Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing

Helping government and non-profit organizations improve their strategic marketing, communications, and digital engagement efforts since 2005.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Source: https://t.co/HIfF2hv0r0

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

It's Media Literacy Week. The 1999 "house hippo" ad, a Hinterland Who's Who spoof, asked Canadians to question what they watch.

That now includes government content. The UK will pilot Content Credentials to show who made it. We think Canada should too: https://t.co/gz74ZL8Rx7

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

New Statistics Canada study: 12% of persons with disabilities said they were often or always housebound because of their condition.

Events, pop-ups and service counters can't reach them. For this audience, phone, mail and accessible online channels are the plan, not the backup.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Paid, earned and shared media usually send people to something you own: a web page, a form, a phone line.

If that page or form doesn't answer the question they arrived with, that's where the plan stalls, however well the rest of the campaign did.

[Evan Solomon @EvanLSolomon]

Some Government of Canada websites have been temporarily taken offline as a precaution to protect government systems and Canadians' information, following guidance from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.

This is in response to a vulnerability identified in PHP, software used by websites around the world. This is a global issue, and other governments and organizations are also taking protective measures.

If your organization uses PHP, apply the latest security updates as soon as possible and follow @cybercentre_ca for updates.

We take this situation extremely seriously. Thank you to the cyber security teams working to protect the services Canadians rely on. Affected websites will be restored once patches are applied.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

One program notice, two versions.

The first leaves the reader to figure out a deadline from "30 days following the end of the reporting period". The second puts the action, date and reason up front.

A notice that asks someone to act is a brief for a small behaviour change.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Source: OECD Trust Survey 2026, Canada results https://t.co/5D6JC55E2U

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

In the OECD's 2026 Trust Survey, 34% of Canadians were confident the government would protect their personal information when it uses AI, the lowest of six AI expectations asked about.

If an AI tool is headed into a public service, its launch has to answer that question.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Source: https://t.co/K5T2HlwMyg

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

A 2026 Media Ecosystem Observatory audit found AI answers about how to vote in Quebec mostly cited Élections Québec. Some still got details wrong, like advance-voting hours, while linking to the page that had them right.

An AI answer can contradict the very page it cites.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔An NYU mathematician says OpenAI used his own progress against him to beat him to one of the biggest unsolved problems in mathematics. Tristan Buckmaster had been working toward a Millennium Prize proof using OpenAI's Codex when information about his progress reached OpenAI.
Days later, OpenAI published a full proof of the same problem using the same uncommon approach, after burning $22.5 million in compute to get there. When Buckmaster confronted them, exec Sébastien Bubeck allegedly said "Why would you ruin your career?" and "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."

My Take
OpenAI spent $22.5 million to solve a problem with a $1 million prize. They didn't do this for the bounty. They needed a headline that says "our AI solved one of the hardest problems in mathematics" and they needed it before someone else got credit. They started days after they heard about Buckmaster's progress and took the same uncommon approach he'd pursued for months. That's hard to explain as coincidence.

Buckmaster did his work inside Codex. OpenAI reserves the right to train on Codex data. They admit they can't rule out that his usage helped improve their models. So a customer used their product, potentially handed them the roadmap, and then OpenAI outran him with $22.5 million in compute he could never match. I don't know if any of this was intentional. But if you're a researcher and you just watched this happen, I don't think you'd keep your best ideas inside someone else's product.

Hedgie🤗

https://t.co/1YnggU7xdI

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Prime Minister of Canada @CanadianPM]

Prime Minister Carney launches Digital Transformation Canada to deliver better, faster, more reliable government services to Canadians: https://t.co/rboijmwLOo

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

"We're excited to announce."

We've opened posts that way ourselves. It spends the one line most people actually read on how we feel, instead of what changed, what it costs the reader, or what they need to do.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Details, dates, and registration: https://t.co/XFLgebugmK

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

The out-of-office replies are coming down, and the fall planning cycle is close behind.

September is the easiest time to book a day for professional development, before other priorities fill your calendar. Eight one-day online workshops on the card. Details in the first comment.

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

Source: https://t.co/gVuPh10OYX

[Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing @CEPSM]

A 2026 @StatCan_eng study found that 47 percent of Canadians say it's harder to tell true information from false information compared to three years ago. The people most likely to say so are the ones doing the checking.

[Glenn Schmelzle🇨🇦 @heyglenns]

Google Analytics measures anything...that you set it up for.

Next 1-day workshop "GA4 Essentials for Public Sector and Non-Profit Organizations," is Sept 10th. If you handle comms/engagement, come learn how to see results in #GoogleAnalytics.

Register at the @CEPSM website.

[Richard Dias @RichardDias_CFA]

Some in the Canadian media, a few members of parliament, and many on Twitter seem not to bother reading the excellent and FREE research on the Canadian economy that is readily available.

As a result, it makes for poor discussions about how screwed we are, how we got here (hint: it's not tariffs), and what, if anything, we can do to get out of it.

So in an effort to improve this, here's a list of resources that I rely on every day. I encourage you to share one that you like below.

National Bank (my personal favourite)
https://t.co/4xHIbWFTQa

TD Economics
https://t.co/cnCfkxV8pI

RBC Economics
https://t.co/oTyledMFW3

Bank of Canada: Monetary Policy Report https://t.co/LC5Z4LjRGF

Bank of Canada: Staff Papers (boring but important)
https://t.co/E78Yi5zPBQ

CREA
https://t.co/3zJbg1rLVg

Stats Canada
https://t.co/c6iVdT7h44

S&P Global PMI
https://t.co/1WmiFkZLUb

Yardeni (more market stuff)
https://t.co/gtjhlcu4lR