"Game on!" cried Thomas Mulcair at the end of the New Democratic Party's recent caucus meeting in Ottawa.
Actually, the electoral "game" has been on for a long time – indeed, the "permanent election campaign," as the Conservatives call governing, never stops. But with an election this year, the NDP has its top team in place, candidates being nominated and policies rolled out.
They also have a very good leader. It frustrates Mr. Mulcair and the NDP to no end that it's Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, with a thinner résumé, who wows the crowds. As a senior New Democrat ruefully remarked, Mr. Mulcair thinks the public and the media see Mr. Trudeau as the cover of People magazine and the NDP leader as a well-thumbed copy of National Geographic.
The Liberals say they are saving policy pronouncements for later. The New Democrats have been rolling theirs out for a while – on the theory, one supposes, that they need the publicity now more than the Liberals do.
The New Democrats caught a bad break in the fall. Soon after Mr. Mulcair unveiled his promise to provide one million daycare spaces at $15 a day, the shootings on Parliament Hill and Quebec switched the political channel to security, a channel the Conservatives like to see on the screen.
The NDP daycare pledge has plenty of uncertainties attached to it, notably how Ottawa would cajole, bribe or browbeat the provinces to enter into a "national" daycare program, or any other social policy, for that matter. Still, the promise throws light on a serious national gap – the lack of affordable childcare arrangements for many Canadian families, beyond Quebec.
Who knows where the Liberals stand. But the NDP has certainly taken a better approach than the Conservatives have to dealing with the reality of Canada's childcare needs, as opposed to the politics of the issue.
It was always a joke to believe that the Conservatives' family allowance scheme (wrongly called a child benefit) of $100 a month per child 6 and under was a childcare policy. Do the math – $100 a month divided by 20 days at school means $5 a day, ostensibly for childcare. That's enough for a sandwich and a carton of milk, or thereabouts. It's a joke.
But the policy was politically popular, as "free" cheques in the mail tend to be. So the New Democrats, sadly, propose to leave in place the richer family allowance scheme that the Conservatives have announced – with the larger cheques due to arrive in early summer, just before the election.
This expanded Conservative scheme will cost $4.8-billion; the NDP believes its daycare scheme will cost $5-billion. The New Democrats could have all but covered the cost of its program by diverting the Conservatives' family allowance money. Instead, they ducked the political fallout of taking away the sandwich and milk money and proposed to pile the cost of their own scheme on top of it.
That's the old NDP bugbear: See a problem and throw more money at it, rather than make a tough decision. You can see the same reflex at work in health care, where the party proposes to boost the federal transfer to 6 per cent.
Of all the dumb things that could be done about Canadian health care, jacking up the the federal transfer would be the dumbest.
Following a recommendation from the Romanow commission, Ottawa agreed in 2004 to raise transfers by $41-billion over a decade and to index them at 6 per cent a year.
That huge infusion of cash produced pitiful results. If if anything, it retarded reforms because it bought off interest groups and allowed everyone to believe the answer to challenges lay in getting more money for themselves rather than doing things differently.
The Conservatives have pledged that future transfers will track nominal economic growth and inflation, which might mean something like 3 to 4 per cent. Today, more reforms are happening because fewer new dollars are being injected into the system. Health-care cost increases have come down nationally from 7 per cent to a sustainable 2 per cent.
Raising the federal transfer, as the NDP proposes, would be great for doctors and unionized employees but it would once again retard reform. Pouring even more money into health care might sound great on the hustings. Some health-care providers would be pleased. But substantively, it would be all wrong.