One of the things that has surprised me during my first few weeks back in Canada is the proportion of television advertising that's paid for by the Government -- or rather, the governments, since Canada has so many levels. Here in Ontario, the provincial health plan can regularly be found informing everyone of how many different health care choices they have. (I know how they can afford to pay for those ads -- despite being a taxpayer in this country every year since 1975, I don't qualify for public health insurance until I've been back in the country for three full months). Elsewhere, the provincial lottery corporation repeatedly reminds us of all the wonderful things that are financed by lottery profits: community centres and such like. You know, the kind of thing that we used to be able to finance out of taxation.
The ads that surprise me, though, are the ones presented by the Federal government. These are mostly designed to extol the government's economic "action plan", which is apparently working 24/7 for all Canadians. There's lots of expensively-shot footage and a plinky-plonky version of the first few notes of "O Canada" to ram home the feel-good message. It's hard to square that message with the right-wing, small government ideology of the Harper government. Considering that the major national economic priority is supposed to be deficit reduction, one might think that these ads would be a good place to start swinging the axe.
One thing that's very clear is that this sort of advertising would never work in the UK. Brits are much more skeptical about government than Canadians appear to be. Any self-congratulatory UK government ad on the lines I've described would be shouted down so loudly by the pundits and the populace that you'd be able to hear the din in Ottawa.
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