I beg your pardon, my lord; promises and pie-crust are made to be broken. ~Jonathan Swift

         I was watching CBC some days ago and saw a story in which a “fact checker” was looking into allegations that Pierre Poilievre, who has been critical about Mr. Carney’s actions on behalf of Brookfield, is actually invested in Brookfield Corporation himself. (He is, although indirectly). The query, of course was in response to Poilievre’s criticisms of Carney’s “sneaky” decisions on behalf of Brookfield. That whole set of stories around Carney’s filings with the ethics commissioner on his personal finances and his business dealings with Brookfield, and even Poilievre’s refusal to get a security clearance, leaves me frustrated and annoyed.

         In 2008, John McCain responded to questioners at a rally with these statements about Barack Obama: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues…I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

         Obama was impressed. “I appreciated his reminder that we can disagree while still being respectful. And I admired his willingness to stand up to some of the more hateful elements in our politics.”

         Wouldn’t we like more of that kind of civility in Canadian politics? Or would we prefer Donald Trump’s reaction to McCain, to wit: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” And later, after McCain’s passing, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.”

         It’s not like I am totally averse to some shots being fired. Winston Churchill is a favourite of mine. Referring to Clement Atlee, he commented “he is a modest man, but then he has much to be modest about.” Of another opponent, Ramsay MacDonald he said “he’s a sheep in sheep’s clothing”. There is always a place for witty barbs like these.

But here’s the thing. We are watching a campaign for an election that has been termed by many the most consequential election of our lifetime. Does anybody really, seriously, think that Mark Carney’s integrity is in question? That I, or anyone else, give a good goddamn about the details of what’s in his blind trust investment portfolio?  Is it important how Pierre Poilievre invests his savings? Do we think his security clearance issue is anything more than political maneuvering? Do we believe that the Carney decision to move some portion of Brookfield management personnel to New York was anything but a good business decision for the stockholders to whom Carney was responsible at the time? And “Elbows Up”? Is that seriously worthy of your vote? All of this is trivial nonsense. Sadly though, personal attack politics is the flavour of the day. It needn’t, and shouldn’t, be thus.

If this is such a consequential election, we should be being treated to a substantive discussion of issues and policy proposals. Three months ago, I wrote a summary package of the parties’ key policy statements. But of course, the Trump election, the Trump tariffs, and the Trump annexation threat have changed the key election questions.

Questions about international trade and Canada’s sovereignty weren’t very prominent in any policy document prepared by the parties last year or the year before. We’re in the campaign now, that period when leaders can promise anything, confident that we won’t hold them to it. What are the leaders saying? Are they hewing to the party lines that have been previously adopted at Party conventions? What if anything is changing?

As I did with my earlier articles on party policies, I’m going to provide you with my analysis, based on what I’ve read, and then I’m going to list the leaders’ campaign statements at the bottom for those who want to dig a little deeper. I’ve really only used one information source for this review. You can follow what the leaders are saying on this CTV News web site: https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/article/promise-tracker-what-the-parties-are-pitching-in-the-federal-election-campaign/. It’s updated regularly and simply tracks what the leaders are saying. It’s an easy way to see what we’re being promised.l8

Liberals:

The Liberals are attempting to move the party more to the centre and to create distance between the old regime of Justin Trudeau and the new regime of Mark Carney. The magic trick for them will be to shuffle the cards, replace one of the jokers with a new King of Diamonds and convince the public that they’re now playing with a completely new deck.

I was disappointed to hear Mr. Carney walk the Liberals away from the consumer carbon price. In fact, the carbon tax was not a tax but an incentive program, with almost no net negative impact on the consumer once the rebates are accounted for. And it was producing a positive impact on Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. So, we’re getting rid of a somewhat useful element of policy because Pierre Poilievre persistently and convincingly sold the lie that the carbon tax was a net negative for consumers. I recognize that “the carbon tax” had become political poison, and probably had to be abandoned for political reasons. But I don’t like seeing a good program rejected for political reasons.

