Parliament reflected in a skyscraper. Creative Commons photo by Vince Alongi.

The governing Conservatives are about to table a budget that spends many billions of dollars. It sets the agenda of virtually every government department and it means a lot to anyone who pays taxes in Canada. But when the budget is introduced by the finance minister tomorrow, the prevailing Ottawa groupthink says it’s not about the money.

Instead, we all wonder: will the budget trigger an election?

That the next few days will have nothing to do with the details of the budget and everything to do with an election that seems inevitable when a minority parliament makes the decisions. The spring session, much like the fall session on the other side of the parliamentary calendar, presents a window of opportunity for opposition parties in the mood for an election. It might well be impossible to avoid those twice-annual tugs of war, where jockeying and horse trading rule the day, until one party leads a majority government—or, as we call it in Canada, a friendly dictatorship.

Indeed, during the majority governments of not so long ago, elections happened when the government wanted them to happen, or when it ran out of time and had no other choice.

But now, parliament revolves around potential election triggers, and Budget Day is like a gold rush for election speculators.

Not long after the crack of dawn tomorrow, hundreds of journalists will enter an hours-long lockup at Ottawa’s grand old train station and study the details of the budget documents. They’ll pen their first stories while cooped up, and no doubt place final bets on the big question: election or not? None will emerge until the finance minister rises in the House of Commons to detail the government’s plans.

When he rises to speak, that first raft of budget stories will hit the wires and the secret will be out.

Meanwhile, outside of the House of Commons, the finance minister’s opposition critics and their leaders will already have reporters badgering them for their comment—not on the details of the budget, of course, but on whether or not it’s enough to postpone an election.

It all happens so fast. So are those questions, asked so soon and with such demand, fair to politicians who have a huge federal budget sitting in front of them?

“It’s completely unfair,” says David Akin, Sun Media’s national bureau chief. “I suppose you have to ask. But [politicians] seem to be punished for not having a decent answer.”

Don Newman, on the other hand, says those questions are unavoidable these days.

“When the embargo is lifted, political parties flood the foyer,” says Newman, the chair of Canada 2020 and erstwhile dean of budget reporting—he covered 30 throughout his career. “And government ministers do the same.”

It’s a race to get the message out, and there’s only time for basic talking points.

And then, Akin says, finance minister Jim Flaherty becomes chief budget salesman. “The government will put an immediate sell on the budget,” Akin says. “The finance minister will do the rounds on the television networks, and he’ll do op-eds the next day.”

The Big Thing

Akin defends Ottawa’s focus on the budget.

“The budget document itself is, I would say, the most important document a government will produce in a given year—money makes things happen,” he says. And that importance is confirmed by local papers, Akin says, the editors of which decide which story their readers should see on the front page.

“Those editors, who are very closely connected to their local communities, are making that decision,” Akin says. “Editors vote with their front pages, and they think it’s the most important story year in and year out, just based on the play it gets.”

It wasn’t always like that, says Toronto Star senior political writer Susan Delacourt. In years past, she never had time to cover budgets. That’s because there were larger stories in the nation’s capital.

“It’s my overall impression that budget lockups have become such large affairs because everything else is not,” she wrote in an email. “The only big things the federal government does these days is either spend money or cut taxes.”

Delacourt said the “big things” of the past included national debates around the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords—governance based on ideas, not just money. But now, Delacourt says, the budget is just about “the only show in town.”

Whither long-term planning?

Newman says the current government would do well to avoid planning budgets around potential elections, since it leads to short-term planning.

“I’m a little disappointed that politicians and journalists have disregarded fixed election date laws,” he says, adding that governments “would have to have more far-reaching plans.”

The current government passed fixed-date legislation in 2006, and it didn’t last a single election cycle before Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election in September 2008. If he were to follow that law to the letter, Harper could work toward a four-year plan where each budget was but one part of the longer-term whole that he could present to parliament on an annual basis.

But even that scenario might not silence all the election talk, because the fixed election date law cannot overrule a vote of non-confidence in the House of Commons. And since none of the opposition parties would likely buy in to Harper’s four-year plan without conditions, elections would always be just on the other side of a Commons vote.

Horse races as shiny objects

No matter what, the budget usually finds support in one corner of parliament or another, and election speculation is put off for another year—as is much of the reporting about the budget itself. And that’s the annoying part, according to Maclean’s columnist Aaron Wherry.

“You could do weeks of stories about what’s in the budget. It’s insane to think that all that can be covered in a day,” says Wherry, who recently wrote about the declining relevance of the House of Commons. “It should be the start of the coverage, but we all shrug our shoulders and walk away.”

That’s because more incisive reporting is relatively rare in the world of minority government, which is very much a zero-sum game where every story has a winner and loser.

“Most stories are ‘X’ versus ‘Y’. It’s entertaining, but I don’t know what people are supposed to take away from that,” Wherry says. “We don’t spend a lot of time explaining what’s going on.”

Jim Flaherty, post 2009 budget

Progressive Canadians seldom get very excited whenever a Conservative government brings down a budget. More often than not, the priorities of the two groups are so wildly different that it’s almost not worth the effort to make a fuss.

Last year’s budget was a different story. Stephen Harper’s team came up with a plan of action to fight the sagging economy that was straight out of the Keynesian playbook. The massive stimulus spending pissed off hardcore conservatives and delighted their opponents. On that point at the very least, progressives were appeased.

But that was last year. This year was a different story.

Budget Day was March 4. It’s a peculiar day in Ottawa, because it’s one of the only times all year when you can find most of the city’s journalists in one place. They all gather in the Government Conference Centre, a beautiful beaux-arts structure that used to be a train station, and they pore over embargoed copies of the federal budget. It’s all very boring until the finance minister stands up in the House of Commons and delivers his speech.

