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By Lydia Miljan

Parliament is back in session, with fireworks in the Commons over the New Democratic Party’s continued support for the Trudeau government. But instead of focusing on (often-contrived) political drama, the media would better serve Canadians if it critically evaluated government policy, with a keen eye on government finances and taxpayer money.

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For example, the government will soon table its fall fiscal update, which presents the state of its finances. That will occasion the first “confidence” motion directly related to money in the fall session of Parliament, providing another opportunity for the opposition NDP and Bloc Québécois to withdraw their support for the government and trigger an election.

Unfortunately, the media is more likely to delve deeply into palace intrigue than to ask tough questions about the government’s fiscal policy, which includes unprecedented spending and massive deficits and debt. Moreover, on those relatively rare occasions when reporters do focus on the substance of policy proposals, they often lean on the government’s talking points rather than on any critical evaluation of how to pay for new programs.

In a new study published by the Fraser Institute, I analyze Trudeau government press releases about three new major social programs — child care, dental care and pharmacare — and the subsequent coverage by the CBC and CTV from Feb. 1, 2021, to May 30 of this year.

Not surprisingly, the government press releases talked about how these programs would help Canadians but downplayed any information regarding their budget or fiscal implications or how the government would fund these programs. In terms of word count, less than one per cent of the government’s press releases mentioned the three programs’ costs. And there was no mention at all of how the government would fund the programs, whether through new taxes, new debt or some combination of the two.

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That governments would downplay the costs of new programs is understandable. But reporters shouldn’t let them get away with it. Yet CBC and CTV television reporters who covered the government’s announcement of these programs emphasized their political implications — including the NDP’s “supply-and-confidence” deal with the Trudeau government — without examining whether Canadian taxpayers could afford them. In fact, in terms of time, the cost of the three programs comprised a mere 4.1 per cent of CTV’s and 3.7 per cent of CBC’s coverage. In other words, on two of the largest news broadcast organizations in Canada, more than 95 per cent of the combined coverage of these three major new government programs made no reference to how the government plans to pay for these programs.

That is serious journalistic neglect.

When Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, he promised his government would be “open by default.” To underline that commitment, he released the mandate letters of his entire cabinet, drawing applause from media members who said this would allow them to better hold the government to account.

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Fast-forward to 2019, and Trudeau’s mandate letter to his finance minister, Bill Morneau, made reducing the government’s debt the first of his key principles. When Trudeau replaced Morneau with Chrystia Freeland in 2020, he said she was to keep the original priorities and be “guided by values of sustainability and prudence.”

Despite the media’s initial excitement over the release of mandate letters, CTV and the CBC each failed to ask how the government’s new permanent spending for three major new social programs — again, child care dental care and pharmacare — was consistent with its supposed commitment to “sustainability and prudence.”

Given the massive spending commitments associated with these programs and their potential for much greater costs in the future, it’s not unreasonable for the public to expect Canadian journalists to evaluate them critically, particularly with respect to costs. Unfortunately, many in the media are not doing their job.

Lydia Miljan, professor of political science at the University of Windsor, is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

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