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With respect to taxes, after all the verbiage, talking points, claims and counterclaims, it seems Trudeau has put his party marginally ahead of the Conservatives pound for policy pound, because the Liberals’ proposed middle-class tax cut and revised national child benefit would, in fact, constitute a financial break for the majority, and not a tax increase, as Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre wanly insisted for weeks on end this spring.

The Conservatives could have pre-empted this state of affairs with a broad middle-class tax cut of their own after it became obvious last winter this was the Liberal plan; they chose to stick with income-splitting for couples, which the late Jim Flaherty said benefited too few Canadians for his liking.

Mulcair, meantime, has promised to boost the federal corporate tax rate by three or four points into the high teens, from the current 15 per cent, but has latterly seemed uncertain of his math. In a scathing dissection last week, The Canadian Press’s Joan Bryden had the NDP leader wobbling all over the map and still not settling on a final target. This last is surprising: the New Democrats have known, or should have known, for months, that both Liberals and Conservatives would be gunning for the costing of their voluminous promises, which already run into the tens of billions for a four-year term.

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On Senate reform, the Liberals — sadly, for those of us who would like to see the Red Chamber turned into a bowling alley — have offered, thus far, the only feasible alternative to the status quo, given the Constitutional constraints. Sweeping electoral reform was always NDP territory; as of last week, the Trudeau Liberals have made it their own, promising to ditch Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. It remains to be seen whether this translates into votes, but no one can fault the plan for lack of ambition.

There are, of course, four months to go in this campaign. Harper and Mulcair doubtless have policy surprises of their own, held in reserve. But for the time being, they’re left arguing Trudeau can’t deliver, or won’t deliver, what he has pledged; which is a far cry from being able to credibly say he has nothing on offer. There’s a pervasive assumption among Trudeau’s opponents he’ll scupper himself in the debates, which he may. Given how the policy battle is shaping up, it seems they may be relying overmuch on that view.