The Conservatives have finally shown on paper how they would achieve what they’ve promised for months now: a balanced budget within five years, by squeezing the civil service, tightening their fist around operating budgets and delaying billions in infrastructure spending.

Released on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving weekend, just as advance polls opened across the country, the Conservative platform was the last to be published in this campaign of unprecedented fiscal scrutiny, and voters now have some starkly different approaches to choose from.

Smaller government, lower taxes and some cuts from the Conservatives? A blend of tax cuts and new spending from the Liberals? Big government and big new taxes from the NDP? The choices are distinct, but also true to the traditional ideologies of each party.

The good news for everyone is that voters have a more transparent, more reliable view of what the big political parties plan to do with taxpayers’ money than they’ve had in campaigns past. That’s thanks to the Parliamentary Budget Officer giving real-time, independent assessments of the parties’ proposals, along with scrutiny of the broader fiscal integrity of each platform by former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page and his team at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, and numerous reliable economists dissecting promises quickly and publicly on social media.

“Voters have a better idea of what they’re getting. It’s better than any election in my memory,” said Page. “They’ve been forced to put in ‘governing’ platforms.”

The Conservative platform says Andrew Scheer would run a tighter budget, gradually reducing the size of government and the civil service, and also require that any new spending be financed by cancellations of old spending. Deficits would shrink over the mandate, but the Conservatives wouldn’t aim to balance the budget until after the next election.

The platform would delay billions of dollars in spending for infrastructure the Liberals had put in place, reducing the spending to about half of what it was intended to be in some years. Included in that is a commitment to scrap the Canada Infrastructure Bank, a Liberal creation meant to leverage public money with private-sector financing.

The Conservatives would also scale back growth in the civil service, cut foreign aid and what the party calls “corporate welfare,” find $14.4 billion to trim from operating expenses over five years, as well as a cancel parts of the Liberals’ last budget, such as a subsidy to companies to buy electric vehicles and the Canada training credit.

That’s hard to do without pain. Successive governments have had similar cost-cutting exercises, but not recently on this scale. The Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy figures the restraint will feel like a 40,000-person reduction in the size of the government.

But it needs to be done if the Conservatives want to eliminate the deficit while also cutting income taxes across the board, cut the GST on home heating, and give tax credits on parental leave.

What’s not costed out in the platform is Scheer’s proposal for a national energy corridor, which researchers have pegged at $100 billion. Like the Liberals and their plans for pharmacare, the national energy corridor is something the Conservatives talk a lot about but have no solid plans on how or when to implement.

The NDP, which published its entire platform this summer without price tags attached, also rolled out its numbers on Friday.

At first glance, the NDP’s bottom line resembles the Liberals’. They both make sure the debt burden is slightly declining over time. They both increase spending and they raise extra revenue by taxing corporations.

But there are more differences than similarities once the layers of the budgeting onion are peeled. The NDP platform is blatant about its big spending, as well the big new taxes on the rich and corporations to offset the new costs. Universal daycare, universal pharmacare, sustainable public transit and affordable housing would be paid for largely by a new wealth tax and raising corporate tax rates.

Overall, they’re talking about $130 billion in new spending over four years, offset by about the same amount in new or higher taxes. The Liberals, on the other hand, propose $57 billion in new spending, offset by about $25.4 billion in new revenues. The NDP deficit in the first year of governing would be about the same as the Liberals’ projections, but the NDP deficit would shrink faster than the Liberals’.

The NDP projections are shrouded with uncertainty. Page and his team note that 90 per cent of the measures meant to raise new revenue are ranked “high uncertainty” by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. That’s mainly because the party doesn’t take into account how corporations and rich people would react to higher taxes, and whether they’d up and take their wealth elsewhere.

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Still, none of the three platforms contains ludicrous projections, and they’re all based on reasonable assumptions. Yes, they all contain uncosted aspirations that reflect long-term ideas the parties are pitching to voters but that would require a lot of groundwork and negotiating with the provinces. But elections are a great time for aspirations. And with all the costing details now in the public realm, there is plenty of solid information for voters to work with.

Just in the nick of time.

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