Highlighting The Budget

* $12-billion to be spent over two years on infrastructure projects.
* Employment insurance benefits to be extended by five weeks.
* $1-billion for social housing the next two years; for seniors, disabled and reserves.
* 190,000 jobs to be created.
* Personal taxation exemptions increased.

And more, much, much more. A little something in there for everyone, from businesses to municipalities, home renovations to an increase in child tax benefits. This far-reaching budget, crafted to incorporate suggestions and recommendations from financial experts and opposition political parties, resulting from consultations as Conservative Members of Parliament fanned out across the country for public intake, attempts to satisfy as many of the country's needs at this critical time as possible.

It represents a sincere attempt on the part of the Conservative-led government of Stephen Harper to offer assistance to forestry, mining, fishing, scientific research, job retraining, culture, recreation, and municipal infrastructure. It presents less as a conservatively prudent undertaking, than a liberal attempt at a scatter gun approach to crisis management. As such, it was hardly likely that Michael Ignatieff could find any reason to reject the budget.

Although he has grandiosely put the government, and more particularly, his nemesis Stephen Harper, on notice. The Conservatives, through the good and kindly graces of the Liberal Party of Canada, may consider themselves to be in a probationary period of tentative trust. To be revoked, in fact, at any future time that the Liberals - and most particularly, their intrepidly forceful leader finds suitable.

The government has been generously given this grace period, but they must report back in several months' time to their Liberal superiors - oops, cautious supporters.

As for the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois; well, the public was already placed on notice that irrespective of what appeared in the budget, it would not be graced with the support of those two parties. Ideologues of the left have made it abundantly clear in their stated ire; it is their party, and their agenda that comes first, it is emphatically not the furtherance of the country that motivates them.

Any forward-looking momentum to encourage optimism in the country and bring opportunity and trust back where it belongs to help recovery that appears in the budget is damned with praise so faint it evaporates into condemnation. The Finance Minister simply has not gone far enough, wide enough, deep enough, to incur sufficient expenditures to satisfy Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe.

The spending stimulus, landing Canada back into deficit territory, and boosting our national debt; the bane of any conservative economist's mindset, is too tentative, too modest, too lacking in merit. Aren't we fortunate they're not in the driver's seat? Ah, there lies the crux of their ire.