The most venomous election since the last one.

There are still two weeks to go, so perhaps they’ll surprise us yet, but on present form the election of 2019 will go down as the most miserable, dishonest, venomous, pandering and altogether trivial exercise in multi-partisan misdirection since the last one.

I don’t think this is really contestable. The platforms the parties have seen fit to put on public display — those of them that have deigned to present a platform — range from the absurdly unambitious (free museum passes, anyone?) micro-baubles of the Liberals and Conservatives to the utopian free-for-alls of the NDP and the Greens.

If the latter may be discounted as the fantasies of the unelectable, the former are scarcely to be taken more seriously, such is the record of broken promises of both parties once in office — of which the most damning evidence is surely the Liberals’ trumpeting of a book by two dozen academics, published shortly before the election, that found they kept roughly half of their promises from 2015. As defences of integrity go, “what about all the promises that weren’t broken” is not among the more convincing.

That credibility gap — the Liberal platform has the gall to include forecasts for the deficit — may explain why the parties have been less concerned with telling Canadians what they would do in power than with making up stories about what their opponents would do. The Liberals have spent much of the first part of the campaign suggesting a Conservative government would legislate on abortion; the Tories seem bent on spending the rest pretending the Liberals would tax the capital gains on people’s homes.

Or never mind the future. The parties seem unable to tell the truth even about the recent past. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has falsely claimed that British Columbia’s carbon tax “isn’t working” (studies estimate the province’s emissions are five- to 15-per-cent lower than they would be without the tax), that Canada gives $2.2 billion annually in foreign aid to “middle- and upper-income countries” (the correct figure is closer to $22 million) or that 95 per cent of Canadians already have prescription drug insurance (10 per cent have none, according to a report by the Commons health committee, while another 10 per cent are under-insured).

As for Justin Trudeau, he and his spokespersons have confined themselves to misleading the public about the Conservatives’ tax cuts (a cut in the 15-per-cent base rate is hardly “for the wealthy,” even if the wealthy would get some benefit from it), or their record on health care transfers (transfers under the Harper government were not “cut” or ‘“frozen,” but increased by nearly six per cent per annum). Oh, and about his part in the SNC-Lavalin affair, up to and including his muzzling of witnesses who might wish to tell their stories to the RCMP.

The Liberals, then, have failed to make a case for their re-election, while the Tories have failed to make the case for why they should replace them. To say this — or to note that their platforms have more in common than they have serious differences — is to risk the ire of partisans of both, who are heavily invested in the idea that this is an election of great import, as they are generally in the idea that politics is a noble calling filled with honourable men and women who keep at least half their promises.

But wishing doesn’t make it so. What is more striking about this election is what is not being discussed than what is; the number and importance of the issues on which the parties have literally nothing to say quite dwarfs the number on which they have chosen to emphasize their comparatively minor differences.

And yes, the latter category includes climate change: it is probable the Liberal plan, at least so far as it is possible to guess what it is — how high would carbon taxes be raised? How would they close the 79-megatonne gap between projected and targeted emissions in 2030, to say nothing of reaching “net zero” by 2050? — would cut emissions by more than the Tory plan would, since the Tory plan would not cut them at all.

But at what cost? The two famously differ over carbon pricing, but there is much in the Liberal plan that is not carbon pricing, virtually all of it more expensive, per tonne of emissions reduced. Measured in terms of bang for the buck, I suspect we might find there was less difference between the two plans than meets the eye.

Leave aside the all-party silence on the deficit (the Tory plan, according to calculations by the economist Kevin Milligan, would add $80 billion to the debt over four years, compared to the Liberals’ $94 billion), as if deficits approaching $30 billion, 10 years into an expansion, were the new definition of fiscal responsibility.

Worse is the profound silence with regard to the critical threat to our well-being posed by population aging. There is no serious dispute about the numbers here — a population, soon, with roughly 2.5 workers for every retiree, down from 5 to 1 not so long ago — nor the size of the fiscal challenge this represents, mostly for the provinces (since most of the associated increase in costs is for health care). Projections by the Parliamentary Budget Office show provinces like Manitoba, New Brunswick and Newfoundland with debt-to-GDP ratios of well over 100 per cent by mid-century.

That’s simply unsustainable. The only way to avert a fiscal crisis down the road is to put the growth rate of national productivity on a permanently higher track, in hopes of making the next generation or two of taxpayers so much richer than we are that they can afford — or choose to — the crippling costs of looking after us in our dotage. To achieve that sort of transformation will require sweeping changes in economic policy, most of them — slashing marginal tax rates, opening protected industries to competition — politically difficult. Yet not a single word has been spoken throughout the campaign about this.

Now add in the mounting instability of the international order, on which Canada’s fortunes so crucially depend. Again, not a word. Or the growing divisions within our own federation. Ditto. We are dancing on the edge of a cliff, as if oblivious to the growing dangers below.

ANDREW COYNE