Platforms go from nonexistent to nonsensical

Less than three weeks before the Oct. 21 election, Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives seem to have some hope of forming government.

It’s therefore very odd that the party has no platform and doesn’t plan to publish one until Oct. 11, only 10 days before the vote.

The Conservatives likely want to know what pitches are working — and what ones aren’t — before engraving promises in a formal document. There’s no sense stumbling onto the only cow pie in the pasture.

We do know the main lines of Conservative policy — an income-tax cut to the lowest bracket (the best economic idea from anyone in the campaign); ending sewage dumping into waterways; and more recently, a national energy corridor.

But the outlines of this stuff on the Conservative.ca site are sketchy at best. Much of it is devoted to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s sins, rather than Andrew Scheer’s virtues.

If swing voters really are starting to consider Scheer as prime minister, they’re going to want a lot more than this, well before election day.

The NDP list of commitments, by extreme contrast, is 109 pages long.

But don’t take this as praise. For one thing, the policy makes no mention of Leader Jagmeet Singh’s public promise to cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Nor does it refer to his incredible statements about any province having the right to shut down a cross-border national project, such as Trans Mountain.

Singh has since conceded that Ottawa does have the power to build such projects. It’s just that he doesn’t see any point in overruling a province that objects to one.

Singh would give provinces a political veto over a constitutional provision that has helped hold this country together. Having a big, fat platform doesn’t always make a leader fit for public office.

The Liberal platform, clocking in at a modest 83 pages, is a cluster of contradictions. It leans heavily on climate change policy — net zero emissions by 2050! — but also has to allow for the $4.5-billion rescue of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

“We will invest every dollar we earn from the Trans Mountain Expansion Project in Canada’s clean energy transition,” the policy says.

“It is estimated that additional federal corporate income tax revenues resulting from the Trans Mountain Expansion Project could generate $500 million per year once the project has been completed.”

The numbers show up under “new revenue” in the Liberals’ costing estimates.

They expect the first injection of $125 million in 2021-22, and $500 million a year thereafter.

All this is carefully framed in environmental rather than economic terms. Trans Mountain can’t be denied — you don’t just ignore a $4.5-billion spending item — but it is the embarrassing cousin of the Liberal platform.

The Green platform is my favourite utopian read, the more whimsical because a small slip in online searching will take you to “Green Platform Sandals.”

Leader Elizabeth May sees the second-largest country on Earth focused on one goal — zero emissions. To this end, virtually every facet of society would be centralized and aimed like a nation at war.

May’s central metaphor is the great evacuation from Dunkirk, when Winston Churchill saved the British army from the Nazis with a flotilla of small boats.

I’m not quite sure how the image applies, unless you imagine Lower Mainland residents being rescued from climate change in zero-emission sailboats.

But May’s obvious point is that everything must focus on the challenge. The language is democratic but the implications are creepily authoritarian. May even demands a “cross-party inner cabinet” — effectively, a war cabinet — to marshal the nation.

Kooky it may seem, but this is the one platform that’s worth reading from end to end. Green policy actually could provide the clearest glimpse of a radicalized future.

Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald