The election promises are coming thick and fast — on taxes, pensions, child benefits, housing, climate change and a lot more. You can hardly tell the players and the pledges without a program, and even then it’s confusing.

The Liberals had a great idea back in 2015 to help voters sort through the welter of competing election promises.

They said they would give the respected Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) the job of costing out the parties’ promises in the next campaign and making them public so Canadians could benefit from an independent, neutral estimate of what the various policies would cost.

To its credit, the Trudeau government delivered on that promise. It gave the PBO half a million dollars in special funding so it would be ready to deliver objective analysis of how the parties’ pledges in the 2019 campaign would affect the government’s bottom line.

So far, so good. The Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens all submitted promises to the PBO for costing, and its reports are readily available online. As of Tuesday the PBO had posted 17 brief documents giving cost breakdowns of pledges by those three parties. They’re a useful resource for voters trying to make sense of the campaign.

You can find out, for example, that the Conservatives’ promise to beef up Registered Education Saving Plans would cost $145 million in the first year, rising to $763 million by 2028-29, an estimate the PBO says it can make with “moderate certainty.” That’s better than relying solely on politicians’ self-serving rhetoric and the party’s own estimates.

The Liberal party, though, is glaringly conspicuous by its absence in this novel process. Even though it was the Liberals who had the bright idea of having the PBO analyze party promises, they aren’t cooperating with the office in a way that would give voters a timely look at the financial impact of the promises they have made so far.

Under the rules, it’s up to the parties to submit their campaign pledges to the PBO for analysis. And they must give the PBO written permission to publish the results.

The other parties have done that. But the Liberals haven’t. They say they are submitting only “big ticket” items to the PBO for costing. And they are delaying the release of the office’s analysis until they issue their full campaign platform because, they say, some of the promises are interconnected. Making individual reports public “wouldn’t tell the whole story.”

At the very least, this isn’t living up to the spirit of the reform that the Liberals themselves put in place. The whole idea was to get real-time, objective analysis of the parties’ promises. Manipulating the nature and timing of the reports risks defeating the whole purpose. Worse, it leaves the Liberals open to the accusation that they aren’t coming clean with voters.

The Liberals should re-think their approach. This is no easy campaign for the governing party. It has a four-year record to defend, a record with many accomplishments but one that also has its share of bungles and scandals. Justin Trudeau’s embarrassing “brownface” escapades don’t help, either.

All the parties are putting a lot in the window in this campaign. It’s a lot to expect voters to sort through the conflicting promises on taxes and benefits. Does it make more sense to cut taxes for everyone (as the Conservatives would do) or to target tax cuts more at the lowest-paid and enhance programs like the Canada Child Benefit (as the Liberals promise)? What about putting a new tax on those fortunate enough to have amassed great wealth (as the NDP wants)?

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Ultimately these choices come down to competing values: who do you want to help most, and who do you think should pay the freight?

But a key piece of the puzzle is how much each measure would cost. The Liberals should do more to help voters figure that out.

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