But at least there is some semblance of a carbon policy remaining in the Liberal platform. I think the large industrial emitters tax was the most impactful element of the Trudeau government’s climate change policy, and it’s being retained. 

I continue to think that climate change policy matters. One of the risks about the chaos prompted by Trump’s tariffs and Trump’s annexation plans for Canada, and Trump’s pullback from NATO and Trump’s complete withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Accord is that we take our eye of the ball here. Climate change suddenly feels like a minor matter – that we have more important things to concern us. And that could be a serious mistake.

I have written a couple of times about the fact that we are blessed with some of the world’s best and least biased journalism. The Liberals announcement on the CBC (more funding and a legal protection of their mandate) is a welcome response to the threats against the CBC from Pierre Poilievre and is deliberately chosen, I think, to emphasize a clear point of difference on this subject.

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New Democrats

Polling data tells us that the NDP are fighting for their lives. Donald Trump is spreading fear amongst the electorate. Some of that fear is the fear of the economic impacts of Trump’s tariffs, and some of the fear is the fear that Pierre Poilievre is a Donald mini-me. The result is that some voters who might otherwise vote “for” the NDP are now contemplating voting “against” the Conservatives, which means strategically placing their vote with the Liberals to avoid letting Poilievre benefit from Liberal/NDP vote-splitting. Election night could be rough for the NDP this time.

My impressions of Jagmeet Singh’s campaign statements? Well first of all, the NDP promises continue to exhibit their shrill distrust of all corporate entities. I can understand that corporations practicing “house-flipping” have driven up housing prices in large cities and I’m OK with policy intended to stop that activity. But the policy needs to be directed at the activity, not at all corporate entities. Current NDP policy would prevent some respectable and useful real estate firms from investing in rental housing for example, and thus have the opposite effect from the one Mr. Singh intends. He’s trying to do surgery with an axe instead of a scalpel.

Second, Mr. Singh loves to meddle in provincial jurisdictions. His rent control policies and his health care policies both cross federal-provincial boundaries, and in both cases, he proposes to bring the provinces to heel by turning off federal funding for those who don’t comply with his vision of how things ought to be run. In health care, his opposition to mixed-provider health care systems would automatically preclude the provinces seeking methods to improve health care delivery efficiency. My belief is that provinces have jurisdiction and the Federal government should provide funding according to approved formulas and get out of their way and let the provinces do their jobs.

Third, the NDP are proposing a great deal of government interference in the economy. Price controls on groceries, barriers on who can and cannot participate in the real estate market, restrictions on government procurement contracts, mandates on what cars the government can buy – they all distort the free market. I understand the antipathy towards “American companies” but what is an American company? If it has headquarters in New York, but has Canadian pension funds invested in it, is it an American company? And if it is, is it a good thing or a bad thing to try to reduce shareholder revenue for Canadian pensioners? If we prevent competition in government procurement contracts, is that increasing or decreasing Canadian efficiency, and competitiveness and the cost of government?

Finally, the promise to cancel the F35 contract and build fighter jets in Canada is absolutely absurd. Mr. Singh confuses a secondary objective, which is the creation of Canadian jobs through our military spending, with the primary purpose which is to actually give our military a fighter aircraft capability. ChatGPT tells me that the most complex aircraft produced in Canada right now is a long-range business jet. We haven’t designed and produced a fighter aircraft since the 1950’s. Proposing that we will rely on an almost non-existent aircraft industry in Canada to develop and produce a world-class fighter aircraft in a timely fashion is beyond silly. Based on the war in Ukraine, I might understand cancelling the contract for manned fighter jets in favour of developing and producing large numbers of low-cost drones. But “let’s reverse engineer an F-35 look-alike”? Please.

