MONTREAL—From promises of affordable child care, to the prospect of petro-dollars paving a Quebec road, to Alberta-style prosperity, and of more infrastructure spending, the federal party leaders were hard at work campaigning on Tuesday.

All that was missing was an actual general election call.

With the next federal vote still theoretically twelve months away this is really the opening week of what stands to become a year-long dry run.

Here is a look at the previews that the Conservatives, the NDP and the Liberals offered on Tuesday.

Stephen Harper’s visits to Quebec often amount to little more than courtesy calls, designed to counter the perception that the prime minister would rather ignore the province (and vice-versa).

But since the provincial Liberals came back to power last spring the tone between the two capitals has become more cordial and, on Tuesday, Harper recycled a three-year old accord with Quebec that would see the province reap the revenues from future oil drilling in the St. Lawrence River.

Politically, the announcement that the federal-provincial agreement could soon be fleshed out by legislation was timely.

It allowed Harper to stake out common ground with Premier Philippe Couillard in the debate that is heating up in Quebec about the role of petro-dollars in the province’s economic future.

On Tuesday, the NDP became the latest federal party to promise Canadian parents a national child-care program.

As prime minister, Thomas Mulcair says he would work with the provinces to make hundreds of thousands of child-care places available at $15 or less at day.

The federal promise of a national child-care initiative has been made and broken so many times that one would think there would no longer be a market for it except, perhaps, with the Elvis-is-alive constituency.

And yet Mulcair easily won the air war on Tuesday.

There is a reason why the affordable child-care promise — even as it has a history of never having been delivered on — is never for long a political orphan. Each successive generation of working parents brings fresh hopes to the discussion.

Indeed, if only because the proportion of working Canadians in need of affordable quality childcare has increased steadily from election to election, the issue is likely to have legs with more voters today than when Brian Mulroney first promised it in 1984 or when Jean Chrétien gave it pride of place in the Liberals’ “red book” in 1993.

Still the dream of a more affordable Canadian child-care regimen might have died, had it not been for Quebec’s groundbreaking early childhood education initiative.

Mulcair’s announcement once again brought to light how the issue divides experts and pundits. But those who actually benefit from more affordable child care are less ambivalent.

It is a rare Quebec parent that would let the province tinker with this popular program without a fight. For that reason, rumours of the impending demise of the province’s universal child-care system at the hands of a cost-cutting Couillard government are premature.

In what may be a first for the NDP, Mulcair’s child-care announcement reversed a historical pattern that had seen the federal Liberals routinely borrow the New Democrats’ big ideas.

But then, the Liberal trash bin is currently overflowing with discarded ambitious undertakings — including some as recent as Stéphane Dion’s 2008 aggressive climate change plan and its carbon tax.

One would think that the Liberals have such an abundance of policy riches that they can afford to place ideas that they used to advocate on the curb for other parties to sort through.

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And yet cutting-edge ideas were not in evidence in the advance-billed “major” speech that Justin Trudeau delivered in Quebec City on Tuesday.

The Liberal leader reiterated that, as prime minister, he would rather invest in social and physical infrastructures than cut taxes. And as is usually the case when Trudeau speaks in his home-province, he urged Quebecers to “again become active partners in the Canadian federation.”

On a day when the NDP was proposing to build on Quebec’s experience to craft a national child-care program and in a city whose voters were among the first to turn their backs on the Bloc Québécois a decade ago, that came across as a kick through an open door.

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