Thank you for the question.

I think I can be helpful on that, and I'll try to be concise as I give you my explanation. I may run out of time in getting to all your questions, so let me start.

PCO's role in government advertising and public opinion research and media monitoring is set out in the communications policy, which is one of the policies from the Treasury Board suite of policies. It's a broad and long policy. It's about 50 pages long and it sets out the roles of various departments and pieces of government and, in particular, the PCO's role in all Government of Canada advertising and public opinion research. PCO's role is designed to comply with that policy.

Let me speak to one very important or foundational tenet of that policy and then I'll start with government advertising in particular.

The policy says that the government has a duty to advise Canadians and to communicate what it's doing on its priorities and the actions it is taking. Based on that, decisions around how government advertising is conducted are played out pretty much like decisions for any other government priorities. It starts with cabinet; cabinet makes a decision on advertising priorities, what the priorities are, and what level of funding should be attached to them. Departments work with Treasury Board Secretariat to get the required management approvals to implement advertising activities. Then the line departments are individually accountable for carrying out those advertising activities. They are assisted in that by the Department of Public Works, which helps them with what I would call accountability mechanisms.

For instance, on an annual basis the Department of Public Works publishes the amount of money spent for the fiscal year before. The other thing that Public Works does is that for major communications advertising files it has guidelines in place before you go out on how to make sure you're going to get the best value for your money. And then after the fact, it has standard evaluation criteria. So all advertising campaigns are evaluated through the standard criteria. You can see that there is the usual rubric of accountability mechanisms around the expenditure of public funds.

In terms of how much was spent, I have an overview for the last five years. Again, you'll find these figures on Public Works' website. In 2009-10, during the global economic recession and the government's expenditure campaign as well as an H1N1 pandemic that required extensive advertising—I think that was the high-water mark—$136.3 million was spent on government advertising. The next year in 2010-11 those expenditures dropped to $83.3 million. In 2011-12 they decreased to $78.5 million. In 2012-13 they were $69 million. In the last report published, which was 2013-14, and I believe that report was just published in April of this year, they are reported as $75.2 million.

With respect to finding information on public opinion research, departments file that information in a place that you might not necessarily think to look, so I'll highlight it for you, and that is Library and Archives Canada. Information is publicly available on that.

Finally, to talk about media monitoring at the Privy Council Office, the Privy Council Office has as part of our main work a branch called PCO communications. Pursuant to the communications policy, it supports the government in implementing its priorities. It provides communications advice and coordination, and to do that it obviously has to monitor the media cycle, which as everybody knows is 24/7.

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