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Conservative Party of Canada

         Mr. Poilievre continues to beat his offensive (to me, at least) “Canada is Broken” theme and he is providing a long list of cures. Those cures are, by and large, consistent with the policy statements his party adopted in September 2023, and about which I’ve previously written. 

OK, what do I make of Poilievres’ campaign trail? Well first off, his climate change policy is a joke. He’s offering incentives for businesses to get clean. That will mean nothing to a business that’s polluting like hell but making good profits. If they’re making profits and there’s no penalty for polluting, there’s little incentive to improve, is there? Using carrots to improve performance is all well and good, but sometimes there has to be judicious use of the stick as well.

The package of statements on deregulation is troubling. There is a global anti-regulation trend, and countries that have effectively reduced red tape are prospering from those changes. So, I don’t object to the concept of looking for ways to reduce government interferences. But I’m afraid the Poilievre promises go too far. The promise that he’s going to approve 10 major projects immediately and another group within six months seems to deny any possibility at all that some of those permits ought to be denied, and that doesn’t sound like a reasonable level of scrutiny to me. 

It is sometimes said that businesses have no conscience. Fair enough. They’re not really supposed to have a conscience. The job of a business is to make profits for their shareholders while acting lawfully and within the rules that govern how they may do business. And those rules are Regulations. We may want to reduce government restrictions, but we mustn’t do that by blindly removing all regulation and hoping for the best. A little careful analysis and study is called for. So, the Conservatives would need to do smart things in this area, not populist attention-grabbing things. A law that says you must eliminate two regulations in order to enact anything new is restrictive and stupid. It might make a good instruction to a cabinet minister as a target, or an intention, but as a firmly committed law it would be a potentially damaging set of handcuffs.

The Conservative policies on tax reform are worthy enough, and their response to US tariff threat is OK. In fact, all three major parties have adopted similar (not identical) positions with respect to the trade war.

The Conservatives have not made a policy statement about Defence since the election campaign started. Prior statements have emphasized the need for more attention to the defence of northern border.

Their whole package on law and order gives me the creeps. Statistics don’t support the diagnosis that we’re in the middle of a law and order crisis. Yes, we have problems. No, they’re not something to get hysterical about. And even if the diagnosis is correct, his prescription is to imprison as many people as possible. They love that in the United States, but then they have the most incarcerated population in the world. Is that where we want to go? Three strike rules don’t work. Mandatory sentences remove discretion from judges and prosecutors and give it to politicians and that’s a mistake. The elimination of bail provisions threatens to overwhelm the presumption of innocence. And Poilievre’s insistence that he will enact these laws even though some legal experts have told them they would fail constitutional challenge is problematic.

Based on the climate change package and the law and order package alone, I would find it impossible to vote Conservative in this election. But what about that concern that Poilievre is a lurking right-wing dictator wannabe? Is there enough meat on those bones to make a meal? Well here are the symptoms. You judge for yourself – has he contracted the MAGA virus?

• The law and order package.
• The populist campaign-by-slogan approach (“axe the tax, fix the budget, build the homes, stop the crime) 
• The intent to ignore niceties like the constitutionality of his proposed laws.
• The boastful hyperbole (“like rocket fuel for the Canadian economy” for what is at best a minor tweak on capital gains tax reinvestment).
• Poilievre’s hatred for the mainstream media, not just CBC but CTV, Global, and the major newspapers too is very like Viktor Orban in Hungary, where they no longer have a democracy.
• The scrapping of climate change policy.
• The “woke ideology” comments.
• The de-regulation approach (“drill baby drill”?).

If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it might not be a cute inoffensive little snowbird. It might be a nasty f’ing duck. Maybe Poilievre isn’t planning an autocratic take-over like Trump appears to be doing. But both his policies and his bullying disrespectful personality make him clearly the most Trump-like politician this country has ever seen. If Donald Trump scares you, I don’t think it’s worth taking the risk of voting for PP in the fond hope that he’s not really what he appears to be. 

