This column was originally published in the Toronto Sun.

Premier Wynne’s newest piece of taxpayer funded political propaganda has been released, and it’s an emotional rollercoaster.

The thing is, other than being hyperbolic and emotionally supercharged, it’s not quite clear what the ad is actually about.

Given on June 1st by to journalists before being posted online, the ad’s overarching and sole message seems to be “climate change is bad, the government is good.”

Featuring ominous music and David Suzuki lecturing an auditorium filled with terrified looking children, Suzuki says climate change means “simply, we’re in trouble, and not enough adults are listening.” It shows an adorable beaver and caribou with the completely serious caption “animals could lose their homes,” and closes with “be a part of Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan.”

The trouble is not just that the ad is over-the-top fear mongering. But that it’s not actually telling us anything. The Ontario Climate Change Action Plan has not even been released. The government is spending money promoting the name of a policy before it has even told the public what the policy actually is.

The only thing we know about this plan is from leaked cabinet documents. The documents reveal a radical scheme by Premier Wynne to spend $7 billion, much of it in subsidies for moving businesses and homes away from low-cost natural gas and onto expensive electric heat. The leaked plan also includes millions more in incentives for luxury electric supercars, and a target of expanding electric vehicle sales to 12 per cent of all sales. By the way, currently there is no final assembly manufacturing of electric cars in Ontario, so all those electric car sales won’t be creating jobs in Ontario.

The government has not given details about what their plan actually is or how it differs from the leaked documents. And while it is rumoured that the details of the plan will be announced imminently, it is a virtual certainty that the plan will receive little to no legislative scrutiny, as MPPs in Queen’s Park go for their summer break on June 9. 

But secrecy hasn’t stopped the government from advertising the non-details of this non-plan to the public at our own expense in the most patronizing way possible.

The pointless ad is no longer subject to the discretionary scrutiny of the Auditor General, who used to have the power to determine when government advertising is partisan. Partisan advertising, of course, should never be paid for with public money, as it advantages incumbents with taxpayer money.

The Harper government was roundly and rightly criticized for their ambiguous and wasteful “Economic Action Plan” advertising. Ontario once proudly led Canada as the sole province where government advertising was subject to third-party oversight to prevent the kinds of waste that was seen at the Federal level. But last May Wynne curtailed the Auditor General’s power and provided a strict definition of “partisan.” The Suzuki ad will now need to meet a strict government prescribed definition of partisan, one which Wynne clearly designed to meet their political needs.

Just like in their advertisement, the Wynne government sees Ontarians as children to be frightened and harangued into doing the right thing (which is seems to be whatever Wynne says it is, no matter how ill-defined).

The ad concludes by stating “let’s not leave this for our kids to figure out.” Instead, what Wynne is leaving for our kids to figure out is $298 billion in provincial debt. But we won’t see any ads fear-mongering about that.