The Sixth Estate

Update: Andrew has suggested to me that it is unfair to judge the column by the title, since he didn’t write it, which is true, although it strikes me that such a complaint would be better directed to the people who write the headlines than to the people who read them. So: sorry, Andrew, for that. In any event, the astronomy pictures are not out of place. Coyne moves from the objection that government should be based on purpose instead of inertia, which (as you’ll note) I agree with, to a second objection that these sorts of sensational stories are inevitable because government is too big and spends money “on everything under the Sun.” I could have printed a list demonstrating the silliness of such hyerbole, but in some cases, pictures really are worth a thousand words.

Yesterday, I pointed out the three things that I thought the media was missing about the Auditor-General’s report on how the federal government has mysteriously “lost” $3.1 billion in anti-terrorism spending, with no idea where the money went. First, it must be obvious which departments “lost” the money, and when. Second, the government has actually lost much more than $3.1 billion, because that’s only the amount as of 2009; in 2010, the Conservatives mysteriously closed down the reporting system that tracked counter-terrorism spending altogether, which means all expenses since then are unaccounted for. Third, both the Treasury Board and, by extension, the Auditor General must know the answers to the first two points, at least in rough terms, yet neither Minister Tony Clement nor Auditor-General Michael Ferguson have deigned to tell us, the tax-paying public.

But that was yesterday. The media has swung into fine form, I can assure you, and they’re asking the Big Questions for a change. For instance, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne has alerted us to the fact that nowhere in the Auditor-General’s assessment of the missing $3 billion in counter-terrorism funding is — you’ll love this — an explanation for why Via, Canada Post, and the CBC receive government subsidies.

This is a bizarre leap, and it’s hardly worth bothering with, except to point out that even if this were a valid question to ask, it wouldn’t be the Auditor-General’s job to ask it. (Even though, according to Coyne, it’s “the real question that the AG report raises but nobody will ask”). The Auditor General’s job is to ensure that money was spent efficiently and responsibly. Whether public subsidies and Crown corporations are good things to have is a question for Parliament — you know, that other essential democratic institution which Coyne’s employer has been energetically flinging feces at for years by endorsing a government convicted of contempt of Parliament. Coyne may be right that we should ask these questions, but the AG’s report is hardly an appropriate opportunity to do so.

His broader point is a valid one — we should want a government driven by purpose, rather than by inertia — and yet the overriding theme here still appears to be the notion that government is too big. It’s not a matter of asking what additional tasks should be handled by government. It’s merely a question of what tasks government is currently handling but shouldn’t be. Yawn.

Still, since he asks, it is obviously the case that the Canadian government is not extraordinarily large. For that matter, no government on Earth is extraordinarily large. For illustrative purposes, some time ago I placed a graphic on the top right of this blog some time ago. The size of the largest government on the planet is indicated by the bright pink area on the big blue and green dot on the top left of the image. I’ve reproduced the image below so you can appreciate the magnitude of the problem:

Here, I’ll zoom in:

Yes, big government is indeed a travesty, an abomination, a hideous grostesquerie. The sooner we can get back to smaller and simpler things, the better off we’ll be.

Meanwhile…

Peace be with you.

In regards to this…

First of all, to the genius publishers of 24 Hours, nicely done. I know you’ve got a business to run, but all you’ve done is to make me instantly discount and ignore any “news” you print on your first page ever, ever again. I’m not sure what you were thinking, but this is ridiculous. I hope you were paid well for it.

Second, to the BC Liberals: Sixth Estate would like to offer you the same deal you got from 24 Hours. My rates are very affordable. Please contact me immediately at the site email and we can definitely work something out.

What’s more interesting in the Auditor-General’s latest report on government fiscal atrocity isn’t what it says, which you can already read about at your leisure in any credible mainstream news source, but what it leaves out. Being an Auditor-General is a tough job, especially when you’re continually investigating a government that overtly does not want to be investigated. Still, the job of an independent auditor is to be, well, independent. Excruciatingly so. Sheila Fraser and Kevin Page understood that, and Canadians rewarded them with their trust. I fear the present Auditor-General, Michael Ferguson, is destined for a more muted legacy.

