Have no fear! The Action Plan is here!
Slick television ads this year for the Harper government's "economic action plan" appear to be inspiring a lot of, well, inaction.
A key measure of the ads' impact is whether viewers check out actionplan.gc.ca, the web portal created in 2009 to promote the catch-all brand.
But a survey of 2,003 adult Canadians completed in April identified just three people who actually visited the website.
Not sure how "slick" a government advert can be. They are, however, quite expensive. Over the last four years the promotion of the federal Action Plan has cost taxpayers over $100 million. Again that's for the promotion of the government program, the actual program has run into the billions. All so the Tories can tell us what a wonderful job they're doing spending our money on important things.
Like government ads.
It actually gets worse:
Jack Aubry also said traffic to the action plan website increased markedly during the winter campaigns — which included TV, radio, print and online ads — to 12,600 visits each day from a baseline of 2,300.
So for a few million dollars a government website was able to boost its traffic to roughly the level of a moderately successful blog. Do remember this is a Conservative government. A Liberal government would likely have spent more, gotten less and found itself embroiled in a few petty scandals in Quebec. Incrementalism does work. Just not in the direction we were all hoping.
This brings us to the question of why any government has to advertise. A private sector business advertises to attract customers; people who might not have heard of the business or might be attracted to competitors. Everyone in Canada knows we have a federal government, even if they only know it as a source of largess. The federal government also has no real competition. In theory you might argue that the Canadian federal establishment is competing against the American federal establishment. But unless you're planning on moving to another country, Ottawa is the only game in town.
Since the federal government is the ultimate omnipresent monopoly, what are they trying to sell us?
The short answer is activity. Since showing Canadians the success of government policies is impossible, it would imply governments succeed at doing things from time to time, the federal PR machine must instead sell activity. Hey Canadians! Look at all the cool stuff we're doing! All your tax dollars are being well spent. No need to pay the slightest attention to the Auditor General's next report. Look at that nice young ethnic lady in a hard hat!
As the above article shows, it doesn't work very well. Does that mean the federal government will stop advertising about all the wonderful stuff it's doing? Hell, no. Despite being an obvious failure the PR spin doctors will insist that such spending continue. After all if such such pending didn't continue they'd have to find another line of work. Just as the federal government must convince Canadians it's doing something about the economic situation, so the bureaucrats must convince the politicians that they're doing something about convincing Canadians that the government is doing something.
This isn't a peculiarity of the federal government. Any large bureaucracy, private or public, acquires a self-justifying mission. Since it is difficult to determine how much value a paper-pusher or a vice president adds to the bottom line in the private sector, the private sector bureaucrats must invent work for themselves to seem as if they are providing value to the bottom line. Since there actually is a bottom line this kind of make-work mentality has a natural limit. Government has no bottom line so there is no natural limit short of national bankruptcy.
This is why you cannot make government run more efficiently. When your source of revenue is guaranteed, you render yourself unaccountable to those who pay your salary. Pointless activity becomes a cover for the inherent uselessness of much of what is being done. This is a logic that applies to governments of every ideological stripe. Big Government cannot be reformed, it can only be abolished.
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