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Oddly, some of the most prominent are the least interesting. A couple of years of deficits, at $10 billion a pop, may have been useful for differentiating the party from the NDP, but it’s rounding error on a $2-trillion economy. The tax changes — four points higher at the top, a point and a half lower in the middle — is likewise mostly for show: the party wanted to be seen to be doing something for the middle class, before it found that bashing the upper class tested better. Nevertheless, considering both were widely assumed to be, as a mid-campaign Winnipeg Sun headline had it, POLITICAL SUICIDE, the party’s embrace of them showed nerve, if not a sound grasp of economics.

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But then add up some of the other items in the platform. To be sure, there is much that amounts to undoing Conservative policies. I was sorry to see the pledge to cancel income-splitting for couples with children, or revoke the increase in Tax-Free Savings Accounts, and sorrier still to see so many sops to the unions — including, incredibly, reinstatement of the Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital tax credit, perhaps the single worst economy policy of the last 30 years. Pulling out of the ISIL mission, likewise, strikes me as the triumph of ideology over reason. The return of the long-form census, on the other hand, would be welcome news, as is the promised rewrite of Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism bill.

But there is much else that represents a real departure, including a complete revamp of child benefit policies, scrapping a passel of existing programs worth $18 billion annually in favour of a new Canada Child Benefit that would deliver more to those at the bottom and less to those at the top. Add to that legalizing pot, expanding the Canada Pension Plan, “putting a price on carbon,” implementing every one of the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a “non-partisan, merit-based” process for Senate appointments — not to mention the political revolution that electoral reform alone would bring about — and you have quite the packed agenda.