William Watson: The Tories serve up a policy dog’s breakfast

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What is it about Conservatives and dogs? First, the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives promised a $500 tax credit for people who adopt a rescue dog from a recognized animal shelter. Now, on p. 93 of their IKEA catalogue-style platform, the federal Conservatives promise to spend $10 million a year — a year! — to “train judges and prosecutors on the links between violence against animals and violence against people.”

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You’d think $10 million a year would buy a lot of training sessions. Fifty trainers, say, at $100,000 per year, and $5 million left over for expenses. On the other hand, we’re talking the federal government here, so maybe not: $10 million probably wouldn’t cover bathroom renovations at 24 Sussex.

The 2016 census says there are just over 3,000 judges in Canada. It doesn’t mention prosecutors but there can’t be that many multiples of 3,000 of them. And you’d think most of these people are pretty smart — or at least retentive of information, since they all got through law school. How much is there to know about the relation between pet violence and people violence, and once you’ve been trained in the connection, how often do you need reminding?

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The Tory platform has generally gotten good reviews, for completeness if nothing else. I suspect this is because, apart from its cover shot of Erin O’Toole in a muscle shirt, it looks and reads like a federal budget. In many quarters that would be a compliment. Not here.

Federal budgets are badly bloated, chock full of gimmicks — some of them big-dollar items, most of them not — that pay off this or that lobby group. A modern finance minister making a budget is like the rest of us taking our dogs for a walk: stopping at every post, bush and hydrant while a little gift of liquidity is left for potentially friendly interest groups. The Tories now have the pet violence/people violence vote sewn up. On to all the others.

Feel-good fiscal support for actual puppies and literally dozens of different interest groups’ pet social and investment projects is not what a tax system, a budget or a party platform should be for

Of all the planks in the Tory platform my second favourite is where it says Canada’s Conservatives will “appoint an expert panel tasked with reviewing the tax system and making recommendations to make it simpler and fairer while improving Canada’s competitiveness to spur job creation.” Its goal would be to overhaul a system “full of special rules that favour the rich, big corporations and those with connections in Ottawa.” You go, Tories! Simplify, simplify, simplify — and cut rates, too.

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(The reason it’s only my second-favourite plank is that my very favourite is: “Canada’s Conservatives will resolve the Softwood Lumber Dispute with the United States” — though it says nothing about how, apart from working with the U.S. government. The dispute has been going on since the 1980s, some say since the 1880s, but it evidently hasn’t occurred to anyone in Ottawa that all we have to do to get it solved is “work with the U.S. government.”)

But back to the expert tax panel: the Tories’ call for tax simplification would ring a little truer if their platform didn’t also propose several new tax intricacies: a Canada Investment Accelerator Tax Credit; a Rebuild Main Street Tax Credit; an Explore and Support Canada tax credit for vacation expenses; a refundable tax credit for child care expenses; a doubling of the Apprenticeship Job Creation Tax Credit; a tax credit for buying from a Canadian startup; “a tax credit to rapidly accelerate the deployment of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage technology in the energy sector and in important industries that have few alternatives to burning fossil fuels, like fertilizer and chemical production”; a “Construction Mobility Tax Credit to help with expenses construction workers incur when they temporarily relocate for work”; refundability of the Adoption Expense Tax Credit; a tax credit for 25 per cent of the cost to employers of additional mental health coverage; an easier-to-qualify-for Disability Tax Credit; and increased generosity of both the Home Accessibility Tax Credit and the Medical Expense Tax Credit.

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I think that covers most of the new tax credit wrinkles they propose — which will be a good starting point for the tax simplification panel. Incidentally, you’d have to be very naive to believe some of these credits won’t benefit “the rich, big corporations and those with connections in Ottawa” — or Calgary.

Perhaps you noted the doubling of the apprenticeship job creation tax credit. “Double” is the Tories’ favourite fiscal verb. In addition to the apprenticeship credit, they will double the Canada Workers Benefit, double the disability supplement, double direct federal investments in palliative care (even if elsewhere they stress the importance of respecting the federal-provincial constitutional division of responsibilities), double funding for the Security Infrastructure Program and double the residency deduction for northerners (since it hasn’t changed since 2016 and, you know, we’ve had 10 per cent inflation since then, which is only one zero — literally nothing — away from 100 per cent, which would be exactly double).

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The choice of doubling emerges, not from careful cost-benefit analysis, or even any cost-benefit analysis, but from a desire to appear both concerned about whatever policy area is in question and resolved to do something about it, whether or not it is amenable to improvement by the more generous application of money. Doubling expenditure on something is politicians’ way of saying “I really care.”

To be completely serious for just a moment, the last two pages of the Tory platform are actually very good — though you have to wade through 150 pages of what must be several hundred bullet points itemizing myriad policy intentions in order to get to them. The last two pages provide a nice summary of a completely coherent fiscal strategy. An excerpt appears elsewhere on this page.

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There’s a structural component to the current $354-billion deficit, the Tories say, a cyclical component and, mostly, an emergency component. As the pandemic abates, the emergency spending can be wound down; the economy will recover, which will restore revenues and reduce the drain from things like employment insurance, thus eliminating the cyclical deficit; and then we can get to work on reducing the structural deficit — the deficit the Liberals were running in the full-employment days before March 2020.

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Part of the Conservatives’ plan is to boost GDP by subsidizing startups and small businesses and taxing Big Tech. I have serious doubts whether their detailed tinkering — today’s Tories never have plans, they have only “detailed plans” — will boost growth any more than all previous federal governments’ detailed tinkering has done. But fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and politicians gotta tinker.

The Tories’ official target is to balance the budget in a decade. But if the structural deficit is only $30 billion, it’s not clear why they can’t do it more quickly. On this one, I’d be with the Nova Scotia Liberals: there’s no reason not to balance in four years.

Of course, look what happened to them. The Nova Scotia Tories outflanked them, not just running as Liberal-lite, but moving clearly to the Liberals’ left. And tax credits for puppies beat long-term fiscal responsibility for humans.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a dog. I love my dog. My dog is part of our family. (See the O’Toole family dog on pages 45 and 63 of the platform.) But feel-good fiscal support for actual puppies and literally dozens of different interest groups’ pet social and investment projects is not what a tax system, a budget or a party platform should be for.