It is the advertising campaign that never ends. Whether you were watching Prime Suspect on CBC or Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday on Global or Friends, the highest rated show in Canada, the provincial government’s health-care commercials were played all over the television dial during the advertising breaks.

And yes, taxpayers paid for all of it.

The “Facts about Health Care” campaign has been going on since November. Full-page newspaper ads, a province-wide mailing and a ton of expensive television commercials have been featured presenting the government’s spin on its own health-care record. This may be the most expensive single advertising campaign in B.C. government history.

What is the price tag for this extravaganza? The Liberal government, breaking its own commitments on “open” government, refuses to say.

The irony is that this kind of government advertising no longer impacts public opinion. Voters are sophisticated consumers of media culture. Television viewers and newspaper readers know about ratings, prime time and advertising costs. If an ad appears again and again in prime time, viewers understand it is costing a great deal of money.

The government clearly hoped that this deluge of advertising spending would improve its dismal poll ratings on health care. Arguably, it is having the opposite effect.

Every time a government commercial appears, the main message voters receive is that the government is spending lots of their money on partisan advertising, ignoring the content of the commercial itself.

More problematic still for the government, Premier Gordon Campbell repeatedly promised before and after the last election that he would not permit the government to do this kind of advertising in the first place. Government advertising, he declared then, “diverted needed resources from patient care.”

This is not a public health information campaign. The government is not promoting flu shots or campaigning against tobacco. This is political advertising designed to defend the government’s record.

The government’s excuses for breaking its word to voters range from the curious to the dubious. The premier says that his government, with 75 out of 79 seats in the legislature, must advertise massively to counter “misinformation” from the two-member opposition, seniors groups and health care unions.

Campbell seems particularly bitter that the Hospital Employees’ Union dares to oppose his agenda after he broke his word and shredded its members’ contract, slashed their benefits and contracted out the work of the poorest paid health-care workers. The premier seems to expect those suffering the effects of his agenda to submit to his will.

Health Services Minister Colin Hansen told the Union of B.C. Municipalities that British Columbians should not worry about the cost of the advertising because it doesn’t come directly out of the Health Ministry budget, but from the government’s centralized communications budget. What part of “there is only one taxpayer” does Hansen not understand?

The main problem with the ad campaign is that it distorts the government’s own record on health care. What are the real facts?

Waiting lists are longer, every health region in the province has to cut services to make up for growing funding shortfalls and the government is closing needed facilities such as Saint Mary’s Hospital in New Westminster.

Health services that used to be covered under public medicare — such as physiotherapy — are being delisted. Fancy and expensive privatization schemes have been undertaken such as the Abbotsford P3 experiment.

Increased MSP premium taxes and user fees have been imposed on patients, a policy particularly harmful to seniors. In a dramatic way, the Liberal government has forced many seniors to ask whether they can afford to get the treatment they need. This makes the government’s assertions in its advertising that it has improved PharmaCare a particularly cruel hoax.

While the federal government and the public have increased their contributions to the health system, the provincial share of overall health expenditures in B.C. has dropped under this government for the first time in two decades. In effect, Campbell and Collins have diverted federal health-care monies to pay for tax cuts.

Finally, there was the sad case of Bill 92, introduced by Hansen last November to ban extra billing at private clinics and comply with the Canada Health Act. The bill was passed by the B.C. legislature in early December then killed by the premier late in the month after an outcry from a core group of B.C. Liberal financial contributors, the owners of private health-care clinics.

This fiasco reveals more than the incompetence of the premier and his minister of health services in managing health-care policy. It underscores the government’s refusal to comply with its legal and political responsibilities under the laws that protect public medicare in Canada.

Instead, the government is cranking up the volume on its spin at taxpayers’ expense. Why not let the premier know you want to end this waste of money? The number listed in their health-care brochure is 1-800-465-4911.

Call and, in the words of another famous commercial, say “stop the insanity.”