A former CBC radio host applies screenwriting theory to Prime Minister Mark Carney's budget, arguing that budgets are stories about choices and stakes. The budget allocates $25 billion for housing, $30 billion for defence, and $51 billion for infrastructure, funded by a 10% public sector cut. The real question: which policies survive out of care, and which out of fear.
Chapters
Years ago, when I was a national radio host at CBC, they sent me to a comedy writing workshop. It was 2 days long. It was done by Robert McKee, a legend in the science of screenplay writing. The first day, the whole day, we spent watching the film A Fish Called Wanda. We'd watch one beat, then he'd stop, and then he would break it all into pieces on giant whiteboards. The protagonist's desire, the constellation of character poles, it was riveting. And before that day, I thought I knew how to tell a story. I'd written scripts, I'd done the whole— trust your instincts thing. Then McKee walks in with this brick of a book and says, actually, no. Good storytelling comes down to one thing: momentum. Mark Carney today announced his first budget as Prime Minister. We had a sense of what was coming when King Charles came out to read the throne speech, but now we know the line items. And the headline is pretty clear: this is a budget built on spending. $25 billion for housing, $30 billion for defence, $51 billion for infrastructure. The money, of course, coming from cuts. 10% reduction in the public sector. That's 16,000 fewer jobs there in the next year. And it comes with a big deficit. Lower than what some economists had predicted, but still big. A federal budget is, at its core, a story. It's choices. Stakes. Real conflict. And this danger is not abstract. It has a name. And a border. It shares history with us. We show what we value by the story beats we choose to protect, and that sometimes means hard choices about what to cut. McKee has this theory that good audiences don't care about perfection. They care about movement. They care about change. They care that something happens, that the story shifts. They want to see the protagonist hit something, a wall, and then decide who they're going to be when the wall doesn't move. Character. We can't fix everything in a budget. When a government pretends it can, or an opposition party yells about how it should, you end up with this mushy middle ground where nothing gets addressed well enough to change anything. People feel that. They may not have the policy language for it, but they know the story doesn't add up. You can think this budget spends too much. I do. You can feel protective of the programs you think are at risk. I do too. But the one thing I learned from that workshop: every time the story slows down, the answer is not to cling to what was familiar. The answer is to pivot, to create momentum. A federal budget isn't a screenplay, but it still asks the same question: What are we holding on to because we care? And what are we holding on to because we're scared to let the story shift?