That’s when the ravenous pack of journalists marches up to the Hill.

Waiting for the scribes is a group of smart people who sat in another lockup for a few hours, reading the same document back and forth for a similar amount of time. Among that group of smart people are some of those aforementioned progressive Canadians. Labour is always there, as are environmental and social justice lobbyists.

Each reads through the sections most relevant to them, so some have more reading to do than others. They come up with responses, memorize them, memorize them again, and then venture out to meet the journalists.

The chosen location: the Railway Room, which is just down the hall from the House of Commons. The two sides clash even before the finance minister sits down.

It is within this context that the progressives laid siege on the government’s plan. There was no shortage of criticism, and it came from all corners.

Sierra Club Canada’s John Bennett was among the most outspoken on Budget Day. After reading through the government’s plans for cleaning up the Great Lakes and dealing with invasive species and re-jigging environmental assessments, Bennett was furious.

“There is no intention to protect the environment,” he said. “We’re going to have environmental disasters as a direct result of this budget.”

Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, was happy that the stimulus spending continued. But he was disappointed on just about every other front.

“It seems to me there was a choice between investing in people and infrastructure renewal for Canada’s cities, or being fixated on the deficit. And there’s no question that they’re giving every signal that from this point forward, fighting the deficit is going to happen at all costs.”

Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives economist David Macdonald said that compared to last year’s budget, which he called a “Liberal, verging on NDP” budget, this year’s document fails on most fronts.

“This year is a very Conservative budget,” he said. “I think this shows their longer term priorities … rock-bottom corporate tax rates, smaller government less able to plan for the future, and on the foreign policy front, it clearly means more money for defence and less money for reconstruction.”

The release of the federal budget yesterday brought few surprises, but plenty of opportunity for debate.

With total spending this year of $280.5 billion, up $12.8 billion from last year, the government will run on a $49.2 billion deficit. The government hopes to curb that deficit by 2015 and bring up back to the black shortly thereafter.

Of course NDP, and Liberals have their own beefs, but neither party is prepared to trigger an election on the issue.

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Here’s some of what’s being said across the internet:

• The Winnipeg Free Press gives an overview of this year’s winners and losers.
• Flaherty uses some effective misdirection by freezing the salaries of federal politicians.
• The Calgary Herald would like to see more help for struggling families.
• Despite an emphasis on becoming a “leader in green job creation” in the throne speech on Wednesday, the Conservatives gave little hope of following through on that promise.
• And contrary to some throne speech boasting, a freeze has been put on any increase in foreign aid. At least until 2o15.
• Even with Flaherty’s tight cutbacks, many people feel his projections are far too optimistic . Which means we’ll be in the red past the Conservatives 2015 prediction.
• Absent from the budget was any tinkering with arts funding, which drew mixed reactions from a community traditionally very skeptical of the Harper government.
• But if you happen to be a foreign investor, things are looking up. Amendments to the definition of “taxable Canadian property” has opened the floodgates, grab your life jackets.
• And Canada’s record breaking performance at the Olympics must have impressed someone in Ottawa because the Own the Podium campaign is getting a boost.
• Finally, the Ottawa Citizen cuts through the Flaherty fairytale and lets you know if his numbers really do add up.

Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is “Canada’s response to the challenge of our time,” many groups, including the Centre for Policy Alternatives, are saying Flaherty’s plan is “too little too late.”

This had us wondering if anyone, or anything, will benefit from the almost $40 billion stimulus package being pumped into our economy over the next two years. Here’s what we found.

Tax Cuts

Personal income tax reductions will give Canadians of all economic stripes between $21 to $53 a month extra to play with. But this $2 billion per year in tax cuts is essentially just a shallow crowd-pleaser that’s widely seen as an ineffective way to jump-start the economy. Instead, the government should have pumped that money into health care, for example, where it could have created more than three times as many jobs as broad-based tax cuts.

Mid- and upper-class homeowners

The 15 percent home renovation tax credits, for renos between $1,000 and $10,000 and available only until February 2010, will benefit only those who happen to have extra money to spend on redecorating.

Infrastructure

The government plans to throw $12 billion over the next two years into infrastructure, mostly through construction projects. But while this is a major job-producing move, it benefits sectors that are still largely dominated by men, leaving women out in the cold in terms of job creation. And while the government likes to boast that its stimulus package equals 1.9 percent of the GDP, CPA economist David MacDonald points out that that figure includes the matching funds that provinces and municipalities are expected to put up for infrastructure, meaning the feds are effectively counting “what other people are spending.”

Unemployed Canadians

Though only 40 percent of unemployed Canadians can access EI, no really significant EI reforms were made in the budget, with the stimulus package granting a mere five extra weeks of available benefits for the unemployed. And of the 1.5 billion set aside for retraining, only one third is available to unemployed Canadians not accessing EI.

Parents needing childcare

Under the stimulus package, low-income parents are able to earn a little more under the Canada Child Tax Benefit, but those earning less than $20,000 will see none of the increases they might have hoped for.

First Nations groups

Although the $1.4 billion allotted to First Nations communities for skills training and on-reserve housing might seem impressive, off-reserve First Nations people won’t benefit from much of this cash.

Affordable housing

Although the government is putting $1 billion over two years into social housing renovation projects, accessing these funds requires a 50-50 commitment from the provinces, a demand that may be difficult for poorer provinces to meet and may mean they miss out on housing they need the most. This money also can only be spent on already in-place affordable housing units—no new units are part of the stimulus plan.