Basically, the situation is this. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Chretien government created a special $12.9 billion fund called the Public Security and Anti-Terrorism (PSAT) Initiative. The purpose of the PSAT Initiative was to finance programs to identify and prosecute or deport terrorists, protect infrastructure, and support international counterterrorism programs that Canada was participating in. The problem is, while all the money has been spent, the government can’t explain where $3.1 billion of it has gone. Nobody, it seems, has any idea. It’s a $3 billion boondoggle, and Ferguson offers the following timid explanation:

(more…)

After a good and I like to think well-deserved hiatus, I’m going to be easing back into blogging now. And I thought that perhaps the way to do it would be to endorse a party in Canada’s only current election campaign, the one in B.C.

One of the things that distinguishes real, grown-up journalists from we juvenile bloggers is their tendency to display their mature non-partisanship by explicitly endorsing their favourite political party in an election campaign. These endorsements are actually quite useful, because they let us know that despite what their own columnists routinely claim to the contrary, the national newspaper industry is a staunchly Conservative bunch.

At Sixth Estate, I don’t pretend to be a responsible and professional journalist. I do try my best, but that’s a standard to which I admit I may never rise. Still, I can try. So I want you to know that I took my task of finding a political party to endorse very seriously, just as seriously as I’m sure the average newspaper does. I searched high and low for someone whose politics I found palatable, and I want you to know, I’ve found someone. I hope you will find my choice just as attractive as I do.

That choice is Mischa Popoff, candidate for Boundary-Similkameen. Mr. Popoff is the former Conservative candidate for the riding, but don’t hold that against him. Boundary-Similkameen is the Florida of B.C. politics. Since the start of this year, all three major parties have turfed their candidates in the riding. Bizarrely, the governing Liberal ousted theirs even though he was already a sitting MLA. (Judging by the polls, the time in which “recent former Liberal MLA” makes Slater’s C.V. stand out from the pile is rapidly drawing to a close.) Mr. Popoff lasted longer than his peers, which says something about him, and he also released the following campaign ad this week, which says even more:

Well. I’ll admit, I don’t know much about his politics, and “too conservative for the Conservatives” probably means we don’t have much in common. But there’s something about delivering one’s bitter politics of resentment at full ramble while being repeatedly head-butted into a fence by a bull that just screams earnestness to me.

There. Did I do my editorial endorsement right, or do you suppose I have a long ways to go as an emulator of top-notch journalism?

Yesterday I published a fairly scathing review of CBC’s attempt at a fact-checking service, which appeared to conclude that the right-wing BC Liberal Party (a former Social Credit gang which is now a close ally of Stephen Harper) was spreading untruths about the record of the opposition NDP when they were in power during the 1990s. Which was fine with me, except that CBC then bizarrely suggested that the Liberals “want [voters] to remember” what happened in the 1990s. Of course the very nature of false propaganda is that you want people to remember what didn’t happen.

Anyways, even that piffling critique must have been just a little too salty for the likes of either the premier’s office or some snivelling bureaucrat in the upper echelons of CBC, or perhaps both, given the miscegenation that has occurred between CBC News and the BC Premier’s Office in recent years. I went back to the offending article on Monday evening, and discovered to my amusement that CBC’s editors had tacked on a disclaimer:

CBC’s Reality Check team has determined Clark’s statement, while technically correct, is political spin.

Clark’s statement, so referenced, is the claim that under the NDP the B.C. credit rating received six consecutive downgrades. The original version of the CBC piece, which for the moment is still visible at Yahoo, did not conclude with this statement. The original version’s verdict was that Clark’s claims and actual reality “[are]n’t quite the same.” The revised version hastens to add that even so, Clark is “technically correct.”

How you can be not quite accurate but still technically correct is left up to readers to decide. CBC’s own story claims that BC received six rating downgrades between 1997 and 1999, in total, from four different ratings agencies. Since (to my knowledge) each agency publishes an annual rating assessment, and since the DBRS rating for the province (which CBC helpfully charts) was not downgraded in either 1997 or 1998, it’s fairly obvious that there cannot possibly have been six “consecutive” downgrades using any normal meaning of that term.

But don’t take it from me, take it from then-Liberal leader Gordon Campbell himself, speaking in the legislature in 1999:

Today the Canadian Bond Rating Service has downgraded B.C.’s credit rating to double-A-minus. It is the second consecutive downgrade of this NDP government.

Oops. One, two, six. Whatever. Coming up next week: after voting for deficit budgets several hundred times during their decade in office,** will the BC Liberals finally be kicked to the curb by voters?

One of the problems with operating an inoffensive “fact-checking” service is that sometimes the facts don’t check. In my opinion “CBC’s Reality Check team” has kind of stumbled out of the gate here by softening their report. I wait with baited breath to see what non-falsehood they’ll locate next. Sooner or later, they’ll have to tackle the Dix Memogate affair, and that’s sure to kick up a fuss no matter what they say.

** Sixth Estate’s numbers are, while technically correct, political spin.

I view the rise of so-called “fact-checking” in the mainstream corporate news with mixed emotions. First of all, it is nice to see them, you know, doing their jobs for a change. But second of all, why do they need a fact-checking column? Does this mean that they’re not, um, checking the facts in their other news articles?

The latest exercise in fact-checking has been launched by the CBC in connection with the BC election. There’s a great deal of hype surrounding the BC election, because it looks as though a far-right Social Credit-turned-”Liberal” Party ally of Stephen Harper is about to be trounced by the purportedly socialist NDP. I say purportedly because, among other things, the top advisors to the two parties recently collaborated to establish a “public affairs” firm, Kool Topp & Guy, an action which I think hints at the unpublicized convergence of political opinion between the two parties. Kool Topp & Guy offers the following rather painful analogy by way of describing its founders’ unmatched skill:

top-notch talent at every position – our speedy sniper swooping in from left wing (Topp), our playmaking centre who can be counted on to win the key draws at either end of the rink (Guy) and our right-winger with the cannonading slapshot that puts the puck in the net every time (Kool).

I wonder how they decided who got to be the center.

Anyways, I digress. CBC has started its fact-checking column, and the likelihood that there will not be any significant difference between a Liberal government and an NDP government is, seemingly, not on the agenda. Instead, CBC has gratifyingly if perplexingly turned to a lie which was started by the Liberals a week or so ago, and it has since been repeated, straightfaced, by a legion of reporters who you would really think ought to be old enough to know better:

We got six consecutive credit downgrades in the 1990s.

That’s premier Christy Clark, launching the rumor. She at least knows it’s a lie, because she started it. Whether or not the journalists were competent enough, I don’t know. At least one of them was obviously uncomfortable enough repeating it that they decided to launch a “fact-checking” column. I can’t help but notice that the CBC has repeated the original lie at least twice — here and here — without batting an eye.

So I guess in the modern news business, fact-checking is just something you get around to… eventually. But not before you’ve published the story. Oh, no.

In this case, the truth is that B.C.’s credit rating was actually downgraded twice under the NDP. Between 1997 and 1999, different combinations of the four bond rating agencies downgraded BC’s credit rating, twice. Now, you might think that actually adds up to at best two credit downgrades, not “six consecutive” ones.

Speaking of which, it’s the following rampant editorializing which got me ticked with the effort. It seems that the anti-NDP bias is so pervasive in the news media that even when they’re printing “fact-checking” columns defending the NDP from Liberal fictions, they still can’t help injecting a little dig about how the NDP are horrible money managers (unlike, say, Liberal premier Clark, who has yet to balance a budget):

While the 1990s is a decade the New Democrats hope voters forget, it’s one the B.C. Liberals want them to remember.

Actually, given that the whole excuse for this “fact-checking” column was that the Liberals are lying about the NDP’s financial record, it would seem as though the 1990s is a decade the Liberals are hoping voters forget.

Which shouldn’t be too hard, since voters have 90% of the news media eagerly helping them out in this task.

CBC then closes with a statement that itself is in need of a fact-checking review:

It wasn’t until 2006, after the fallout from 9-11 and the U.S. housing crisis, that Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government earned B.C. an AAA credit rating.

Hm. Well, I take back what I said about reporters being old enough to remember what happened 15 years ago.

