Budgets

There’s been an ongoing problem in the Canadian government of having too much money and too little all at once. What happens is, there’s a meaningless campaign promise. The sort of thing we all expect politicians to lie about. They promise to spend a certain amount of money on something, and then they don’t follow through.

But unlike most governments, they actually put that money in the budget. The money is actually there, it exists, it is available to be spent. But it doesn’t get spent. At the end of the year it returns to the treasury without accomplishing any of the things it was set aside for.

Last year, I heard about this happening with Veterans Affairs. Offices were shutting down, benefits were being reduced, but at the end of the year it turned out that there was still plenty of unspent money left over, and it went right back to the government.

This year, the news is about the the department of Aboriginal Affairs. It’s having money problems, too. The sort that you would ordinarily ascribe to there being not enough money in the budget. But it turns out that the budget is bigger than expected, and every year 200 million dollars gets returned to the government unspent.

So what does this all mean? It’s a little different from your standard election promise. The budgets are law, passed by parliament. Voting against a budget counts as a non-confidence vote to unseat the government. What does it count as if you vote for a budget you know to be fabricated?