Controlling government spending is never easy and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government was no more successful in the past year than many of its predecessors, with program expenditures up by 2.9% rather than the 0.7% forecasted in the 2011 budget.

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is hoping he can be more successful in the next couple of years, forecasting just a 0.8% increase in fiscal 2014 and just 1.2% the following year.

Flaherty doesn’t believe significant cuts in program spending, such as the cuts in defence rumoured before the budget, are required to achieve this — as long as cost containment of existing programs continues and the lid is kept on new initiatives.

The measures in this budget add just $900 million to expenditures in each year. They are all related to encouraging economic growth and job creation, and most are renewals or enhancements of existing programs.

A major focus in the budget is encouraging innovation and competitiveness in the aerospace and defence sector.

The Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative (SADI), which was launched in 2007, gets $1 billion over five years. SADI provides repayable contributions to support strategic innovative projects by aerospace, space, defence and securities companies.

The Aerospace Technology Demonstration Program is a new program that’s aimed at helping Canadian companies commercialize new aerospace products. Funding of $110 million is provided over four years, starting in fiscal 2015, and $55 million annually thereafter, to finance demonstrations.

Both SADI and this new initiative are in line with the government’s aim to increase both Canada’s defence procurement process and to increase Canadian exports of aerospace and defence products. There is no separate funding for this, but the budget says that it will build on the success of the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy to ensure that purchases of military equipment creates economic opportunities for Canadians “by developing key domestic industrial capabilities to help guide procurement, by promoting export opportunities and by reforming the current procurement process to improve outcomes.”

The other relatively large initiative provides support for the struggling Ontario economy, whose manufacturing sector has had difficulty competing with the rise in the value of the Canadian dollar that accompanied the big increase in resources prices during the past decade.

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDevOntario) was established in 2009 to support projects to help make the economy more productive, diversified and competitive. The budget renews the agency’s funding to the tune of $920 million over five years, starting April 1, 2014. All other regions in Canada have long had such agencies.

The budget doesn’t provide a lot of new money for infrastructure, but points out that spending on infrastructure will continue to provide jobs given the funding already in place.