Well, at least we have it confirmed for us. The reason that Vic Toews is a Cabinet minister despite being convicted of election fraud, the reason that Peter Penashue is allowed to stand as a Conservative candidate despite being responsible for similar violations of the law, the reason Peter Van Loan is still House Leader despite committing similar violations of the law, the reason Gary Goodyear is still science minister despite violating the elections law, and the reason that Tony Clement was promoted in Cabinet despite a Sponsorship Scandal-sized diversion of border security funds into park-building in his cottage country riding, the reason so few Conservatives are troubled that their party committed election fraud in 2006 and is under investigation for doing so in 2011, is that to Harper’s Conservatives, corruption isn’t actually a vice at all. It’s a virtue:

“I attained and pushed for managed to get $85 million for the road, on the Trans-Labrador Highway. I will tell you this. If I was not there, that road, that money would not be spent there. The money would be spent somewhere else,” Penashue said.

“I will tell you a secret. I did not sign the approvals in Newfoundland until I had my $85 million for the road in Labrador, and I held their project for six months,” Penashue told a cheering crowd.

That’s Cabinet minister turned disgraced Labrador candidate Peter Penashue, explaining to his former constituents why they should re-elect him.

What’s interesting about this isn’t which project in Newfoundland was delayed so that Labrador could get its highway, although that’s the question the few journalists who even care about corruption anymore are clamouring for an answer to. The question is how Conservative supporters have become — if indeed they have become, as Penashue and his handlers seem to think — so greedy, morally degraded and contemptible that baldfaced lies about how corrupt their politician is will somehow be appealing to them.

Some of us are old enough to remember that before stepping down to run in the by-election, Penashue was Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for questioning whether the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs has the final signing authority on any multi-million-dollar investment projects at all, let alone that he withheld one or more for months as leverage to secure investment in his own riding. In the past fiscal year, his proactive disclosure report shows exactly zero grants or contributions. (No doubt that’s because he’s withholding his signature until the federal government agrees to move its payroll centre to Happy Valley-Goose Bay or something.)

The worst-case scenario, of course, is that Penashue is telling the truth. As unlikely as that may sound. I can’t imagine what projects he would be able to delay, but it would be a spectacular admission of willful negligence on his part (since he is the Cabinet representative for Newfoundland) and a very useful insight into how the Harper Cabinet works. It would be useful to know whether Cabinet ministers treat all non-Cabinet ridings as bargaining chips to feather their own nest, or whether only opposition ridings are singled out for this sort of collective punishment.

In less than a decade, this country has moved from sponsorship scandal being a national embarrassment to sponsorship scandals being something to brag about. And you can thank Harper’s Conservatives for that.

In the meantime, at least we have one question answered for us. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Prime Minister’s Office is actually not, as some columnists have claimed in recent days, carefully scripting every word that comes out of Penashue’s mouth. It’s hard to imagine the PMO deciding that this would be an intelligent thing to say. Although I suppose I shouldn’t put anything past them.

As regular visitors will have noticed, I haven’t been up to my usual feisty self lately. The truth is, real life intervenes some times, and I’ve been hellishly busy lately so far this year.

I promise, though, that it won’t be a permanent disappearance.

The Cyprus banking crisis is a useful teachable moment about banking and taxation — so I guess I’m not surprised that this opportunity is being entirely missed by the media, most of whom probably don’t know what’s actually going on, either. Both the left and the right are incensed at the Cypriot government’s proposed solution: a 6.7-9.9% tax on savings account balances will raise funds which will then be used to bail out the banks. That didn’t go over well. The result was that the government backed away and is now frantically considering other options. It needs to raise a few billion euros to qualify for a bailout loan from the rest of the European Union. It doesn’t have the money.

But what intrigues me is the controversy over the bank account tax. News of this tax flashed around the world. Various left-wing outlets are describing this as a grand theft organized by European technocrats. The right is playing populist by denouncing the seizure of hardworking Cypriots’ money to perpetuate bad government policy (although credible rumour has it that the largest accountholders in Cyprus are actually Russian oligarchs).

