Front Burner - What you need to know before election day (Part 1 of 2)

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Today, the Liberal and NDP platforms are dissected in the first of our two part series in preparation for voting day. Power and Politics host Vassy Kapelos joins host Jayme Poisson to bring together what you need to know to cast an informed vote. Stay tuned for the Conservative/Green edition on Friday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Okay, so Election Day is less than a week away, if you can believe it. We've done leader profiles on this show so that you know a little bit more about who's at the top of these parties. We've done a weekly election panel to talk through the big developments in the campaign.

We've brought some of you on the show for our new series, Please Explain. Now, today and tomorrow, we want to talk a bit more about what's in the platforms themselves. Because at the end of the day, having a strong sense of what each party says they're actually going to do, that's a good thing to know as you head into the polls. We're going to do the Liberals and the NDP platform today. Tomorrow, we'll do the Conservatives and the Greens. And just a note to say, we're not going to hit everything, but definitely the most significant stuff.

I've got Vashi Capello's host of Power and Politics with me. This is FrontBurner. Vashi, hey. Hi, Jamie. Hi. So the last time we talked after the English debate, you said you'd heard all these guys' platforms like three million times. So thank you so much for going through this with us today, my friend. Anytime. My pleasure.

Okay. So let's start with the Liberals later in the episode. We're going to get to the NDP. episode, we're going to get to the NDP. But as we talked about on this podcast before, the big promises that they've been hammering home, the big promises that everybody's been hammering home have to do with affordability. But we have to realize that the cost of living is going up. Everyday essentials are getting more expensive and wages aren't rising fast enough to keep up. Far too many Canadians are living paycheck to paycheck. So what does the Liberal platform say about that on an individual level?

Like, what do the Liberals say they'll do for you to make your life more affordable? Yeah, there's a couple of things, and you're absolutely right to characterize it as kind of, I guess, the defining, if you want to look at it that way, issue of at least the first three weeks of the campaign, when they were rolling out their platforms. It was very much competing messages around affordability. Where the Liberals are concerned, I mean, their main affordability promise centered around a tax cut, essentially. Six billion dollar tax cut.

Yeah, that's what it's worth to federal coffers. What it means for you and I and other Canadians listening is basically when you go to do your taxes, you know, your tax on the first part of your income at a certain at a certain level. Basically, that will change. And so you'll save a bit of money. Under our plan, middle class Canadians won't pay taxes on the first fifteen thousand dollars of income they earn. And that is the that is the primary, I guess, affordability promise coming from them, essentially giving you a bit more money at the end of the day once you've paid your taxes. Right, right. And we'll get to the conservative tax cut tomorrow. But my understanding is they're very similar. But the liberal one, a little bit better for single income families, the conservative plan, a little bit better for double income families. But we're talking a couple hundred dollars a year, 400 to 800 dollars on

average, right? Yeah. And you're absolutely right that there's like a little bit of who it impacts most that sort of differentiates the conservatives and the liberals. But basically, they're both targeting the lowest income bracket in order to lower taxes for everyone. It's not a massive difference. You're not going to have five extra grand in your pocket at the end of the day, but you will have, as you mentioned, anywhere, depending on the promise, from $400 to $800 extra a year. This will save the average Canadian $292 every single year, while an average middle class family will get $585. So let's do a couple more affordability promises. The Canada Child Benefit, which was a big centerpiece of the Liberals platform in 2015,

they're upping that, right? They are. If you have a baby under one year, you get a boost to that benefit. By 15%. That means getting up to $1,000 more on top of what you're already receiving. And to give people more money up front, we're making maternity and parental benefits tax-exempt at source. Okay. And then I'll speed round a couple more affordability promises, 100,000 affordable homes over a decade, a federal minimum wage boost of $15 an hour,

and up to 250,000 new childcare spaces for before and after school. Anything there that you want to add a little bit more context to? I just think it's it presented. I mean, it's a central message of their campaign, at least at the beginning, but it presented a challenge for them because so much of their campaign in 2015 was focused on this. So they made their big marquee promises four years ago and like the Canada Child Benefit, right? Like the middle class tax cut.

