Ontario Premier Doug Ford's ad campaign featuring the former president Ronald Reagan does not appear to be included in the auditor's report, which only calculated the cost of ads until the end of last fiscal year, in March, 2025.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The Ontario government spent a record $112-million on advertising in its last fiscal year with the most money directed toward a U.S. media campaign as the threat of tariffs loomed, a new report from the province’s Auditor-General reveals.
The “U.S. Partnerships” campaign cost $40.1-million and ran on American TV, and in print and digital media, with $33-million spent on prime-time spots on CNN, Fox and other large U.S. networks, according to the 2025 annual report from Ontario Auditor-General Shelley Spence released on Tuesday.
The total Ontario spent on ads in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2025, was $8.4-million more than the year before. The bill includes spending on domestic ads before and during the early provincial election in February won by Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.
But much of the total spending – $43-million of it, Ms. Spence concluded – would not have been allowed under Ontario’s former legislation on government ads, which was dramatically loosened by the previous Liberal government in 2015. The previous legislation gave the Auditor-General’s Office wider discretion to screen government ads for partisan content.
“Some of the ads ... are quite promotional for the governing party,” Ms. Spence told reporters. “They aren’t really providing good, solid information to the citizens of Ontario.”
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The report does not include Ontario’s recent TV advertisement featuring then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s warning about tariffs, which prompted President Donald Trump to cancel trade talks with Canada. Mr. Ford has said the Reagan campaign would cost $75-million, however it was abruptly pulled at the end of October only about a week after it first aired.
The second-largest ad campaign was Ontario’s “It’s Happening Here” series, which cost $19.2-million and was aimed at domestic audiences. Some were meant to raise awareness about Ontario’s potential electric-vehicle supply chain. But they also made claims such as “More people are working today than ever before, taking home bigger pay cheques,” raising concerns from the Auditor-General about self-promotion for the party in power.
The government also ran ads touting its plans for new highways and infrastructure and its cuts to gas taxes, licence-plate fees and transit fares. Ms. Spence told reporters that some of the numbers the government included in its ads were unsupported or included unverifiable claims about the future.
The Auditor-General flagged the “It’s Happening Here” campaign, along with several other domestic-focused ads, in her report, saying they would not have complied with the previous version of the Government Advertising Act. Ms. Spence has asked for a return to the old rules.
The current Ontario government has declined, even though before Mr. Ford first came to power in 2018, his party criticized the Liberal changes to the law and now-Deputy Premier and Health Minister Sylvia Jones tabled a bill at the time to ban partisan government advertising.
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Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, responding on behalf of the government on Tuesday, defended the ads, saying the province “has a great story to tell” to both domestic and global audiences.
“We’ve educated the American public with our ads. That influences lawmakers. It influences the citizens, our friends, our allies in the United States,” he told reporters.
Opposition parties said the advertising is an unacceptable use of public funds.
“They used taxpayers’ money to put out partisan ads to convince Ontarians that everything was great in their world. And guess what? It isn’t,” Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles told reporters.
John Fraser, the Liberals’ parliamentary leader, said it was wrong for his party to have loosened the rules around government ads. He said the Ford government should have spent the money on hospitals or schools, instead of promoting itself.
The Auditor-General also investigated Ontario’s management of its stockpile of medical masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE), which emerged as a hot issue in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as shortages and expired supplies left the province at the mercy of international manufacturers.
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The report criticizes the new Supply Ontario agency – headed by Mr. Ford’s former chief of staff, Jamie Wallace – which took over the stockpile program in 2023, saying it lacks adequate systems to properly track its inventory and financial records.
In a finding that Ms. Stiles, the NDP Leader, called “absolutely bonkers,” the audit shows that the province wrote off $1.4-billion worth of expired masks and other protective items between 2021-22 and 2024-25. It incinerated 780 million units of expired material from 2023-24 to 2024-25 alone. And at the end of last year, Supply Ontario still had 350 million unusable items in storage, taking up 20 per cent of its warehouse space.
“This is an agency that is run by the Premier’s former chief of staff, who is overseeing a contract that is literally setting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire,” Ms. Stiles said.
The audit warns that the province’s long-term contracts, some of which were signed at the height of the pandemic, obligate it to buy more masks and other items, but that many of them are either obsolete or likely to go unused. The report says if usage levels go unchanged, close to 500 million surgical and N95 masks, worth $126-million, will be paid for, left unused and expire by 2030-31.
Stephen Crawford, Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement, said the province inherited “sub-par” stockpiles of PPE when it took office in 2018 and that when COVID-19 hit it was like the “hunger games” to acquire protective equipment.
“Would you like sub-standard PPE to be used with your children?” he asked reporters.