Article content continued

That hardly exhausts the list of ways the document misleads. What is a revenue and what an expenditure seems to be of little consequence to its authors: spending cuts are sometimes called tax increases, tax cuts are sometimes labelled spending increases, and so on. Actually, nothing is called a spending increase: indeed, the word “spending” does not appear in the plan, except with reference to “Harper” spending.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Rather, it is referred to throughout as “investments.” This familiar political euphemism is here stretched to cover a passel of increased payouts to favoured interest groups: seniors’ benefits, EI benefits, veterans’ benefits, the CBC, and so on. Still, one thing does emerge quite clearly from the exercise. Whatever else the Liberal plan is about, it is not about infrastructure.

That may not be what you have heard. You will no doubt have been told that the Liberals, unlike the other parties, would go into deficit, but that it was all right, because they would only be borrowing to invest — and not just in the meaningless political sense of the term, but really and truly: in things like roads and bridges and public transit.

This, the Liberals have asserted repeatedly, would not only be good for the economy from a short-term, stimulative perspective (to “kick start” it, as Justin Trudeau keeps saying), but as importantly, in terms of increasing the economy’s long-run productive capacity. This wasn’t the kind of old-fashioned deficit spending that went out in the 1970s. It was new, it was different — a bold departure from stale orthodoxies. So it is somewhat disarming to find the party’s own costing document confessing that this is not actually true.