Video: The 2013 budget deconstructed

How did Jim Flaherty do? The verdict from our Ottawa bureau

<p>Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper enter the House of Commons to table the budget on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday March 21, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Patrick Doyle</p>

Patrick Doyle/CP

Budget 2013 is a quiet-seeming document with outsized ambitions: it seeks to reconnect skills to jobs, fund a new generation of rods and bridges, give the industrial heartland a boost and maintain Canada’s increasingly rare brand advantage as a reasonably functional Western economy. Jim Flaherty must have hoped his job would be getting easier by now. No such luck. How’d he do? Here’s the verdict from the Maclean’s Ottawa bureau: