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Meanwhile, the fiscal situation continues to deteriorate: deficits over the next four years, forecast in last year’s budget to total $84-billion, are now headed for $101 billion, on the strength of spending that is now roughly $20 billion per year over the track laid out in the last Harper budget. The $10-billion deficits originally promised, of course, are but a distant memory; the balanced budget is nowhere in sight or even promised; even the steadily declining debt-to-GDP ratio, last and loosest of the Liberal benchmarks, is gone — it rose last year, is projected to rise again this, and may well rise again the next.

But of course it isn’t just that they’ve run out of money: they’ve run out of ideas. Or at least, good ideas. The Liberals had a good idea in the last budget: the rationalization of several different child benefit programs into a single, income-tested Canada Child Benefit, albeit at a cost of $4 billion-plus. And they had a bad one: the notion that Canada’s middle class is falling behind, a claim that is increasingly the object of ridicule. The middle class isn’t falling behind — median incomes have been rising steadily for the last 20-odd years — and if it were the Grits have no sensible plan for remedying it.

What they have are a lot of meaningless buzzwords. I have read a good many tedious, empty budgets in my time. I cannot recall ever reading one quite as mind-bendingly empty as this one. Innovation, strategic, whole-of-government, world-class, value chain, smart cities, centres of excellence: the budget burbles happily on for page after page in this vein; one has the strong sense its authors have no more idea of what any of it means than they do “middle class.” Much is promised, but put off until the future: I lost track of the number of plans that “will be proposed” or policies that “will be developed” at some later date.