Budget Day is still almost two weeks away. That didn’t stop Finance Minister Bill Morneau from quietly slipping out a budget announcement a few days ago.

To coincide with the annual meeting of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, Morneau announced that the federal government was going to extend for another year something called the Mineral Exploration Tax Credit for investors in flow-through shares. It had been set to expire on March 31.

This little goodie, which costs the federal treasury $30 million a year, is just the sort of tax expenditure that the Liberals promised to get rid of as part of a 2015 election pledge to find up to $3 billion a year in savings through an “overdue and wide-ranging review” of tax expenditures. ‘Tax expenditure’ is the fancy phrase for the close to 200 tax breaks, credits and boutique loopholes that bedevil our tax system and cost more than $100 billion a year.

But don’t hold your breath for radical changes any time soon.

The mining credit is typical of the kind of special favours that clog our tax system, providing sweet benefits for some and raising taxes for everyone else. The mining credit, under another name, was introduced in 2000 under the government of Jean Chrétien as a “temporary” measure to help junior mining companies conduct exploration when commodity prices were low.

It delivers a top-up on already generous credits for flow-through shares that are bought overwhelmingly by wealthy investors. Much of the benefit goes to these high earners and the stockbrokers who package the deals. While the credit was deemed “temporary” 17 years ago, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have always given the measure a last-minute reprieve.

When mineral prices are low, the mining industry wails that the credit is desperately needed to make sure the industry doesn’t die. When prices recover, the industry claims the credit is essential to keeping things going swimmingly. It’s never the right time to stop the freebies and force the industry to actually seek out investments on their merits rather through taxation tricks.

The Liberals may be getting cold feet already. They’ve named a special panel to study these breaks but Morneau has decided to delay the big reform he was planning to announce in the March 22 budget. The Liberals may be getting cold feet already. They’ve named a special panel to study these breaks but Morneau has decided to delay the big reform he was planning to announce in the March 22 budget.

“I’ve never believed that anything you do of that nature is temporary,” says Scott Clark, a former deputy minister of Finance. The problem with giving out special credits to chosen classes of individuals of industries is that there’s no end to it, he adds. “Once you start going that road, everybody says, ‘Give me something.’”

Many of the big-ticket items on the tax expenditure list are untouchable, like the deductions for pension contributions or the capital gains exemption on the sale of principal residences. But there are plenty of measures that are there for political reasons — not economic ones — and should be vulnerable.

The Harper Conservatives loved tax credits and used them effectively in a crass, targeted way. They went after suburban middle-class voters through credits for children’s hockey camps and ballet lessons, which the Liberals mercifully ended in their first budget. A Finance Canada study on the credits said the biggest benefits went to high-income families and there was no discernible improvement in children’s physical activity levels as a result of all the spending.

Another Harper credit that should be killed is the $200-million-a-year Public Transit Tax Credit, which hasn’t bought a single bus or extended a subway line and hasn’t gotten anybody to swap their car for a bus pass. It’s essentially a kickback to commuters for doing what they would be doing in any case.

But getting rid of many of these boondoggles will be tough politically. Take the Volunteer Fighter Tax Credit, a classic Harper distortion of the tax system. It was introduced by Jim Flaherty in 2011 and designed to attract Tory votes in the small towns and exurbs where volunteer firefighters are concentrated. Not surprisingly, it attracted cries of “me too” from other groups — so much so that search and rescue volunteers were added to the list a few years later.

But just try to withdraw this benefit, which costs Ottawa $17 milllion a year. I guarantee you the Liberals will have 42,000 angry well-organized volunteer firefighters sending emails to local MPs and jamming social media with anti-Trudeau screeds.

Or try touching the non-taxation of benefits from private health and dental plans, which costs $2.7 billion a year. You risk the wrath of thousands of dentists and insurance agents, who indirectly benefit from this measure.

The Liberals may be getting cold feet already. They’ve named a special panel to study these breaks but, according to reports, Morneau has decided to delay the big reform he was planning to announce in the March 22 budget. He’s obviously made the calculation that it’s cheaper politically to keep the deficit higher, rather than risk fending off angry volunteer firefighters, dentists and mining executives.

And in the meantime, Morneau has actually done more to expand questionable tax credits than to reduce them.

In his first budget, he actually brought back from the dead the highly questionable credit for buying shares in labour-sponsored venture capital corporations — a sop to Quebec’s powerful Fonds de Solidarite FTQ fund — and he added a new credit for teachers who buy school supplies, like Bristol board and glue.

And this past fall, in a separate announcement, the government brought back tax credits for the production of TV talk shows, a niche measure popular in the Quebec entertainment business and keenly backed by Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly.

That gift will cost taxpayers an estimated $135 million over the next five years. Where the federal government is concerned, talk isn’t cheap.

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