There is one plank in Thomas Mulcair’s platform that has received almost no attention. The leader of the New Democratic Party is promising to introduce a federal minimum wage of $15 if he becomes prime minister.

That is 36 per cent above the highest minimum wage in the land (Ontario’s at $11 an hour). Canada hasn’t had a federal wage floor in 19 years (Ottawa applies the relevant provincial minimum wage to federally regulated workers). A change of this magnitude would normally bring howls of protest from employers and warnings of job losses from economists.

Mulcair’s proposal has been greeted with near-silence.

There are legitimate reasons for this muted reaction:

Almost no one in Canada is paid the federal minimum wage. Entry level jobs in the federal public service pay well above the lowest limit and workers in federally regulated industries — transportation, telecommunications and broadcasting, banking, interprovincial pipelines and uranium mining — aren’t even close to the wage floor.

Ottawa has no authority to compel the provinces to raise their minimum wages, which range from $10.20 in Saskatchewan up to $11 in Ontario. For the majority of workers, those are the benchmarks that matter.

Unless Mulcair wins a parliamentary majority, he has little chance of pushing this policy through the House of Commons.

The NDP is trailing both the Liberals and Conservatives by a wide margin in public support.

What makes Mulcair’s minimum wage plan interesting is that it offers a clear point of differentiation between himself and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, both of whom are courting middle-class voters. The NDP leader aims to build economic stability from the bottom up. The Liberal leader aims to “give voice to the aspirations of our middle class.”

Their divergent philosophies filter through all of their policies.

Mulcair’s pledge to bring in a $15-a-day national child-care program is a good example. It would certainly help middle-class families. But the biggest beneficiaries would be low-income single mothers who need affordable child care to get a job and earn their way out of poverty.

His commitment to keep the age of eligibility for Old Age Security at 65, rather than raise it to 67 as the Tories have done, would certainly make it easier for middle-class workers to retire. But it would help older welfare recipients even more. They count the days till their 65th birthday because their first pension cheque ($1,328.14) is typically double their last social assistance payment ($626 in Ontario).

His plan to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 within four years would signal to the provinces and the public that Canada’s wage floor is unacceptably low. If the premiers followed Ottawa’s lead, all workers would be affected. The 6 per cent of workers earning the minimum wage would get an immediate boost in their take-home pay and the adjustment would percolate upward through the labour force, lifting the middle class.

Trudeau, by contrast, would use federal investments in science, infrastructure and higher education to trigger Canada’s next growth wave, providing opportunities for the middle class. A Liberal government would also seek job-creating foreign investment and use trade missions to promote Canada’s designers, engineers, builders and financiers — not just its raw materials — in rapidly modernizing Asian countries.

Detailed comparisons are impossible because Trudeau’s prescriptions are so vague. But he appears to regard government as a catalyst whereas Mulcair sees it an equalizer.

Both parties are fishing in the same vote-rich pool of urban/suburban angst. Both are tapping into the same hunger for change. And both are offering alternatives to the unbalanced, high-polluting petro-state Prime Minister Stephen Harper has built.

“Middle-class families are having a tough time making ends meet,” Mulcair said last week. “The middle class is having a hard time making ends meet and struggling with debt,” Trudeau said a year ago.

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Their words are interchangeable. But their prescriptions are profoundly different.

Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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