OTTAWA - Days of digging by Conservative researchers have turned up just three examples of the former Liberal government calling itself by the name of the sitting prime minister in the same fashion as the current "Harper Government" branding exercise.
That contrasts with literally hundreds of "Harper Government" headlines splashed across Government of Canada web sites over the past four months.
Treasury Board President Stockwell Day read a "Paul Martin government" news release in the House of Commons record this week, a release that used the moniker three separate times.
"That is three times in two sentences," quipped Day. "Even we have not been that aggressive."
But other Liberal examples provided by Dimitri Soudas, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman, pointed to ministerial speeches and other occasions that experts say are clearly not part of the Government of Canada's formal identity.
"Feel free to review the attachments and the links below should you wish to write a balanced story without black helicopters or conspiracy theories," Soudas wrote in an email.
When asked to provide other Liberal examples that matched the "Harper Government" wording employed in current departmental headlines, Treasury Board produced two other "Martin government" headlined releases from 2004.
Civil servants in at least six departments now say the naming policy comes from "the Centre" -- meaning the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office.
Several former top bureaucrats say the Conservatives are simply wrong when they claim the recent rebranding exercise follows "long-standing practice" in Ottawa.
But the government may be on safer ground when it argues there is nothing in the Federal Identity Program or communications policy that technically forbids it.
David Brown, a retired public servant who served at both Treasury Board and PCO, said in an interview the letter of the policy may not be breached, but it does appear to set a new precedent.
"There you're into the realm of practice," said Brown, who is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at Carleton University.
"This is not law. It's not even something completely captured by policy. There's no question the Harper government has probably been more aware of the symbolism and the power of branding and those kinds of things -- and more aggressive in using those things -- than any predecessor. Although the Liberals were pretty good at this stuff, too."
Brown is one of three former top bureaucrats who say the Conservatives are treading where former governments haven't gone.
"I'd say this is quite a departure from previous practice," said David Zussman, a former official in the PCO who now teaches public sector management at the University of Ottawa.
Mel Cappe, a former clerk of the Privy Council, said Day got it wrong when he told the Commons that Cappe had previously approved "Chretien government" language in communications.
"There was no systematic use of the 'Chretien government' and in fact there was a systematic use of the 'Government of Canada,"' Cappe said in an interview.
In letters to two of Canada's largest daily newspapers this week, Soudas said there was "no 'directive' of the type referred to" in a Canadian Press article that revealed the Harper Government branding exercise.
But a spokesman from the Privy Council Office acknowledged that while no "formal directive" was issued on the usage, there has been instruction from the PMO.
All communications pass through the PCO before being released and sources say the changes to the releases are being made there before being sent back to departments and even arms-length government agencies. Some departments have refused to accept the alterations, and at least one agency scrubbed the "Harper Government" moniker after senior management discovered it on the agency website.
News of the rebranding exercise has generated considerable public interest, very little of it flattering for the government.
Harper is running ahead of the Conservative party in public opinion and far ahead of his opposition leadership rivals, so the "young, keen political minds" in the government may have thought this branding a good idea, said Allan Bonner, an author and veteran political communications consultant.
"We'll get name recognition and we will let everybody think that anything good and reasonable and decent that's happened in the past four or so years has been the result of Harper and not the government."
But Bonner believes it is not a good marketing strategy: "You're really expecting people to connect a whole bunch of dots and people don't think that deeply about these issues."
Pollster Allan Gregg of Harris-Decima also isn't impressed with the plan.
Calling it a "pretty ham-handed measure," Gregg likened it the strained populism of 1930's U.S. Senator Huey Long: "Personalize accomplishments in an effort to link the two and infer one is not possible without the other."
The rebranding effort is "probably more grief than benefit" for the Conservatives, said the pollster.
