The federal budget contains two big, new spending buckets. The first is devoted to a job where government action is long overdue. The second is being sent on a mission where government runs the risk of doing more harm than good.

Let’s start with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s promise to give dental insurance to uninsured families with incomes of less than $90,000. That’s an excellent idea. The program has to be properly designed to deliver maximum value-for-money, but the basic goal – making sure everyone can afford to visit the dentist – is clear and urgent.

An estimated one-third of Canadians don’t have workplace dental coverage. And so, no surprise, more than one-fifth of people aged 12 and older avoid going to the dentist because of cost, according to a 2018 Statistics Canada study. Among low-income Canadians without dental insurance, half had not seen a dentist in the previous year. In many advanced countries dental care is part of universal health care, but not in Canada. That’s a serious gap and the budget promises to close it.

But does the government have a plan to do it, and at reasonable cost? That’s unclear. Despite many peans to deliverology during its first mandate, efficient execution has not been the Trudeau government’s strong suit. At $13-billion over five years, and an estimated $4.4-billion a year thereafter, the program’s budget is already double last year’s original price tag.

And then there’s the fact that health care is provincial turf. It’s not legally impossible for the feds to create a denticare program unilaterally, but in certain provinces – bonjour/hi, Quebec! – it would be politically challenging. Long negotiations may lie ahead.

But those reservations aside, in aiming to create a national dental-insurance program for the uninsured, the Trudeau government is at least attempting to do something that clearly needs doing.

Which brings us to the other big, new envelope in the budget: tens of billions of dollars of subsidies for Canada’s environmental-industrial complex. This is something whose necessity is less certain. Unlike the carbon tax, whose only purpose is lowering emissions, much of this spending is not for that purpose but for job creation.

On the plus side, the way the Trudeau government is proposing to hand out money is, as these things go, probably the least subject to future political meddling.

Under the heading of “A Made-In-Canada Plan” for “Affordable Energy, Good Jobs and a Growing Clean Economy,” Ottawa has pencilled-in $18.5-billion over the five-year budget horizon for such things as a 15-per-cent tax credit for power generators to produce clean electricity, a 30-per-cent tax credit for clean-tech manufacturing, a hydrogen tax credit of up to 40 per cent and a 50-per-cent tax credit for carbon-capture projects. The government says that, by 2035, total spending could add up to $80-billion.

The fine print is still to come, but it looks like Ottawa will offer benefits, through the tax system, to any company that satisfies some basic criteria. It shouldn’t matter who your lobbyist is or whether your business is headquartered in a province key to winning the next election. Meet the criteria; get the money.

But are these tax breaks well targeted? One head-scratcher is how much of the money is going to subsidize the cost of electricity and how much may end up being paid to provincial power utilities. The biggest line item, worth $6.3-billion over five years, is that tax credit for clean electricity projects. The feds appear to be promising to pick up 15 cents on every dollar of construction costs at future Ontario Power Generation nuclear reactors or Hydro-Québec dams.

Beyond that, the plan is about luring certain industries to Canada. The threat is Washington’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which is gearing up to spend hundreds of billions of dollars paying various industries to locate in the United States. It’s all in the name of climate change, but a lot of it is really about re-industrializing the country and fighting China.

Whether Canada should enthusiastically jump into this industrial-subsidy arms race, and to what extent, is a question worth asking.

If you funnel tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into certain businesses or industries, that money won’t be available to be spent or invested elsewhere, which can lead to ever greater costs known as opportunity costs. Subsidies make things happen, but they also make other things not happen. Done badly, they risk sidelining other more profitable investments and leaving Canada less well off.

It’s entirely unclear what will be the economic costs and benefits of the budget’s menu of industrial subsidies. Nor is it clear what would be the economic downsides – or upsides – of a different or smaller serving of subsidies, or no subsidies at all.

The political benefits, however, are hard to miss. A sales pitch promising free money for everything, everywhere, all at once – higher-paying jobs, a stronger economy and a cleaner planet – is a political juggernaut. It pulls off the rare trick of finding common ground among big business, big unions and environmentalists. Even Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is wary of saying he’s opposed.

But what are the long-term economic consequences of earmarking so many future tax dollars to decades of industrial strategy? That’s a lot more uncertain than anyone is letting on.