Budget Barbie can't do two things at once.

The Shiny Pony is taking at least a two year break on that ever-so-difficult-because-it-involves-numbers paper-like write down budget sort of things.

A senior government official told The Globe and Mail that March has been ruled out as a window for unveiling the budget, which will have to address the unprecedented economic and health crises brought on by the coronavirus.

 

The last time the government presented a budget was on March 19, 2019. A federal website lists budget dates as far back as 1968. During that period, there has never been a gap of more than two years between budgets until now.

As an aside, what's with the creepy "Year Zero starts with the election of Pierre" attitude to posting budgets? More critically, how bad at journalism does Globe and Mail columnist Bill Curry have to be to put in a weasely statement about "what the federal website shows". It would have taken Curry two extra clicks to get to the charming CTV News story recounting the 1957 budget, or to the Fraser Institute's Livio Di Matteo's report titled A Federal Fiscal History: Canada, 1867-2017 [pdf] which discusses how StatsCan only started publishing budgets in the late 60s:

The basic sources for the data in this study are relatively few. For the period from 1867 to 1975, there is heavy reliance on Section H–Government Finance of the second edition of Historical Statistics of Canada (Leacy, 1983). There is an overlapping set of coinciding data from 1966 to the present from the Department of Finance’s Federal Fiscal Reference Tables. Figures on the federal debt are from two sources: assorted volumes of the Canada Yearbook for the period 1867 to 1965 and then, once again, the Federal Fiscal Reference Tables for the period 1966 to the near present. 

But that budgets existed before then takes another 20 minutes or so to find the (archived) Library of Parliament article about the "new shoe" tradition which looks at every budget speech since Confederation and looks for contemporary articles about the shoe wearing and nevermind that's not really important.

What is important is that there were federal budgets during the Second World War, but the "crisis" caused by a minor ChiCom bioweapon is too much for the 2021 Liberal Party of Canada to bear.

It's disingenuous of course: Shiny Pony's government has time to draft legislation to take away your fundamental human right to gun ownership (no relation to the Wuhan Flu), push false claims that Residential Schools were wrong (no relation to the Wuhan Flu or indeed reality), and their ridiculous attempt to ban single-use plastics (which actually makes the Wuhan Flu more dangerous).

In the past Canada could do an annual budget while fighting for the heart and soul of Europe (spoiler alert, everybody lost), but now with a woman running finance it's not possible to add up all those numbers in a mere 365731 days. Is it because, like most women, she's bad at math? Or is it because, like all progressives, she's bad at math?