The Harper Tories have shown their disdain toward the Liberal fetish for picking winners by boosting (after renaming) a smorgasbord of industrial policy slush funds, including the $1-billion Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative and the Automotive Innovation Fund. The latter's $250-million annual kitty was increased to $500-million a year for two years in the 2014 budget. The Harper government's clean-tech fund, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, has doled out $740-million so far, with hundreds of millions more still to go out the door.
No wonder the Liberals and New Democrats have been calling for the state to re-engage with business to boost Canadian innovation. After all, the Tories abdicated their responsibility in this area by conducting the most comprehensive review of federal support for private-sector research in decades and implementing the main recommendations of a 2011 expert panel's report on the matter. The Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Credit, which cost $3.5-billion annually and had been subject to much abuse, was scaled back by about $500million - with most of the savings plowed into direct grants to businesses, just as the experts ordered.