[SebC]

Andrew Coyne "decodes" the budget (National Post)

Over the years we’ve grown used to seeing finance ministers shuffle spending forward and back in time, or claim that a spending program is really a tax cut, or re-announce old programs as if they were new. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a budget quite so opaque as this one.

It isn’t just the many significant details it omits — for example, the content of the government’s spending plans. It’s that what is included is so maddeningly misleading, not to say vexingly vague.


The sheer emptiness of the budget, indeed, led many reporters to assume there was nothing in it. We should have known. This government has a peculiar gift for understatement. When it wants to claim credit for something, it is careful to call attention to it in the best way it knows how: by leaking it to a member of the press. But when it has something controversial to announce, it whispers it in Swahili at the bottom of a well.