How’s Mulcair going to pay for all this?
NDP, Liberals take shots at each other over budget promises before debate
OTTAWA— Thomas Mulcair stood on a small platform above about 1,000 people crowded in a ballroom in downtown Toronto and delivered the line that he — and his team — had been waiting to give.
“The question a lot of Canadians are asking: If Justin Trudeau can change so many of his long-standing and firmly held principles before election day, which ones will he abandon after election day?” the NDP leader told the crowd last Tuesday night, his voice dripping with theatrical sarcasm as he sharpened his attack on the Liberal rival with whom he is battling, especially in Ontario, to represent the voices calling for change in the Oct. 19 federal election.
The line was met with enthusiasm from the partisan crowd.
“Tom was just pointing out the obvious — that Canada needs a leader that is principled, experienced and . . . doesn’t flip-flop all over the place,” said NDP candidate Olivia Chow, who is hoping to return to Parliament Hill by defeating Liberal candidate Adam Vaughan, who won the seat in the new Spadina-Fort York riding in a 2014 byelection. The riding was created using a good chunk of the old one she left for her unsuccessful bid to be mayor of Toronto. “He was on fire tonight,” Chow said. The New Democrats entered this marathon election campaign with the most credible shot at forming the federal government in their history. But the latest public-opinion polls, though still kind to the NDP, also show growing momentum for the Liberals.
So comes the NDP’s shift in messaging on Trudeau, with large portions of the stump speech devoted to the Liberal leader despite the many “Defeat Harper” signs held by those positioned behind him for the benefit of audiences watching at home.
The Liberals, meanwhile, have been going hard after what they see as a weakness: the NDP promise to balance its first federal budget despite a long list of expensive priorities, including covering 60 per cent of the funding required to create one million $15-a-day child-care spaces within eight years.
Mulcair is the one, the Liberals said last week in a flurry of news releases emailed to reporters travelling with the NDP campaign, who will not be able to keep his promises after Election Day. The New Democrats hope to put one of the biggest questions they are facing, and have faced for years — how are you going to pay for all of this? — to rest as they release the financial details of their promises this week, before the debate on economic issues hosted by the Globe and Mail in Calgary.
“We are going to be putting out the numbers. It will be fully costed. We are putting that out there so that everybody can see a full accounting of what we’ve been talking about and I hope the other parties will do it as well, because none of the major parties has done that so far,” Mulcair told reporters in Winnipeg last Thursday.
Brad Lavigne, a senior NDP campaign adviser, confirmed that the costing document will include a number the NDP has been hinting at for years. That would be the proposed increase to the corporate tax rate — currently at 15 per cent since 2012 — which they have often cited as one big answer to that question.
And while there are no plans to announce this during the campaign, the Star has learned that Andrew Thomson, the former Saskatchewan finance minister running for the NDP in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, would fill that cabinet post at the federal level should the NDP get its chance to form the government.
Mulcair also faced tough questions on his policy proposals from reporters covering his campaign this week, notably on the logistics of the NDP pledge to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees in Canada by the end of the year.
It was always going to be a challenge to sustain momentum — and have its promises subjected to greater scrutiny — but the NDP remains in a good mood about their steady-as-she-goes campaign, having filled the past week with economic announcements focused mainly on job creation and infrastructure.
The party was thrilled with the size of the crowds that were showing up at its rallies in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough and Edmonton last week — about1,500 at the one Thursday night, the NDP claimed.
“The rallies showed the momentum that the NDP has coming out of Labour Day. Outstanding numbers everywhere we went, record crowds everywhere we went, shows the growing support for the NDP is showing up on the ground,” Lavigne said when asked for highlights of the past week.
The party has also not had any terrible days on the campaign trail. Even dealing with offensive tweets made by Shawn Dearn, director of communications, about the Roman Catholic Church were nothing compared with breaking news alerts detailing the internal implosion of the normally highly disciplined Conservative campaign.
On the bus heading to Tuesday’s Toronto rally, Peggy Nash, the NDP’s candidate in Parkdale-High Park, who won the seat in 2011, said she is surprised by the effect Mulcair has had in the three short years since he was elected NDP leader over six other contestants, including her.
Nash said that it was not until Jack Layton’s fourth campaign as NDP leader in 2011 that he became a “rock star.”
But she can tell there are still a lot of undecided voters.
Jerry Herman, 61, said he made up his mind at the Edmonton rally Thursday night.
“I don’t like Tom,” he said, as he stood on the platform where the NDP leader, relaxed and comfortable, had played off an enthusiastic crowd.
“People vote from their heart and where I see a failure in Tom is that he cannot grab you with your heart,” said Herman, who said he is a lifelong Liberal who has volunteered with campaigns going back to the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
But Herman said he liked the NDP platform and that this time, he would vote for them.