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Adam and Farah’s “success story” is that Farah can stop worrying that high child-care costs will force her to leave the workforce. “New federal investments in social infrastructure” — there’s that pixie dust infrastructure again — will allow her to stay at her job while her kids are young. In this case, success clearly means success in the labour market, not necessarily in the family, though that doesn’t actually seem a very work-life-balanced, liberal approach to life.

My favourite success story is the unnamed Cree person benefiting from CMHC’s 30-year-late renovation of his or her four-plex or six-plex. What imperatives of political correctness made the ghostwriters decide the Cree person should be the only one not to get a name?

As successive governments do not tire of telling us, Canada has the highest rate of post-secondary education in the world. Do you think maybe our governments could start treating us like the educated people we are? Do we really need Kardashian-style mini-dramas to understand what our different social programs do? Who does Ottawa think reads the economic and fiscal update? People accidentally swiping the wrong way on their e-readers and getting the update rather than the rom-com, chick-lit or guy-cry pot-boiler they’ve been working through? Somebody should tell Finance: It’s only us policy wonks out here.

The economic and fiscal review’s first two chapters, roughly 60 pages, are self-serving propaganda in which, like all its recent predecessors, this supposedly fresh, different government uses our tax dollars to persuade us it’s doing a simply terrific job on policy. The third chapter is a reasonably sober accounting of the economic outlook heading into budget discussions. My very favourite part of the update is the annex, which provides basically neutral descriptions of where the accounts stand and, most important, new spending since the spring budget: 27 separate line items, totalling $726.6 million this year, rising to $2.7 billion in 2021-22.

Perhaps in future the people-oriented parts of the report could be published on the totally people-oriented Liberal Party website while Finance just releases the annex.