Good morning. Now that we’ve had more time to sit with it, and the Liberals have survived the first confidence vote, we can start to unpack the federal budget. Sure, it wasn’t revolutionary, but it does confirm this government’s brand is progressive conservative liberalism, among other revelations. That’s in focus today, along with the best places to be a renter in Canada.

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Hi, I’m Tony Keller. I’m a columnist for The Globe and Mail. I’ve spent the last couple of days wrapping my head around Tuesday’s federal budget and writing about it.

Unless you’ve been under a rock since last spring, you’ve heard Prime Minister Mark Carney say, time and again, that thanks to the return of a certain person to the White House, Canada’s old business model – ever-more trade with the United States, and ever-closer economic integration – is over. In response, he has promised, time and again, to transform not just Ottawa but the Canadian economy itself.

The PM has talked a lot about “meeting the moment” while suggesting that the moment calls for something like revolutionary change – and implying that the budget would map the way there. The height of expectations was raised to somewhere between the moon and the stars.

Which is why, when the actual budget landed, many of my colleagues in the punditocracy found it a bit of letdown. So did many on Bay Street and Main Street.

What happened to building the unimaginable at the speed of the inconceivable? And the unthinkable on the timetable of the impossible? All at the scale of the incomprehensible?

The captain of Team Liberal overpromised, which meant that what was delivered could never have met the stratospheric expectations.

And while it’s true that the Titanic has not performed a full 180-degree turn, it has turned. There has been a course correction, and it is not insignificant.

We may have been promised a glass full to overflowing with radical change, and this isn’t that. But neither is the glass empty. Far from it.

The Trudeau government, which presented as New Democrats with expense accounts and a clothing allowance, has been replaced by the Carney administration– which is progressive conservative Liberalism. The budget is the latest step in the makeover.

There are substantial measures to encourage business investment, to lower the tax rate on business investment, to make it easier to build and to downsize a bureaucracy whose ranks grew far faster than the rate of population growth during the Trudeau years. The aim is to boost the economy’s growth rate.

You can nitpick about places where the budget underspends or overspends, and the places where Ottawa shouldn’t be spending at all. My biggest regret is the so-called middle class tax cut that the Liberals promised in last spring’s election campaign.

This one percentage point reduction in the lowest income tax bracket, a bribe to voters which kicked in this summer, will cost Ottawa $27.2-billion over the next five years. It’s the largest new spending item in the budget, behind only the increase in defence spending. It sucks up more dollars than all the money devoted to business investment and long-term growth.

And though you probably won’t say no to an extra couple of hundred bucks a year in your pocket, it’s all borrowed money – a deficit-financed e-transfer from the future to the present. It will do nothing to boost long-term Canadian economic growth. The money would be better spent juicing business investment.

That said, the budget is a change from what came before. Radical change? No. Incremental progress? Yes.

You can read my column here.

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