Hello,
Prepare for a lot of big promises with big bills attached.
The Liberal campaign, on the ropes last week over past controversies about Justin Trudeau in blackface, has come out swinging this week. On Sunday, the party promised that, if re-elected, they would raise the basic personal exemption on income tax to $15,000 (about $2,000 more than currently). The measure would cost the federal treasury about $5.6-billion a year in forgone revenue. As well, the party said it would aim to get cellphone bills cut by 25 per cent by “encouraging” competition in the telecom market.
Do those promises sound familiar? It might be because voters heard other parties make very similar promises earlier this month. A week ago, the Conservatives promised to lower the rate at which the lowest income bracket is taxed, a promise, they said, that would also cost about $6-billion a year. (Unlike the Liberals, the Conservative promise was independently costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office.) And days before that, the NDP pledged to lower cellphone bills by, on average, $10 each.
Today, the campaign is all about drugs and houses. The Liberals have promised to invest a $6-billion “down payment” over four years in health care. They say their priorities for the money are ensuring Canadians have access to family doctors and reasonable drug prices, but most of those measures will require co-ordination with provinces and the announcement had few details about how those promises would be achieved. The Conservatives, meanwhile, said they wanted to make home ownership more affordable by allowing insured mortgages to run up to 30 years and loosening the mortgage stress test. But after the Liberals made their own promise to help home buyers earlier in the campaign, Globe personal finance writer Rob Carrick said those who really need the help right now are renters.
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DAILY TRACKING OF PUBLIC OPINION
- Conservatives: 34 per cent
- Liberals: 33 per cent
- NDP: 13 per cent
- Green: 11 per cent
- Bloc: 6 per cent
- People’s Party: 3 per cent
Analysis from Nik Nanos: “It’s an election toss-up. Conservatives and Liberals gripped in a very close race in the ballot box. Trudeau and Scheer also tight as preferred prime minister.”
The survey was conducted by Nanos Research and was sponsored by The Globe and Mail and CTV. 1,200 Canadians were surveyed between Sept. 20 and 22, 2019. The margin of error is 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Respondents were asked: “If a federal election were held today, could you please rank your top two current local voting preferences?” A report on the results, questions and methodology for this and all surveys can be found at https://tgam.ca/election-polls.
WHERE THE PARTIES STAND
Throughout the campaign, Globe and Mail journalists will delve deep into the policies that the parties are putting forth. We’ve already taken a hard look at measures to address climate change. Watch for more forthcoming on recent promises about tax cuts, pharmacare and more. We published a new explainer this morning: on immigration and those seeking asylum in Canada by crossing the United States border.
MORE HEADLINES
Former Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin reveals in her new memoir that her then-husband Roderick requested an assisted death in 1988 when he was dying of cancer. The procedure, of course, wasn’t legal at the time and wasn’t provided. But five years later, Ms. McLachlin wrote the dissenting opinion in the court’s 4-3 decision to keep medically assisted deaths illegal, and more than a decade after that she presided over the court when it legalized the procedure.
Teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who has led a series of global strikes by young people to demand action on climate change, told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly that they were failing their young people and their countries’ futures by acting too slowly. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said in a fiery speech.
The RCMP warned at least two international allies more than a year ago that it suspected there was a security breach in its operation. The public recently discovered what that breach was when the Mounties arrested and charged one of their senior intelligence officers with allegedly leaking secrets.
And a year ago, Globe and Mail journalists began trying to track the source of the handgun used in a deadly shooting on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue in the summer of 2018. After much reporting work, they discovered that the gun was originally stolen from a shop in a Saskatchewan town, down the road from where crews filmed Corner Gas. But it remains a challenge to discover the source of handguns used in violent crimes, though what data we do have suggests a large portion of the guns are sourced domestically – not smuggled in from countries like the United States. Toronto Mayor John Tory, for one, says policy makers like him need a better idea of where these guns are coming from. So far in the campaign, both the Liberals and Conservatives are shying away from an outright national ban on handguns.
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on pocketbook issues: “But it is hard to see how Mr. Trudeau fits the tax cut into a coherent fiscal policy in 2019. And it’s hard to have a lot of faith that the cellphone-bill promise is going to come true. Is it really that easy for the government to cut $1,000 off your bill? Why are we just hearing about this now?”
Rita Trichur (The Globe and Mail) on finding foreign markets for Canada’s energy: “What’s more, gathering economic headwinds in Canada and India underscore why neither country can afford the status quo. Canada’s oil sands are stuck in the doldrums because of depressed prices for heavy crude, diminished capital investment and delayed (and deceased) pipeline projects. India covets energy security and more influence over global commodity trading – especially now that rival China is starting to position the yuan as a petro-currency to challenge the U.S. dollar’s dominance in the oil trade.”
Andrew Willis (The Globe and Mail) on the parties’ economic plans: “CEOs want to hear Mr. Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer talk about what matters to working Canadians, because that’s what’s important to them and the thousands of employees they manage. They want to know what our next prime minister will do to make Canadian businesses more competitive on a world stage. Is there a way to help entrepreneurs create world-beating companies, rather than selling out at the first opportunity? What’s your detailed plan, please, on the tax system, on trade, on infrastructure, and especially on the environment?"
Shachi Kurl (Ottawa Citizen) on the impact of those photos: “Now, a sputtering Trudeau’s campaign momentum has stalled. The story is so explosive it is making headlines internationally. That cannot be good for a politician who banks a lot of capital on being a darling on the world stage. But the world is learning, as people at home have already, that Trudeau has a special talent for letting down those who believe in him the most.”
Tejpal Singh Swatch (CBC) on race in the election: “In the end, the problem isn’t oafish outbursts by a politician. The bigotry that needs to be talked about in this campaign and in this country is the one that reduces people of colour, Indigenous people, women, and other marginalized groups into trinkets — shiny baubles that, at best, gesture toward empathy, but are the result of selfish, cold calculation.”
John English (The Globe and Mail) on what politicians hide about their pasts: “In the time of Twitter, when nuance is rare and forgetting is forgotten, a politician’s past behaviour has become the tinder for political conflagrations whose fire and smoke obscure the differences among leaders and parties. Is Pierre Trudeau’s argument that we can be just only in our own time – or put simply that we should focus on the present not the past in our political debates – still possible or legitimate?”
Fabrice Vil (The Globe and Mail) on Canada’s two solitudes: “Canada’s geographical size makes it difficult for us to physically connect but, distance aside, many other obstacles and disparities exist that contribute to my perception that we’re foreign to one another – Quebec’s distinct status as a nation and its official language being French being just two of them.”
Elizabeth Renzetti (The Globe and Mail) on how all countries need to work to fight climate change: “Decades ago, racial segregation in South Africa was considered a blight so vile that its government was rightly censured by people around the world. Climate apartheid, as the United Nations calls the disparity between the experiences of rich countries and poor ones, is equally real but more intangible, at least for those who live in the West. It will take more of an effort to solve. It can’t be fixed by boycotting a particular wine.”
Only 28 days left of the campaign...
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Chris Hannay