NDP surplus estimate has that shrinking feeling
OTTAWA— The New Democrats are preparing for a much smaller surplus in their first federal budget than they originally promised, but still vow to balance the books as they tackle a long list of priorities.
“Canadians are ready for change,” NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said Friday morning in Montreal as he released the full party platform ahead of the final sprint to the polls at the end of an extraordinarily long campaign.
“We are ready like never before to think bigger, to be bolder and to reach higher. At the heart of this country is our unwavering belief in our fellow Canadians. It’s the belief that we are stronger when we work together, that we stand taller when we stand up for one another and that we are all better off when we take better care of each other,” Mulcair said.
The platform — titled Building the Country of our Dreams — revises the $4.1-billion surplus the NDP projected for the 2016-17 budget in the costing document it released last month down to a worst-case $2-billion surplus.
“Given the current economic climate, we have included a sensitivity analysis of the budgetary balance to economic shocks,” the NDP wrote, saying their analysis incorporates an updated outlook the Parliamentary Budget Officer put out in July.
The costing table at the end of the platform is still based on the earlier math. The 72-page platform includes the promises — and the annual price tags for a four-year majority government mandate — the NDP has put forward during the campaign so far, as well as others that have been promoted over the past few years. One promise would be to hold “open, transparent trade negotiations,” which comes as Mulcair has vowed not to bring the tentative Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal to Parliament in its current form due to concerns over the impact it would have on dairy farmers, the auto industry and the cost of pharmaceuticals.
The NDP would also revive plans to introduce a new Consumer Protection Act, which would limit ATM fees to $0.50 per transaction and establish a gasoline ombudsman to deal with complaints about pump prices.
The NDP would also establish an Office of the Parliamentary Science Officer, so that MPs and senators have access to the best science-based analyses as they create and deliberate legislation, create a scientific advisory council to provide the same service to the Prime Minister’s Office, restore the mandatory longform census and allow government scientists to speak and publish freely.
The platform also commits to holding no fewer than three public inquiries: one into missing and murdered indigenous women, which would be called within 100 days of the NDP taking power; another one “immediately” into the fatal train derailment at Lac-Mégantic, Que., and the last one, in the second year of its mandate, into the spraying of the toxic herbicide known as Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick in the 1960s.
The launch of the party platform comes as the NDP finds itself now in third place in public opinion polls, with signs the Liberals are the growing beneficiaries of anti-Conservative sentiment.