William Watson: The Liberals’ 570 fixes for Canada

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Just as you don’t truly get a sense of how big Canada is until you drive across it, you don’t truly get a sense of how all-controlling a modern political party wants to be until you read its platform. Canada is r-e-a-l-l-y big, as you feel in your backside after many days of driving. And political platforms express a r-e-a-l-l-y big need to control, as you feel in the weight of your eyelids as you force yourself to stay awake in your readers’ interest.

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Take the Liberals’ 82-page offering “FORWARD. For everyone.” Funny title, that. I guess “FORWARD, everyone!” would have sounded a little Xi Jinping-ish. But forward is a direction, not something divisible, so that there can be a little bit for everyone. Maybe “FORWARD. Together.” would have been considered too hackneyed.

In any case, “FORWARD. For everyone.” offers fully 570 bulleted commitments from the prime minister and his party. True, only 518 carry actual bullets, little red ones. Another 52 are in sections about commitments to First Nations and in an afterword called “Disability Statement,” which summarizes what the Liberals have already done about disability and intend to do further. Why the commitments in these sections don’t get bullets and why the disability statement is a kind of appendix are interesting editorial decisions I’m sure the Liberals will never discuss.

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To be completely fair: I’ve included in the bullet count two commitments that don’t actually have bullets, though they probably should as they appear following “A re-elected Liberal government will:” — which is the lead-in to bullets everywhere else in the document. I guess the poor copy-editor’s eyelids got heavy, too, even if page 13, where the omission occurs, is a little early for that. Incidentally, that phrase “A re-elected Liberal government …” appears 163 times in the 82 pages. Busy, busy, busy!

After six years in government, they have almost double that number of things they want to do

Whether the exact number of Liberal promises is 516 or 518 or 570, it’s a lot of promises. Strangely, it’s a lot more than the 325 in their 2015 platform. I know there were 325 because I counted them and the Post ran my spreadsheet of them. But now, after six years in government, they have almost double that number of things they want to do — as if “appetite had grown by what it fed on,” as Hamlet says.

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If I were considering coming to Canada and I heard that the party in charge for the last six years thought the place was still 570 ways imperfect, I might go elsewhere — which would at least ease the pressure on housing prices.

Not all the new promises involve financial commitments. The budget table presented at the end of the document, just before the disability statement, includes only 112 new spending lines. Only. A lot has been made of how the Liberals have had their plan costed but as neither they nor the Parliamentary Budgetary Officer is saying anything about how the costs were calculated it’s not clear how boast-worthy that is.

The Liberals have done their own gender and diversity analysis of their own proposals. No worries: it’s all good. No one argues diversity isn’t important. But the platform includes the word “diversity” 38 times, versus only three appearances of that other d-word, deficit. The most important mention: “This plan will continue to reduce Canada’s debt as a share of the economy over time and our deficit is decreasing every single year” — an awkward construction that suggests the copy editor didn’t just have trouble with bullets. Incidentally, the word “deficit” does not appear in the fiscal table. The line where the numerical deficit appears simply says “fiscal projection.” It shows negative numbers all the way out, including negative $32.1 billion in 2025-6.

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“If you have 40 priorities, you don’t have any priorities,” Paul Martin used to say — which is ironic, since he eventually lost the prime ministership to a simple, understandable five-priority Conservative platform. (Note that 570 is more than 14 times 40.)

In fairness to the Liberals, they do indicate which policies they would address in their first 100 days — even if governments usually emphasize the first 100 days when, like FDR in 1933, they’re replacing an opposition party, not themselves. By their own 100 days measure, they have 10 really important priorities: Legislating 10 days of sick pay for federally regulated workers and meeting with the provinces to see if they’ll give it to everyone — so the whole country can experience the absenteeism and productivity rates of the federal civil service. Hold a summit on restarting the arts and culture sector. Appoint a new federal housing advocate. Re-introduce legislation requiring tech giants to finance Canadian cultural production. Introduce legislation requiring them to share revenues with Canadian news outlets. Re-introduce reform of the Broadcasting Act, also aimed at tech giants. Re-introduce legislation banning conversion therapy, including for people over 18. Complete the Federal Action Plan on LGBTQ2 issues. Introduce legislation to combat serious forms of harmful online content. Re-introduce Bill C-22, which would reform mandatory criminal sentences.

Yes, four of the Liberals’ highest-priority items are to reintroduce legislation that their calling of the election put on hold. Gender and equality accounting is fine but what I’d really like to see in the platform is a list of how many of the proposals the NDP would have blocked if the Liberals had tried to get them through the last parliament. My guess is none. No wonder the prime minister is having trouble persuading Canadians his not having a majority government is preventing FORWARD. For everyone.