A budget for busy, busy Liberals.

I must be getting old — I am getting old, we all are — but I got tired just reading the table of contents of Tuesday’s federal budget. Housing, training, retirement, high-speed internet, innovation, reconciliation, health, veterans, research, justice, the arts, even tax breaks for digital newspaper subscriptions. You think maybe there’s an election coming? The list goes on and on, eight pages long. That’s in a document of 282 pages, not counting annexes. When your table of contents is almost three per cent of your document, you know you’ve got a busy document.

Busy, busy, busy is the theme of this budget, which is appropriate since busy, busy, busy is what modern governments do. I count 174 different spending initiatives. That doesn’t include another 19 taken since the fall economic statement (amounting to $3.93 billion) for a total of 193 items. The Liberal Red Book of 2015 included 325 separate promises — I counted — not all of which have been broken, so things could be worse. But on budget eve Monday how many Canadians believed Canada was imperfect in 193 ways?

We call this process “budgeting” but it has no relation to what normal people understand by that term. In our family’s budgeting we’re wondering whether to keep our telephone land line. Many Canadians have gone through a similar exercise. What are the costs and what are the benefits? Is this something we really need to keep spending money on? In the federal budget, by contrast, the thinking is: What’s the problem and how much spending does it morally deserve? Or even worse: How much money do we want to be seen spending on it?

Any consideration of an actual budget constraint, of what used to be called “budget discipline,” is minimal. The budget plan reports that since the fall economic statement the government’s budgetary situation has improved by fully $4.8 billion. Hmm. How should we respond to that? I know, let’s round up and spend $5.0 billion. Thus despite the lowest unemployment rate in Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s lifetime, the budget deficit actually increases this fiscal year, from $19.6 billion to $19.8 billion, departing even further for even longer from the government’s 2015 promise to keep it to $10 billion (which the finance minister signally failed to explain in remarks during the budget lockup). The next fiscal year the deficit actually rises again, albeit only slightly.

If you keep chiselling away at your society’s imperfections with hundreds of initiatives every budget, you can hope that maybe it eventually produces a more perfect society. But you can be sure it produces a much bigger government. With accretion after accretion added year after year, government grows like coral. Actual coral is under threat from global warming. But global warming, among many other perceived social problems, is causing the coral that is government to grow out of control.

Literally out of control.

Consider page 36 of the Fiscal Plan, which appears in a section of the document called “Horizontal Skills Review.” You might think horizontal skills have to do with sex workers or maybe mechanics sliding under the car to work on the muffler or transmission. It turns out “horizontal” actually modifies “review” and refers to the government’s recent examination of more than 106 programs it delivers across 30 departments to promote skills development. You read that correctly: 106 programs.

The graphic artist working on this section of the budget can’t be a Liberal: it’s dominated by a giant “106+” in about 100-point font. The budget tells us the horizontal review concluded Canada has a “robust suite” of programs. “Robust suite” is bureaucratese for “administrative jungle so impenetrable we’re going to have to provide guides for Canadians intrepid and desperate enough to enter it.”

It goes on: “Targeted changes could be made to help Canadians more easily navigate the programs and supports they need.” They “could”? Ya think? When there are 106+ programs?

The government says it wants to “improve how programs show results so that decision-makers can better identify and invest in ‘what works’.” I know the minister of finance doesn’t do the department’s punctuation but quotes around “what works” are disconcerting. Ordinarily, you use quotes for new and unfamiliar or dubious and questionable concepts. But the search for “what works” is the whole mandate here. How do you discover what works? By constant review and reassessment. In that respect, it’s also not encouraging that the document says the recent review “provided an opportunity to reflect on successes.” Reflecting on your successes is how you figure out what works? Any innovator I’ve ever read says you learn most from your failures. But of course governments don’t want to discuss their failures.

Unless, of course, they’re the failures of a previous government. In this regard, I do like a couple of lines in budget table A5.2, which show the money saved by ditching the children’s fitness and arts tax credit and the public transit tax credit ($250 million and $205 million, respectively, this fiscal year).

Nothing against kids or public transit but these tax credits mainly rewarded people who were already spending on the targeted activities. (The same will be true for entirely analogous tax credits for subscribing to digital newspapers, but since that’s a Liberal initiative it presumably is immune to failing in the same way.)

It’s understandable that a government wouldn’t dwell on its own errors. But only adding, never subtracting is how we’ll end up with 106+ programs for every public policy goal.