Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 19.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The 1995 budget from Liberal finance minister Paul Martin tamed the deficit, restructured federal departments and set Canada on a path to fiscal sustainability for years to come. Mr. Martin managed to table that 192-page document on Feb. 27, 1995.
A generation later, Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered her first budget on April 19, 2021, close to three weeks after the start of the fiscal year on April 1. Her effort weighed in at a hefty 739 pages, nearly four times as long as Mr. Martin’s 1995 budget.
This year’s instalment will be only slightly earlier, on April 16, but still well after the start of the fiscal year, and nearly seven weeks after March 1, when the government’s main spending estimates – notionally a reflection of the coming year’s fiscal plan – must be tabled.
Those main estimates are rendered meaningless this year (and in many other years) since they do not take into account the spending initiatives in the budget. The government later introduces an updated version, called supplementary estimates. But the vote on those estimates, the nuts and bolts of federal spending proposals, did not take place last year until mid-June, when a fifth of the fiscal year had come and gone.
Of course, the trend toward budgets growing later and longer did not start with Ms. Freeland. Stephen Harper’s finance ministers nudged budget day well into March, on average 15.5 days after the deadline for main estimates. Bill Morneau, Ms. Freeland’s Liberal predecessor, did slightly better, with an average of 15 days past the deadline.
Ms. Freeland’s budgets, meanwhile, have been on average 40.5 days after the March 1 deadline. (The figures for the two Liberal finance ministers don’t take into account 2020, when no budget was presented.)
The provinces this year tabled their budgets far earlier: British Columbia, on Feb. 22; Alberta, on Feb. 29; Quebec, on March 12; and Ontario, slated for March 26.
This is more than a plea for organization for the sake of being organized (though that would be a plus). The drift of federal budgets into March, and now past the start of the fiscal year, undermines the ability of parliamentarians, and Canadians, to scrutinize the government and hold it to account.
And it’s part of a pattern of the Liberals’ cavalier attitude toward the role of Parliament in controlling the nation’s purse strings – the reason for Parliament existing in the first place. The Liberals declined to produce a budget at all in 2020, saying the disruptive effect of the pandemic made it impossible to craft a realistic plan. Yet every other G7 country managed to produce a budget that year, as did all the provinces. Somehow, the uncertainty of the pandemic uniquely affected Ottawa.
And it’s worth recalling that the Liberals proposed in March, 2020, that the government be allowed to tax and spend for up to 21 months without any further approval from Parliament, a proposal the opposition parties rightly decried as a blank cheque. That plan was withdrawn.
Yet there is not a similar furor over the drift of the federal budget past the start of the fiscal year, which nibbles away at the ability of the House of Commons to hold the government to account. Departmental plans, for instance, include personnel projections. But those projections are useless for the most part, since they do not include any changes to spending in the budget (a few weeks in the future). And the government does not update those personnel plans. The result is that there is no way to know whether departments are sticking with their hiring allotments, or exceeding them – a particularly germane question as the federal civil service continues to swell in size.
More fundamentally, it’s farcical that MPs are debating spending plans for a fiscal year already well under way. Reforms to the budgeting process are needed, starting with a statutory deadline for budget day, ahead of the March 1 cutoff for main spending estimates. That would restore discipline to federal budgeting, allow the main estimates to reflect reality, give provinces time to adjust their own budgets and, most important, restore to parliamentarians the ability to scrutinize the government’s plans.
That change might spell an end to the supersized budgets of recent years. But there are more than enough days in the rest of the year for long-winded press releases.