This year’s federal budget may have been killed by the Opposition within minutes of being tabled in the House of Commons. But it will make a dandy campaign platform.

There is a cookie for almost every Canadian crammed into every nook and cranny in this year’s relatively slim budget volume of 352 pages. Take away the appendices and charts, and the stillborn budget 2011 really isn’t much thicker than the famous Liberal Red Book of the 1993 election campaign.

We may never know whether the Harper government actually expected the New Democratic Party to support the 2011 budget in order to avoid a non-confidence vote.

But, had NDP Leader Jack Layton said “yes” to the budget, we would have witnessed the first federal NDP budget in the country’s history without the NDP actually having to win power.

The NDP’s shopping list of demands might have been sated with four concessions ranging from a new top-up benefit for seniors — $600 a year for singles, $840 for couples — to incentives for more health-care workers and doctors to move to rural areas.

There also seems to be a strategy in the budget to keep quiet the perpetual complainers who are usually natural allies for the NDP, such as municipalities, Aboriginals and environmentalists.

The municipalities get a permanent annual infusion of $2 billion in the Gas Tax Fund for infrastructure. There is a ton of stuff for Aboriginals that crops up in several places, including $200 million for a framework for economic development, $30 million for First Nations policing and another $22 million over two years for water and waste treatment on reserves.

Environmentalists may not be getting a full-fledged mea culpa from Ottawa on climate change and the oilsands, but there are a wide range of environmental goodies — from subsidies for the elimination of fossil fuels to an extension of the ecoENERGY Retrofit – Homes program.

For the middle class, there is a children’s arts tax credit of $500 per child to match the children’s sports tax credits the Conservatives bestowed upon taking power.

Round it all out with sweetened capital-cost allowances for the manufacturing sector, continued support for small and medium-sized businesses, help for the forestry and mining sectors and tax credits for volunteer firefighters, and we might have had a budget designed to offend as few people as possible. The only things missing are details. There aren’t any.

Less than a decade ago, the typical federal budget consisted of several volumes with appendices and several executive summaries. This one is a slim volume, a speech of short, tweetable paragraphs and a handful of pamphlets.

Also missing is much thought about Canada’s future. The Canadian Space Agency may have been looking for several hundred million in this year’s budget so that this country can continue to participate in the International Space Station and, therefore, keep several thousand highly skilled people continually employed in Canada. But the agency got nothing.

The stillborn budget of 2011 may have been billed as the next phase of Canada’s economic action plan. But, really, it was a stay-the-course strategy while the government continues to reassure us all that the deficit will be history by 2015. But just how the deficit will be eliminated, in terms of numbers, remains as much a mystery today as it was last year.

Canada’s health-care system may be vacuuming up more than half of provincial government revenues. The 10-year federal/provincial Health Accord may be expiring in 2014. But there is no hint of what Ottawa has in mind for public health care.

Sure, all budgets are political documents. But there was a time not too long ago when budgets were also policy documents that stimulated healthy debate.

This year’s budget raises the question of how many more minority governments — and the blood sport politics that go with them — Canada can withstand. IE