It is not about a $200,000 cheque: it is... about Liberals not being able to change dubious old-school habits.

Let’s talk about the federal government’s spending of $212,234 on artwork for the 2017 budget.

The first order of business here is to give full credit to the Blacklock’s Reporter parliamentary news agency for Tom Korski’s scoop. Getting ahold of this information involved a disgusting Access to Information struggle with the Department of Finance, complete with a formal complaint to the information commissioner.

ATI requests are tedious even when they are not resisted by government, and they can be unrewarding and costly. An individual newspaper or reporter may not capture all the publicity benefit from their own filing, even when it is successful.

This one had singularly enlightening results. The headline is the $212,234 figure, paid to McCann Canada for “budget art themes,” notably, a cover illustration. Blacklock’s tells us that this total included $89,500 for “talent fees” and models representing the artistic title given to the budget: Building a Strong Middle Class. The cost exceeds the figure for last year’s budget, which was $176,339.

Even as I summarize this news, I can see the potential for various kinds of carping from ad men or illustrators who don’t want their oxen gored. “Sigh, this is just business as usual.” Like hell it is: under the Conservatives the finance department used plain covers or inexpensive stock photos for the budget. This is exclusively Liberal tomfoolery.

“Okay, but the cost is perfectly reasonable for what we got!” Two hundred thou for one document, huh? Try that one out on a newspaper art director. Try it out on anyone who ever worked for a magazine, particularly one with newsstand sales that actually depended on a fancy cover.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Even if it’s a bit ridiculous, it’s ONLY $200,000 against a background of billions.” But is it? To me this is the most intriguing part of all. Blacklock’s quotes an email (“It’s fresh. I love where this is going”) from someone who has the title “senior marketing advisor for the finance department.”

Am I the only one left asking, “Why the hell does the federal finance department need a marketing advisor?” The “senior” part denotes a six-figure salary, none of which is included in the cheque that was written to the nice creatives at McCann. Is the finance department a business whose revenues depend on effective advertising? Does Canada’s federal government have several finance departments contending with each other for market share?

Someone with a job title in “marketing” might make sense at a department like Global Affairs, which does a lot of traditional straight-up selling of Canadian products to the outside world. It may even make some sense at the Canada Revenue Agency, which is in the position of offering a service, involving different forms and modalities and commercial applications, directly to the public. But why does the work of finance need to be marketed to Canadians? Do we have a choice not to deal with finance? Do they care whether we are keen on them?

And if we have full-time marketing specialists at finance, for what are we paying an ad agency? Is that the main job of a government “marketing advisor” — choosing someone appropriate to do the actual work for a reasonable price? If so, I cannot say, as a media professional, that I am impressed with the advice given. Also, I think I definitely picked the wrong career.

Rest assured I am only pretending to be slightly dumb about all this. Finance has “marketing” specialists for the purpose of advertising a political agenda to the public. It cannot be helped that a Liberal government is bound to give a budget a campaign-friendly name like “Building a Strong Middle Class” and to throw your money at promoting it. The Conservatives liked to play a similar happy talk game with the titles of parliamentary bills, which some people found odious, but which didn’t cost us 200 Gs at a stroke, either.

This is the sort of use of public funds for essentially partisan purposes that we can’t throw anybody in jail for, except in my daydreams. Blacklock’s uncovered emails make this positively explicit: in arguing over the 2016 budget cover someone observed that, “Justin Trudeau’s election mantra was all about positivity, change, and optimism for the future. We want this budget cover to illustrate that feeling.” I would say this utterance is not quite in the tradition of our public service, except for my fear that it is a perfect expression of the real tradition.

Of course, using an ad agency for this foul business has the bonus of cementing Liberal friends in a trade that has a lot of power over the media. No doubt I am making trouble for my company’s desperate, beleaguered bean counters by even talking about this. It is ugly. It is not about a $200,000 cheque: it is about the underlying abyss at which that money hints — and about Liberals not being able to change the exploitative, dubious old-school habits that led them to the Adscam disaster.

I do not spend a lot of time wishing for a New Democratic federal government, but I am pretty sure such a government would put a plain orange-ish cover on the print version of the federal budget. And, by the way, how many people even handle a printed version of any government’s budget in the year 2017? A few dozen? Don’t marketing experts know we have the internet now?