The details are there for those who care to look
By Ivan Morgan\April 14, 2023
There is a lot of nonsense in politics. One of my favourite bits of silliness is the line incoming governments often use when they take the reins of power. They are shocked! The state of the books! The state of the finances! They didn’t know! It’s a lucky thing they took power just in the nick of time! With some bold vision and hard choices, they will steer the province away from the shoals of bankruptcy that the folks who just lost power were steaming towards. (And then they set about continuing to bankrupt the province – but that’s a story for another day.)
Danny Williams went on TV in 2003 to tell us all the dire financial straits he’d discovered when he took over from the Grimes Liberals. I was sitting at home watching his news conference when my Mom called. “Has anyone told him he won and can stop campaigning now?” she asked drily.
Dwight Ball and his crew tried something similar in December of 2015.
It’s such hooey. The “books” are all online for you and I to look at whenever we want. You can get a pretty fair idea from these accounts how things are going. If you know how. That’s the big “if.”
Every year government brings down its budget and gives the media detailed notes for them to copy and publish. (I covered 15 budgets in a row, in one way or another, so I am an old hand at it). Then they are obliged to have a series of committee meetings where the opposition parties are allowed to ask questions about the budget: one meeting for each department. These meetings are called Estimates (because the best budget is only ever a guess).
The minister sits with his top officials on one side of the House, the opposition with theirs on the other. Opposition parties have several hours to ask any budget related question they want.
I sat through my first Estimates committee gobsmacked. The opposition went through the budget line by line. The minister or officials happily answered all their questions. I had been a working journalist and a columnist for years. Why didn’t I know about this?
Rooting around in the budget details is great fun (and was my job). Governments often hide things in their budgets, things you won’t find in their news releases. They bet the opposition and the press can’t be bothered to dig for these nuggets. That just made me dig harder. My colleague and I once found $110 million “parked” in a departmental budget. No explanation what it was for. That’s a fair chunk of change. What was it for, my MHAs asked? The government of the day got angry and didn’t want to answer our questions, which is of course why we asked them. (It was a loan to Kruger for the Corner Brook Pulp and Paper Mill).
One morning years ago, in an Estimates committee meeting we unearthed government cuts they had not made public. I texted our comms director upstairs in our offices, who immediately notified the media. An hour later, the meeting over, the minister walked out of the House and into a crowd of reporters. Surprise! Of course my MHA was there as well, to condemn the cuts and the underhanded manner government was going about it. Too funny!
If you are interested in how your government works you could do worse than to follow these committees. The minutes and the audio are posted online. So is the budget. Any government spending you want to know about? It’s all there. Just settle down with the departmental budget, put on the headphones and follow along.
I will never understand why more people don’t follow the Estimates Committee budget meetings every year. Maybe because it’s hard to follow and consists of hours upon hours of people droning on about government budget items in bureaucratic language? Maybe it’s because the vast majority of it is regular stuff like salaries and office supply costs. Maybe it’s because, in many, many Estimates committee meetings I sat through, everyone there – except for me – found the process debilitatingly, stupefyingly boring.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com