My final message is this – this election should be about issues, policy and platform, not about personalities and slogans and attack ads. Try not to get caught up in mean-spirited election fog, and keep looking for what substantive policy statements you’re being given.

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Liberals’ Campaign statements

Tax Reductions:

Moving to the centre has meant adopting tax reduction proposals, which is bitterly resented by Poilievre who claims that they’re stealing his thunder. There are, however, differences in the depth of the proposed tax cuts and the points where they would be applied. Carney will reduce income tax for middle class by 1%, and eliminate GST (for first time home-buyers only) on houses worth less than $1M.

US Tariff Response 

Acknowledging, and potentially benefiting politically from, the threat of US tariffs, Carney is proposing a number of measures to provide income support for those with threatened incomes. He promises:

– temporary supports to help retirees (increased guaranteed income supplement, reduced RIF withdrawal requirements to protect savings).

– trades support in the form of a new apprenticeship grant plus a $20 million capital funding stream for new training spaces for apprenticeships and a focus on increased labour mobility.

– support for agricultural production quotas.

– $2B fund to protect autoworkers

– A $5B Trade Diversification Fund to build infrastructure to diversify trade and create jobs.

– Waiving the one-week waiting period for employment insurance for those who lose their jobs to U.S. tariffs and temporarily allowing Canadian businesses to defer income tax and GST and HST payments to help boost their liquidity.

Housing:

• Carney also promises to create a housing entity to increase new home building, to double Canada’s rate of residential housing construction over the next decade to nearly 500,000 new homes per year.
• speed up affordable housing construction
• provide financing to homebuilders.

Other:

• fund and protect the CBC
•  promote a number of conservation members including creation of at least 10 new National Parks.

Defence:

• Accelerate defence spending to achieve 2% of GDP by 2030. 
• Focus on recruitment to address the critical need to make the military an attractive career choice for young people in this country.
• Expand and improve Canada’s military presence in the north including the purchase of Australian over-the-horizon radar technology.

Climate Change:

• eliminate the consumer price on carbon emissions
• retain the tax on large industrial emitters
• provide incentives for clean technologies
• penalize imports that come from high polluting sources

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New Democrat Campaign statements

Housing:

– Build new homes, with $16B incentive program to build 3 million homes by 2030 plus $1B for 100000 rent-controlled homes

– Banning foreign buyers, numbered companies and corporate proxies from buying homes

–  Establishing national rent control to protect tenants from unfair rent increases. Tie Federal housing funds to tenant-protection measures.

– 3.3 million low-income households would get energy-saving retrofits like heat pumps, air sealing and fresh insulation either free or with low cost loans (means test).

-low interest loans for first time home buyers

Taxation:

– Review the tax code to find and close loopholes on corporate taxes 

– Increase the basic personal exemption amount.

– Raise the guaranteed income supplement for seniors.

Health Care:

–  An additional one per cent in Canada Health Transfer funding to provinces that guarantee access to a family doctor. 

– Make it easier for American doctors to come to Canada.

– Ban American firms from buying up Canadian health-care assets

–  provinces that want federal funding would have to fully enforce public health-care standards.

Affordability:

• Emergency price caps on basic food items.
• Enforce a mandatory grocery code of conduct to regulate prices, empower the Competition Bureau to act as a watchdog and tax profits from the country’s biggest grocery chains.
• Remove the GST from “essentials”.

US Tariff responses:

– “Canada Victory Bonds” would be available in five year and 10-year terms and pay a compounding interest rate of 3.5 per cent. 

– protect essential Canadian industries like public hydro, critical minerals and the cultural sector

–  ban American companies from federal procurement contracts if Canadian workers can do the job.

–  protect jobs in the Canadian auto sector 

– boost employment insurance

–  require that federal departments and agencies buy vehicles made in Canada

– create jobs by investing in infrastructure and using Canadian resources, and expand trade beyond the United States

Defence

– Cancel Canada’s F-35 contract and build fighter jets in Canada instead.

