AT EVERY LEVEL, messages from governments ought to be accurate, informative, and politically neutral.

Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, and as a result the taxpayers who pay for them can find themselves being indoctrinated rather than simply informed.

In Ontario, a law in effect since late 2004 has required all government communications in the form of pamphlets, and radio, television and newspaper advertisements to be pre-screened by the Auditor General to make sure they aren’t partisan. However, even that law, the Government Advertising Act, has a loophole that permitted the McGuinty Liberals to promote the controversial July 1 harmonization of the federal and Ontario sales tax via the Internet.

Be that as it may, we’ve come a long way from the days when every highway construction project was promoted with blue billboards and the names of the premier and highways minister, and when the Bill Davis government even came up with a widely-publicized BILD program.

As we see it, since all government communications by definition are funded by the taxpayers, they should be non-partisan both in what they do and don’t say.

Unfortunately, there is no federal legislation on the subject that goes even as far as Ontario’s, and we can cite a couple of examples of the need to have such a law.

The federal Conservatives, who used to criticize advertising by Liberal governments as always having too much red, have simply moved to producing materials that not only have lots of Tory blue but seem designed more to get votes than to convey useful information, and sometimes fail to convey needed information.

Nowhere is this been more obvious than in the promotion of the government’s 2009 budget and “Canada’s Action Plan.”

Commercials promoting the costly stimulus program convey little more than how marvellous such things as tax breaks for home renovations are, and they fail rather glaringly to point out that federal grants toward infrastructure improvements must be matched by the provinces and municipalities.

Interestingly, we have not seen any comparable commercials on U.S. television channels promoting the huge federal stimulus programs there. If nothing else, that’s pretty good evidence that there’s really no need to tell taxpayers how much of their money is being spent when what they’re really interested in is economic recovery and a speedy return to low levels of unemployment.

The second example of what ought not to have happened in Ottawa was disclosed last week as the result of freedom of information request by The Canadian Press.

The request led to disclosure of the fact that a citizenship study guide released last fall did not contain references to gay rights that had been in early drafts of the guide.

Coincidentally or not, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has been a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage.

Asked by a reporter why he had blocked any information about either same-sex marriage or Charter rights protecting sexual orientation, Mr. Kenney replied: “I did not do such thing. No, no, you are wrong.”

The CP story said an early draft of the guide, which new immigrants must study for citizenship tests starting March 15, included references to the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969 along with other gay-rights milestones.

But a memo to Mr. Kenney from senior bureaucrats at Citizenship and Immigration last June showed that the sections were removed at the request of someone in the minister’s office. Another memo indicated the bureaucrats were rebuffed when they made last-ditch request to have gay rights reinserted in the guide, which was released in November and replaces one published in 1995.

In our view, it really matters not who was responsible for what can be seen as

form of censorship. Since the publication was by his ministry, the minister must take ultimate responsibility and correct the situation, perhaps with corrective pamphlet explaining that was an inadvertent omission.

After all, there surely is no more important information for a new immigrant to Canada than the status of equality rights in their adopted homeland.

Consider, for example, the fact that homosexual activity is still considered sinful, if not criminal, in many parts of the world. We wonder how many immigrants from Muslim nations are aware of the fact that it’s unlawful in Canada to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

We obviously don’t know what the publication does contain, but we’re at loss to think of any area of information that is more crucial than a full and accurate portrayal of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and how it has come to be interpreted by our courts.

Nor is the ministry’s apparent stance, that the omission will be corrected in the next edition of the guide, satisfactory, in view of the fact it took 14 years for the previous guide to be replaced.