After hundreds of budget promises, Liberals must get them through bureaucracy

OTTAWA — Former policy advisers and senior government officials say the Liberal government is sure to encounter immense bureaucratic congestion as it looks to execute on its sprawling 724-page budget, part of a chronic issue that could threaten the Trudeau government’s lofty ambitions.

The lengthy document tabled by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday targets a wide range of issues, laying out hundreds of new programs and initiatives for everything from artificial intelligence to higher supports for senior citizens. Now those hundreds of plans will need to be divided among the departments and crammed through the bureaucratic machinery of government, which can take months if not well over a year to complete.

“Government is big, it’s complex, nothing moves fast in the best of times,” said Robert Asselin, senior vice-president of policy at the Business Council of Canada and senior adviser to former finance minister Bill Morneau between 2015 and 2017.

The 2021 budget introduces no less than 270 new programs and initiatives, according to Asselin’s count. Given that past Liberal promises have repeatedly fallen behind schedule — like their $187-billion infrastructure spending plans, or their pledge to end boil-water advisories on First Nations’ reserves — it seems likely that programs will similarly fall through the cracks in the supercharged 2021 budget, several people said.

“Let’s be honest, this government is not best known for its execution and implementation,” Asselin said. “How is it going to roll out 270 measures? What’s the plan for that?”

His concerns, among those of others, come as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to seize a “once in a generation opportunity” to widen the social safety net and transition toward a green economy.

But among the top concerns raised by former advisers was the sweeping nature of the Liberal budget, which declined to prioritize a few top initiatives that would provide a clear pathway toward achieving those aims. It instead ascribes equal value to a long list of social and environmental pressures, which observers say could translate into an unfocussed government approach.

“They’re saying everything’s important, everything’s urgent, everything needs to be done,” Asselin said. “But then the implementation can be very, very chaotic.”

Federal budgets are always followed by a frenzy of media attention that dies off a few days after the document is tabled. But for everyone in government the real work has just begun: money is divided up, spending plans are submitted to Treasury Board, and various departments haggle over who is responsible for executing what detail.

Uncertainty around how programs will be implemented, or whether they are implemented at all, is often lost on the public, said Sean Speer, fellow at the Public Policy Forum and former senior adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And the rambling nature of the latest budget will only add to the annual bottleneck.

“Governments that prioritize everything ultimately prioritize nothing,” he said.

Meanwhile, public trust in governments’ ability to execute on its plans has waned, he said, driven in particular by the sometimes haphazard way in which federal and provincial governments have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think people have reason to be skeptical,” Speer said.

That skepticism could present deeper troubles for the government down the road, should it become clear that the Trudeau government’s ambitions prove too unwieldy for the public service.

“That is honestly the biggest threat to the Trudeau government agenda,” he said. “Not withstanding the ambitions and intentions, do we have the state capacity to deliver?”

Freeland’s flagship $30-billion national childcare plans, which would be spent over five years, is easily the highestprofile program to be met with doubts over implementation, largely because it still requires sign-off from the provinces.

Don Drummond, professor at Queen’s University and a former senior official in the Department of Finance, said the childcare program “could take years” to be developed, and may not ever come to fruition.

But he said those same uncertainties exist for any number of the hundreds of Liberal promises.

One $275-million promise to support Indigenous languages, for example, will be welcomed by First Nations, but will require a lot of grunt work to find the necessary teachers or to write a proper curriculum. Another program seeks to unleash an army of 28,000 trainers to assist businesses with digitization, but specific plans around how the program will function have yet to be determined, Small Business Minister Mary Ng acknowledged in committee earlier this week.

Officials said the need for execution is particularly vital following the 2021 budget, as Canada begins to come out of a yearlong recession and as federal and provincial governments continue to pile on new debts.

Economists are broadly in agreement that current deficits are sustainable, but the rapid assumption of new debt nonetheless puts pressure on the federal government to continue achieving a certain level of economic growth well into the future to cover its costs.