Conservatives double down on jobs, economy and childcare change

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This article was published 15/08/2021 (1229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA – Erin O’Toole is out of the gate early with the Conservative platform, laying down the planks on the second day of the federal election campaign with a focus on jobs and economic growth.

In a slick 162-pagedocument replete with images of families, medical professionals and a T-shirt-sporting O’Toole on the cover, the Tory leader highlighted his pledge to restore within a year one million jobs lost to theCOVID-19 pandemic.

The magazine-style platform billsO’Toole as “the man with the plan,” though that plan has yet to be costed.

“This election is about who you think can get us out of the recession and rebuild the economy. Who do you think can secure the future for all Canadians?” O’Toole said from the stage of the party’s hotel-based broadcast studioin downtown Ottawa.

He criticized the Liberals, NDP, Bloc Québécois and Greens as big spenders who are more obsessed with their image than inflation.

“Because of them COVID-19 has made the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

The platform doubles down on economic resurgence, rolling out a slew of tax credits, rebates and business loans to help roar back from a pandemic that battered Canada’s economy with a 5.4 per cent drop in real gross domestic product last year, followed by an uptick in 2021.

A Conservative government would ease affordability problems for struggling families by revving up the economy alongside a balanced budget by 2031, O’Toole said.

It would also scrap all Liberal government childcare funding deals with the provinces and territories. Trudeau has signed agreements with eight premiers in the past six weeks.

Instead, the Conservatives would provide a refundable tax credit of between $4,500 and $6,000 per child, the party said.

The plan, when layered on top of certain provincial refund programs such as Quebec’s, aims to cover up to 75 per cent of childcare costs for families with incomes under $30,000, and a smaller percentage for households with higher incomes.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, when asked about the Conservative promise to kill off the multibillion-dollar daycare deals, appeared incredulous and asked if that was really in their platform. He threw up his arms and said that clearly the Conservative nature “has come back at a gallop.”

“It’s Stephen Harper’s approach, it’s the Conservatives’ approach to cut programs, not to be there for women, not to be there for families,” he said in French.

Conservative governments in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island all signed on to the program, he noted.

O’Toole said his plan would support “all parents immediately, not some six years from now,” and offer more flexibility for shift workers and employees with rigidhours.However, a raft of new daycare spaces is not the goal, party officials said.

In a bid to paint the Liberal government as back-scratching “insiders,” O’Toole promised to toughen anticorruption laws. The platform would also ramp up mental-health funding for provinces, raise tax credits for low-income workers and revive made-in-Canada pharmaceuticals.

The set of commitments bolsters the Conservatives’ national “recovery plan” from March, but the party says the platform will not be costed until the parliamentary budget officer provides an estimate in the coming weeks.

The Tories, who have yet to board a campaign bus, are the first party to release a full platform ahead of the election on Sept. 20, although the NDP showcased a blueprint for its own campaign pledgeslast week before the race had officially begun.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation said O’Toole’s road map has failed to find savings.

“The Conservatives don’t have a credible plan to balance the budget and they’re barely paying lip service to reducing the deficit,” director Franco Terrazzano said in a statement.

“The government is spending $500 billion this year, but instead of going after the low-hanging fruit like reversing MP pay raises, the Conservatives are promising to spend billions the government doesn’t have.”

As Canada deals with the fourth wave of COVID-19, O’Toole aims to wind down pandemic relief soon after taking office, replacing the wage subsidy with a plan to pay up to half the salary of net new hires for six months. He would also give targeted support tothe hospitality and tourism sectors.

“We want to help the most highly affected,” he said. “There are thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses in hospitality, tourism, restaurants hanging on by a thread. So, our plan will secure those jobs, help them thrive and that will help us get a growing economy.”

Party officials said the robust economic recovery on which the Tory plan rests assumes annual GDP growth of roughly three per cent, a target reached only once since 2011.

“We’ve chosen an appropriate target based on a very ambitious set of economic development policies,” O’Toole said.

He cited the one-million-jobs plan as well as a strategy to spur innovation by cutting the income-tax rate in half on new patented technologies and fanning investment in tech startups through securities reforms.

The Liberals and NDP have also pledged one million post-pandemic jobs.

The Conservative platform plans to scrap the Canada Infrastructure Bank and pour funds not yet earmarked into roads, public transit, energy production and broadband, with the goal of connecting all Canadians to high-speed internet by 2025.

The Tories have criticized the government over the Canada Infrastructure Bank not having completed a single project. The Crown corporation was launched in June 2017.

O’Toole would also create a new post, the minister responsible for red tape reduction, despite the risk of irony. Ontario has a minister responsible for this file and Alberta has an associate minister.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 16, 2021.

— With files from Stephanie Taylor and Mia Rabson