Would it surprise you to find out that the federal Liberals’ 10-year, $187-billion infrastructure plan has been largely useless so far?

“Really!?,” you ask. “Grotesque overspending by Ottawa has been mostly ineffective? Say it ain’t so.”

Distroscale

But it is so.

We are about one-third of the way through the Liberals’ proposed decade of infrastructure excess and we know three things for sure.

Total new spending was never going to be close to $187 billion. At the beginning, the Liberals simply reannounced $92 billion in infrastructure spending promised by the former Harper government, added $95 billion of their own and – presto! — $187 billion.

The spending since the Liberals took over in 2015 has been so haphazard that even the best fiscal minds in the country cannot say how much of the money spent so far has gone to legitimate infrastructure projects (roads, bridges, telecommunications networks, rail lines and waterways) and how much to Liberal pet projects in swing ridings.

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And, finally, the third thing that can be said with some certainty is that all this tax- and deficit-funded spending has had nowhere near the economic impact the Liberals projected during the 2015 federal campaign. The best guess (and because of the shoddy bookkeeping, all anyone can do is guess) is that the program has had no more than one-third of the stimulus effect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed it would have.

The Liberals insisted that if they could just overspend by $10 billion a year for three years, the new infrastructure those deficits would pay for would boost Canada’s GDP by 0.4% a year or nearly $5 billion annually.

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Instead, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) estimates the maximum amount of stimulus generated by all these buckets and buckets of taxpayer cash has been 0.16% or less than $2 billion. The stimulus effect might even by closer to just $1 billion a year.

Our economy would have been better off leaving the money in Canadians’ pockets and letting them use it for savings or consumer goods.

The Liberals’ infrastructure spending has caused annual deficits of between $20 billion and $30 billion – much larger than the $10 billion promised by Trudeau and his party while campaigning four years ago. And those deficits could last through 2040, not be gone by 2020. Yet that red-ink spending has failed to lift our economy out of stagnation.

While there are pockets of economic despair in Canada (particularly in the oil-dependent West), our national economy has been mediocre. It has been OK, but only OK.

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However, it could have been very much better had the Trudeau government not gone ass-over-apple-cart for new infrastructure spending. Sucking $30 billion or $40 billion out of the economy for questionable government spending over the past three years, in return for at most a couple billion a year in GDP growth, is a very poor investment.

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According to the PBO, there are 32 federal departments or agencies that have been given money to spend in the infrastructure program, but no one entity or cabinet minister that has overall responsibility for where the money is spent. That, of course, means no one who knows where or how the money is being spent.

The chaos is so complete that former Budget Officer Kevin Page, who now heads the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa, admits that data is “so lacking” his institute was unable even to do a rough analysis.

The trouble with people who support the Liberals and Trudeau is that results matter far less to them than appearances. Throwing money at a goal is proof of caring.

And caring is Priority No. 1. So actually stimulating the economy is less important than appearing to care.