What this budget tells us about the Liberal mindset before 2019 election

OTTAWA—All governments live by a clock. It typically starts ticking loudly in the third year of a majority mandate, when there is still time to put in place the structural elements of a re-election platform. The next-to-last Liberal budget of the current Parliament begins to lift the veil on the ruling party’s pre-election mindset.
As a fiscal blueprint, Tuesday’s installment mostly lives up to its advance billing of a placeholder document.
It sticks to the government’s pro-deficit-financing creed, paying little more than lip service to the return to balanced federal books in some post-2019 election future.
Having successfully broken the taboo on running deficits in the last campaign, the party comes across as more comfortable than ever with the notion of doing so again in next year’s election.