Give Finance Minister Joe Oliver an A for consistency, at the very least. In his pre-election budget he bulled ahead with all the bad ideas his government has brought forward in the past six months, and added another one for good measure.

As endlessly advertised, he proudly proclaimed that the federal budget is now balanced after six years of deficit spending: “This budget is written in black ink.” Just as predictably, the surplus is razor-thin — only $1.4 billion on total spending of almost $289 billion, or barely half a percentage point. Even to get to that he had to raid the government’s rainy-day “contingency” fund, but no matter. The political point is established.

This budget locks in measures that may well prove popular with key voting groups come election day in October but don’t benefit most Canadians or address such pressing issues as high youth unemployment and the need for affordable child care, and aren’t good for the health of government finances in the long run.

Exhibit A is the government’s attractively named “Family Tax Cut,” better known as income-splitting for couples with kids under 18. As critics from both right and left have noted, it won’t do anything for fully 85 per cent of households. Many families that could use the most help — such as single-parent households — can’t take advantage. Yet it will drain federal coffers of some $2.2 billion a year.

On top of that, Oliver confirmed he will almost double the maximum contribution to Tax-Free Savings Accounts, from $5,500 to $10,000 a year. Tax-free accounts were brought in precisely to give lower-income people a chance to save on future taxes. But doubling the limit ensures the benefits will go disproportionately to wealthier people. And the cost to the treasury will skyrocket in coming years.

On Tuesday Oliver tossed in yet another measure that will benefit better-off taxpayers most of all. He plans to cut the tax rate on small businesses from 11 per cent to 9 per cent over the next four years. The idea is to encourage them to invest and grow. But independent critics — including some on the right who would normally be expected to support Oliver — argue it will just funnel more money to already-comfortable people. And, they say, it will have the perverse effect of incenting small businesses not to expand, but to remain small to get the maximum tax benefit.

Even some of the more attractive measures in Oliver’s budget turn out to be problematic. Take new funding for urban transit projects, a crying need in the Greater Toronto Area and other big cities.

Municipalities had been pushing hard for a commitment of $1 billion a year for transit, above and beyond existing infrastructure spending. As it turns out, the government is promising to set up a new “Public Transit Fund,” but it will involve just $750 million over two years and won’t kick in until 2017. It won’t reach $1 billion until 2019, or four years from now — meaning hard-pressed transit riders will have to wait for yet another election cycle before the new money is fully flowing.

And even that kind of money, spread among Canada’s big cities, won’t buy many subway stations. The Greater Toronto and Hamilton region will still find itself fighting for its share among competing projects from Vancouver to Halifax.

Nonetheless, any significant new money for urban transit is welcome, as is a commitment to provide police and intelligence agencies like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service with more to fight terrorism and other security threats.

The budget sets aside a lot of money — $292 million over five years — to strengthen intelligence and other efforts aimed at countering terrorism. We’ll have to see the details, but concrete steps like that are a better idea than the ill-conceived Bill C-51, the Harper government’s dangerous “anti-terrorism bill.” Before the terror attacks last fall in Quebec and on Parliament Hill, the government had actually been cutting funds to the security agencies. Oliver’s move is a welcome reversal of that short-sighted move.

To top it all off, Oliver promises to go ahead with one of the most discredited political gimmicks of all: a law mandating that Ottawa balance its budget in “normal” times.

Virtually no one who has studied the history of such measures takes them seriously. They usually have so many qualifiers as to be meaningless, and in any case governments routinely ignore them when they become inconvenient. There’s no reason to think Oliver’s law will be any different.

The government’s overall calculation with this budget is now clearer than ever.

It has committed the bulk of this year’s projected surplus, and surpluses for years to come, to its own priorities — some of them worthwhile, many of them ill-judged.

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Now it is daring the opposition parties to make a choice: either cancel tax breaks and other goodies at the risk of angering a wide range of groups, or raise taxes to fund any promises of their own that they want to make.

It isn’t necessarily great budgeting, but it could well be good politicking in the lead-up to a federal election. And that, of course, is precisely the point.