The Liberals brought three of their candidates to Ottawa late Saturday morning with seemingly one goal in mind: to outflank the NDP on the left and sell themselves as the best progressive alternative to the Conservatives.

Two incumbents — John McCallum, running in Markham–Thornhill, and Chrystia Freeland, running in University-Rosedale — joined another non-Ottawa candidate, Hochelaga’s Marwah Rizqy, not to announce a new policy, but to compare the merits of their existing proposals to those of the NDP.

Top of the list was the NDP rejection of both the Liberals’ middle-class tax cut for income between $44,701 and $89,401, and their tax hike on income over $200,000.

“What would Tommy Douglas say? Opposing a higher tax on the highest income people,” McCallum asked rhetorically.

“When I talk about how we are presenting a true progressive economic program, one of the elements is… that we are proposing an increase in the top marginal tax rate. We’re going to raise taxes on the one per cent, and that is — politically — a bold thing to do. It directly addresses increased income inequality,” Freeland followed.

The higher tax on the one per cent, The Globe and Mail‘s Bill Curry has noted, would push the top combined tax rate in six provinces to nearly 50 per cent or more. Some economists argue that would lead to tax avoidance.

For his part, Thomas Mulcair has said any tax rate over 50 per cent is “confiscation”.

One thing the NDP would do instead is raise the corporate tax rate, which the Liberals oppose.

“I come now to an NDP policy which is dead wrong — that is, to impose a higher corporate tax rate in the middle of a recession,” McCallum said Saturday.

“That is counterproductive to jobs, counterproductive to getting out of the recession. We don’t know how much they’re going to raise the corporate tax rate by. It has to be quite a lot to pay for all their promises.”

With McCallum moving on to the NDP’s national $15-a-day child care plan, which he said will forces provinces like Ontario to cough up billions of dollars they don’t have, the question was turned back on McCallum: how will they pay for their generous Child Care Benefit?

The Conservatives enthusiastically pointed when the Liberals released their proposal in the spring that the numbers didn’t add up.

“We took a bit of flak for that, but we were honest. It’ll cost $4 billion — $2 billion comes from ending the income splitting for families, not for pensioners… and the $2 billion we fill find. And that remains true,” McCallum said, adding that Canadians will get a fully-costed platform after everything in it has been announced.

“I happen to be involved in looking at the costing, and you can be assured that well before the election Canadians will have a document in which every penny spent will be itemized, justified, and added up,” he said.

“We haven’t yet announced everything in our platform, so we cannot give you the total numbers before we announce all of the measures. For example, one of the big ones coming in the not too distant future is on infrastructure.”