The most annoying thing about this week’s federal economic and fiscal update from Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was its bottom line.

Nominal GDP has turned out to be $66 billion higher than was forecast in April’s budget. Nominal GDP is, as the document says, “the broadest measure of the tax base.” So unexpected growth should be great news for the deficit. And the deficit is lower than forecast in April, “only” $327.7 billion, down from a forecast of $354.2 billion. Good. But the improvement is just $26.5 billion, even though the improvement in the fiscal situation, the result of all that unanticipated growth, was $36 billion. It’s a long, long time from May to December and the government has managed to spend $9.5 billion more than even last spring’s blowout budget planned for.

Next fiscal year, 2021-22, is worse. Extra GDP growth: $83 billion. Automatic improvement in the fiscal situation as a result: $38.5 billion. Improvement in the deficit: just $10.2 billion.

And, as many commentators have pointed out, we haven’t yet been treated to all the Liberal promises from the past election. We don’t want politicians to break their election promises, of course, except those we can’t afford.

Back in the dinosaur days of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien the question always was: As the fiscal situation improved, how much of each dollar gained would go to debt reduction, how much to tax reduction and how much to new spending? If you look at the six years covered by this week’s update, nominal GDP is $434 billion higher than forecast last April, the status quo fiscal situation is $126.9 billion better, but the deficit is only $59.8 billion better. And of course there is no mention at all of tax cuts. Where does the money go? It all goes to new spending.

The second most annoying thing about the update are the nine little sidebar boxes that describe the “Gender and Diversity Expected Impacts” of the various policies the update introduces. (And shouldn’t that be Expected Gender and Diversity Impacts?) I hope the first thing a Conservative finance minister does, if we ever have one again, is to eliminate these little boxes. Either that or tell us by how much each policy was pumped up or downgraded because it did or didn’t involve enough Canadians belonging to a now-favoured group.

For instance, “Men make up 61 per cent of federally regulated workers …” and so will benefit disproportionately from amendments to the Canada Labour Code to extend paid sick leave in federally regulated industries. Would the government have gone for even more than 10 days’ leave if more women were involved? “Overall, 60 per cent of firms with fewer than 100 employees offer no sick leave, and 80 per cent of employees at these firms are men.” So sad for such firms: no one will to go to bat for them, I guess.

And how does that factoid gibe with the government’s gender and diversity rationale for improved ventilation, which a new, refundable “Small Business Air Quality Improvement Tax Credit” of up to $50,000 per business is going to make possible: “Improving ventilation is expected to particularly benefit those most vulnerable to negative air quality, including seniors, children, pregnant women, and people with chronic diseases” — who are disproportionately absent, actually, among that 80 per cent of employees of smaller firms who are men.

Of course, better ventilation in small businesses will also help the customers of such businesses (any who visit the premises, that is) so we’d really want to know the gender and diversity data of customers, too, before making firm conclusions about what economists call the “incidence” of this policy across racial, age, sexual, gender, religious, linguistic, regional, ethnic, income, wealth, and educational attainment — have I left anything out? — grounds. One thing economists have learned from studying “incidence,” for instance in taxation, is that it often falls on people other than those you think you’re directly targeting.

It’s always interesting to have new facts about your policies. But the information requirements for determining exactly what effects your multitudinous policies are having are prohibitive — and even if you had all that information, you’d likely not agree on what it meant.

But it gets worse. At the bottom of the first gender-diversity sidebar we taxpayer-readers find the following, in tiny font: “Note on Terminology: In this section, the term ‘visible minorities’ is occasionally used because it is the official demographic category defined by the Employment Equity Act and used by Statistics Canada in their surveys. With the commitment to support a task force on modernizing the Employment Equity Act, the question of appropriate terminology will be taken up by the members.”

Translation: We here at Finance are perfectly pristine in our political correctness. Don’t blame us, blame Statistics Canada, if we have to use the colonialist, racist term “visible minorities” — which of course in its day was a euphemism introduced to get over the colonialist, racist language “racial minority,” at a time when, before invention of the term “racialized,” increasing numbers of Canadians were uncomfortable with the whole idea of “race” and dreamed of the (no doubt colonialist and racist) concept of a colour-blind society.

In the next budget — certainly in the next auditor-general’s report — it would be useful to see how much the terminological task force is costing taxpayers. There’s no reason, in fact, why its discussions of the issue shouldn’t be streamed live so all Canadians can see for themselves just how their money is spent.