MARCH MADNESS SPENDING OF GOVERNMENT

   March Madness keeps much of Ottawa up at night. No, not the sports tournament! I’m talking about the spending binge that happens every March as federal government departments urgently try to get money out the door before the start of the new fiscal year on April 1.
  March Madness has long been criticized. Spending money for the sake of spending money is not a productive or transparent way of using Canadians’ money — just because you have the money in your budget does not mean it needs to be spent on superfluous items.
But what is March Madness? Does it actually happen? Can it be proved?
   A CBC article in April 2018 lamented the “return of [the] ‘March Madness’ budget rush” as the government placed a rush order for 31,000 smartphones. It defined March Madness as a “long-observed phenomenon in Ottawa which sees federal departments quickly spend all of their remaining annual budgets in the last month of the fiscal year to avoid losing the cash altogether in the following budget — a use-it-or-lose-it strategy.”