Just before prime minister Stephen Harper shut down Parliament until March, the Commons finance committee concluded its annual pre-budget hearings. The committee recommended that the parliamentary budget officer be given more resources and autonomy, as befits a true watchdog.

That a senior committee such as finance — chaired by a senior Tory, James Rajotte, and effectively government controlled — would recommend more power for someone who has been a royal pain in the prime ministerial posterior would have been a major story just a few years ago.

However, few on Parliament Hill even noticed, just as few inside the Ottawa Queensway really care about the pre-budget hearings anymore. Finance is now like all the other committees on Parliament Hill these days: it no longer matters.

Anyone with an interest in what will be in the March 4 budget, or any future budget, should be mindful of these changes.

But you may not hear much about the budget until it happens. That’s because the Tories have been quietly proroguing various parts of Parliament since they took office in 2006.

There is still a lengthy pre-budget process, however. The Tories have just internalized it. The method they are using operates mostly in the dark. It consists of a quietly built system of sectoral caucuses of Tory MPs who deal with everything from aboriginal affairs to the auto industry.

They meet in secret and listen to citizen delegations on an invitation-only basis. When Rajotte is not chairing the Commons standing committee on finance, he is the chair of the internal finance caucus.

For the past three years, this caucus has been doing a separate set of pre-budget hearings with trade associations and corporations the government wants to hear from.

That way, those who have been given a seat in the inner sanctum will be more likely to support the government publicly on Budget Day.

Ottawa during the Harper era has become the land of the quid pro quo. Put more bluntly: if you don’t have a seat at the fiscal table, you are more likely to be on the menu of coming spending cuts and rollbacks of stimulus measures.

So, when Stockwell Day, the newly minted president of the Treasury Board, said Tory MPs were polling Canadians on what spending measures they would like to see cut, he wasn’t just mouthing a sound bite.

Just as the federal Liberals, who started the pre-budget hearings in 1993, followed a very deliberate strategy leading up to elimination of the deficit, the Tories are doing the same thing. Their goal is to wean the country off stimulus spending and ultimately balance the budget.

When the Liberals took power after the 1993 election, there was much ballyhoo about starting pre-budget hearings so that all sectors of the Canadian economy could participate in the development of the federal budget.

In reality, the Grits were looking for a way to manufacture public consent for the draconian measures they knew would be needed to get rid of a huge structural deficit. Why scare the heck out of the public, when a private-sector economist will do that for you?

The result was that the public not only expected tough love; they demanded it.

Machiavelli would have approved.

The Tories don’t have the luxury of a parliamentary majority as the Liberals did. In addition, the Tories have boxed themselves in by promising not to raise taxes or cut transfer payments to the provinces, through the strategic fiction that economic growth alone will take care of the deficit.

Given the current volatility of the electorate after the recent prorogation fiasco, these are promises the Tories dare not break — at least, not right now.

Hence, a different playbook.

There is no way any political party can make sustained progress toward a balanced budget in the current minority environment. As a result, things will have to be done in instalments.

The Tories are following a strategy of assuring their core voters that this round of cuts won’t hurt them. Only arts groups and “elitist organizations” such as the Canadian Council of Learning — which has already lost 100% of its federal funding — need worry about what is coming down the budget pipe.

Although this strategy may be only nibbling away at the deficit, the Tories, like their predecessors, understand the art of illusion. They will be able, with the help of a crisis-hungry media, to blow these cuts into something much more significant than they actually are.

@page_break@If a majority government continues to elude the Tories, and they continue to govern with a minority, watch for some borrowing from the playbook of the Harris government of the mid-1990s in Ontario. Like that government, the federal Tories are masters of the “wedge issue.” They will find someone to blame for the necessity for draconian fiscal policy.

Who — or what — might the candidates be? Here’s a partial list of the likely candidates: civil servants and their generous pensions, NGOs and arts groups.

One could even call this fiscal theatre. IE