– Bolster Canada’s Arctic with new defence spending

– Build marine search and research stations

–  increase pay for soldiers 

–  build northern community infrastructure.

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Conservative Party campaign statements.

Housing:

– Reimburse municipalities 50 per cent of the amount they cut from development fees, up to a maximum of $25,000 per home.

– Eliminate the GST on purchases of new homes for up to $1.3 million.

Tax Policies:

– Income tax cut by 2.25%.

–  Crack down on offshore tax loopholes.

– offer whistleblowers up to one-fifth of the money recovered from illegal tax schemes

– Eliminate automatic annual tax increases on alcohol and bring the tax rate back down to 2017 levels.

– Expand the tax write-off that trade workers can declare for work travel.

– Stop businesses from writing off luxury corporate jets; companies could instead write off the equivalent cost in commercial flights.

– Allow working seniors to earn up to $34,000 tax-free.

– Allow seniors to keep their savings in an RRSP until age 73, up from 71.

US Tariff Response:

– Cut federal sales tax from Canadian-made vehicles while tariffs last.

– $3-billion fund to loan money to businesses hit by American tariffs to keep workers employed

– Early renegotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement

– Retaliatory tariffs targeting U.S. goods that Canada produces or can source elsewhere.

– Defer capital gains tax if they reinvest those earnings in Canada… would act like “rocket fuel” for the Canadian economy!

– Contribute another $5,000 — for a total of $12,000 a year — into tax-free savings accounts, provided they invest that extra money in Canadian companies.

– Expand training halls and provide direct grants and faster access to employment insurance for apprentices in licensed trades.

–  April 1^st Poilievre promises to enact a set of five demands from the country’s energy sector in the face of U.S. tariffs if his party forms government. They include streamlined regulation of projects, six-month deadlines for project approvals, an end to both the emissions cap and the industrial carbon price and the provision of Indigenous loan guarantees “at scale.”

Regulation:

– Pre-approved national energy corridor

– Fast-track approvals for projects such as transmission lines, railways, pipelines and other critical infrastructure.

– Create a one-stop shop that sees one application and one environmental review for each project…  impose a one-year cap on wait times for approvals

– Rapidly approve 10 projects that are “stuck in limbo”.

– Cut bureaucratic red tape by 25 per cent in two years. 

– The plan for what he calls a “two-for-one” law would mandate that two regulations be repealed for every new one that is brought in. It would also require that for every dollar in new administrative costs, two dollars must be cut elsewhere to ease the burden.

– Pre-approved permits for major resource or energy projects. Get permits in place early for a mine, liquefied natural gas plant, pipeline or other major project.

– Approve all federal permits for mining in northwestern Ontario’s Ring of Fire region within six months

– $1 billion over three years to building a road network to link the mining sites to Ontario’s highway network and First Nations communities in the area.

Social Safety Net:

• fund recovery treatment for 50,000 people facing addiction by making cuts to the federal government’s existing safer supply programs and suing opioid manufacturers.
•  keep the retirement age at 65. (I think that’s a walk-back from earlier positions)
• maintain existing federal dental-care, pharmacare and child-care programs.
• Eliminate “woke ideology” from federal funding allocation for University research programs and civil service operations.

Law and Order:

– Impose mandatory life sentences on people found guilty of trafficking fentanyl, human trafficking and exporting illegal firearms.

– Those convicted three times of “serious” offences would be ineligible for bail, probation, parole or house arrest. Those offenders would also be sentenced to a minimum prison term of 10 years and could get a life sentence. 

– New criminal offence for assaulting an intimate partner

– The strictest possible bail conditions for anyone accused of intimate partner violence, including GPS ankle bracelet monitoring.

Climate Change Policy:

– Repeal the entire carbon pricing law for consumers and big industry

– Expand eligibility for the clean technology and clean manufacturing tax credits.

– Reward businesses that make products with emissions lower than the world average.