​Andrea Horwath and the New Democrats have released their election platform, and the good news for party stalwarts is that the centrism of 2014 is gone: the party is pegging its fortunes to an ardently progressive platform — one that includes free or inexpensive daycare; some student-debt forgiveness; and substantial commitments to transit construction and operations.

There are plenty of policy bones to work with here, but there’s precious little meat on them. That’s forgivable: it’s the government’s job to put detailed policy together, and to do that, they’ve got an army of ministry staff that opposition parties like the NDP lack. Nevertheless, there are important questions to be asked about some of the New Democrats’ platform pledges.

1. Who, exactly, will pay $12 (or less) per day for daycare?

This is the big blank space in the NDP platform. What we know is that the party wants to provide any households making less than $40,000 — that is, the lowest-earning 40 per cent of Ontario families — with free licensed, non-profit daycare. Those in the remaining 60 per cent of the province would pay an average of $12 a day, with individual prices to be determined using a sliding scale (the idea is that wealthier families would pay more). But the NDP couldn’t say on Monday what that sliding scale would look like. The median Ontario household makes around $75,000; does the NDP’s pledge mean that a household earning that much would pay $12 a day? Details like that would need to be worked out with data that only the government collects.

Stay up to date! Get Current Affairs & Documentaries email updates in your inbox every morning.

(Of course, given the price of daycare in the GTA, middle- and upper-income families could pay two or three times the $12-a-day price tag and still save substantially.)

2. Who pays the speculator tax?

The NDP isn’t just spending money in its platform. It’s raising taxes, too — on everything from luxury cars to corporate incomes to property owned by people residing outside Ontario. The party borrowed that third idea (with credit) from the British Columbia NDP, which introduced the policy in this year’s budget. Ontario’s current speculator tax, brought in by the Liberals last year, applies only once, when a property is sold; the NDP is proposing instead to introduce a property surtax on homes registered to anyone who doesn’t pay income tax in the province. The stated intent is to encourage people to either sell empty homes or rent them out.

But B.C.’s experience with the tax has been rocky: the NDP government there had to water down their initial proposal in the face of harsh opposition because, as the legislation was initially drafted, the tax would have applied to people who were residents of B.C. and owned summer cottages.

Will the Ontario NDP learn from that unforced error and start off with a weaker proposal? Or will they gamble that the Muskoka set won’t be voting for them anyway? Why is the speculation tax limited to non-Ontarians? Someone who lives here can make bank by flipping a house just as easily as someone who doesn’t. These are just some of the questions the NDP will have to answer.

3. Where will all this affordable housing go?

The NDP platform includes a commitment to build 65,000 affordable homes; 45,000 of those go above and beyond what’s called for in the federal government’s National Housing Strategy. The party estimates the cost will be $500 million a year. It doesn’t seem, on the face of it, as if that sum will be enough: federal and municipal governments will need to chip in, and Ottawa might not be enthusiastic (or willing, after an election) to cough up more money.

But even if provincial money alone proved enough to build the full 65,000 units, the NDP would have the same problem other governments with ambitious housing plans face: Where are they going to put all this stuff? There’s no actual shortage of land — if you’re willing to overrule recalcitrant NIMBYs in big cities. But the New Democrats explicitly state elsewhere in their platform that they want to empower local communities even more than the Liberals have done, by ensuring that the government’s changes to the Ontario Municipal Board leave neighbourhoods in control. So who will win: Affordable-housing advocates or NIMBYs?

God help any political party whose housing policy needs to be gentle enough that it doesn’t spook the sort of people who get outraged by daycares.

4. Why will NDP’s take on “gentle density” succeed where the Liberals’ didn’t?

Another potentially interesting bit of language in the NDP platform: the party wants to encourage “missing middle” housing types, which cities have said they want to see more of — it’s the kind of housing that’s more dense than detached bungalows but more human-scale than massive condo towers. The party also says it’d create a “Residents Rights Act” aimed at legalizing basement apartments, laneway houses, and granny flats.

But the Liberals already tried to legalize so-called secondary units with amendments to the Planning Act in 2011, and then they strengthened those amendments last year. Success has been limited, because the government has been unwilling to force municipalities to comply with the act (and municipal councils have dragged their feet, because new apartments are often unpopular).

The idea of legalizing “gentle density” in Ontario cities is a good one, but the experience of the Liberals shows that doing so is harder than it looks. Would the NDP be willing to go further to force towns and cities to comply?

None of these questions is a show-stopper — even the daycare question is less problematic than any one of the many questions raised by the Liberals’ high-speed rail plan. But if the New Democrats form government, the hard work will have only just begun for them.