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COMMENTARY
March 31, 2012
Budgetary theatre
Lent is a good time for making budgets. However, that was not the reason for the tradition of tabling them at this time of year. Instead, it is a throwback to the old secular calendar, when the New Year began in late March, and the royal accountants did their annual thing on a "chequer" board.The word "budget" is itself from the old Norman, "bougette," a little bag, carried about by the court's chief financial officer, containing who knew what. In the public imagination, crows flew out. This became a budget box, in the age of paper. Our Canadian tradition of new shoes on budget day is said to go back to that fine frugal Scotsman, Sir John Rose. Presenting the first Dominion budget in 1868, he thought he should make a show in new clothing. The foot fetish was a much later innovation. It was John Crosbie who varied this tradition by wearing new mukluks. Traditions, such as the above, tend to be retained where money is involved. Even radical politicians dress all conservative for Budget Day. (Crosbie was not a successful finance minister.) The psychology is obvious enough. In marketing we learn, "never make a joke at the cashpoint." Money is serious, and your customers must not sense levity while their money is visible. Advertising can be lighthearted, because the wallets aren't out yet. Bank tellers must pretend to be serious; and only behind walls do the bankers cackle, at dark jokes about everyone's impending bankruptcy (as surgeons do, about operations gone wrong; and pilots about "technical difficulties"). But in the presence of customers, the straight face. Only a chancellor of the exchequer, or "finance minister" in these colourless times, can fully appreciate the mess he is presenting to Parliament. And if he doesn't understand the aggregated nonsense in a sprawling document, assembled in deadline panic from a thousand cubicles, then he is perhaps not sentient enough to keep the job. I have every confidence that Jim Flaherty, like Paul Martin and Michael Wilson and other enduring ministers before him, is sentient, to a fault. He looks the part of "stability." (And let us not forget the imposing Samuel Leonard Tilley, the pharmacist and temperance advocate who made Sir John A.'s later drunken policies seem almost plausible.) Were I ever asked to give tactical advice to a finance minister (and not one of them ever asked), I would pester him with quotes, not from Machiavelli, but from the French painter, Edgar Degas. "A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth." A budget is like a painting, in this respect. It must give an impression. The work of the department is another thing. That is where political theatre ends, and real tyranny begins. Economic theory, even cause and effect, cease to count. The job of revenue officials is to milk the cow dry. The job of the finance minister is, make it look pretty. Or as Degas said, "What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming." The Ontario budget set a new standard for cowardly deceit. After public suggestions that the provincial government would impose wage freezes if civil service unions did not voluntarily play along, minister Dwight Duncan then omitted this threat from the document itself. Posing tough, then caving before every special interest, has been the Queen's Park strategy for a decade now. At the cost of turning Ontario into a have-not province, it has preserved Dalton McGuinty in power. In Ottawa, after tedious rhetoric about the plight of Canadian families, all promises of tax breaks for them were deferred until that glorious day when the budget is rebalanced. Meanwhile, a tiny deficit nip-and-tuck, and a promise to address pension entitlements in 2023, are presented as grave matters. The memorable thing was the retirement of our one-cent piece. The copper was extracted from it in 1996 (except the veneer), but the unit manufacturing costs are now higher than the coin's value, no matter what they make it from. But of course cents, like the old "mils," will be maintained as unit-of-account, so the government may collect every last grain of HST. Don't tell anyone, but I have a private hoard of pre-1996 "pennies" (actually the weight of traditional half-farthings), which I've been extracting from change as my retirement fund. This is technically illegal, so I live in fear a police SWAT team will crash in, and impound the lot; for I think I may have $5 accumulated in the jug by now. Why do I take this risk? To be unnecessarily reminded that our public finances are a cruel joke, and that the only sound thing is the theatrical traditions in which they are presented. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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