This report pretty well epitomizes why most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around deficit numbers.
That's not a knock on my colleague Bill Curry, who reports the latest budget information entirely properly. It's just that there are so many numbers, and such big ones, that it's hard for the general public to intuitively grasp what it all means.
The deficit of $39.4-billion through the first nine months of the current fiscal year shows the shortfall for 2009-10 will be higher than Jim Flaherty predicted in his last budget. But it may also be lower than the $56-billion that he predicted in the fall.
Is Canada doing better than expected? Worse than expected? I'd be surprised if many people out there have a clear sense. And it would be even more surprising if most people felt strongly about $10-billion this way or that.
That sounds crazy, but pretty well any public opinion expert will tell you that it's the smaller numbers that resonate, not the bigger ones. Past a certain point, the numbers are just noise.
That's why opposition politicians tend to focus on marginal stuff that's barely an accounting error in the total budget - a questionable grant here, an overly generous salary there, and so on. When it's a question of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's a little more relatable.
It's also why governments are all struggling to figure out just how much public appetite there is for aggressive deficit-fighting. Since most governments are going to have large shortfalls for many years to come, how much political value is there in each billion you take off?
There's all kinds of real value there, because the size of year-to-year deficits affects debt burden, and that will affect discretionary spending down the road. But all the finger-pointing over the mere scale of the number is pretty useless unless you're able to compellingly explain the consequences.