Platt: In an era of fake news, the Ontario Liberals are making things worse – Ottawa Citizen

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, right, speaks as Ontario Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault looks on during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, March 2, 2017, to announce the government's hydro relief plan. Frank Gunn / THE CANADIAN PRESS

When a government picks a slogan, you never hear the end of it.

News releases, social media feeds, podium placards, radio and TV advertising, speeches by ministers the branding is everywhere, backed by the hefty resources of the state. With the federal Liberal government, its been real change and a strong middle class, over and over again.

In Ontario, the slogan after the 2014 election was building Ontario up, and, more particularly, the governments four-part plan to build Ontario up. Everything the governmentdidsomehow fit into those four parts. It was on every single news release for years.When the legislature cafeteria cancelled its Friday $5 fish-and-chips special (to my lasting chagrin), I have no doubt the premiers office could have justified it with the four-part plan if asked.

This is how political messaging works. It gets repeated endlesslyso it percolatesthrough to the public, even if the media never usesit.

Premier Kathleen Wynnes Liberals now have a new slogan, with its own website and social media accounts. Its called The facts still matter in Ontario, and it involves a daily effort to fact check something the Opposition (almost always Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown) has said.

Sometimes these facts still matter dispatchescome from the Liberal party; sometimes they come from a cabinet ministers office. Its both a Liberal party slogan and an Ontario government slogan. Expect to hear it constantly.

Its a clear attempt to exploit the concerns over fake news, and the stream of lies coming from the White House.Mediaorganizations are fighting off attacks on their credibility, Facebook is attemptingto flag fake stories and civic institutions everywhere are grappling with the dwindlingeffectiveness of fact-based arguments. Its a very real problem.

So now the Ontario Liberals, and by extension the government, are declaring themselves the championsof facts. You can anticipate how this is turning out. They do indeed catch some incorrect claims, but they dont stop there. No, everything must fit the message. So we get dubiouspolitical spin dressed up as fact-checking.

Heres a fact check they sent out the other day. The PCs called cap-and-trade, which is expected to raise $1.9 billion a year in new government revenue, a cash grab. Fact: Wrong again, the Liberals wrote. Every dollar generated through cap and trade will be deposited in a dedicated account and reinvested into green projects. (It goes on to tell us how great the projects are.)

Actual fact: Many of those projects were already in the works, but are now being funded from this new revenue stream. Ontario is not off-setting carbon pricing revenue with tax breaks, as British Columbia is. Ontario is grabbing the cash and spending it on stuff. Whatever you think of these projects, it is not factually wrong to call the funding mechanism a cash grab.

At a time when the U.S. presidentis shamelessly using his office to spread conspiracy theories and insult those trying to respondwith reason, we really dont need the Ontario government further degrading the meaning of a fact and adding to the atmosphere of cynicism.

And theLiberals have already demonstrated how they really feel about having to scrupulously stick to facts. We used to have a law passed by Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty in 2004 that forced taxpayer-funded government advertising to only be used for public service information campaigns. The auditor general couldhalt government ads whose primary purpose was obviously self-promotion of the governing party.

Wynnes Liberals gutted that law in the spring of 2015. They didnt want ads filled withdry facts; they wanted ads that sold their message to voters. And now we have a blitz of taxpayer-funded advertising promoting Wynnes new plan to reduce hydro rates. For the Liberals, as with all political parties, a fact is only worth mentioning when it makes them look good.

Brian Plattis the deputy digital editor for the Ottawa Citizen. Previously, he was based at Queens Park as a policy reporter.

twitter.com/btaplatt bplatt@postmedia.com

See the rest here:

Platt: In an era of fake news, the Ontario Liberals are making things worse - Ottawa Citizen