Goodbye to budget secrecy, and good riddance

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Day after day the Prime Minister appears bearing promises of cash and favours. A renters’ bill of rights. More federal funding for daycare. A national school lunch strategy. A $6-billion housing fund. It’s expected to continue right up until budget day, April 16, when it will all be announced again.

There was a time when you could go to jail for revealing the contents of a budget before it had been introduced in the House. Finance ministers who let so much as a line of a budget slip out in advance were expected to resign. But the convention of budget secrecy has long since been observed more in ritual than in substance.

Reporters are still expected to submit themselves to the budget “lock-up,” confined with hundreds of their colleagues in a windowless room for hours in advance of the document’s official release. But these days they do so in the full knowledge that much of what they report on will have already been leaked.

The only thing that’s new in what The Canadian Press mischievously calls the Prime Minister’s “charm offensive” is that the leaking is being carried out in the open, by the Prime Minister himself (the Finance Minister is rumoured to be doing much the same) rather than by shadowy figures in his entourage. These are granted anonymity, according to the currently approved journalistic hokum, “because they were not authorized to divulge budget contents,” i.e. because they were specifically authorized to divulge budget contents in return for anonymity.

There’s a valid principle underpinning budget secrecy, so far as the budget contains information that would move financial markets. The point is to let everyone know about it at the same time, rather than allow individuals with foreknowledge to unfairly profit.

But so much of a modern budget has nothing to do with financial markets, or budgeting for that matter. It’s just an excuse for the government to bundle its entire legislative agenda into a single omnibus bill, forcing Parliament to pass the lot in one go rather than give each item the separate examination, debate and vote it deserves.

The elaborate pretense of budget secrecy, likewise, has little to do with preventing insider trading and everything to do with media manipulation, not to say mind control. After half a day attempting to ingest hundreds of pages of dense government spin, deprived of most human needs and assailed at regular intervals by Finance officials speaking “on background,” reporters are in no condition to analyze anything.

Which is why, for all the media’s efforts to rush out comprehensive budget packages the second the Finance Minister rises to speak in the House, it usually takes several days to get an accurate read on what the budget actually contains. Which is pretty much mission accomplished, as far as governments are concerned.

It’s a double-edged sword, however. On the one hand, heaving the whole thing at reporters in one go improves your odds of smuggling the dodgy or unpleasant stuff past them without anyone noticing. On the other hand, the more crowd-pleasing items tend equally to get lost in the shuffle.

That’s why governments hit on the selective leaking strategy. But this comes with its own trade-off. On the one hand, leaking a story to a single news outlet ensures it gets huge play from its grateful recipient, for whom the story’s news value has less to do with its actual importance than its exclusivity. On the other hand, it tends to be ignored by its competitors, for the same reason.

Conversely, having the Prime Minister come right out and tell everybody what’s going to be in the budget, one item at a time, makes for wider coverage, but at the cost of a certain lack of enthusiasm. Stories that a paper’s editors, amped up on insider access and “exclusive first looks,” could persuade themselves were “scoops” worthy of front-page coverage look a lot less exciting when everyone has them.

Where media disappointment goes, critical scrutiny soon follows. So, for example, while it has been widely reported that the budget will contain a slew of measures for renters, it has also been widely reported that most of them are ineffective, unworkable, or provincial jurisdiction – or all three.

There is, too, the little problem that the government’s budget-leaker-in-chief no longer exerts quite the same fascination for the public, or the media, that he once did. If a prime minister discloses the budget’s contents in advance, and no one is listening, does it count as a leak?