The prize for the biggest buyer of partisan advertising on Facebook and Instagram in the country goes to the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), which has spent up to $1 million on these platforms since it was impossible to distribute news articles on them.
“The choice of [Justin] Trudeau and the New Democratic Party’s plan to fight crime is to legalize hard drugs,” reads a Chinese-language post on the Conservative official page.
The CCP paid Meta more than $5,000 to boost the visibility of the factually incorrect post, which appeared on the screens of at least 10,000 people in April in Ontario and the Western provinces, data made available by Meta shows.
In total, the party has “sponsored” 1,960 posts on its page or that of its leader, Pierre Poilievre, since last August. All were in English, except for 150 in French, 7 in Mandarin and 1 in Punjabi. A compilation made by The duty shows that the official opposition in Ottawa has sent between $760,300 and $1,059,340 over the past year to the multinational Meta, owner of the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
1er August 2023, Meta announced that it was removing all news content from these two platforms in Canada, in response to the passage of Bill C-18, which was supposed to force the sharing of its profits with news companies. Since that date, the news media accounts have become inaccessible, and Internet users can no longer share articles on them.
Liberals critical, but customers
In response, the Trudeau government announced last year that the federal machine would cease all advertising spending on its platforms. The Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), in power, is clearly not linked to this boycott.
Including sponsored posts from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s page, the Liberals have had the most ads, totaling 3,845 over the past year. Just under half (1,690) were in French.
Their overall value, however, is less than that of the Conservatives: less than half a million dollars (between $107,400 and $497,655). The Liberals spent more money on ads on Meta each week during the 2021 election campaign.
The most recent federal party financial reports show that the Conservatives lead the other parties in revenue, recording revenues of more than $41 million in 2023. A fifth of that was spent on advertising, including $5.8 million on television, $668,000 on radio and $2 million on “other” ads. The Conservative Party of Canada did not respond to questions from the Duty on its advertising investments.
For comparison, the Liberal Party of Canada had revenue of $15.7 million last year, and spent the equivalent of 2.5 per cent of that on advertising, or $381,346, according to the report, which ends on December 31, 2023. “While we do not comment on our advertising strategy, innovative digital campaigns have always been an important part of how the Liberal Party of Canada has engaged with Canadians over the years and informed them of Justin Trudeau’s positive plan to invest in the middle class,” explains LPC spokesperson Matteo Rossi.
Personal data purpose
Many of these ads are designed to redirect Internet users to sites where they are encouraged to provide their personal data, a practice “used by almost every political party in the world” to identify its supporters, explains Sébastien Fassier, a former Liberal digital strategist and vice president of the public relations firm TACT. “These platforms allow for very precise targeting [son public]like a Chinese community around the issue of supervised injection centers, for example.”
Philippe Dubois, a professor at the École nationale d’administration publique (ENAP), sees this as proof of a “permanent campaign” in Canada, with parties striving to reach voters even outside of election events. “Politicians have an interest and must reach out to us to continue to feed us, to mobilize us. Social media is one of the best avenues to do this,” he says, while pointing out that political parties still opt for traditional advertising campaigns.
Far behind on Facebook and Instagram, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and its leader, Jagmeet Singh, bought 107 ads from Meta, spending between $49,300 and $68,893. That’s a small fraction of its 2023 revenue of nearly $7 million. “Quebecers and Canadians are juggling family responsibilities, bills to pay and daily challenges. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to reach them where they are and where they get their information,” explains Lucy Watson, the NDP’s national director.
In Quebec City, the Coalition avenir Québec and its leader, François Legault, invested less than $25,000 on Meta. Québec solidaire, less than $10,000. Both parties justified these expenses by their need to reach citizens. The Parti Québécois and the Quebec Liberal Party have not spent anything on Facebook or Instagram in the past year, nor has the Bloc Québécois, at the federal level.
With François Carabin