Of budget covers and glossy bloat

Like many of you I read that Blacklocks Reporter scoop on the $212,000 the Liberals paid an advertising agency to produce a cover and related materials for last spring’s federal budget with an appreciative shiver of disdain, pausing at various points to gag pleasurably on the details: the $89,500 for models hired to depict middle-class Canadians; the weighty email conversations between officials at Finance and the agency over whether the boy holding a cartoon bridge (symbolizing “infrastructure”) should be wearing glasses or not; the urgent queries as to which “ethnicities” to feature (“Asian? Native? Indian? Latino?”); and so on.

Part of what makes such inside peeks at the sausage being made so amusing is precisely those details. It is the business of people in politics and advertising to obsess about such things, as we must be at least dimly aware, but it is not until the particulars of the job are rubbed in our face in this way that we really come to grips with the crass calculation, the habitual fakery and ludicrous selfimportance it requires. This is the premise of television shows like The Thick Of It or Veep: the humour comes less from the contortions of plot than from the writers’ ability to simply put a frame around reality — though, as these periodic email dumps (thank you, Access to Information laws) suggest, the full tawdriness of that reality may still elude their grasp.

But of course any feeling of amusement soon dies when we start to consider the implications. It isn’t just the cost, though that is worth a moment or two of outrage: while $212,000 is a mere drop in the $305-billion ocean of federal spending, the kind of breezy contempt for the public purse it reveals — the notion, not just that those in power are entitled to spend such absurd amounts to such absurd purposes, but that the expenditure is even likely to achieve its objective — is a small but useful example of how we got here. It is out of thousands of such drops that an ocean is made.

But even if it were a fraction of that amount, it would still be objectionable. The comparison has been made to the $600 previous Conservative governments supposedly spent on their budget covers, through the use of stock photos and such. Leave aside that the Harper Conservatives in fact spent millions promoting their “Economic Action Plans”: in principle, why should the cover of a budget cost a dollar more than the price of the paper needed to print it? How much does it cost to stamp the word “Budget” on it? What, beyond that, is actually required?

It isn’t the document obviously, that’s the problem. It’s the underlying attitude of which it is an expression: that every twitch of government should be considered as an opportunity to manipulate the public — that the symbols and practices of a great and democratic state, hard won through centuries of struggle, should be reduced to a billboard for the party in power — that every last shred of institutional dignity should be pureed into the same mush of adspeak that now envelopes all of Canadian politics — that absolutely bloody everything that can be politicized should be.

Other countries, less unserious than ours, do not allow their budgets to be covered in advertising in this way. Neither did we, once. Until the latter half of the 1990s, the cover of the budget was a plain white or grey, on plain stock, bearing little more than a date and rudimentary title: The Budget, or Budget Plan. Those were the days of austerity, of course, so perhaps this was only fitting. But as the years went by and the sense of restraint passed, so the covers themselves changed — glossier stock, more graphics, eventually joined by inspiring slogans (“Building Canada for the 21st Century,” “Better Finances, Better Lives,” “Delivering On Commitments”), until finally we arrived at the happy array of multicultural Canadians of recent note.

The size of the budgets expanded accordingly. The great 1995 budget, which rescued the country’s finances, was all of 192 pages long, which was three times the page count of the previous year. By the end of the decade, they were over 300 pages; in the decade that followed, over 400 pages; Budget 2015 (anyone remember anything about it?) was fully 528 pages. Something of the same has happened to the budget speeches. The columnist William Watson has lately described the jarring experience of reading budgets from decades past, when finance ministers simply explained, in plain and direct language, what was in them and why. They had not yet become the pastiche of simple-minded slogans with which we are now familiar.

Again: none of this matters, in itself. But it is surely no coincidence that as the budgets have grown more bloated, so has government; that their own decline into childishness and partisanship has tracked the broader decay of our politics. It is the same attitude that explains, for example, the uniquely desolate spectacle that is our question period. It isn’t partisanship, as such, that is the problem: partisanship is as much a part of British politics as our own, and yet at Westminster it is expected that the questions put to ministers should be something approximating questions, the answers at least tangentially related to the questions — in all that the participants should behave in a manner vaguely reminiscent of adults.

We can change the rules of question period, or how Parliament works generally; every bit helps. But the broader problem is cultural. No one planned that our politics should be so ridiculous. We just sort of slid into it. Alas, I fear there may be no way to slide out of it.