ELECTION NOTEBOOK
Conservative
After nine years under Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, Canada’s election campaign is proving familiar. Voters are being offered new boutique tax credits, a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure program, business tax cuts and expanded transfer payments for families, all hallmarks of the prime minister’s record thus far. This time around, though, they’re not all coming from Harper.
Liberal
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, for one, offered a tax credit for teachers — Harper has been criticized for complicating the tax code with a barrage of similar options — and to double the Conservative government’s existing infrastructure spending. He broke from the pack in saying he’d run deficits to do so, but pledged to balance the books in 2019, just in time for the next scheduled federal election. Harper’s spring budget was his first in eight years written in black ink, with new programs kicking in just in time for the current campaign.
NDP
New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair toured southwestern Ontario, a region battered by manufacturing job losses over the past decade, and reiterated a pledge to cut the small business tax rate — which Harper has already cut, and also aims to cut further — and to bring in a tax credit for businesses that closely mimics one cut by the Conservatives two years ago. The NDP has also begun saying Trudeau is “not up to the job” of prime minister, evoking attack ads run for months by Harper’s party labelling the Liberal leader as “just not ready.”
Coiffure Controversy
One of Canada’s foremost literary icons waded into the campaign to mixed results last week. A column by Margaret Atwood was published by the National Post, taken down and then republished later with changes, leading the author to ask on Twitter whether she had been censored. What was the column about? Hair — specifically, Conservative jokes about the Liberal leader’s “nice hair” and Harper’s own hairdresser. It was coined “hairgate” and described by Atwood herself as a “flighty little caper.”