OTTAWA—In politics as in college, challenging a failing grade can be worth it.

Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page and his team at the University of Ottawa has revised their assessment of the Green party’s platform from a “fail” to a “pass.”

The better mark comes after the Greens provided supplementary information about the fiscal assumptions and platform costing.

“From a voter perspective, (the revised platform) is a clearer picture of the baseline assumptions and articulation of economic and fiscal challenges and uncertainties associated with the Green party’s platform,” an analysis of the platform, conducted by the non-partisan Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD), read.

Page and his team at the institute are evaluating party platforms in this election based on three categories: how realistic the economic assumptions are, how fiscally responsible the platform is, and how transparent parties are with their numbers.

The Green’s revised platform merited a passing grade on both its economic assumptions and transparency. But the institute team still determined it failed the test when it came to fiscal responsibility.

“The Green party has an ambitious agenda with significant resources set aside for pharmacare, education, infrastructure, the environment and to addressing challenging elements of Canada’s history,” the IFSD’s updated analysis stated.

But to pay for that ambitious agenda, the Greens have proposed “fundamental changes to the tax system,” including a new wealth tax, a tax on financial transactions and e-commerce, and a one-time hike in corporate taxes.

“While there is significant uncertainty associated with all the costing of individual tax measures, this uncertainty (economic and fiscal) is magnified when all of these measures are combined and implemented over the short term,” the analysis reads.

“The Green party highlights risk related to the implementation of these measures, (but) there are no contingency plans or prudence adjustments to raise confidence in the medium-term fiscal objective of a balanced budget.”

For these reasons, Page’s team determined the platform was “not defensible” as a medium-term plan to balance the books.

The Green’s original “fully-costed” platform received an overall failing grade, with the institute determining that some of the numbers literally did not add up. Page told the Star last week that there was something “very substantial” missing from the original document.

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The Liberals re-election platform, meanwhile, received a “good” grade from the IFSD on fiscal responsibility and transparency, a “pass” on the underpinning economic assumptions, for an overall rating of “good.”

Page and his team have yet to evaluate Conservative policies, as the party’s platform and costing have yet to be released in full.

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