What’s left for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to say when she stands up in the Commons next Tuesday?
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Do you suppose we’d be having this cross-country pre-budget spending extravaganza tour if Chrystia Freeland were still finance minister?
Oh, you’re right: she is. Yes, I think I have seen her in some of those “Where’s Waldo?” tableaux of happy, smiling and above all nodding Liberal MPs you see behind the prime minister as he makes his way across the country, spewing dollars, platitudes and carbon, across the land.
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I worry some of the more enthusiastic nodders will hurt their necks, though they probably have generous physiotherapy allowances in their sweet MP HR deals, probably a massage or two a year and aromatherapy.
The nodding is so syncopated they must get instruction in it. Self-respecting adults, elected members of Parliament no less, wouldn’t volunteer to look like such pliable idiots, would they? Chinese President Xi Jinping doesn’t get half as much nodding when he makes a speech with his apparatchiks lined up behind him. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll nod in the wrong place and there goes their career. Or worse.
I assume one of those snotty PMO junior staffers the MPs are so terrified of checks the tape to make sure the nodding optics are just right. Probably the same junior staffer who lines them all up behind the PM, making sure the gender and racial balance is just right and the logo for the day is in frame. We don’t like yes men in our MPs. But the focus groups must be saying we’re OK with nodders.
Budget secrecy used to be a thing. Ministers got in trouble if budget details leaked. In 1983 Liberal finance minister Marc Lalonde had to do a last-minute rewrite when a TV camera glimpsed pages from the budget as he riffled through it in his pre-budget new shoes reveal.
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But now, the prime minister crosses the country on a Budget Billions Spend-a-Ganza. His travel schedule for just the past 30 days: Montreal ➛ Ottawa ➛ Calgary ➛ Southwestern Ontario ➛ Montreal ➛ Ottawa ➛ Montreal ➛ Toronto ➛Ottawa ➛ Vancouver ➛ Ottawa ➛ Toronto ➛ Halifax ➛ Toronto ➛ Winnipeg ➛ Calgary ➛ Ottawa ➛ Montreal ➛ Eastern Ontario. And at most of them a budget announcement. I assume the MPs lined up behind him on any given day know where they are. Do you think he does? Why does he travel so much? Did somebody tell him he gets paid by the mile?
The point of budget secrecy is that no one makes money scooping the capital markets’ reaction to the government’s fiscal plans. But for years now there has been zero suspense about this government’s plans. If they get an extra dollar in revenue, they spend it. And if they don’t get an extra dollar in revenue, they spend that, too. After nine years, the capital markets are fully clued in.
But the strategy of actually announcing all the new spending initiatives that are in the budget, rather than just teasing them, is new. What’s left for Minister Freeland when she stands up in the Commons next Tuesday? Even more spending? But there’s hardly anything left to subsidize. Or is the strategy to leave her just the economic and revenue forecasts and the bottom line? And is the bottom line so bad the prime minister has been trying to reduce budget viewership — never high in any case, except among nerds — to divert attention away from it? Maybe they should have scheduled the budget for Eclipse Day.
Is leadership politics at work here? When former defence minister Anita Anand’s profile rose too high, she was exiled to Treasury Board. Does the PM feel threatened by Chrystia Freeland, too, so much so that he decided to take all the fun budget announcements, making it clear who’s still boss?
Perhaps you’ve seen the government’s new ad campaign: “Every dollar counts.” When I first heard it, I was hoping it might be the theme for this year’s budget. Wouldn’t it be great to have a budget prepared by someone who thought every dollar really did count? Because it does. Somebody earned that dollar and could have used it. And the dollars the government borrows, somebody else could have borrowed to build something themselves. Instead we’ll all pay interest on it.
An “every dollar counts” finance minister would begin — and maybe end, too — by axing programs: “We tried this. It didn’t work. We tried that. The auditor general wasn’t impressed. Gone and gone.” Over the years, as politics proceeds, announcements and programs accumulate and accumulate. The time comes when you’ve got to clear the underbrush.
But it turns out “Every dollar counts” is the government’s attempt to empathize with Canadians feeling stressed by inflation (which makes every dollar count more because it’s worth less). And there’s a handy interactive questionnaire — not brought to us by the ArriveCan people, I hope — that tells you all the great spending programs you may have access to.
I checked out the business subsidy section, to see if I could get help for the little operation I run writing these columns for you. It asked me how much I wanted. Not wishing to appear greedy, I checked off $250,000. It then asked what my goals were so I checked off both productivity improvement and greening my operation. (I don’t know, maybe a solar-powered laptop.)
But then it froze. So maybe the ArriveCan people after all.
Or maybe budget Tuesday will be my good-news day.
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