Hooray! We're in the money. The federal government's surplus for the past fiscal year is $9.1 billion rather than the $1.9 billion then-Finance Minister John Manley gloomily predicted last year.
A typographical error? Not if you know how governments budget in the black these days.
Gone are the days of fudge-it budgeting, where governments would predict rosy balanced budgets, only to see the real numbers come in drenched in red ink.
Or are they gone? No, it's just the same trick in reverse.
The current trend in budgeting, pioneered by Prime Minister Paul Martin when he was the chief book-cooker, is to sandbag the numbers as much as possible - paint as gloomy a picture of the economy as one can get away with and pad the program spending to boot, then breathlessly reveal the new and greatly-improved numbers later - just before an election, if you can manage it, of course.
Since Martin discovered this little trick back in the late 1990s - after slaying the deficit on the backs of the provinces and thus, you and me - provincial premiers have cottoned on to the joys of crying poor at budget time and delivering the big payoff later. Watch for Premier Gordon Campbell to roll out not the promised balanced budget when the books close next April, but a massive surplus - just weeks before the next election, by complete and utter coincidence.
The only problem with these little political surprise parties is, they're just as dishonest as predicting surpluses and delivering deficits. It's fudged budgeting with a happier outcome.
Wouldn't it be better for governments to actually give a realistic picture of revenues and spending at budget time and then, barring truly unforeseen events, live up to it?
Then again, that's the difference between government and politics.
