The Liberals have delivered a forgettable budget, again

Since 2015, Trudeau’s progressive instincts have only weakened

The current federal government came to power promising one of the most progressive eras in our history.

It has not entirely failed in that promise. But with each successive annual budget since it came to power in 2015, the Trudeau government’s progressive instincts have weakened.

The continuation of that trend in this week’s budget should have Grits worried that their party is losing its soul.

In their budget this week, the Liberals proposed advances in skills upgrading, housing affordability, pension protection, relief from high prescription drug costs and financial support for buyers of electric vehicles.

And yet, in each of these initiatives, the Grits propose to tackle the country’s challenges with timidity rather than conviction.

As a matter of official party policy, the Liberals have long supported universal pharmacare and daycare.

And Justin Trudeau came to power on the promise of building a sufficient amount of new affordable and social housing so that every Canadian would have high-quality shelter.

Trudeau also pledged to significantly increase spending on infrastructure, to replace several thousand “structurally deficient” or functionally obsolete highway bridges and decrepit schoolhouses almost a century old.

But with this week’s budget, Canadians remain deprived of the universal pharmacare and daycare that have long been mainstays of Europe’s social safety net.

The budget is silent on daycare, whose steep cost helps account for Canada’s pitifully low birth rate, on the genderpay gap and on retrofitting the country’s inventory of buildings to make them energy efficient in the fight on global warming.

That last priority enjoys such widespread acceptance that this week’s budget is one of the few places where it