Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page (Canadian Press)

Almost 5,000 pages later and Parliament's budget watchdog still can't tell how effectively the federal stimulus program is creating jobs and underwriting a recovery.

But from what he can gather so far, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page sees the stimulus money flowing very slowly.

Page has finished analyzing crates of stimulus documents and papers handed to him by Transport Minister John Baird.

And in a report released Friday on the infrastructure stimulus fund, Page said the information is too thin to come to final conclusions about how well the program is creating jobs or fostering economic growth.

"The government has yet to provide a performance reporting framework to assess the success of the [fund] in achieving these objectives," the report said.

His initial conclusions suggest, however, that the stimulus program is filtering into the economy slowly — despite government promises to rush billions of dollars out the door to get people back to work quickly.

"I think the data indicate that a lot of work has been done in terms of processing applications," Page said in an email, pointing to 3,000 projects worth $2.8 billion in federal money that were approved as of the end of September.

But it seems only $512 million of the $4 billion in the fund had actually been handed over, Page said in the report.

That's about 12.8 per cent of the total — close to the 12 per cent estimated by Liberal critics, who had been quickly dismissed as misinformed by the ruling federal Conservatives.

"Once you move away from approved applications, the level of activity in terms of program implementation does diminish," Page said.

In Quebec City on Friday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said cash will flow faster in 2010 for federally funded construction projects, now that numerous engineering studies and environmental assessments are being completed.

"They are snowballing, if I can put it that way," he said. "They are gathering momentum as we go forward, as engineering studies are done, as environmental assessments are done. So there'll be a lot of cash flow next year into the Canadian economy."