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One Fine Day at a Provincial Budget Lockup
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan.
“We’re in for a long day.”
Overhearing this amid the din of a boardroom in the Macdonald Block, those of us still groggily waking up at Torontoist’s designated table in the media room wondered what we might have gotten ourselves into. Covering the provincial budget was new for us, after all. We were invited to be part of the annual tradition known as the budget lockup, in which reporters from various media outlets are sequestered for several hours to review the budget before its release to the public and to ask government figures questions about its content. No phones, no internet, no contact with the outside world for eight hours.
And so as we settled in, we wondered: would attending the lockup be an educational experience or one that felt like a prison sentence?
We arrived early. Very early. At 8 a.m., we were amongst the first of the media finding their way past OPP officers to assigned spots. We opened our registration packages, which included instructions on how to turn off wireless connections—helpfully illustrated with diagrams of the Wi-Fi signal icon (for Mac users only), in case we weren’t sure how to do that. Waiting at each of our seats was a folder containing photocopied press releases, the three-hundred-page budget document, and a thinner tome featuring the speech Finance Minister Dwight Duncan would give fellow MPPs eight hours later. Duncan’s speech read like a printout of a Twitter feed—sentence-long paragraphs, few containing more than 140 characters. The formatting of the speech was ideal for dramatic pauses during its reading—or a creative interpretation by William Shatner.
A scan of the instructions for turning off wireless connections.
As mellow jazz played in the background, we spent the next hours digesting the budget. We quickly realized just how integral a research tool the internet has become when we were denied its riches of information whenever we wanted to look up agency names or old news items. We couldn’t phone external sources either: like the ‘net, phone lines were blocked during the blackout period. But we weren’t left completely in the dark: experts from the Ministry of Finance were on hand to answer our questions to the best of their knowledge. Still, we felt disconnected from the rest of the world; a catastrophe could occur a block away and we would have been oblivious.
Gradually the room filled up and the jazz gave way to the drone of other reporters poring over their packages. A basic spread that would cause only the most zealous watchdogs of public spending worry was served for lunch: lasagna, salad, breadsticks, cookies, soft drinks. As 1 p.m. neared, the noise level in the room decreased as the media and a growing number of government and party officials awaited the arrival of Dwight Duncan to begin the afternoon’s round of speeches and Q&A sessions.
As Duncan and opposition party leaders Tim Hudak and Andrea Horwath spoke, we found ourselves lulled and latching onto the key phrases they repeated ad nauseum. Duncan linked Hudak to Mike Harris, to the point where both men’s names rolled off his tongue like one—“Harrishudak.” The speeches by Hudak and Horwath mentioned “families” every other sentence. By the time the opposition leaders brought up families for the fifty-ninth time, it was hard to keep groans internalized. It was interesting to notice the steady decrease in the number of questions each candidate was asked: Duncan filled his forty-five-minute slot; Hudak took half an hour (assisted by quasi-bouncer Norm Miller); Horwath, eleven minutes. The speakers’ backdrops also reflected their status in government: Duncan had the video screens that played budget propaganda all day; Hudak used a sizeable backboard to cover up the screens and a smaller banner on the podium; Horwath had a skinny backboard that the flags onstage cozied up to.
Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak.
Some parties prepared their press material better than others. When we noticed a Conservative staffer handing out folders, we went up to grab one…only to find that we were out of luck because they printed only fifty copies for a room filled with at least two or three times as many reporters—from which we must conclude a Harrishudak government would save taxpayers money by tightly monitoring the provincial photocopiers. The NDP was better organized, as their staffer handed out single-page statements to be passed around each table.
When the blackout period ended at 4 p.m., mayhem ensued. Some news organizations headed out the door. Some picked up the phones, frantically hitting the hang-up button and waiting for the lines to be turned back on. Most waited for the restoration of internet access to their laptops, though this proved frustrating for several unlucky souls (we latched onto unused DSL lines, as wireless service was non-existent in the room).
By the time we finished filing our initial batch of reports at 5:45 p.m., the room looked as if a parade had gone by, with abandoned folders and remnants of meals left behind. A few diehard reporters were still working while the room was transformed back into an empty meeting space. In the midst of the resetting of chairs and the removal of the detritus, we reflected on the provincial budget lockup and determined that though there were dead points in the day, ten hours in the room wasn’t penal punishment—in fact, it was kind of fun.
Photos by Nick Kozak/Torontoist.