These were huge, very tangible things that people in the so-called middle class could grasp very easily. They were well communicated and it worked for them. Well, what do you do four years later when you've already spent a ton on making those promises? You move forward, quote unquote, as they'll say, right? But moving forward is not the easiest thing to sell. There's no shiny, real new object in the window. It's just an expansion of policies that are already in effect. This fall, we've all got a choice to make. Keep moving forward and build on the progress we've made or go back to the politics of the Harper years. OK, let's move on to health care.

Another big topic in this election. And what are the liberals saying they're going to do about health care? Well, the big question around health care in this election has revolved around pharmacare. And that is mostly the product of a report that the Liberals, when they were government, commissioned, an independent report that looked into whether or not Canada should have universal single-payer pharmacare. And it recommended in the end that it should. The Council truly believes that national pharmacare's time has come. Better access to the medicines we need, improved health outcomes, and a fairer and more sustainable

prescription medicine system. The issue is that it said it's going to be expensive, probably around $15 billion a year. And so the Liberals have promised instead some semblance of some kind of pharmacare, or at least of working towards that kind of pharmacare. A re-elected liberal government will work with provinces and territorial partners to implement national pharmacare. But they've only allotted $6 billion over four years, which means that they're not going to come up with an agreement or a plan right away. There's no money allotted for it for them to spend on universal pharmacare.

So it really kicks that promise down the road. Their opponents will say this is what they've done before. They keep promising it election over election and it never actually happens. So that is kind of the focus of a lot of criticism for them where their health care platforms are concerned. Bill Morneau is an Ontario Liberal candidate. He joins us now. There is no way for us to move forward in this approach without actually sitting down and negotiating with the provinces. So we've put money in the window so that we can start those negotiations. And we fully believe that we can do this in our next term. I would add the caveat there that not all the provinces are on board. I was also going to say it feels very optimistic

to say that all the provinces, considering the landscape right now, would just suddenly work together within the first six months of an election. It'd be a Christmas miracle, Jamie. But we're not going to write a blank check. We're not going to send a blank check to Doug Ford or any other premier. And so we've got this $6 billion critical step sort of promise from the liberals. I should say we're going to talk a little bit more about pharmacare when we do the NDP and tomorrow when we do the Greens, because they're also promising sort of a more concrete version of it. Finally, the third very big issue that I want to spend a bit more time on today is the climate.

And we've talked about the party's climate policies in depth in an episode called Please Explain. You can go back and find that in our feed for everyone listening right now. But I also wanted to highlight this because the CBC has just done some really interesting reporting looking at how each of the party's climate policies will actually hit their climate targets. This really lands for me. So where does the Liberal Party stand here? Well, the Liberal Party as government is not on track to meet the targets set. Those targets were adopted from the Harper government. They're essentially that they would reduce emissions 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.

They're not on track to do that. They insist that all the new stuff that happens from here on out will get them to that target. We have to stay hungry for change. We have to keep going. And then they've added a promise in this election to be more aggressive on the targets and hit this 2050 net zero emissions goals. That means not putting any more carbon emissions into the air than we take out. What they've failed to do is provide a really detailed explanation of how they plan to do that. And they also, according to the former PBO, parliamentary budget officer, haven't allotted or provided for costing of that. So we don't know really what's going to happen beyond 2022, for example, with the price on carbon. A lot of conversation about whether it has to go up or not, etc. The Liberals will not commit to any specific number or even

they won't even commit to the idea that has to rise. And then they say they're going to reach this new target. And they do have a lot of investments to be fair coming in public infrastructure, transportation, especially. Right. That kind of thing. Electric vehicles. Yes. Cuts for clean tech firms. This would include, for example, companies building battery technology for electric vehicles or those working on next generation solar panels. Yeah, but again, like, is that enough to get us there? They also say they're going to plant two billion trees.

