There are some interesting differences between the parties. When it comes to paying for child care, for example, the Tories would index the current $100 a month universal child care benefit to inflation, while also providing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the provinces for child care “spaces.” Whereas the Liberals would provide up to $1.25 billion a year to the provinces, without reducing the monthly child care benefit. And whereas the Tories would raise the Age Tax Credit for seniors by $1,000, the Liberals would raise the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors by $600.
I kid, slightly. The Liberals and the NDP both promise to reduce poverty by roughly a third in the space of a single term, with child poverty to be cut in half. The Tories make no such pledge. The Liberals and the NDP would allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to the provinces to hire more doctors and nurses. The Tories make no specific promise in that regard. The Liberals promise modest cuts in personal and corporate income tax rates; the Conservatives would cut the diesel tax, raise the threshold of eligiblity for the small-business tax rate, and abolish tariffs on imports of machinery and equipment; the NDP would raise corporate taxes, though only to where they were under the last government.
The NDP platform, it should be said, is more overtly interventionist than the others’: among a very long list, the party would restrict imports, subsidize exports, cap credit card rates, ban ATM fees, regulate gas prices, set wages, and “review” the whole system of financial regulation. It would set up a “job protection commissioner” to investigate layoffs, “citizen oversight committees” to investigate bank and utility fees, plus “sector-specific strategies” for just about every industry you can name.
But in general one is struck more by the similarities than the differences. All three parties would spend about the same amount on “infrastructure” (née roads and sewers), and all would hand over billions of dollars every year in federal gas tax revenues to the cities to spend as they please. They would all spend more on the arts. All favour subsidies to industry, and would expand the current sheaf of impenetrably named regional development agencies (FEDNOR, FORD-Q, ACOA, etc.) to include those few parts of the country not already papered over with federal cash. None would cut subsidies to farmers, or touch a hair on supply management’s expensive, consumer-abusing head.
All promise to pull Canadian troops out of Afghanistan, in one year or three. None, God knows, would so much as talk about abortion.
