At around 4PM today, the Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland will rise in the House of Commons to deliver her third, and the Trudeau government’s seventh, federal budget.  This is a good opportunity to give y’all a peak at how the sausage gets made, and how lobby/interest groups play a role in the development of budgets.

The annual budget cycle starts pretty much the minute the previous one ends.  During spring time, the government spends its time working out how exactly to implement the previous budget, but also keeps its ears open as to which bits landed well, which ones didn’t, and which issues are brewing that might be salient over the next few months.  This part of the process tends to culminate in a cabinet or caucus retreat in the spring, where some basic broad themes (e.g. “fairness”, “competitiveness”, “jobs”) are agreed upon. 

By the early fall Finance/PMO should have worked out some slightly more detailed plans – by the time of the fall caucus retreats in September, the government usually has a pretty good idea about which specific problems it wants to solve in the next budget, and which departments it needs to work with to develop new programs/revamp old programs for the budget.  It is – and I can’t stress this enough – REALLY HARD to insert anything new into the budget development cycle after September.  Short of a war or a pandemic, it’s practically impossible, even though in theory the budget is not actually set in stone until about three weeks before budget day.  Those last four months or so are devoted to getting the fine details of the individual initiatives down pat.

From a government relations perspective, this imposes a certain structure.  The real work does not happen in the run up to the budget: by that time, it’s much too late.  Rather, the game is won and lost prior to September.   It is in the shaping to the themes and the narrowing of policy choices to particular instruments where the real wins and losses occur.  And in turn, what that means is that the genius of getting one’s priorities in the budget has very little to do with one’s ability to spell out details of specific policies, and everything to do with being able to tie one’s broad priorities to the wider zeitgeist  (that said, being able to spell out good policies enhances one’s credibility with the line ministries who have to actually execute policies, so skimping on your policy shop is still a bad idea).

If the above timeline seems a bit off to you, it’s because what I am describing is the combined timeline of the Finance Department and the Prime Minister’s office.  It’s not a hermetically-sealed process: these folks will consult selectively with whom they deem necessary to gauge the appeal of various options; but it is not a public one.  Parliament – and specifically, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance  – Is in charge of the public consultation theatre and it runs on a completely different logic and schedule.

The Finance Department/PMO version of budget making happens in an iterative manner, going from really big themes to fine details in a series of steps.  The Standing Committee of Finance mashes all that into a single phase: basically opens its doors throughout the fall and says to Canadians (or, more accurately, the organized interest groups that represent various sectoral interests): come give us your ideas!  Then it publishes a report, usually well in advance of the budget (though this year it seems to have come out only a couple of weeks ago).  I’ve described these documents elsewhere; they are , as one might expect from a take-any-idea-no-matter-how-wild process, almost useless of a source of strategic insight, but rather provide a grab bag of really specific policy ideas, close to 100% of which are about increasing spending in various ways. 

Now, I won’t say that participating the Parliamentary process is useless.  But it’s not really the way budgets are influenced.  Largely what it consists of are various interest groups getting their more specific policy asks on record for the world – and perhaps especially whichever line department one is lobbying – to read.  Then each groups can go around town for the next couple of months to its various lobbying targets to say “did you see our finance committee submission?”  If the topic has already been pre-selected by the Finance/PMO process for consideration, this is useful: the committee submission then becomes a basis for future discussions between the interest group and that part of the public service tasked with looking at the issue.  Otherwise, at best, if your idea is interesting enough, it might end up as fodder in the discussion for the following year’s budget.

So what does that mean from a GR point of view if you’re an interest group?  I’d argue there are three key rules of thumb.

The first is that year-over-year, interest groups should stick to a very few (three if at all possible) simple and repeatable themes.  For years, Universities Canada was really good at this – it would have one ask on research, one on student aid, and another on internationalization.  Simple and easy-to-remember.  Then the real trick is finding ways to hook these themes onto whatever priorities come out of the government’s spring-phase budget process.

The second rule is to find new ways of packaging ideas within those themes every year.  CICan is especially good at this.  In substantive terms there is very little continuity from one year to the next in their asks.  Some people might find this flighty, but I think it is good tactics.  Throw spaghetti at the wall!  See what sticks!  Being adamantly loyal to specific policy solutions is not helpful.

The third rule is, unfortunately, one that the entire higher ed community seems to have forgotten over the last decade or two.  And that is: if there are multiple interest groups in a single space, COME UP WITH SOME COMMON POSITIONS.  A sector is immeasurably more powerful when it is speaking with one voice rather than many.  A government can play one part of a divided sector off against another all day long; when they unite around a few key positions, though, it is much harder for government to ignore. 

Which raises the question: why don’t peak higher education organizations do this more often?  It’s not as though they aren’t aware of this dynamic.  My take: budget submissions are only partly about getting results; to a non-trivial extent, they also function as a form of virtue-signaling from the Ottawa organizations to their members.  The point is not always to get results in the form of cash to the sector; often Ottawa organizations simply prefer to signal to their own members that their priorities are being heard and advanced rather than make compromises that would advance the sector as a whole. Keep that in mind if today’s budget turns out to be – as I suspect may be the case – the least promising one for higher education since 1996.