Kids, you may not believe this, but the federal budget used to be a big secret.
On Tuesday, Finance minister Chrystia Freeland will give the budget speech. But unless there’s a blockbuster surprise under wraps, we already pretty much know what’s coming. The prime minister and cabinet have been criss-crossing the country with spending announcements. The Liberal Party of Canada website even offers “A Peek at Budget 2024.”
As many have pointed out, not so long ago this would have been outrageous. The budget was a super-secret package until the literal moment the minister rose in Parliament and began their speech.
The two reasons for secrecy were financial markets - lest someone profit with insider information - and general respect for Parliament. According to a Department of Finance history, Louis St. Laurent even required his finance ministers to type out their own budgets for reasons of secrecy. (This sounds apocryphal and I couldn’t find it mentioned in this excellent recent book on St. Laurent, but that’s what the government site says.) And budget secrecy was a particularly impressive feat back in pre-online days, when endless copies had to be printed and shipped across the country under tight security so that everyone could get their own copy the moment the minister got up.
Oldsters will remember the two great budget leaks of the 1980s.
In 1983, a TV crew was filming Liberal minister Marc Lalonde at his desk (“Minister works on budget speech”) and captured actual budget documents and figures, which they then broadcast. The opposition went ballistic, demanding the minister’s resignation for this outrage. The minister did not resign, but the budget was likely tweaked so that the leaked info was no longer accurate.
In 1989, Global TV reporter Doug Small obtained a cast-off budget document from the printing plant, and immediately went on air, famously holding it up and quoting it, leading to an emergency catch-up announcement that night by finance minister Michael Wilson to give the other highlights. In a classic illustration of the cyclicality of politics, the opposition Liberals now decided they were champions of the free press and that the minister must surely resign, while the Conservative government - the same gang that went ballistic for Lalonde’s resignation six years before - was so incensed that Small was arrested and charged with possession of stolen property. The case was thrown out. (Small writes his reflections in this undated piece, saying “I think I can predict it will be the one story that will rate a line in my obituary”, while Wilson still maintained in his posthumous 2022 memoir that “this wasn’t a leak; it was a theft.”)
It’s these 80s retro moments that make the 2024 Budget Sneak-Peek Teaser Tour so bizarre. But….does it matter?
Budget events are constructed myths. This is best seen in the weird tradition of new shoes for the finance minister on budget day. Mary Francoli and Alex Marland do their best to figure out where the heck this came from, but no one really knows. In the same way, budget secrecy arguably became a self-reinforcing fetish that led to absurdities like charging Doug Small.
Even the budget speech itself is a bit of an artificial construction. The real action is the motion traditionally introduced right before the speech: “ That this House approve in general the budgetary policy of the government,” after which the finance minister decides they might as well say a few words in support. That’s the budget speech, but technically it doesn’t have to happen. As with so much of Westminster governance, it’s a tradition, and traditions can change.
Where the current Budget Tell-All Show does irritate me is how it is yet another slow chipping away of the authority of Parliament, which has enough problems asserting its preeminence on regular days. If all the important budget announcements are made elsewhere, what’s left for the House of Commons? We thought we’d knocked this down two decades ago, when the Ontario Eves government - another aging government slipping in the polls - unveiled its “Magna budget” at an auto manufacturer rather than the legislature, to general derision. But now we have a slow-drip undermining that is likely to continue, and few will remember otherwise.