TAX-CUT CHEQUES A PITCH TO WIN FEDERAL VOTES
Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre, the most brazen pitchman Ottawa has ever produced, wants Canadian moms and dads to know about the amazing tax savings coming their way.
So Sunday he held an event at an Ottawa discount store — flanked by Conservative candidates, cute kids and a store mascot in a fur suit — to put a new spin on old news about cheques that will land in mailboxes next Monday.
“This $3 billion injection into the mailboxes and bank accounts of Canadians comes at a perfect time to support not only our families, but our retailers, as they generate thousands of jobs for Canadians,” he enthused.
Poilievre is approaching this mission with the subtlety of a discount store flyer. Last week, he even flew out to Winnipeg to tour the cheque-printing facility, filmed by taxpayer-funded videographers who follow him everywhere.
This gimmicky sales pitch looks like a key part of the Conservative plan to win the votes of the moms and dads cashing the cheques.
Stephen Harper needs to wring every bit of political benefit out of this tax cut, which was obviously designed to deliver benefits to a key electoral demographic in the seats around Toronto and similar suburbs across the country.
The other big tax breaks in the budget went to seniors, who are also a key part of the Conservatives’ potential winning coalition.
But the old cheque — in-the-mailbox trick does not guarantee re-election. The Conservatives must convince moms and dads that they’re doing a good job managing the economy.
Harper took credit for Canada’s economic resilience in 2008, which was almost entirely the doing of the previous Liberal government, which resisted calls to deregulate the banks.
Now it looks like he has to take the blame for something that isn’t really his fault — the fall in oil prices, which seems to have our economy in a shallow recession. He doesn’t want to take the blame. Finance Minister Joe Oliver, for instance, wouldn’t admit the facts last week.
But in Pickering on Saturday, Harper finally acknowledged that Canada is in a “downturn,” blaming it on “the downturn in the global economy,” whatever that means, and promising to provide “strong fiscal discipline,” which means not borrowing to stimulate the economy.
That’s why on Sunday, Poilievre was portraying the tax cheques as stimulus.
“A family with two kids will receive as much as $1,000 in a single day under the Harper Government’s Universal Child Care Benefit,” the release says. “Parents may spend this money on childcare services, back-toschool supplies, sports activities and much more, boosting the economy and creating jobs across Canada.”
A lot of parents will surely use the money to pay down their credit-card bills, so this won’t have anything like the impact that infrastructure spending would have.
With the economy slowing, the argument for stimulus is getting stronger by the day.
“Mr. Harper could, if he chose, provide a boost,” The Economist wrote last week. “Canada’s government debt burden as a share of GDP is the lowest among G7 countries. It therefore has room to borrow and build more roads and bridges.”
But Harper wants smaller government and lower taxes, and he’s made such a fuss about finally balancing a budget that he can’t change course now.
What he can do is change the subject to security and foreign affairs, send Poilievre out to hunt for headlines and hope that neither of the opposition parties manages to put together a credible economic plan.