‘Propaganda?’: A government of Canada campaign hopes to win hearts and minds

Rudyard Griffiths and Harrison Lowman discuss a recent Government of Canada advertising campaign promoting Canadian patriotism and national pride, and the jarring disconnect between the ad’s upbeat, flag-waving messaging and the current reality facing Canadians, from economic uncertainty, high unemployment, to everyday cost of living struggles. They explore whether this represents state propaganda, with the government potentially spending millions on symbolic imagery, rather than investing in tangible improvements and concrete results that would give Canadians genuine reasons for national pride. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Propaganda or patriotism? We’re going to get into some ads that have been deluging all of our social media feeds, podcasts and the Internet. And to help break it all down, I’ve got Harrison Lohman in the studio with me, the Hubs managing editor and our resident media guru, the host of Full Press. Harrison. Great to be in conversation, Richard. HARRISON LOWMAN: Thank you so much for having me. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: So let’s first play this ad. Why don’t we do that for our audience, just so they get a sense of what we’re talking about. I’m sure you’ve either seen or heard of this ad, but let’s spend an excruciating 20 or so seconds together. AD: Canada, it’s time for more us. Because we’re more than just a place on a map. We’re an attitude. One with more empathy than ego, more unity than division, more grit. And we got this. The more we choose to stand up as our most flag flying, maple leaf buying, local, adventuring selves, the more we are the true north, unbreakable, strong and free. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: There we go, Harrison. Excruciating indeed. Packed with cliches. But what I wanted to talk with you about is we always expect government kind of engages in soft propaganda of this sort. Different governments of different political stripes have done this over the years. But what seems remarkable here is the messaging and the imagery of this ad versus the reality of where the country finds itself today. High levels of unemployment, real sense of precarity in people’s lives. People are not celebrating climbing mountains, waving the Canadian flag. Instead, they’re wondering, where’s my next paycheck coming from and how am I going to pay my grocery bill? And just to layer on top of that the seeming discontinuity between this ad and where the Carney government is at now. This ad seems almost like a flashback to the election, to that elbows up moment. And yet here we are, six or so months later, we’re talking about building pipelines into the United States. Golden domes with the golden president. How much things have changed on the political front? Yet it seems Ottawa is committed, dedicated to pushing out these kinds of narratives of a patriotic, prideful, boastful, happy country. What explains this kind of jarring difference between the manufactured world of how Ottawa sees Canada versus the reality of the country today, politically and otherwise? HARRISON LOWMAN: I just think it’s easy for the government to put out something like this, right? It’s harder to actually do the work. Like you said, we don’t have time to be dancing around with maple leaves in our hair. In some sort of grove. We have real issues we’re confronted with, whether they be international or here domest. All these ads are made for a domestic audience, obviously. Right. And you get tones of this elbows up mantra that we heard during the campaign almost uncomfortably close to what you heard from the Liberal Party during the election. And as you said, they’ve blanketed multiple departments. Canadian Heritage, science and innovation. Words like and strange language we can get into. Tell me what this means. Rudrad be your most flag flying, maple leaf buying local adventuring self. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: There is a rally cry for a country that is something we should be. Our new coat of arms should have that as its motto. Local adventuring self. I can only imagine the focus group and the firms that were paid to come up with that particular ordering of words that just so beautifully captures the national character and national identity. HARRISON LOWMAN: Roger, how about the YouTube video, the Karaoke version of O Canada that the government created so that you could join arms with your friends over a Canadian lager and sing with the words why you need the words? I thought you were supposed to be patriotic. I don’t understand. But the 81 view YouTube video that is available to citizens at what cost? We don’t know. How much does all of this cost? We’ll be looking into it because it certainly was in the millions. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yeah. Again, the seeming gap here between the type of imagery and the messaging, which as one of our younger producers here, I thought accurately pointed out, kind of almost harkens back to the Vancouver Olympics, to the I am Canadian ad. It’s interestingly kind of retrograde. It doesn’t, in fact, I think, capture for better or worse the state of the Canadian nation today. It seems so obviously propaganda in a kind of clumsy fashion. It is just these, these expected images. Of course you have Terry Fox in there. Of course you have a soldier, you know, from one of the great wars. Not that we have an army. HARRISON LOWMAN: Harrison Lowman: There’s all these boxes that have to be ticked. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Exactly. You go through the list and I wonder what it says, Harrison. Just about officialdom in Ottawa and this idea of a kind of synthetic culture that we seem trapped in, a culture that if Ottawa would have its way, is again happy, cheery, filled with national symbols and flags and people d in the street. Does that suggest that maybe Ottawa doesn’t understand our culture anymore or simply doesn’t care, is, I would say cynically engaged in propaganda, engaged in manufacturing images, manufacturing narratives that are probably more closely aligned, aren’t they, Harrison, to a political objective, and I might even say a political. HARRISON LOWMAN: Party it feels like we’re stuck in the 60s or something. We got this with the Mike Meyer ads that Carney did, right? Maybe you could ask the question. We’re forced to do this because maybe has Canada done anything good lately? We’re not able to pull from something amazing we’ve done in the last few years. I think a lot of conservatives would say, in some ways, welcome to the party Canadian. Su Lean left. We’ve been trying to preserve and promote Canadian identity for the last few years. You’ve been telling us that, you know, we should feel shameful and guilt ridden and we should lower the flag for almost half a year and now, you know, same party in power and yet we should be our most flag flying selves like this. It just, it rings. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I think it’s local adventuring selves, which is again, whatever that is. I guess it could be an interesting acronym for some state of Canadian being. As we wrap this conversation up, Harrison, what is the role of government when it comes to talking to Canadians about Canada? I guess I have a somewhat kind of nostalgic view, maybe that government should kind of not do this. Basically, government should be doing things that are mission critical, that is having maybe an army, having hospitals that work, furnishing an education system, you know, that meets the country’s needs. And to see instead this kind of studious. Because clearly, I mean, there, there are, as you say, entire federal departments that are pushing this campaign out. It is all over my podcast feed, this ad. It is, I presume, possibly, I don’t know, we’ll. We’ll try to find out. But maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe, maybe a million dollars or more of advertising spend behind this to push this kind of pablum out on the country? I don’t know. What should Ottawa be doing when it talks to Canadians? Is there a different calibration that would be, I don’t know, more mature, more treating people as if they were actually intelligent and not likely to be bamboozled by this kind of rank symbolism. HARRISON LOWMAN: I like to feel warm and fuzzy on the inside as much as the next guy. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Right. HARRISON LOWMAN: And we’re both patriots and nationalists, but I just feel like it needs to be attached to some substance. To hearken back to something you said early on, it would be great if these were attached to projects. We’re great because we’re going to get this pipeline built in the next few years. We’re great because these icebreakers will be built and will be surveying and protecting Canada’s northern waters in the next few months. Actual tangible results that give us reason to be optimistic about the future, not just celebrating the past. That’s what I would say. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yeah. If anyone’s listening, pro tip. Take a trip to the Isaac Barack Memorial on the Niagara Peninsula, a key place that commemorates our victory over the Americans in the War of 1812. I went there last year. It’s a national heritage site. It’s dilapidated, it’s run down, it’s second rate. I would say if you want to start somewhere, start with our physical history. Take a site like Brock’s monument and turn that into a genuine place of national pride that shows the extent to which you care about history by actually caring about history and not caring about a series of images that seemed, again, to be more aligned with the political messages of a political party. In this case, the government of Mark Carney, who is still pretty keen on selling Canadians on a kind of. I don’t know what you call it, patriotism. L I T e vis a vis the Americans and the Trump administration. I’d say let’s start there. Let’s start with our actual past and turn it into something that actually reflects our pride for that shared history. Let me give you the last word. HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah, I just think that we should be focused on results and tangible things, that monument being one thing. Right. I’ve also seen many monuments that are in a state of horrible disrepair, and I would have liked to seen the money spent on that as opposed to flashing images of indigenous folk soldiers and the like beaming that Clockwork Orange like into my open eyes for the next few months. Let’s put the money elsewhere, maybe. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yeah, let’s put the money elsewhere. Let’s just get the government out of this type of communication. We’re all way more sophisticated than this, and I think we see through it for what it is, which is primarily state propaganda. Harrison Lohman managing at the Hub, host of our popular podcast, Full Press on the Media, Covering the Beat. We appreciate having you here in the studio. HARRISON LOWMAN: Thanks for having me on. RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening to this version of Hub hits. Check out our website for more stories and analysis. We’ll get Harrison. And trying to track down how much money the government’s actually spending on these ads. We’re not going to let this one rest. We’ll talk to you soon.