use of taxpayer dollars — because of the supposed bias against Conservatives in mainstream media. To that I say, yes, plenty of news organization have political slants, but most stop short of being partisan.

Every single major news organization in Ontario covered the Wynne Liberals’ many scandals, and all of them publish at least the occasional opinion piece that is incongruous with their institutional slant. (By the way, if you don’t like the coverage, you can write to the editor, or the ombudsman, or submit your own op-ed.)

Ontario News Now, on the other hand, is a strictly partisan operation.

There will be no attempt at balance. It is propaganda made all the more sinister by a weak attempt to pass itself off as news — literally fake news. I suspect the closest it will come to critical coverage will be something like: “Premier Doug Ford’s smile too bright for Nuit Blanche: report.”

Maybe you still think this is all too ironic coming from the taxpayer-funded CBC. And that’s fine. But surely the answer here is not for the public to fund another “news” operation.

In any case, the Ford government is quite shamelessly breaking its own No. 1 rule: Respect for taxpayers. This is public funding of partisan nonsense. All for what? To own the libs?

Perhaps when Ford said “the party with the taxpayers’ money is over,” he meant to say that the Liberals’ party with taxpayers’ money is over.

The PCs’ party with taxpayers’ money is apparently just beginning.

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This column is part of CBC’s Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor’s blog and our FAQ.