The trouble is, I don’t think a lot of people really understand how banking works. Because if they did, I don’t think they’d find the savings tax all that upsetting. If you’re going to have bank bailouts, then savings account taxes are probably one of the best ways of financing them. A better way would probably be to hand over ownership of the bank to the people with savings accounts, which I’ll get to later. But the important thing is that we discuss these things with the proper background knowledge of what’s going on. The media evidently doesn’t see its role as providing this sort of education to the masses, and neither, evidently, is the school system doing so, which leaves anyone who has never taken a macroeconomics course a few steps behind, understanding-wise. Ain’t modern democracy grand?

The most important reality that I think the vast majority of people don’t understand is that despite what your monthly statement may say, you don’t actually have (almost) any money in the bank. Bank accounts are not like safety deposit boxes. A savings account is actually a loan. You loan the bank whatever you “deposit.” In exchange, the bank promises to pay you a trivially small amount of interest, plus to pay up on the loan whenever you demand it, in the form of a “withdrawal.” Then, the bank takes your money and loans in to other customers.

This system, called fractional reserve banking, works because the bank knows that its creditors — meaning, you and me — will only demand a small fraction of their collective deposits on any given day. So, it only needs to hold back a few percent of that pool to give out on an as-needed basis. The rest of that money, it can do with as it pleases. It can take it and invest in Greek government bonds, for instance, like Cyprus did. Whoops. Or it can loan it out to other bank clients as a mortgage. Or whatever. As long as the investments don’t go up in smoke and as long as the account-holders don’t all show up on the same day demanding to withdraw all their money, the system can appear entirely normal.

Governments try to limit the damage through vehicles like deposit insurance, although the net effect is that in exchange for preventing all small-scale crises and bank runs, you create an appearance of total normalcy until a really big crisis comes along. In Canada, for instance, we feel that our accounts are “safe” because they’re insured by the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation. CDIC currently guarantees that the first $100,000 in your account is safe, no matter what. But that’s a total of about $650 billion right now. CDIC doesn’t have $650 billion to pay out. Instead, it has around $2 billion.

What this means is that, despite what everyone (including the banks) tell you to think, you really shouldn’t think of your savings account as a pile of money waiting for you to use it. It’s a loan to the bank, plain and simple. That’s why you earn interest on it every month. The banks don’t pay us very much interest, because of supply and demand: they don’t have to. We loan them money anyway, habitually, because we’ve all been raised to think that it’s entirely normal to loan the bank money every time you have more cash on hand than you absolutely need for the day’s expenses, and because banks have such a good track record for paying off loans on demand that it doesn’t really feel like there’s any risk involved.

But there is risk involved. Canada is only one mass trip to the bank away from being the next Cyprus (except it can’t be: more on this in a moment.) Every so often, a combination of bad government policy and bad private bank investment activities — it doesn’t actually take both of these, but they usually go together — combine to cause multiple large banks to be unable to meet their financial obligations. At that point, the governments bail out the banks, to the tune of trillions of dollars if necessary. The right screams that this is distorting the market and the left screams that the banks should just be nationalized. The “centre” takes the worst of both worlds by offering exorbitant taxpayer-financed bailout packages to private corporations.

Which brings us to Cyprus and its controversial bank account tax. Never mind the fact that without a bailout (or a nationalization) in some form, the people with these savings accounts will be totally broke anyways. If the money isn’t raised somehow, the banks will collapse. So they’re protesting that writing off 7-10% of their savings as a tax is an unfair way to save the other 90% of their savings.

But notice that everyone is still behaving as if “their savings” are involved. As I’ve explained here, “their savings” are already gone. They’re not customers waiting for service, they’re creditors with amounts owing that can’t be paid up right now. If you’re one of the unlucky millions who has just found out how the banking system really works, well, tough luck. If you’re upset at the prospect of the government taxing one-tenth of your savings, think about the prospect of losing 100% of your savings.

But there’s almost no question, anyways, that there will be some sort of bailout. The question is, where will the money come from? This is where the Cyprus case could give us some real lessons, if we want to learn them.

Traditionally, the way that governments keep the banking system solvent is by creating more money. Outside of a major crisis, they do this a little bit at a time. The result is that there’s more money to go around, but each dollar is worth a little bit less in terms of what it can get for you in the market. It’s a steady trickle of devaluation so gradual you barely even notice. In Canada, the official goal for the inflation rate is 2% per year. Right now, it’s lower than that. In the past it’s been much higher; during the 1970s, it rose above 10% for a number of years.

