Thursday, May 1 Songs for the new millenium? The government says it needs a new mandate, more than a year before the last is out, to present Canadians, in the Prime Minister's phrase, with a "real choice about the kind of society we want." And what bold new directions do the Liberals propose? What were those historic choices that could not wait another week? According to the party's new election manifesto, one of the government's most pressing priorities is the expenditure of $10-million on "new works of art to celebrate the new century." A number of questions arise from this bizarre, tentative document, but of these surely the most telling is: why bother? If, after all, a party goes to the trouble of writing down its promises on paper, presumably it is in the expectation that people will believe that they might actually carry them out.

Alas, we have been here before. Having casually discarded, once in office, virtually every major plank from the platform on which they campaigned in 1993, the famous Red Book, can the Liberals really expect people to pay any attention to their promises this time around?

Perhaps that explains the hollowness of the present installment. In 1993, the Liberals were full of grand schemes to change the country. They would "renegotiate" NAFTA, they would "replace" the GST, they would create several hundred thousand daycare spaces, stabilize funding for the CBC and much else that never came to pass. When it came to public finance, on the other hand, the party promised more of the same, offering no more than $600 million in net reductions from the spending track laid out in the last Tory budget. Luckily, this, too, turned out to be a mirage: program spending, if held to the Red Book's schedule, would today be $128-billion, or about $22-billion more than the actual figure.

The lesson the Liberals appear to have learned from that experience is not that you should keep your word, or that you should promise only those things you can be sure of delivering, but to say nothing at all -- and to say it at length. The document plunges on through 102 pages of dense mush, praising the Liberals' record, promising to "respect diversity" and "work with the provinces," and so on. But what, in the end does it amount to?

Aside from the $1.4-billion annual cost of holding social transfers to the provinces at $12.5-billion, rather than reducing it all the way to $11-billion as planned, the Liberals' spending promises add up to little more than $300- million a year.

On the other hand, that's $1.7-billion a year, $6.5-billion in total, that the party claims we can't afford -- when the issue is cutting taxes. This is the true significance of the manifesto. With its scattershot array of contributions to the usual worthy causes -- $40 million a year for AIDS research, $4- million for Centres of Excellence for Children's Well-being, $500,000 for a Commissioner for Aquaculture Development -- the Liberals have chosen to cover their left flank, to close off any possible resurgence of the NDP. They do so, however, at the cost of opening a major strategic breach on their right.

It is not possible for the party to pretend any longer that there is no room to cut taxes. If the debt situation has improved to such an extent that we can afford to start spending billions of dollars more, then we can just as surely afford to cut taxes by the same amount. If the Liberals choose to spend more rather than tax less, it is because they prefer a larger government than their Reform and Conservative opposition -- not because they are more fiscally responsible.

On the other hand, if the debt remains perilously high -- so high as to rule out tax cuts -- then the party has no business raising spending either.

Of course, the Liberals don't want to be completely offside on either issue, taxes or debt, which accounts for the throwaway line about diverting half of any surplus to reductions in each. But you can tell their heart's not in it. The party has always, even in the darkest days of 1995, done the least in the way of trimming government that it could possibly get away with. That remains true today.

It isn't that there aren't matters of public policy that merit increased spending. But the Liberals have given no indication of where they would cut spending to make room for them -- the correct course for fiscal conservatives with a social conscience. And where they do choose to spend more, they reveal some skewed priorities. A needless -- but politically sexy -- infusion of cash into the bloated health care system gets the fast track.

But a truly urgent matter like child poverty must make do with the promise of more funds "when possible". That would be sometime after 2001: A Celebration in Dance, one supposes.