MP Marc Serre Continuing to Advertise on Facebook

Liberal MP is still using his $50,000 taxpayer funded ad budget on Facebook despite directive to stop doing so.

Over the last couple of months, the Liberal government has been in conflict with Meta (or better known as Facebook).

After the federal government officially passed the controversial Bill C-18 (Online News Act) on June 22, Facebook announced that it would no longer allow Canadian news links on it’s website. This was in response to the new rules that would require social media platforms to subsidize mainstream news companies such as CTV and CBC.

The following week, the federal government escalated the conflict by announcing that they would be pulling all advertising on the Facebook’s platforms.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said "the Government of Canada will be suspending advertising on Facebook and Instagram.”

During the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the federal government spent over $11M of taxpayer dollars advertising on Facebook.

You might ask: Why does the government have to spend so much money advertising on Facebook? That’s a good question because the law states that taxpayer funded advertising is meant to only advertise “the government” and not the individual politicians or parties. Obviously that line has become increasingly blurred.

One MP who has made the most of taxpayer dollars is Nickel-Belt MP, Marc Serre. Earlier this year, when he was getting criticism for not standing up for gun owners, he used taxpayer funds to pay for “boosted” ads on Facebook himself holding a firearm while at the same time supporting the controversial new gun legislation in Canada.

Serre is not shy on using his office budget to promote himself. According to the House of Commons financial records, in the last fiscal year (2022-2023) Serre’s office spent $54,613 on advertising. Meta is listed as receiving many of these payments. That’s a staggering sum.

Facebook Advertising

One aspect of this taxpayer abuse that many were hoping would end was the amount he spent on social media. Specifically, the taxpayer dollars he spent to boost ads of himself in order to appear in your social media feed ahead of the cute photos of your niece.

When Minister Rodriguez said that the government would cease spending money on the platform, one would assume that included MPs office budgets as well. However Serre has apparently chosen to defy this directive.

There are a number of ads from the past few weeks that are still boosted and marked as “sponsored” (including this recent photo of himself promoting mask use).

I reached out to Marc Serre’s office for a comment on this but at the time of writing I have not received a reply.

A scan of the Facebook pages of other Liberal MPs including the page of Sudbury MP Viviane Lapointe reveals that other have indeed stopped advertising on this platform.

This leaves us with the only conclusion that Serre either is ignoring his party’s directive or simply disagrees with the position that the Trudeau government has taken on this issue.