A Fish Called Carney

Years ago, when I was a national radio host at CBC, they sent me to a comedy writing workshop.

It was two days long and was given by Robert McKee — a legend in the science of screenplay writing. The first day — the whole day — we spent watching the film A Fish Called Wanda. We’d watch one beat, he’d stop, and he’d break it all into pieces on giant whiteboards: the protagonist’s desire, the constellation of character pulls. It was riveting.

Before that day, I thought I already knew how to tell a story. I’d written scripts, produced radio, done the whole “trust your instinct” thing.

Then McKee just walks in with this brick of a book and says, actually, no. Good storytelling comes down to one thing: Momentum.

Values on screen

Mark Carney this week announced his first budget as prime minister. We had a sense of what was coming when King Charles came out to read the Throne Speech, but now we know the line items.

• The headline was clear: this is a budget built on a big dependence on spending. $25B for housing. $30B for defence. $51B for infrastructure.

• The money, of course, will come from cuts. 10% reduction in the public sector, among other things (that’s 16,000 fewer jobs there in the next year).

• And it comes with a big deficit. Lower than what some economists predicted, but still big.

Values on screen

A federal budget is, at its core, a story.

It’s choices: Stakes and real conflict. The danger isn’t abstract. It has a name, a border, and history with us.

We show what we value by what story beats we protect. And that means hard choices about what to cut.

McKee has this theory — good audiences don’t care about perfection. They care about change. They care that something happens and that the story shifts.

They want to see the protagonist want something, hit a wall, and then decide who they’re going to be when the wall doesn’t move.

Character.

Momentum or comfort?

We can’t fix everything. When a government pretends it can, or an opposition party yells about how it should, you end up with a mushy middle where nothing gets addressed well enough to change anything.

People feel that. They don’t always name it in policy language, they just know the story doesn’t add up.

You can think this budget spends too much. I do. You can feel protective of the programs you think are at risk. I do too.

But one thing I learned from that workshop is that every time the story slows, the answer isn’t to cling to what was familiar. The answer is to pivot. To create momentum.

A federal budget isn’t a screenplay, but it still asks the same question:

What are we holding on to because we care, and what are we holding on to because we’re too scared to let the story shift?