With the proceeds of TMX. The pipeline. Yes. Trees are remarkable. They pull carbon out of the atmosphere. OK. Much to be seen here. But right now with the liberal plan that they have right now, they're 100 megatons short of meeting those targets by 2030. promises from the liberals. Let's do like a very quick 15 seconds speed round and just rhyme off for me a couple other big liberal promises that people might want to keep in mind when they go to the polls. We are starting right now. Okay, 15 seconds. Gun control is a big one. They didn't

go so far as to ban all handguns nationally. They just said that they're going to help municipalities do it. Good luck with that. I have no idea legally how that's even going to work, but that's the compromise that they reached. Thoughts and prayers are just not going to cut it. The camping one where they're promising sort of subsidy for lower income people to go camping. The prime minister, Justin Trudeau, made the announcement in front of this like scenic thing on a canoe. It was a whole thing. I mean, it just fed a lot of the stuff that you've heard before. To be fair, it is aimed at lower income people. It just was

sort of spun as they're giving money for people to go camping when all this other stuff is going on. The joy of roasting marshmallows with the kids or jumping into the lake on a hot summer day. You just can't beat it. summer day, you just can't beat it. Okay, so we made our way through a bunch of promises. I think this is a pretty good picture of what this platform is. But what should people keep in mind as they consider this platform and as they head to the polls on Monday when they're sort of like weighing this? I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is there are some expensive promises being made, not to the point where, you know, it's like inconceivable. It's somewhat on the track that they've promised for the last four years. But the fiscal situation

of the country is healthy right now. And the liberals keep saying, and we also have that AAA credit rating. You know, all these credit agencies say we're in good shape. If you choose not to take our word for it, that we're fiscally responsible, you just need to look at the independent bond and credit rating agencies around the world like Moody's and S&P. The fact is that one of those agencies a few months ago said, you know what, there's a lot of debt in that country. Fitch says Bill Morneau's preference for deficits in the latest budget could create problems down the line. And it's warning that total federal provincial debt is nearing a danger zone that's

incompatible with a triple A rating. So I think the justification for not caring about deficits anymore, focusing solely on debt to GDP, like it's, I understand it and it seems to be working. But if the economic circumstances of this country were to change if there was a global recession yeah or even a recession here or i mean there's no indicators right now in this country to be to be fair that point us in that direction but we are so impacted by the instability and the uncertainty south of the border and there are so many things going on in the world right now. Brexit, China, you name it, right? Like, this is not the most stable of periods. So if we were to find ourselves in a problematic situation, there is not a lot of room to maneuver. If you had asked people 30 years ago, if you would be going into $30 billion deficits when the economy was essentially at full employment, they would have been very surprised to hear that. So I think I would just, you know,

issue a note of caution to go along with all of this. A lot of it bets on raising revenue in certain situations, like by closing tax loopholes and things like that, that are not guaranteed. So the deficit may end up being bigger. Maybe people are fine with that. I understand that position. But it's based on a set of circumstances that can always change. Okay. And, you know, one thing I just want to highlight here, and I don't want to nail just the Liberals for this, I think it's something to think about for any party, but a group of academics looked at 353 of the Liberals' promises in pre-2015 election. They found that by March of this year, the government had entirely followed through on about 50% of those pledges,

partially delivered on about 40%, and had roughly broken about 10%. So yes, marijuana is now legal, but we don't have electoral reform. And it's just something to keep in mind when you go to the polls. It doesn't mean that this is a foregone conclusion that even if your party or your leader gets elected, that all of these promises will come to fruition. That's a great point. I think it's not a contract, right? It's not a contract with voters. We've seen that. So platforms do change. Promises do change. They're not going to live and die by it. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Let's do the NDP. Industry Connections. Let's do the NDP. I mentioned earlier that the NDP also have a pharmacare promise in their platform and that it's actually one of their marquee pledges. So Jagmeet Singh, NDP leader, brings it up a lot. For the first time, every single Canadian can count on this. If you need medication, if your loved one needs medication, you can get it, period. What is the NDP Pharmacare promise? How is it different than what the Liberals are promising?

So it's a lot different than what the Liberals are promising. The big thing is that it is exactly what that report came out and recommended. It is universal, single-payer Pharmacare. That report came out and recommended it is universal, single payer pharmacare. Free drugs for everyone. Free drugs for everyone. They're promising the whole boondoggle, basically. To cover everyone in our country. And this truly means that within one year of our plan, we'd put this in place.

