Well, it’s that time of year again. Stakeholder and interest groups are scurrying about Parliament Hill with their briefs and policy papers on what they would like to see in the 2016 federal budget.

The activity is all part of what has become known as the pre-budget process, even though the budget document probably was wrapped up by the first week of February.

Think of the lobbying as a useful fiction for those in the political sector – just as Christmas is for retailers. But instead of moving merchandise and giving Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) a bump, the pre-budget process is all about what Walter Lippmann, the great mass media theorist, called the “manufacture of consent,” with Liberal MP Wayne Easter, chairman of the Commons finance committee, giving out goodies like a department-store Santa.

Governments need this pre-budget process to prepare public expectation and hone their messages for the big day. This year, Trudeau the Younger especially needs this year’s process to pre-sell a deficit that could be as large as $30 billion for the sake of job-creating infrastructure projects.

Even the Opposition needs this useful fiction to get the voters riled up in advance of all the ugly things the Opposition will claim to be in the budget. And the government relations industry is busy cranking out policy briefs and strategic advice on behalf of clients.

So, an effective pre-budget process now should really be aimed at the 2017 federal budget, not 2016’s.

Here is why. The massive stimulus spending of Budget 2016 is likely to give the economy a boost – but in the short term. Canada actually needs a long-term growth plan to break out of the mediocre GDP numbers we have seen since the 2008-09 recession.

And that long-term growth plan – or, at the very least, the beginnings of one – should be in the 2017 federal budget.

That we can’t continue to be dependent on the petroleum industry, with its boom and bust cycles, for long-term economic health should be pretty clear. The price of oil will be subject to too many variables beyond our borders.

Plus, there is a long list of persistent inhibitors to economic growth that we need to address – an aging population, poor productivity, low innovation, declining trade and limited access to the world’s largest markets. More innovative thinking is the key for dealing with all of these.

For starters, governments at all levels need to nudge Canadian business away from the tyranny of short-term thinking. As Tiff Macklem, the former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, notes, tax cuts and other policies designed to help the private sector accumulate cash don’t result in increased investment in the economy because nobody is thinking past their quarterly numbers. Our obsession with the short term is a threat to our economic growth. Both government and business – especially business – need to widen their horizons.

Perhaps our short-term obsession is linked partially to the recently ended commodity binge. Certainly the commodity binge distracted us from our longer-term economic growth problems.

Now is the time for savvy company directors and wise investors to resist short-term gyrations of the market and build solid companies that will continue to grow from cycle to cycle. Ottawa needs to alter tax policies to help rather than hinder small and medium-sized companies to become large companies, as John Manley, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, argues.

Macklem and Kevin Lynch, formerly the Clerk of the Privy Council, recently argued in the Globe and Mail that Canada needs a long-term growth plan that uses our fiscal capacity wisely, strengthens foreign investor confidence and tackles the structural impediments to healthy economic growth: “A growth plan would provide a longer-term road map for business, investors and the provinces as to how, working better together, we can revitalize Canadian growth for the long haul.”

Shovel-ready infrastructure projects, which will dominate the 2016 budget, will do only what they are designed to: provide short-term stimulus. A solid economic growth plan will help us to get past the boom-and-bust cycles of oil and help us prepare for the fourth industrial revolution and all its disruption. As soon as this year’s budget is out of the news, intelligent – and perhaps less political – discussion should begin on what should be in 2017’s.

© 2016 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.