Notice, though, that inflation has exactly the same effect on bank account balances as the proposed Cyprus bank tax would. 5% inflation is equal to a 5% tax, except that instead of actually taking money away, it’s just making the existing money worth less. So the inflation associated with printing money, or inflation for any other reason for that matter, is the same as a savings tax. The difference is, inflation affects all money. The Cypriot bank account tax would only affect people who deposited their savings in bank accounts. In practice that’s pretty much everyone, so the net effect would be similar, but as a means of bailing out failed banks, a bank account tax is actually fairer than inflation because you would only suffer in the taxation case to the extent that you’d loaned money to the banks in question.

All that said, even if a savings account tax is the “fairer” option, it’s also a completely unmanageable one. As Cyprus quickly learned, if you tell everyone that 10% of their savings accounts will be confiscated on, say, next Wednesday, then everyone will try to make sure they don’t have any money left in their savings accounts on that particular day. But the banks don’t have the money. So they can’t process all the withdrawals. And you end up with a bank run anyways. It would be hard to implement a savings tax specifically on bank account balances without creating some sort of mass financial panic, and even harder to do it as a one-time-only event, which is what Cyprus has tried to do.

There is another option which seems reasonable to me (and I would be interested to see it discussed by anyone who actually knows anything about business): allow a bank, perhaps upon authorization from the relevant government department, to convert bank account balances into equity shares in the bank. Capped at, say, 10% of the total balance. As far as I can see, this would make it the same loss to account-holders as Cyprus’s proposed bank account tax, except that it would leave the account-holders with something tangible for their loss: an equivalent amount of ownership in the bank.

Under the circumstances, of course, that may not sound terribly attractive to you: who wants to own shares in a Cypriot bank which has already been downgraded to junk status by the bond rating agencies? As unattractive as it might be, I propose this option because (a) the people are probably going to lose at least this much money one way or another anyways, whether it’s to inflation, bankruptcy, or a savings tax; and (b) this is how things normally work when a company goes bankrupt. The people who are owed money come first in line before the people who own stock, and one way of making up the shortfall between what they are owed and what the company actually can give them is made up through ownership.

The result is that the current owners’ shares are worth less, the creditors take on ownership in the ailing company, and hopefully a new management is able to put things back on a sound financial footing. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing, which is what the Cypriots are being offered in the case of a tax. It would be different if the tax was for actual government revenue. In this case my understanding is that the tax is simply being imposed to raise funds for the banking sector, so it’s basically equivalent to just chopping 10% off of everyone’s account balance.

I have stood by the Globe & Mail since I started this blog. You might not have noticed, given all the names I’ve called them over that time, but I have stood by them. When commenter after commenter tells me just to give up on them as an irredeemably right-wing rag, I have always responded that — love them or hate them — the Globe is our national paper of record. Unlike the Toronto Star, which is really just a jumped-up local paper, or the National Post, which really is an irredeemably right-wing rag (and proudly so), the Globe has a long and proud past as a leading institution of critical journalism. That means it’s worth saving.

So I have always said. But I have now reached the end of my longsuffering patience. I continued believing in the principle, if not the practice, of the Globe & Mail when it inexplicably called for strongman government back in 2011. I continued to treat them seriously after they brushed off documented allegations of serial plagiarism by a major columnist in 2012. I went to the trouble of arranging to keep reading an unlimited number of Globe articles after they imposed a paywall. I accepted the fact that the Globe’s editors were resolutely Conservative in their political preferences, and even that they felt free to say so during election campaigns.

When, however, does political bias become mere propaganda? At what point does a newspaper’s ideological and political preferences cease becoming merely necessary editorial flavour and seriously compromise the position of the paper within the fifth estate? At what point does editorial opinion become simply a sad joke?

