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It isn’t that many of the recipient companies are also hefty donors to the Ontario Liberal party, or that the distribution of grants, as the Post’s analysis shows, tends to skew toward the most hotly contested ridings.

It isn’t the bizarre complexity of the scheme, comprising, as the expert panel’s report found, about 65 separate funds delivered through nine departments, as well as an archipelago of quasi-autonomous “innovation hubs” and institutes.

And it isn’t the secrecy surrounding the report itself, though the panel chair, business professor Margaret Dalziel, had been assured it would be made public when she took the job. Completed in 2014, it was only finally released when the Post’s Ashley Csanady started asking questions.

None of these really gets at the policy’s fundamental weakness. The program could be run at a fraction of the cost — it could be a model of transparency, untainted by patronage or corruption, with streamlined administration and clear objectives and published metrics — and it would still be a silly waste of money. No, worse than that, a harmful, distortionary waste of money.

The program would be no less harmful if, instead of giving most of the money to large, profitable corporations, it gave it all to small, failing ones. At best — if, say, it were buried in the ground — it has no effect. But if it has any effect, it is to steer capital and labour away from their most efficient uses, to those that are by definition less efficient; away from those dictated by costs and returns, and the willingness of consumers to buy the product in question, and toward those dictated by the availability of subsidy.