For the federal Department of Finance, Tuesday (May 2) was a chance to take a turn in the limelight. With national attention focused on the first budget of the Conservative government, it seemed, and was, a major event. But for government agencies like Parks Canada, the most important fiscal moment of the year had already come and gone.

“Our main budget is covered in the main estimates, which were tabled two weeks ago,” said Mike Fay, Parks Canada’s chief administrative officer and the man in charge of financial planning. With the agency’s corporate plan having already passed muster, all that might have happened Tuesday was the addition of new funding.

“In last year’s budget, the recapitalization money was added,” Fay recalled, referring to a commitment to increase funding for capital improvements over the subsequent five years.

Fay, who spoke to the Fitzhugh a few hours before Finance Minister Jim Flaherty presented his plans to Parliament, had no indication of what to expect.

“This is a very closely guarded secret,” he said. “In our main budget we saw pretty well what we’d expected.”

The last major budgetary crunch for Parks Canada came in the mid-1990s, when a comprehensive review of federal spending led to deep funding cuts. While the numbers are slowly recovering, the biggest ongoing issue for Parks is a lack of inflation protection in the agency budget.

“Our big challenge is sustainability,” Fay said. “We have had no inflation protection for the last 15 years. We do have that for our collective agreements, but not for anything else.” 

As a largely operational arm of the government, increasing costs for fuel and vehicle maintainence, for example, make a major difference to Parks’ bottom line, and the base budget hasn’t been boosted in some time.

Even before the big speech on Tuesday, Fay and his colleagues at national office had begun to portion out their overall budget to the various field units. Every subsection of the agency submits an annual business plan that is reviewed either at the national or regional levels.

“Every field unit superintendent looks at their management plans and corporate direction and the national corporate plan to come up with a business plan,” Fay said. While the sheer number of field units makes it impossible for the national executive to review every plan on an annual basis, they do review these documents once every two years. This year, the Jasper business plan was approved by the executive board and CEO Alan Latourelle in February.

“We spend our time looking at the changes, not every single nickel,” Fay said.

While the mountain national parks (including Jasper and Banff) are managed as a unit when it comes to gate revenues, there are no plans to shift the budgeting process to a regional level.

“The situations in each field unit are so different and each Park needs to have the ability to make their choices as much as possible,” Fay said.

While the budget speech contained no major surprises for Parks, the devil, as they say, may turn out to be in the details. Towards the end of the speech, Flaherty revealed that the government would begin a review of its “expenditure management 

system”, and asking the Treasury Board to identify $1 billion in savings for the next two fiscal years. As these two initiatives are scheduled for 

completion by the fall they will not make any difference to Parks Canada in the current fiscal year. As for the future, it’s all speculation, Fay said.

“I don’t know. Anything is possible.”