Trudeau presents election platform
Big ticket items include students, climate; Tories, NDP say numbers don’t work
OTTAWA— Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau released his party’s full election platform Monday at the same time the Conservative government announced it had signed the biggest free-trade deal the country has ever reached.
Asked how the Liberals expect to compete electorally with such a significant economic achievement by the Conservatives, Trudeau waved his 88-page platform document as the answer. It’s a document that reprises the Liberals’ big-ticket items: tax cuts for the middle class and a doubling of infrastructure spending over the next four years. It also confirms the party’s readiness to run deficits of up to $10 billion a year in the first half of a mandate.
The platform Trudeau held up to cameras laid out new spending he hadn’t announced to date, including:
Nearly $1billion for more direct aid for post-secondary students;
Up to $2 billion over four years for a carbon-reduction fund;
$100 million for police to get illegal handguns and weapons off streets;
A reinstatement of the $5-million Court Challenges Program to aid groups challenging the constitutionality of federal law;
About $260 million in new support for the agricultural sector.
It pulls together Liberal positions that have gotten little attention, including a promise that international aid money for maternal, newborn and child health programming would “cover the full range of reproductive health services” including abortion counselling and services that the Conservatives refused to pay for. It also says Trudeau would amend anti-terror powers that Bill C-51 gave CSIS and CSE, by narrowing what the activities they may legally engage in under warrant and establishing oversight.
The Conservatives and NDP attacked Trudeau after the platform release, each of which said his numbers don’t add up. The NDP claimed the Liberal plan would lead to significant cuts in health programming, and the Conservatives said Trudeau will have to pay for his program through “payroll taxes, taxes on families, taxes on personal savings, as well as $6.5 billion in additional, yetto-be-named tax hikes.”
Entitled, “A new plan for a strong middle class,” the Liberal document showcases the enhanced tax-free child benefit and proposed tax cut for middle-income earners. They are to be financed through a parallel tax hike on top earners, cancellation of the universal child benefit and the cancellation of income splitting.