Pre-election budget: Think of it as a job application by the government

There’s policy and there’s politics ... sometimes they even overlap

In a good year, Ontario’s annual budget lasts for 12 months. But a preelection budget is unlike any other.

With voting day just weeks away, Wednesday’s budget may have a remarkably short shelf life — with June 7 its best-before date. This budget is merely a blueprint, to be rewritten and reincarnated as the campaign platform for the governing Liberals — later matched by countervailing promises from the opposition parties.

The opposition Progressive Conservatives were first off the mark last November with The People’s Guarantee, but it was invalidated when Doug Ford took over as leader this month vowing to demolish and rebuild the platform. The NDP is also cobbling together election pledges focused on health care, notably pharmacare and denticare, that will find an echo in the Liberal promises.

But will any of this matter to the voting public? While public servants toil in obscurity to make the numbers add up, and party strategists perform their political calculus to move the needle, the correlation between fiscal acuity and popularity remains unproven.

David Lindsay has sat on both sides of the political divide, as a non-partisan deputy minister working for a Liberal government (under Dalton McGuinty), and as a partisan chief of staff working for a Tory premier (Mike Harris) in the 1990s. Despite helping to author the Common Sense Revolution that propelled the PCs to power in 1995, Lindsay wonders how much the fine print matters.

“Don’t worry — they don’t read it, they just weigh it,” a party strategist once quipped to Lindsay, he recalled at a panel discussion on “Policy Wars” that I moderated at Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts this month.

Lindsay, a wise policy wonk who now heads the Council of Ontario Universities, assuredly reads the fine print of both budgets and platforms. But his humorous caution is a reminder that it’s easy for insiders to get lost in the weeds, which surely matter but rarely get much notice until it’s too late.

Jamison Steeve, a political staffer who served as McGuinty’s principal secretary overseeing policy, argued that policy platforms — and the budgets that precede them — are increasingly seen as a contractual undertaking or job application by a party seeking power.

“As a policy guy, I want to see what happens between budget day (March 28) and the writ drop (campaign kickoff on May 9),” he told the audience.

And judging by Liberal plans to go let the budget drop back into deficit, he sees the party in power trying to reposition itself. “If there’s populism happening on the right, there’s going to be an attempt at an articulation of what populism on the centre-left looks like,” said Steeve, now head of the Martin Prosperity Institute.

Shelly Jamieson, who headed the non-partisan public service under McGuinty, noted that civil servants are kept at more of a distance in an election year.

“Pre-election budgets are different than any other budgets in any other years, and the civil service is less involved,” she told the audience. “This one is different because it is likely their platform, and they hold it close to the chest, as they should.”

But the interaction between political staff, non-partisan civil servants, and cabinet ministers is a delicate dance. Reflecting on their different perches, the three panellists recalled how they had to behave like magicians at times.

As cabinet secretary, Jamieson said she needed the ability to see around corners, mindful of the long term, while political players often focused on short term turnarounds. Part of that process is preparing for a transition of government if there is a change of power after an election like the one coming up.

Jamieson assigned three teams of non-partisan staff to monitor platform pronouncements of the three parties so that the civil service could anticipate their needs and compile briefing books for the incoming cabinet to act on, whomever won.

But what happens if a new party takes power with ideas that are not just undesirable, but unworkable? How does a public servant speak truth to power?

“There’s good policy and there’s good politics, and sometimes they overlap — and sometimes they don’t,” Lindsay said. “You fearlessly advise, and then you faithfully execute. They are the decision makers.”