Team Trudeau has created a budget monster

The pair were the flowers of English literature — one faded, the other about to bloom — and, as with the Grits’ latest federal budget, they too were fans of female inclusion.

At least they were that dreary night in 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, then serving as home to Lord Byron, who’d fled England following accusations of incest involving his half-sister. The other man, aspiring young poet Percy Shelley, arrived with his 18-year-old girlfriend in tow.

To amuse themselves — the beauty of Switzerland, then, as now, being matched only by its tedium — they decided upon a ghost story contest, insisting young Mary Godwin shouldn’t be excluded simply because she was female.

For two long days, the nervous teenager worried about how she could possibly come up with a story to amuse and suitably scare her illustrious companions.

In the end, she didn’t do too badly. The story she told and would later expand into a book published exactly 200 years ago, was a hit. In fact, it became the greatest horror story ever told, though by the time it was published, she’d married that boyfriend, dropped the Godwin name and would forever be known as Mary Shelley. The tale, of course you guessed, was Frankenstein.

Which leads us back to the latest federal budget unveiled last Tuesday that was as much a sowing together of diverse parts as Dr. Frankenstein managed in assembling his monsterto-be in Shelley’s famous book.

Truth be told, this wasn’t even a budget at all. There was no adding up of accounts, no financial reckoning or fiscal projection of any actual seriousness. No, instead, this was a collection of touchy-feely messages wrapped up with oodles of promised accompanying dollars in which every flavour-of-the-month lobby group got a fair share of the spoils.

Or at least they were promised such largesse, though if the money ever actually ends up in anyone’s open palm, other than some nameless bureaucrat, is doubtful.

The biggest noise was about encouraging female workplace inclusion. That was followed by yet more grandiose plans for Indigenous engagement.

But we were just getting started. Then there was the environment lobby to appease, followed by seasonal workers promised more EI, plus a vague shout-out to science, and then the usual cybersecurity blather and bluster. There was even some supposed cash to help journalism survive in rural areas — hey, maybe if I move to Hanna, I’ll finally get a government cheque.

Seriously, what was this about? Just like the prime minister himself, it was all hat and no cattle. A budget turned into sound bites or tasty chicken bits. Don’t we have serious economic issues to tackle in Canada, such as pipelines, NAFTA renegotiation, the competing challenge of lowered U.S. corporate tax rates, the recent upward creep of interest rates?

Isn’t that what a budget is supposed to be about — not some warm and fuzzy carnival sideshow?

But this is Justin Trudeau’s happy place. This is where we can stop someone in mid-sentence to advise that no longer should the word mankind be uttered, but instead, it should be replaced with peoplekind (the Oxford Dictionary is playing catch-up). Yet we invite terrorists to our overseas banquets and zip off to billionaires’ islands for a nice lie in the sun.

Yet the real monster, a steadily accumulating national debt, is of no consequence. These are economic good times, yet we’ll still we run an annual deficit of $18 billion. This adds to an accumulated debt that will eventually rise and do its worst, like Mary Shelley’s imagined creation.

So, 200 years ago, a young woman caught the exact mood at the Villa Diodati, and in doing so, also unintentionally nailed it when it comes to Justin and his future legacy: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”

Truth be told, this wasn’t even a budget at all.

Chris Nelson is a Calgary writer.