OTTAWA—The Conservative election platform received a positive overall score from the former Parliamentary Budget Officer, who graded Andrew Scheer’s party on the plus side for realistic economic assumptions, fiscal responsibility and transparency.

Kevin Page, the former Parliamentary budget watchdog, assessed the Conservatives’ platform Friday for the Star, after Page and his team of economists at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy graded each of the major party’s fiscal plans earlier in the campaign.

In an interview Friday, Page said the Conservatives have put forward a different type of spending plan than their main national rivals, the Liberals, New Democrats and Greens. Where those parties are heavy on government spending, Page said, the Conservatives are looking to make “pretty significant” cuts.

“This is definitely a different philosophy. This is more about shrinking the footprint,” Page said.

After waiting until the final stage of the campaign — after the debates and on the same day as advance polls opened across the country — the Conservatives unwrapped their 102-page election platform in Delta, B.C. on Friday.

The party projects they can balance the federal budget within five years, pointing to more than $35 billion in cuts to foreign aid and “corporate welfare,” as well as reduced annual spending on infrastructure funding and savings from cuts to government “operating expenses.”

The party also plans for billions of dollars in new revenue. It expects $410 million in the 2020-21 from a new 3 per cent tax on the profits of “the largest” Internet companies — like Google and Facebook. The party would also reallocate $750 million in government spending to boost enforcement of tax dodgers and corporations, a move that the current Parliamentary Budget Officer — Yves Giroux — predicted could rake in $7.5 billion over the next five years.

Conservative Party of Canada Platform 2019 Costing View document on Scribd

Page said that, while the party gets an overall pass for its fiscal plan, there are still areas of concern. It’s unclear, for instance, how the Conservatives would find savings from government operations without affecting federal services, he said.

“You shouldn’t underestimate (and think) it’s going to be easy to do,” he said.

Page also pointed to the reduced annual spending on infrastructure. This will clearly help the party balance the budget in five years, as Scheer promised during the campaign, but it could throw a wrench in long term economic competitiveness by delaying upgrades to transit, roads and other pieces of infrastructure that could create jobs and economic growth, he said.

On transparency, Page said the party has laid out a clear vision of its intentions, even if the platform was unveiled late in the election campaign. Most of the party’s major proposals — like its “universal tax cut” on the first $50,000 of income people make each year, as well as removal of federal sales tax from home heating and the cancellation of the federal carbon price and rebate system — were announced earlier in the campaign, he said. And the fiscal plan doesn’t have the same transformative effect to the economy that proposals from the Greens and NDP would have, including the creation of new and untried forms of taxation, Page said.

“If you can achieve a balanced budget in this sort of package, the fiscal structure federally would remain sustainable,” he said.

“This isn’t the kind of fiscal plan that would upset the economy in any significant way.”

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