If there is one consistent theme in the government's watery proposals for social-policy reform (after white papers and green papers, this is the liquid paper), it is fear: fear of the public, fear of the provinces, fear of the deficit. It is not the fear that inspires but the fear that transfixes, the deadly paralysis of the rabbit in the cobra's gaze.

It is plain the Liberals themselves have little stomach for the task, but even if they had the will, they lack the mandate. Instead of using the election to prepare the public for reform, the Liberals insisted no such reform was needed. The days of Tory "austerity" were over, they proclaimed. This deviousness served them well - but at a cost. Having won power, the Liberals find themselves unable to use it. Hence the high-water mark of federal ambition is to cut a reported $4-billion by 1997-98 from a spending envelope of $39-billion. And we are only at the beginning of the consultation process.

Without a mandate from Canadians, the government cannot hope to succeed in any battle with the provinces. Knowing this, it has not bothered to try. Lucien Bouchard may claim to detect an "imperialist and centralizing" tendency in the document, but to those of us whose hair is not always falling over our eyes it looks like an abject denial of federal leadership, or what remains of it.

There are no solid plans for reform of the Canada Assistance Plan, for example - only a proposal to give provincial governments more "flexibility" to spend federal transfers as they please, on the theory that the same people who ruined the school system and bankrupted medicare will now suddenly design a sensible welfare program. There are hints, too, of a federal pullout from job training, with similar absence of justification.

The proposal (suggestion? idea? fond wish?) to redirect federal transfers for higher education to students, rather than to the provinces, is good as far as it goes, which is not very. While more money would be channelled through students to the university of their choice, much the greater part would still flow straight from provincial governments to the universities of their choice.

About $2-billion in federal grants would be converted to loans, to be repaid as a percentage of future earnings. But without getting the provinces to do the same with their portion, not much else would change.

The document's most revealing failure is the abrupt rejection of a guaranteed annual income, which would roll several existing income-support programs into a single plan. This idea of a GAI, endorsed by everyone from the Macdonald Commission to the Ontario Social Assistance Review Committee, is here dismissed as "not practical." What this means, though it does not say, is that this would require the co-operation of the provinces, the same obstacle that has blocked all attempts at such reform since the early seventies. But there is more to Ottawa's reluctance than that.

"Even with relatively modest benefit levels," the paper states, "implementing such a program today would cost several billions of dollars more than the total of existing programs." Since no estimates are provided, we'll have to take their word for it. Why might it cost more? Because recipients get to keep a larger share of their benefits as income rises than they do under the current regime, in order to restore incentives to get and keep a job. If so, this would be the single most worthwhile expenditure of public funds imaginable.

Granted, the current fiscal crisis would seem to make a GAI less affordable than before, what with a $40-billion annual bill for interest on the debt. But the urgent need to cut spending overall does not entail that each single item must be cut. Were the Liberals willing to spend less on inessential but politically useful things - if, say, Art Eggleton had not been given $2-billion to pave the country with boccie courts - they could spend more on the needy. But since they aren't, they can't.

This is the legacy of cynical politics, jurisdictional wars and excess spending: a federal government that dares not move in any direction, helpless even to save itself.