Attack ads - outside of election campaigns

[jo]

I'm certain we all have opinions about the use of attack ads during election campaigns. The key there is "during election campaigns."

What about parties that run attack ads where there is no election campaign going on?

Of course i am referring to the latest round of attack ads launched by the Conservative party against Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. And while i know we commonly say that with a minority government situation, parties are always in election mode, there is no election on the horizon. The Conservatives have far more money to spend than any of the other parties (probably combined), and annoyingly for them, there are limits to how much of that cash they can spend during actual election campaigns. Hence why they like to use up some of their excess funds by running ads when there's no election going on.

Should the Elections Canada Act be amended to ban this sort of obvious non-campaign campaigning?

Comments

[kuri]

I'd support imposing quarterly spending limits for between elections, but not a ban. However, I'd only even support that in the event that it was very simple to administer: the bookkeeping demand on riding associations and parties is already excessive, IMO.

The bigger difficulty would be third party spending: they are also limited during elections from spending excessive amounts in advertising for and against various parties. Should this, too, be carried over in order to be consistent? Would that then be an unreasonable infringement on the right to free speech?

[jo]

I had an idea after i posted - maybe we could allow between-campaign advertising, but deduct the costs of those ads from the party's overall campaign limit for an actual campaign. That would at least force parties to decide if they really wanted to bother with attack ads during a non-election period.

As for 3rd parties - are there a lot of groups that do this? And do they do it between elections? I've been trying to think of any examples and the only one that comes to mind is the NCC - i recall they'd really gone after the Liberals a couple of elections ago, but i think that was only during the actual election campaign. I can see an interest group taking out ads to campaign against a government policy initiative between election campaigns - but to me that's targetting the policy moreso than the party specifically. They might not have any other issue with the party in power, just that one issue.

[kuri]

It depends upon the interpretation of the legislation. In BC, the election-time 3rd-party rules prevented such things as a union saying that a particular policy would hurt their members. The NCC is the classic example federally, but I think there's a lot of grey areas.

[(Anonymous)]

I seem to remember unions in Ontario doing this in a (successful) attempt to bring down the Ernie Eves government. (Mind you, it was ready to fall anyway. Still, I'm sure the union ads helped a bit.) However, I can't remember if I got those ads through my workplace, which is unionized, or in the public sphere. I think it was both.

[jo]

I just read that a Senator has a bill which would force parties to count the cost of all their advertising in the three months prior to an election call as an election expense - so sort of what i proposed, although i wouldn't limit it to 3 months prior to an election. My problem with the 3-month limit is how would a party know when an election might come (in a minority situation)? Even our fixed election date legislation isn't really worth the paper it's printed on. My point being that a party could spend a load on ads thinking there won't be an election for maybe a year or what-have-you, then get a nasty surprise and find they just blew half their election spending limit when the writ is dropped much, much earlier than expected.

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