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Photo by Justin Tang/CP

But of course any feeling of amusement soon dies when we start to consider the implications. It isn’t just the cost, though that is worth a moment or two of outrage: while $212,000 is a mere drop in the $305-billion ocean of federal spending, the kind of breezy contempt for the public purse it reveals — the notion, not just that those in power are entitled to spend such absurd amounts to such absurd purposes, but that the expenditure is even likely to achieve its objective — is a small but useful example of how we got here. It is out of thousands of such drops that an ocean is made.

But even if it were a fraction of that amount, it would still be objectionable. The comparison has been made to the $600 previous Conservative governments supposedly spent on their budget covers, through the use of stock photos and such. Leave aside that the Harper Conservatives in fact spent millions promoting their “Economic Action Plans”: in principle, why should the cover of a budget cost a dollar more than the price of the paper needed to print it? How much does it cost to stamp the word “Budget” on it? What, beyond that, is actually required?

It isn’t the document obviously, that’s the problem. It’s the underlying attitude of which it is an expression: that every twitch of government should be considered as an opportunity to manipulate the public — that the symbols and practices of a great and democratic state, hard won through centuries of struggle, should be reduced to a billboard for the party in power — that every last shred of institutional dignity should be pureed into the same mush of adspeak that now envelopes all of Canadian politics — that absolutely bloody everything that can be politicized should be.