Here we are with fewer than two weeks left in the federal election campaign, and the two parties that could plausibly form the next government have yet to provide voters with critical information needed to judge their promises: a costed platform.
Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have pledged to release their full platforms before the two official debates on Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, Liberal Leader Mark Carney would only say his party’s costed platform will be made public before advance polls close on Monday.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, have only said they will work with the Parliamentary Budget Officer to have their platform costed.
The PBO only examines individual pledges contained in party platforms, not the platforms as a whole. It only does it at the request of each party, and it only makes its findings public if the party agrees to it. To date, only the Green Party has made PBO cost estimates public.
That means voters might only get a picture of how the Liberals and Conservatives will pay for their promises in the last days of a short election campaign, and after advance polls have closed.
The 2021 election was a bit better, but not by much. The Conservatives released a full platform the day after the election was called. But they only released the PBO’s costing estimates the morning of the first of the campaign’s two official debates, which took place 12 days before voting day. The Liberals released their (costed) 2021 platform 17 days before voting day.
In this election, the Liberals and Conservatives have both promised to cut income taxes, eliminate the GST on some new home sales and build new energy corridors.
The Conservatives also say they will eliminate the sales tax on new cars, increase the amount of money seniors can make tax free and let people put more money into their tax-free savings accounts. The Liberals are killing the carbon-fuel charge while making one additional $4-billion rebate payout that won’t be funded by revenues from the tax. They are also cancelling a planned capital-gains tax increase. And both parties have talked about increasing defence spending, without providing details.
More broadly, neither party has yet provided details about how these significant revenue cuts and spending will be paid for. The Liberals only say they will make government more efficient through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning; the Conservatives claim they will boost the country’s economic activity by half-a-trillion dollars over five years through regulatory cuts. As well, the Tories have said they would reduce the size of the civil service, without being more specific.
There is no hard math in that, just a cynical calculation that voters will hear only the part about having more money in one pocket and ignore the bit where Ottawa has to reach into the other pocket to cover its costs. Or has to cut programs to make the books balance. Or has to run huge deficits.
The Liberals and Conservatives need to release that information this week, in full detail and in time for the debates. Anything else will amount to political cowardice.