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Worse yet is the Conservatives’ “Green Home Renovation Tax Credit,” part of the party’s “real plan” for dealing with climate change. The credit is supposed to give families an incentive to make their houses more energy efficient. But families already have an incentive to do that: to save on their heating and electricity bills. Why do they also need a cookie from the government?

Give the Tories some credit though: at least we know how much their proposals would cost

Well, I can think of one reason: because the Conservatives are also promising to remove the GST from home heating oil. In effect, the Tories are paying people, via the tax break, to consume more fuel, then paying them again to consume less of it.

Another possible reason: to encourage people to limit the amount of carbon dioxide they emit, rather than simply dump it into the atmosphere. But there’s a simpler, more effective way to do that: by adjusting the price of fossil fuels to take account of their carbon content, an approach sometimes called a carbon tax. Naturally, the Tories have ruled that out.

And then there’s the Tory proposal to restore the preferential tax treatment of income sheltered in private corporations, a tax break much beloved of doctors and other small business owners, as the Liberals discovered when they tried to close it a couple of years back. The Liberals may not have gone about it in the best way, but to simply return to the previous system, in all its garish inequity — and inefficiency — is utterly retrograde.

Give the Tories some credit though: at least we know how much their proposals would cost, the party having submitted them all to the Parliamentary Budget Office for its assessment. The same cannot be said for the Liberals, at least thus far (the party says it will ask the PBO to cost its entire platform, when it is unveiled).