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In recent decades we’ve been able to raise incomes, not by making each worker more productive, but by putting a lot more people to work: we had the fastest labour force growth in the western world. Latterly we were given an additional boost from high oil prices. Neither of these apply any longer. So we really have no alternative but to get serious about raising productivity.

The problem with Canada’s economy, then, is not so much that growth is below potential as that potential growth itself is less than it might be. Short-term demand stimulus won’t help that. But investments that enhanced the economy’s productive capacity — aggregate supply — might.

Except only a fraction of the Liberals’ planned new spending — about a third — is for “infrastructure,” much of which is earmarked, not for the sort of projects that are acknowledged to have potential payoffs in higher productivity, but for “social” and “green” infrastructure. Even if you excluded them, the likelihood that such politicized “investments” will be subject to genuine tests of risk and return must be rated as slim.

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But never mind. Assume the government means what it says. To reinforce the message, the government announced it had appointed an “advisory council on economic growth,” headed by management consultant Dominic Barton.

To take this seriously, you are obliged to absorb two rather charming assumptions. One, that sluggish growth is a problem that just cropped up, something the party has not had time to consider before this. And two, that all that has been missing in our approach to this problem to date has been the report of another advisory council.