The federal Liberals are crediting a new fundraising email referencing Andrew Scheer dropping a pledge to give a tax deduction to parents who send their children to private schools for driving up donations in August.

A mass email sent out by the party earlier this month and credited to Liberal MP and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains doubts the veracity of Scheer’s decision to withdraw the promised tax deduction from the Conservative platform, as first reported by iPolitics.

Bains noted in the letter that Scheer first made the promise during the 2017 Conservative leadership campaign, and only dropped it with weeks to go before this year’s general election.

“It’s a promise Scheer made to win the leadership of the Conservative Party, and now just weeks before the federal election, he wants us to believe he won’t follow through on making this huge private subsidy with your public funds — for now,” reads the email note attributed to Bains.

“He’s not fooling anybody. He campaigned on this for 831 days.”

Liberal party spokesperson Braeden Caley told iPolitics while the party generally doesn’t provide specific figures, the email was a “significant contributor” in pushing the party past its midmonth online fundraising goal of $200,000 for August.

BACKGROUNDER: Scheer drops private schools deduction

A Scheer spokesperson attributed the Tory leader’s decision to not move ahead with the tax credit to the large budget deficits recorded by the Trudeau government in recent years.

“As a result of Trudeau’s budget mess, Mr. Scheer will not move ahead with the tax credit for independent schools at this time,” Daniel Schow told iPolitics earlier this month.

In this past March’s federal budget, the Liberal government projected a $19.7 billion deficit for 2019-20. In the three previous years, the Liberals tabled budgets that resulted in annual deficits of nearly $20 billion.

When reached for comment, Schow slammed the Liberals for the fundraising email.

“What a ridiculous desperate smear from a party whose leader was just found guilty of breaking ethics laws,” he said in a statement, referencing the ethics commissioner’s finding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau violated the Conflict of Interest Act in the SNC-Lavalin controversy.

When asked why the party sent out a mass email referencing the dropped pledge, Bains told iPolitics that it was an “important issue the party wanted to highlight,” considering the potential effect on federal coffers and how Scheer had campaigned on the idea for the past two years.

“Have they really dropped it? Has he really proposed to eliminate it or has he delayed it? There needs to be clarity around that,” he said in a phone interview on Friday.

“We want to make sure Canadians understand that there’s a clear contrast between our plan, our team and our leader and … [that] Andrew Scheer has no plan.”

Bains also said the since-dropped pledge speaks to how Scheer’s policies are “really targeted” at benefitting the “most wealthy,” compared to the Liberals’ focus on helping middle-class Canadians.

The Liberals, he said, have been “very clear” that the government has limited resources that are best spent strengthening the public education system, instead of offering a tax subsidy for already wealthy parents.

Bains slammed Scheer’s proposed deduction as a continuation of the former Harper government’s preference for handing out tax credits to the “most wealthy” Canadian families and Conservative opposition to the Canada Child Benefit (CCB).

The CCB, which is tax-free and based on income, is offered to all eligible families with children under the age of 18.

According to the government, more than 3.7 million families received over $23 billion in CCB payments between July 2017 and June 2018.

In a statement last month, Scheer noted that the CCB was built off a Harper-era benefit program that sought to directly give money to parents to help them offset the cost of child care. The Liberals, he said, have a “long history” of opposing sending child-care money directly to parents prior to the Trudeau government’s creation of the CCB in 2016.

“It wasn’t too long ago senior Liberals were accusing the Conservatives of giving families money for ‘beer and popcorn.’ They were wrong ⁠ — child poverty during the previous Conservative government fell to a record low of 8.5 per cent,” he said in a statement.

Scheer said the Conservatives would maintain the CCB if elected in the fall, while also removing the carbon tax and the GST off home heating bills, and introduce a new tax credit to help offset the cost of renovations that improve energy efficiency.

READ MORE: Feds top-up CCB, simplify application forms

*This story has been updated with comment from the federal Conservatives.