Roundup: The PBO’s dubious stamp of approval strikes again

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With less than two weeks to go in the campaign, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says he has returned 75 of 100 costing requests, but the Conservatives have not authorised release of any of theirs yet. The Liberals appear to have released most of theirs, and the NDP have only released two so far – but theirs are both fairly problematic.

Their first costing was for their pharmacare plan, basing it on Quebec’s 2016 formulary, and drawing their assumptions out from there for five years, and presumes that they could get a national plan up and running by next year using that formulary as an example. That’s a virtual impossibility, and a national formulary still needs to be negotiated (which the Canadian Drug Agency Transition Office is set up to coordinate once more provinces sign on), but hey, they got the PBO’s stamp of approval. Their costing for their wealth tax is also loaded with plenty of poor assumptions, has a huge uncertainty around a behavioural response – tax avoidance is a whack-a-mole problem – and most importantly, the base assumption is for a tax on “economic families,” when our tax system is built around individual filers. They would need to create a whole new tax system to capture this one percent of net wealth. And as Lindsay Tedds points out, there is no way this could be administered to get revenues for the current taxation year, but hey, the PBO put his stamp of approval on that one too.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435346365228400643

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435349658805624834

The notion that the PBO should do platform costing because he’s “neutral” is a poor move, because costing is an inherently political exercise. It requires implementation decisions that have huge effects on what is being projected, and those are decisions that he should be far away from.

On the campaign trail:

  • Justin Trudeau was in Montreal to re-announce his housing plan, and noted the campaign would need to adjust after Monday’s gravel incident.
  • Erin O’Toole was in Ottawa to promise lower cell phone bills by opening up to more local and foreign competition.
  • O’Toole also said that his health minister – should he form government – would be vaccinated, which is a low bar.
  • Jagmeet Singh was in Toronto to badmouth the Liberal climate plan.
  • The Greens unveiled their full platform (sans Annamie Paul), and it’s the usual mix of lofty uncosted promises with few details on how they would implement them.
  • The Star’s fact-checker went through a week of O’Toole’s statements, and was way, way too lenient on him and let him get away with several lies. (Thread here).
  • The Star soft-peddles O’Toole’s lack of consistency and constant shifting positions.
  • The Star also soft-sells how Singh is using deception and disingenuous talking points to sow disillusionment in the Liberals’ performance.
  • The CBC goes deeper into just what the gun crime statistics are saying, and homicides are on a downward trajectory.
  • Susan Delacourt makes note of Trudeau’s increasingly fired-up tone as we are now in the final two weeks of the campaign.
  • Heather Scoffield talks to Atlantic Canadians about their current shifting political attitudes, and why it’s no longer safe territory for Trudeau.
  • Chantal Hébert delves into the ugliness on the campaign trail, and how that could eat into O’Toole’s support as it bleeds away to Bernier.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1435295416350818305

Good reads:

  • Former Liberal MP Kent Hehr is planning to run for mayor of Calgary.
  • Energy policy economist Jennifer Winters pans the NDP’s climate plan as being frustratingly vague on details that matter to determining its viability.
  • My column wonders why we haven’t had a substantive debate on Indigenous issues in this election, considering where we are with the graves at residential school sites.

Odds and ends:

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