Government candour on budgets is notoriously haphazard

We do not ask for much, really, we Canadians. When it comes to our governments, our expectations are almost pathetically low. We know that we are not quite a democracy — that our representatives don’t really represent us, that our legislatures are not really where important public matters are debated, that the executive, the people who govern us, are not accountable to them in any meaningful way.

Rather, having lied, bribed and slandered their way to the approval of perhaps a quarter of the eligible voters — converted, through the fun-house mathematics of the first past the post electoral system, into a majority of the seats — they are then entitled to govern more or less unencumbered for the next four or five years.

Only in one respect do we insist they be held to account: the budget, the “business of supply,” the getting and the spending of the public’s money — ancient prerogative of parliaments, fundamental responsibility of legislators.

Well, no, we don’t, really. We know that budgets are habitually deceitful documents, where they are not meaningless, intended to conceal and confuse more than to render an honest account of the government’s spending plans; that the estimates are even worse, so dense and voluminous that even seasoned members of Parliament can barely comprehend them; and that budgets and estimates commonly bear only the slightest resemblance to one another.

So we know that legislators have only the vaguest sense of what they are voting on, and would, even had budget bills not become the occasion to vote, not just on the business of supply, but on virtually every item on the government’s agenda, or had governments not, as in the case of the F-35, taken to giving out false information.

We cling, in the end, only to this: that in the aggregate, the government will take and spend something like the amounts it claims; that we can have some idea of the brute size of government, if not its precise composition. Maybe our legislators are incapable of the sort of detailed, line-by-line scrutiny we supposedly elect them to perform, but at least we can trust the numbers at the bottom of each column!

Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not really true, either. As a new study by the C. D. Howe Institute makes clear, actual spending by governments bears at best a familial relationship to the amounts voted at budget time. Never mind out-year projections, which we have learned to discard the moment they are issued. We are comparing here the amounts promised in the budget at the start of the fiscal year with the amounts published in the public accounts at the end of that same year.

According to the institute, federal and provincial governments routinely overspend the amounts originally authorized, to the tune of billions of dollars annually: over the last decade, the overruns add up to $53-billion in all. A natural disaster here, an unforeseen emergency there, you could understand. But this is systemic, a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the legislatures.

As bad as the federal government is, the provinces are worse. And as horrendous as the provinces are generally, the record in some provinces borders on the fraudulent. Saskatchewan and Alberta, for instance, have overspent their budgets in the last decade by an average of nearly 5%. And since each year’s overshoot becomes the baseline for next year’s budget, the cumulative impact is to produce spending, in the fiscal year just ended, vastly larger than was ever specifically authorized in advance: in Saskatchewan’s case, nearly 40% larger.

That’s as best the institute can make out. Provincial accounting is notoriously haphazard and inconsistent. Not only does each province use its own rules and procedures, making it impossible to compare the public accounts from one province to another with any confidence, but in several provinces — Newfoundland and Quebec are the worst offenders — the public accounts are not even stated on the same basis as the budget.

And while the public accounts must ultimately prevail, efforts to reconcile the two sets of figures, and to explain the discrepancies, are spotty at best. In some provinces — Quebec, Saskatchewan, British Columbia — auditors have refused, repeatedly, to sign off on the books without attaching reservations.

So not only can voters have little confidence that governments will spend what they said they would, they can have little ability even to reckon how much they overspent, or to compare their own province’s performance with the others’. All in all, a thoroughly disgraceful performance. (Honourable exceptions: Ontario and Nova Scotia, though voters in both provinces have other reasons to doubt their governments’ fiscal candour.)

We have grown used to provinces failing to match spending to revenues. Part of the explanation, this report makes clear, is their inability even to match spending to spending: to keep within their own, not-particularly-stringent budgets. Even as provincial governments are fessing up, this budget season, to the phoney forecasts they issued this time last year, they are preparing new whoppers to be atoned for at some later date.

The prospect before the provinces was grim enough, a future marked by shrinking labour forces and skyrocketing health care costs. But with provincial legislatures having, in a quite literal sense, lost control of the public purse, what hope can there be that governments will face this challenge squarely?