If you need medication or a medical device in our country, you would use your health card, not your credit card. That is not a surprise, though. I will add the caveat. They have been insisting that that should be the case from even before that Pharmacare report came out from Eric Hoskins and that group. So this has been sort of central to their messaging, even before it became more popular to like the NDP in this campaign, right? This is something that they have promised for a really long time. It's not a cheap promise. Like I said, the independent assessment was around $15 billion, and it requires provincial cooperation. And it also requires that provinces pony up some money. We're going to put in about $9 billion federally. The plan would be delivered still provincially. But what would we, in fact, we would do is we would bulk buy and negotiate in bulk to make sure the prices are lower. Right. Again, this issue of provincial

federal cooperation comes up on this issue for the NDP. We talked about the liberal tax cut just before this. The NDP are not promising a tax cut, but they are promising a lot of things to make your life more affordable, including free drugs. But what else are they saying that will make your life more affordable? For sure. Well, affordable housing is another really big plank of theirs, and they're promising to fund the construction of and the development of way more affordable housing. And build half a million new quality affordable homes across this country. They're also promising to look at the idea of foreign ownership and its impact on the price of housing in this country. That's to some

degree, all the parties are addressing that. But certainly their promises have been pretty specific on that. The BC government has done this. They put in a foreign buyers tax because they saw a lot of folks that were just using the Canadian housing market market as like a stock exchange they're also i mean they're they're not talking about tax cuts they're talking about raising taxes right and they're specifically aiming that at corporate canada right they're going to raise the corporate tax rate and they're also going to introduce this super wealth tax yeah well tax yeah we were raised strategic about our choice of one percent the advice we received that it would cost more to try to hide money than it would be just to pay the 1%. $15 minimum wage, just like the liberals, committing $1 billion to affordable not-for-profit child care in 2020

and promising to increase that amount yearly. So that goes further than the liberals. And, you know, this isn't a concrete promise, but they are working towards free university and college tuition. Yeah, they're also going to legislate. I mean, you mentioned the billion dollars for child care funding in 2020. They're also planning to legislate and enshrine Canada's commitment to high quality, quote unquote, public child care. With legislation at the federal level that ensures that it's protected in law, that it's affordable. Our goal is to make sure that no kid goes without child care.

So they're going to make it law. I don't know how anything like that would work. But certainly, if you'll remember, in 2015, they had made that promise specifically for universal child care. It gave them a boost at that point in the campaign, but didn't end up working for them come voting day. So this is almost a bit of a compromise. Right. Sort of like a watered down version of what they promised several years ago. Indigenous issues, to me, have not been front and center during this campaign. Certainly not like where they were in 2015. But the NDP has emphasized indigenous issues and how so. Yeah, they've made a promise to set up a National Council for Reconciliation to oversee basically what they call a planned overhaul of natural resources policy. So specifically where, for example, indigenous opposition to the construction of TMX is concerned, Mr. Singh and the party have come down very much on the side of those who oppose the pipeline and even expanded that to other natural resource projects. So they have indicated that, for example,

they would defer and never impose any sort of big infrastructure project, specifically around natural resources, on any indigenous community. So that is like a red line that they've drawn in the sand. They've also talked about Grassy Narrows, which is dealing with the effects of mercury poisoning. And he was in, Mr. Singh was in Grassy Narrows. He also promised to build the kind of treatment center that they have been waiting for for many, many years. This is something the Liberals promised as well, but it hasn't come to fruition.

We need to do everything possible to provide treatment for people who are faced with mercury poisoning. We need to make sure that that treatment center is funded long term. We also need to make sure that we clean the water. Whatever it takes to do these three things, I'm committing to do. Yeah, exactly. And that was where sort of a defining moment for Mr. Singh's campaign as well, where Indigenous issues are concerned, because I think he received a question there about, well, are you just sort of writing a blank check for Indigenous issues? And he had a really powerful response. If Toronto had a drinking water response. If Toronto had a drinking water problem, if Montreal had a drinking water problem,

would you be asking the same question? Why is it that we ask the question about whether or not Indigenous people should have clean drinking water? We've got to take a minute and think, why is that even a question? He has identified the crisis that exists on so many reserves and First Nations in this country.

