OTTAWA—Tom Mulcair stood in Montreal Thursday and said an NDP government would cancel the Conservative cuts to the CBC.

The country did not tilt. Work days did not come to a screeching halt. The CBC News Network didn’t even cover it.

If you are a fan of the slow bleed of the public broadcaster ineptly scuffling through one of the toughest periods in its history, you weren’t going to vote for Mulcair’s New Democrats anyway.

But Mulcair coloured in another square in his electoral canvas as he tells Canadians what the NDP would do if it ever formed government.

You can question the finances, you can mock him, you can applaud or shrug, but he’s informing the electorate.

Justin Trudeau will get back to you on that.

Two men locked in combat to become the alternative to Stephen Harper’s Conservative government are employing two diametrically opposed strategies.

Lay it all out or keep it in your back pocket?

It’s easier to oppose than to propose but Mulcair is trying to do both.

If analysis of both strategies was limited to the hothouse of a political strategy room, the Liberal gambit would make more political sense.

Put your platform out early, you become a target. You face questions at every stop about how you would pay for your promises. You can spend too much time on defence.

There is an ongoing debate within senior Liberal circles about the need to have the leader step to the podium and make announcements with dollar signs attached — not roll out the platform, but announce Liberal programs.

The decision was to hold fire and again Trudeau’s luck took care of the rest.

Given the financial uncertainty in this country right now, Trudeau loses nothing by standing back and watching Stephen Harper delay his budget and turn himself into a fiscal contortionist in a bid to keep his political promises as the price of oil nosedives.

Trudeau has the luxury of being able to play things cautiously. He appears to have paid no political price for biding his time and he has maintained flexibility when it comes to putting together an economic platform.

He can respond to the events of the day, even if those responses are vague, and still take up much of the oxygen in any news cycle.

There are regular meetings of a team of his economic advisers, but those discussions do not cross into the political and questions of the pros and cons of making announcements sooner rather than later do not make it on to the agenda.

Mulcair says policy planks are too important to be announced in “a burst of fireworks” during a frenetic campaign, but the flip side of that is that promises made too early in the game are too easily forgotten.

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There is also the reality that Trudeau, whom opponents maintain is not ready for the job, would face more scrutiny and heat over any economic announcements than Mulcair.

Yes, the NDP leader may be making these announcements because he needs the attention if he is to somehow turn the 2015 campaign into a substantive clash between him and Harper and paint Trudeau as a lightweight.

But regardless of motives, he is doing the right thing. Voters in 2015 should be told up front by their leaders how they would govern, or how they would continue to govern if re-elected. They should be given time to consider policy proposals.

Mulcair would restore long-term predictable funding to the CBC by reversing $115 million in cuts over three years to the public broadcaster.

He would provide predictable, stable funding to the CBC so it could adapt to modern broadcasting strategies.

An NDP national daycare strategy would eventually cost Ottawa $5 billion per year and require the buy-in of provinces. That initial announcement was sidelined by an attack on Parliament and a subsequent sexual harassment scandal in the days following the NDP rollout.

Mulcair would also hike the minimum wage for federal workers to $15 per hour and roll back to 65 the eligibility age for Old Age Security. He would cancel Harper’s income-splitting plan.

He has not been properly pushed to tell us how he would pay for this and the NDP has never had to craft a federal budget.

But as he drops policy bit by bit as we move toward the election, voters will be able to say they know where Mulcair stands.

Such is the charmed political life of Trudeau that he can benefit by doing just the opposite.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1

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