There’s no one answer to those questions, but for me, the Globe’s inexcusably pro-government editorial on the 2013 budget shows that the line has been decidedly crossed. As a result, at least for the time being, I’m going to follow advice my readers have been giving me for two years. I’m no longer going to be a regular reader of Globe & Mail editorials and comments. It’s not because I’m avoiding publications with different political perspectives than my own. I read those every day. It’s just that I no longer have the time to waste, or any interest, in reading vacuous propaganda outlet that might as well have been written by a hack in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The 2013 budget is, if anything, offensive in its modesty. Even the National Post, which used to be far more pro-conservative than the Globe, pronounced it “disappointing.” The Globe, in contrast, pronounces itself incredibly excited about the budget. This is “Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in full flight,” the Globe’s editors enthuse. The Conservatives are “changing the Canadian government in some profound ways.” It is the latest step in fulfilling “Mr. Harper’s larger vision.” The editorial is even more inexplicably given that over the past couple days the Globe has printed a raft of critical commentaries on the shortcomings and unanswered questions of the new budgetary measures.

What’s offensive about this editorial, to me, isn’t simply that some of its piffling claims can be easily refuted, or even that it is being pro-Conservative about something on which I am firmly (and just as openly) anti-Conservative. It is that the Globe’s editors have gone out of their way to find praiseworthy things to say about the government on subjects about which there really is nothing worth saying at all. At that point, in my opinion, a newspaper crosses the line from being politically biased, which I’m okay with, to being partisan, which I’m not. Put another way, it’s the transition from political to Pravda.

So it’s goodbye to the Globe & Mail, at least for me, at least for a while.

The Globe & Mail singles out three things about the 2013 budget which it apparently feels are especially important and “profound” reforms being implemented by the Harper government.

The first one, incredibly, is the roll-up of CIDA back into the Department of Foreign Affairs. I say “back” because that’s where CIDA used to be. It had to be sent back, says the Globe, because CIDA suffers from a “bureaucratic mindset.” “The nobility of its mission had until now protected it,” says the Globe, but the time for change has come. Funny. That sentiment happens to match by own feelings about the Globe. Of course, says the Globe, there’s a risk that when CIDA is moved into Foreign Affairs, its grants could become politicized, but they say that’s an acceptable risk.

These are incredible claims — and I don’t mean “incredible” in a good way. CIDA’s reputation has just been flipped, Soviet-style. Grants were already political — were the writers just comatose in the run-up to the 2011 election, or what? The notion that CIDA is terribly and unacceptably “bureaucratic” has been conjured out of nowhere to meet the political whims of the day. CIDA’s excessively “bureaucratic” personnel will still be in place, albeit with different stationery and business cards. They will still be answerable to a Cabinet minister — the same Cabinet minister, in fact, since despite the bureaucratic shuffle, there will still apparently be a junior minister for international aid. And they will still be a bureaucracy — only now, they’ll be a bureaucracy within a larger bureaucracy.

Can we expect gushing praise from the Globe every time the government shuffles some offices around, or is this a one-off event? I only ask because if it’s the first of many, we may be in for a lot of incredibly boring editorials in the future. The reality is that it makes relatively little difference where CIDA is housed. Relative to, say, the fact that a ranking member of the federal Cabinet has recently stepped down over allegations of serious violations of the law, to name but one example. So nice when the paper of record has its priorities straight.

The straw that broke the back of my willingness to keep standing by the Globe, though, was buried in the last paragraph, maybe in the hopes that nobody would read far enough to see how embarrassingly completely the Globe has surrendered their editorial integrity:

Critically, the budget lays out a hopeful path to a return to balance in fiscal year 2015-2016.

It’s statements like these that make me lose hope. As I’ve tried to explain, I’m quite willing to read a newspaper that takes political positions I disagree with. Evenpositions I find odious or silly. Then, I’ll write responses indicating why I disagree.But this is not a matter of opinion. Factually, the budget does not contain a new plan to balance the budget in 2015-16. That plan already existed. It has been in place, with some occasional amendments, for years. What happened this week was that the Conservatives’ deficit projection for 2013 ballooned from $10.2 billion to $18.7 billion — in other words, the coming year’s deficit has almost doubled from what they said it would be just one year ago. The Conservatives claim this won’t affect their plans to returned to balanced status in 2015. Whether that’s true or not is debatable, but sweeping their past projections down the memory hole simply won’t cut it. We are $8.5 billion per year behind where the Conservatives said we were last year, and no amount of fawning praise of the government by our increasingly partisan media is going to change that fact.