MONTREAL— If one were to summarize the spirit of Justin Trudeau’s so-called fairness for the middle-class manifesto, it is that the Liberals have belatedly resolved to fight fire with fire next fall or, in this case, tax cuts with tax cuts.

For the first time in a decade, they are set to go head to head with the Conservatives on a battlefield that the latter have largely owned by default until now.

In the past three elections, Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff to varying degrees tried to shift the campaign focus from the Conservative tax-cutting agenda to the social benefits of an activist federal government.

Martin attempted to fight the lure of promised cuts to the GST and the reintroduction of a monthly child benefit by arguing that they would leave the coffers empty for major national initiatives such as universal child-care program. His pleas — on the heels of decades of unfulfilled federal promises on the child-care front — fell on a lot of deaf ears.

Dion appealed to voters’ concerns over climate change. But his platform — loaded as it was with a carbon tax — was not crafted with the turmoil of a global economic crisis in mind. After his defeat his plan disappeared from the Liberal agenda.

Under Ignatieff, the Liberals tried to appeal to both the pocketbook and the social conscience of some of the voters that they were targeting. They promised to make post-secondary education financially accessible to all. That commitment failed to register — as did most of the 2011 platform.

Based on the two major fiscal planks Trudeau unveiled on Monday the plan he has built for his upcoming campaign is more a departure from that of his immediate predecessors than a continuation.

None of them embraced tax cuts in the way that Trudeau will be.

In contrast with the narrative of recent Liberal campaigns, the message will not be that Trudeau would spend the federal surplus all that differently from Stephen Harper but rather that he would distribute it more fairly.

By retargeting the Conservative child benefit on families that earn less than $150,000 Trudeau is able to offer most parents a sweeter deal, at the expense of a more affluent minority.

The Liberals would cut the federal tax rate on middle-income earners ($44,701-$89,701) and raising it for those who earn more than $200,000. That likewise would make more winners than losers.

If you believe that elections are largely won or lost by putting money back in voters’ pockets these days, then the measures Trudeau puts forward make the Liberal party competitive with the ruling Conservatives for the first time since Harper — as the then-leader of the official Opposition — visited a GTA store early in the 2005 campaign to promise to shave two points off the GST.

But there is a trade-off, for what the Liberal platform will not do is recreate the federal fiscal room lost over a decade of aggressive Conservative tax-cutting for the kind of spending programs that used to a hallmark of previous Liberal platforms.

To fund his measures Trudeau would cancel the doubling of the ceiling for contributions to a tax-free savings account (TFSA). He would do away the Conservative income-splitting regimen for all but seniors. That would still leave him $2 billion short — with details as to where those dollars would come from to be released at some later stage.

All that adds up to a sizeable chunk of the spending of a future Liberal government.

Over the past two years, Trudeau has promised to spend more on infrastructure. He said he would restore funding to the CBC. He is committed to offering the First Nations a better deal than the Conservatives. He talked about the federal government co-ordinating a provincial offensive on the climate change front. He wants to discuss health care and pension reform with the premiers.

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Most of those commitments fall under the general heading of a return to a more co-operative federalism than that practiced under Harper.

But with much of the incoming federal surpluses spoken for, the federal government that Trudeau would bring to the provincial table would at least initially be as strapped for cash for new ambitious programs as its provincial counterparts.

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