In praise of a balanced budget
The head of the Van Owe (a big winter game festival held almost one year ago on the other coast) is very proud. To quote from a CBC website article: “The operating budget resulted in neither a surplus nor a deficit”. Before your next burst of applause, please try to interpret what that actually means.
The planning team presented a scenario where the costs and the revenues balanced. Good accounting. The adding machine was right in sync with the subtracting machine (an accountant’s other tool). Almost biblical (or Ben Franklinish); neither a borrower nor lender, etc. Except that there’s a small bit of forgetful behaviour here. It cost a bucket of money from the taxpayer to grease the rails.
There’s an estimated five billion dollars in infrastructure. We love that term in Canada, all four and a half syllables. It means “stuff left behind”. As a taxpayer, you can rejoice in knowing that somewhere (for part of the year) there are ski hills and biathlon tracks and skating surfaces that you will never be allowed to use. Bought and paid for (by our children’s children’s children). And the 1.9 billion dollars that actually paid for the day after day didn’t fall in a snowstorm up on Whistler. Again, you and me, one Loonie at a time.
Lest we forget, the opening ceremony had a torch that failed to deploy. We had a luge track that still causes nightmares. We allowed our Parliament to take a vacation just in case the MPs had found tickets in their Christmas stockings. It’s over, but locally my mayor still dreams of his games, with his name and his decade of photo ops. After all, if Canada has a Van Owe, it needs to balance things with a Quebec Paie.
