Andrew Coyne: Bad policy versus no policy — the real difference between Conservatives and Liberals

Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau. Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images; Cole Burston/Getty Images

Where the Tories seem intent on bribing voters, one absurdly microtargeted tax credit after another, the Grits prefer to swindle them

Two weeks into the campaign, the differences between the two major parties’ platforms are starting to emerge. In brief, the Conservatives’ promises are specific, costed and mostly stupid, while the Liberals’ are vague, uncosted and mostly meaningless.

Where the Tories seem intent on bribing voters, one absurdly microtargeted tax credit after another, the Grits prefer to swindle them, with policies so devoid of detail or any sense of how they could be practically achieved that they dissolve on contact.

To be sure, in the broad strokes the two parties’ offerings are effectively identical — not only with regard to that vast constellation of issues neither has any intention of touching, from tax reform to military procurement to equalization and beyond, but also on more contentious matters — deficits, refugees — where the parties took care to obscure their differences in the run-up to the campaign.

In a tight election, it’s not surprising to see this tendency continue. The Liberals, in particular, have been assiduously matching the Tories promise for promise. Where the Conservatives offer a tax credit on maternity benefits, the Grits respond by making them tax free. See your universal tax cut, raise you an increase in the basic personal amount. And so forth.

Still, there are differences. In a previous column I wrote about the Liberals’ penchant for targeting benefits, as opposed to the Tories’ preference for universality. But more striking than any difference in philosophy is the vacuity gap — the distinctive ways in which the two parties manifest their contempt for the intelligence of the voters. These may be categorized, broadly, as bad policy versus no policy.

The Conservatives have proudly staked their colours to the first. The party seems to have put a great deal of care and attention into producing the worst possible policy on any given issue, even bringing back ideas, like the children’s fitness tax credit or the tax credit for transit passes, that had already proven failures under the previous Conservative government.

These could be dismissed as interfering bits of social engineering, were there much evidence that they had any actual effect on behaviour. Mostly they amount to paying people to do things they were going to do anyway.

Worse yet is the Conservatives’ “Green Home Renovation Tax Credit,” part of the party’s “real plan” for dealing with climate change. The credit is supposed to give families an incentive to make their houses more energy efficient. But families already have an incentive to do that: to save on their heating and electricity bills. Why do they also need a cookie from the government?

Give the Tories some credit though: at least we know how much their proposals would cost

Well, I can think of one reason: because the Conservatives are also promising to remove the GST from home heating oil. In effect, the Tories are paying people, via the tax break, to consume more fuel, then paying them again to consume less of it.

Another possible reason: to encourage people to limit the amount of carbon dioxide they emit, rather than simply dump it into the atmosphere. But there’s a simpler, more effective way to do that: by adjusting the price of fossil fuels to take account of their carbon content, an approach sometimes called a carbon tax. Naturally, the Tories have ruled that out.

And then there’s the Tory proposal to restore the preferential tax treatment of income sheltered in private corporations, a tax break much beloved of doctors and other small business owners, as the Liberals discovered when they tried to close it a couple of years back. The Liberals may not have gone about it in the best way, but to simply return to the previous system, in all its garish inequity — and inefficiency — is utterly retrograde.

Give the Tories some credit though: at least we know how much their proposals would cost, the party having submitted them all to the Parliamentary Budget Office for its assessment. The same cannot be said for the Liberals, at least thus far (the party says it will ask the PBO to cost its entire platform, when it is unveiled).

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Source: Andrew Coyne | National Post