For a campaign platform chock full of gimmicks, Erin O’Toole spent the day touting one of them – a proposed “GST Holiday” in the month of December, ostensibly as a way to stimulate economic activity. It’s a hugely expensive proposition, but also a hideously complicated one – by promising to make this come off at the till rather than as a rebate from CRA, he is loading all kinds of complication onto businesses, who may not be able to easily disentangle the federal GST from provincial sales taxes, particularly if they are harmonized in an HST as they are in most provinces. (It also won’t make those purchases “tax free” as O’Toole says in his video, unless you’re in Alberta). And even the Canadian Federation of Independent Business thinks this is a dumb idea that is more complicated than it’s worth.

Purchases won’t be tax-free except in Alberta, as there will still be provincial tax (and this will mess with POS systems in those retailers).
As for your plan to “lower prices” for Canadians, are you saying that you want the Bank of Canada to target deflation? https://t.co/ZJFMDx1tfp

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) August 17, 2021

.@CFIB comments on the Tories “GST holiday” plan in the new platform: “Some of the other promises, like a month long GST holiday or credits for vacations or restaurant meals on certain days seem a bit gimmicky and will likely be too complicated to be of much value.” #cdnpoli

— Laura Stone (@l_stone) August 17, 2021

We also should call out the fact that this is not only a gimmick, but O’Toole keeps trying to message around the cost of living and food prices, which a GST holiday would do nothing about because the vast majority of food items are GST exempt. O’Toole keeps trying to make inflation an election issue, never mind that it’s the domain of the Bank of Canada and not the federal government, and if he thinks the Bank’s mandate should be changed to target deflation instead of slow and steady 2 percent inflation growth, he needs to come out and say so rather than this posturing about rising prices. Prices are supposed to rise – inflation is not a bad thing when it’s low and predictable, because that helps the economy to grow. But this is populist noise, and for the so-called “party of the economy” to mislead people about this is telling.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1427636793420169217

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1427637831002886155

On the campaign trail:

• Justin Trudeau spend the day talking about child care to contrast his party’s plan with the Conservatives’.
• Trudeau also warned of “consequences” for civil servants who refused vaccination, but was accused of a “cover-up” when Treasury Board pulled their online guidelines.
• Erin O’Toole’s big message of the day was his “GST Holiday” gimmick, naming December as the month he would implement it.
• Apparently opinion is split among Conservative insiders as to whether O’Toole’s stance on mandatory vaccines has hurt him, or if the issue is over.
• The words “racism,” “antisemitism,” or “Islamophobia” don’t appear anywhere in the Conservative platform, which raises questions about how seriously they take it.
• The Conservatives were forced to remove their “Willy Wonka” shitpost video after a copyright complaint. (You think?)
• Jagmeet Singh says the IPCC report caused the party to change their climate policies.
• The NDP plan to claw back wage subsidies from companies that paid dividends or bonuses is being panned as difficult-to-do retroactive taxation.
• Blame is being cast for the death of the conversion therapy ban bill on the Order Paper (and yet nobody is throwing the blame on Senator Gold).
• Chantal Hébert takes her own kick at Erin O’Toole’s platform, and its penchant for choosing the wrong battlefields while they focus on undoing Liberal policies.
• Susan Delacourt suggests that Justin Trudeau should be more afraid of Jagmeet Singh than Erin O’Toole.

Good reads:

• Hours after Marc Garneau said the government was taking a wait-and-see approach to recognising the Taliban, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared they would not.
• The Federal Court case to block the production of secret documents to the House of Commons has ended as the production order died when Parliament was dissolved.
• Major-General Dany Fortin is being charged with one count of sexual assault.
• RCMP members are set to get big pay increases as their first collective agreement has been ratified. Their pay has been dwindling for decades.
• The Progressive Conservatives won the election in Nova Scotia, and no, they’re not the same as the federal Conservatives and ran to the left of the provincial Liberals.
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column weights the pros and cons of a short election campaign, as the current one is the bare minimum number of days.
• Philippe Lagassé calls out the media for their practice of referring to the prime minister as simply a party leader in an election, as it causes confusion.
• Matt Gurney talks to Mike Moffatt about the brewing housing crisis in Ontario.
• Colby Cosh contemplates the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the country’s collapse as a re-tread of their misadventures in Vietnam.
• My column reads through the Conservative platform, and finds it to be a hot mess of inconsistencies, with a dollop or two of magical thinking and Green Lantern Theory.

Odds and ends:

For the CBA’s National Magazine, I review the government bills that died on the Order Paper.

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.