The NDP released their platform costing document at 4:30 PM on a Saturday – the second day of advanced polls – a time of day where most of the population will have tuned out already. This was a choice, much like the Conservatives releasing theirs right before the debates – so that attention would be elsewhere. Why? Because as much as they might dress it up, there’s not a lot in there that is credible.

There is some $215 billion in proposed new spending, some of which is difficult to see is feasible, such as their plans for a basic income for the disabled – they have no costing details for it from the PBO, and that is largely intersecting with provincial benefits programmes, and one economist who looked at the number said it’s way too low. Their revenue projections in particular are very, very rosy, and an expert I reached out to said it’s impossible to get that money, especially in the first two years, because of the amount of administration necessary to capture it. So that blows their projections out of the water. But wait, they will say – we got the PBO to cost it and got his stamp of approval! But he was working with their inputs and assumptions, and implementation matters (which is why he shouldn’t be costing platforms in the first place, because implementation involves political decisions). If they tell him that revenues can start in the next year, he has to operate on that assumption, even though it’s not possible, so they get figures that won’t bear out in reality, but they can wave them around and say they have a stamp of approval. It’s a problem, and it’s another example of how parties play games with promises that they don’t spell out how they’ll implement, which increasingly means that those promises are hollow (and yes, all parties are guilty of this).

https://twitter.com/AaronWherry/status/1436825763806957574

Meanwhile, on the subject of the Conservatives’ “carbon savings plan” and the points they claim you’ll accumulate in lieu of a tax rebate, here’s energy economist Andrew Leach on how impossible that will be to implement. It’s a long thread, but a worthwhile one, because once again, implementation matters. And this is clearly a plan that there is no intention to actually implement (especially considering that their costing document claimed its costs would be negligible – another fiction).

If we can't have a vaccine passport because of privacy concerns, how will we have a government tracking system that follows all of your purchases?

That's what you'd need to get a refund of what you've paid in carbon taxes. Oh, and we're also going to track what you spend it on.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) September 11, 2021

But, I'm open to new ideas, new policies, etc. I just don't like magic and unicorns. Unless you're going to give every product in Canada a carbon score and have gov't or an agent of gov't track every purchase back to the individual at the product level, this is a unicorn.

— Andrew Leach (@andrew_leach) September 11, 2021

Obvious answer to @andrew_leach’s question is the CPC has no intention of implementing this scheme. It’s campaign garland to distract from their weak climate plan https://t.co/oO6XgXx5Ub

— Chris Turner (@theturner) September 11, 2021

On the campaign trail:

• Justin Trudeau was in Mississauga, Ontario, to repeat his message on ending the pandemic and on climate change, before heading to Montreal for more events.
• Trudeau is also denying that he was asking Jody Wilson-Raybould to lie about SNC-Lavalin, as an excerpt from her book is now circulating.
• Erin O’Toole was in Whitby, Ontario, to announce support for transit projects already underway, and then headed out to Surrey for a rally.
• O’Toole is facing questions as to why he dumped one candidate for Islamophobic comments, but let another one stay on.
• Jagmeet Singh was in Vancouver to re-announce his housing plan yet again.
• A Liberal candidate in Oshawa has apologised for requesting a donation before appearing at a live panel discussion.
• The Conservative candidate in Peterborough has been campaigning while only partially vaccinated, including inside seniors’ residences, which O’Toole is fine with.
• Activist groups are saying that there isn’t enough of a focus on addressing racism in the campaign.
• Chantal Hébert reads the political mood in Quebec and explains why that Legault endorsement that O’Toole debased himself for may be more curse than blessing.

Good reads:

• Here’s a look at the fall of Afghanistan, and the factors that led up to it.

Odds and ends:

https://twitter.com/robert_hiltz/status/1436767891098116096

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