And he is pledging probably as forcefully, if not more forcefully than anyone else, to make that a priority. Right. OK, so let's do climate policy again with the NDP and talk about how their policy proposals stack up here. So the NDP has promised a more ambitious climate policy. They actually want even higher targets than what the Canadian government has committed to. They want 38% below 2005 levels. We all know the science is very clear. We've got to keep warming to 1.5 degrees. And we know that's going to mean that we're going to have to dramatically reduce our emissions.

But according to the CBC analysis, their current plan still falls short of even the government's targets, although they're doing better than the Liberals. And what are some of the things that they say they're going to do to get there? So essentially, the NDP would keep the Liberals' basic framework, keep a lot of the marquee actions that they're going to do to get there. So essentially, the NDP would keep the liberals basic framework, keep a lot of the marquee actions that they've already taken in their plan. And the one that probably our listeners will be most familiar with is the carbon tax. They would kind of redistribute it, though they would not take they would apply it fully to heavy emitters to industry. And then they would change the way the rebates work right Right now, everybody gets a rebate. They would change it so that the higher your income is, the lower the

rebate. The lower your income is, the higher the rebate. They won't commit to exactly what that price will be, though, just like the Liberals won't beyond 2022. So that's definitely something to watch as we head into Election Day. They'll also create sort of an independent office to monitor the success of this. And this is kind of a key promise, I think, and we'll get into it with the Greens as well. But the idea that there's some sort of independent accountability, because what we have seen successively from government after government is the setting of targets and then the failure to meet them. So what is the consequence of that? And who will hold the government to account outside of a writ period or outside of

an election day? So they have somewhat of a writ period or outside of an election day. So they have somewhat of a proposal for that. And they're also proposing to spend about $15 billion on basically like a green overhaul of transit and housing and the electrical grid to make everything as electric as possible and emit less. We want to electrify all public transit by 2030. This is a massive investment in public transit. And we know that transportation is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emission. That is like another big promise that they're making as far as climate change goes. Okay, speed round. I can take this one.

We talked about the 1% wealth tax. Jagmeet Singh and some of his surrogates have talked about the possibility of ripping up NAFTA. That would have a lot of serious consequences economically for the country. He has sort of walked that back since. We're going to work with the Democrats in the States to make sure that this agreement does create a level playing field for Canadian workers. And we talked about pharmacare. The NDP is offering also free dental care. It'll cover everyone who has a salary less than $70,000.

So there we go. So big takeaway for the NDP, this is a party that hasn't governed federally before, so we can't look at how many promises they've kept once in government. But what should we think about as we weigh the promises presented by the NDP? I think you're going to talk about money. Yeah. So here I go back to my old fiscal nerd out.

And I mean, again. I should say for people listening, Vashie loves talking about deficits. I just love talking about fiscal plans and revenue assumptions, because I'm not living and dying by any of that stuff. And I understand that they are appealing to a large segment of the population that sees a big role for government in improving the affordability of their lives, as well as the quality of it. And I would never take away from that. But those promises come at a cost. And I would scrutinize from my perspective the way in which the party intends to cover those costs a bit more. So the revenue assumptions that they make around that thing, you know, the wealth tax or closing tax loopholes or going after money in tax havens.

Well, the difference is we're not going to give billions of dollars away to corporations, the wealthiest corporations that don't need help. We're making a clear choice. I'm not saying it's impossible. It's not something that happens overnight. So I would take the numbers that they present with a grain of salt. And I would also highlight a lot of the promises that they're making, particularly where health care is concerned, are very much an intricate function of the relationship between the province and the federal government. And provinces and the federal government have a tenuous relationship right now. So you can't assume that it's all going to work out. That will be, not to say that they shouldn't make the promises in the first place, but

that will be a big part of the puzzle as well. Okay. Vashti Kapelos, thank you so much. I will see you tomorrow. You bet. Can't wait. So one more tidbit from the campaign trail. Yesterday, a very high profile endorsement came through for liberal leader Justin Trudeau, former U.S. President Barack Obama, who notably has not yet endorsed a Democratic nominee in his own country. And make sure you listen to tomorrow's episode. We'll be talking about the platforms of the conservatives and the Greens. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Jamie Poisson, and see you all tomorrow.