It’s no wonder the Liberals are in some political hot water over their handing of $50 million to a Mastercard project.

So often when the federal government gives money to profitable companies, the Conservatives raise the alarm, pouncing with accusations of corporate welfare and helping their friends.

We heard it loud and clear when, before the last election, the Liberals gave $12 million to Loblaws to retrofit their fridges. We heard it again when they gave BlackBerry $40 million a year ago now to boost development of software for autonomous vehicles. We hear it increasingly around the $950 million spent on the “superclusters” strategy to foster a competitive buzz in some industries.

Now, Conservative MPs and the various candidates positioning themselves to lead the party, are crying foul over the federal move to partner with Mastercard to open a cyber security research centre in Vancouver.

“Trudeau gave 50,000,000 of YOUR money to a credit card company?! All the while household debt is on the rise & Canadians are struggling to pay off the balance of their credit card at month’s end,” Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer tweeted last week.

Whatever the merit of such criticism, there’s a reason the Liberals are so vulnerable to it: Justin Trudeau can’t seem to offer a compelling justification for his strategy, even though there appears to actually be method to his madness.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week that the Mastercard money was about job creation. Others have said it was all about middle class prosperity. Meanwhile, the initial announcement of the project was made by Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains at the ski-resort town of Davos, Switzerland — hardly a middle-class mecca. There, the messaging was all about technology and connecting safely to the internet.

They’re probably all simultaneously right — the government money for the Mastercard cybersecurity centre and Loblaws and BlackBerry are partly about enticing companies to research and innovate in Canada and create good jobs here, while also improving our technological edge.

But there’s a bigger, more persuasive case to be made. So why isn’t Ottawa making it?

After all, Ottawa is now pursuing a vision that countries around the world have pursued in recent years to great effect: a growing belief that governments need to be directly involved — heavy-handed, even — in the private sector in order for the countries to be competitive and prosperous.

Since the turn of the millennium, Canada’s governments systematically withdrew from active participation in business, opting instead to stay out of their way, negotiate free-trade agreements, facilitate competition, scale back regulation, lower corporate taxes, and indirectly support innovation through tax credits for research and development. Funding for aerospace and the auto sector were the exception, not the rule.

But after a couple of decades of a light-handed approach, Canada’s productivity is still stalled and still paltry compared to other countries. We have loads of education and training, and as individuals are often a font of new ideas, but we have a hard time packaging and marketing our innovation.

And so policy-makers, based on the successes of other countries and the recommendations of our own private sector, are beginning to pick winners and put money directly into companies that complement the government’s aims. No more neutral government when it comes to economic development.

That kind of thinking manifests itself in the $2-billion Strategic Innovation Fund, which has boosted 65 different projects since 2017 — including the Mastercard and BlackBerry grants — in the name of pushing successful firms to anchor their research and development efforts in Canada. It shows up in the various clean technology funds such as the Low Carbon Economy Fund — the source of the $12 million for Loblaws — with the goal of spawning new ideas that will cut emissions and “encourage clean growth” at the same time.

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The trouble is, the Liberals forgot to sell the Canadian population on the idea, and the Conservatives have usurped that conversation and turned it into one of cronyism and corporate welfare — even though some of the activist thinking predates the Liberal government and was evident in the widely-read Jenkins Report commissioned by Stephen Harper in 2012.

There’s a factoid that a Bains spokesperson eventually coughed up about the Strategic Investment Fund: for every dollar the federal government has spent, the private sector has invested $21 on those initiatives.

That hints at potential, but the government needs to do more than hint.

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