Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks at a press conference in Kitchener, Ont., Sept. 2, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
Premier Doug Ford is doing a bang-up job of governing Ontario. How do I know? I saw it on TV.
The Ford government has been rolling out TV and radio ads designed to persuade us just how fabulous it is. A recent report showed it has spent more than $100-million on such ads in the most recent fiscal year.
The latest ads brag that “we build – that’s what we do in Ontario. As Canada stares down economic uncertainty, we’re ready with a plan to protect Ontario. Today and for generations.”
The Protect Ontario tagline just happened to be the slogan of the Progressive Conservatives when Mr. Ford called a snap election last year, ostensibly to gain a mandate to fight the tariff threat from Donald Trump’s United States.
In the TV version, we see stirring scenes of a dynamic province with lots of cars being manufactured and homes being built. Other ads you might have watched explain how the government is redeveloping Ontario Place, the shuttered amusement park on Toronto’s waterfront. Or planning to exploit the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit in the northwest of the province. Or developing small-scale nuclear reactors. They tend to be heavy on rhetoric and short on facts.
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Just how many of these propaganda campaigns the government will produce and what the total cost will be, we don’t know. When Global News asked, the Premier’s office did not reply.
What we do know is that the Ford government is not shy about spending money to toot its own horn. CBC News managed to obtain documents that showed the cost of the Ring of Fire campaign alone was more than $7.5-million. Viewers became used to seeing it during the playoff run of baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays last year.
The province’s Auditor-General found in 2024-25, the government paid for $112-million worth of advertising in a variety of media, from print to digital to television. That was a record amount, about $8-million higher than the previous year. More than a third of it, the AG said, was designed mainly “to foster a positive impression of the governing party.”
One ad series called It’s Happening Here touted Ontario’s economic performance. “More people are working today than ever before,” it proclaimed, and “taking home bigger paycheques,” too.
Another trumpeted the government’s decision to make it easier to buy booze in Ontario. “Now even more retailers will stock your favourite drinks,” it said. “That’s one less stop on your way to summer fun.” Cost of the campaign: $1.4-million.
If all the shameless crowing were not bad enough, the government’s ads are often misleading. The Ring of Fire version leaves the impression that red tape is the only thing in the way of making Ontario a “critical-minerals superpower.” What it doesn’t mention is that it will take many years and many billions to build the infrastructure needed to bring out the minerals, with no promise the mines will be commercially viable even then.
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Until about a decade ago, Ontario governments were prohibited from running ads meant merely to glorify themselves. If they wanted to get out some useful message like how to renew a health card or where to get a flu shot, fine. If they just wanted to persuade voters how great they were, no.
That changed when the government of Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne softened the legislation in 2015. Since then, governments have been allowed to put out just about any kind of ad, provided they avoid doing things like splashing a party’s logo or showing the premier’s face. Mr. Ford’s party said it would reinstate the old rules, but changed its tune once it took office in 2018. Now the worst that can happen is a disapproving mention from the Auditor. No wonder we are seeing such a slew of government ads on the airwaves – paid, of course, by you and me.
Ontarians should learn to see through all the flim-flam. The claims retailed in these ads are no more reliable than those you might find in your average used-car lot.
In a province with a debt closing on half a trillion dollars and struggling to pay for all the hospitals, schools, subways and roads it needs, spending tens of millions on politically motivated advertising is inexcusable. Politicians are free to boast about their supposed triumphs at any time. That’s democracy. Dressing those boasts up as facts and blasting them at us is something else. It blurs the crucial line between party and government. That is yet another step in the decay of our democracy.
We do not have to use our imaginations to see what can happen when boastful, bombastic leaders take control of our political life and guardrails like Ontario’s rules against partisan ads are taken away. It is happening right next door in the great democracy to the south.
Remember that the next time an ad declaring the marvellous achievement of Ontario under its current government appears on your screen.