OTTAWA—If you subscribe to the notion that governments are meant to walk their talk at budget time, then Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are on a treadmill.Finance minister Bill Morneau’s second budget is, for the most part, a wordy rewrite of his previous one.It adds up to sea of words that almost manage to drown the inconvenient fact that, in most instances, he is putting little or no money where his mouth is until just before the next election.Read more about the 2017 federal budgetTake innovation, the self-declared theme of the 2 017 budget. As advertised, it has pride of place in the budget.But that placement brings the government perilously close to indulging in false advertising.Morneau’s strategy, to put it charitably, is a work-in-progress. The government is still in consultation mode on most of the plan. Legislation to set up a previously announced infrastructure bank has yet to be introduced.The government says it is about to engage in discussions with the CRTC as to how to go about ensuring high-speed Internet access for all Canadians.That promise first surfaced in a Paul Martin budget in a previous century . . . The government wants to make it easier for unemployed Canadians to get training through unemployment insurance. But, if you are out of work this year, you may also be out of luck; the government is not planning to spend new money in its skills section of its innovation agenda until next year.Moving on to social programs, we are again presented with a slow-paced rollout that will see dollars magically materialize in greater numbers just before the next campaign.The budget devotes what may be an all-time record number of lines to social and affordable housing, but only 20 million dollars to the file this year. It will be going up to almost a billion dollars in 2018-19.On paper, the government is committed to helping the provinces create thousands of new child care spaces. But funds for the initiative will not start flowin ...
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