Well said

Ed Broadbent:

First, we should have no illusions about where our poor children are to be found. Most are in families with two adults. Most poor adults work. Most of them have incomes so low that they can't afford housing and can't adequately feed or clothe their kids. If kids are members of aboriginal or immigrant Canadian families, the odds are even much greater that they will be poor.

Second, this poverty was not inevitable. Mostly it is the product of governments that have neither shared nor cared. As a Unicef report last Friday pointed out, Canadian politicians have failed our children. During the 1990s, the federal government abandoned a leadership role for Canada's poor. It unilaterally cancelled the Canada Assistance Plan with the provinces, eliminated all low-cost housing programs, ceased to set the pattern for minimum wages and failed to bring in a national child-care program. Perhaps most serious and unbelievable of all, it exacerbated the inequality that was emerging in the marketplace by changing the income-tax system to the advantage of the richest Canadians.

On the 20th anniversary of a noble parliamentary resolution, let's acknowledge our failure. And then reverse course. Instead of an income-tax policy favouring the rich, let's do the opposite. For a start, let's get our poor, hard-working families what they need immediately: more money.

For more than a decade, it is upper-income Canadians – not the poor or middle class – who have disproportionately benefited from globalization and deregulation. Therefore, I say that increasing their share of income taxes would be based on neither greed nor class envy. It should be called justice.

CanWest Editorial Policy: Benefits? What Benefits?

With the Cons' announcement that they'll correct a couple of the more glaring flaws in their "child care benefit", each of the three main federal parties has now offered at least some additional funding for Canadian families through tax benefits. And by any direct comparison, the Cons' proposal offers the least support of the three.

So naturally, CanWest's post on the topic...utterly ignores the New Democrats' and Libs' child tax benefit proposals, instead comparing the Cons' proposal to the other parties' plans to build a national child care system.

Which means that instead of providing an accurate picture - that the other parties are both making greater benefits available, and planning to create child care spaces where the Cons have failed completely - CanWest manages to give the false impression it's only the Cons that are proposing to provide any money directly to families. And all this under a headline and introduction which mirror the Cons' language about "modest" programs.

Fortunately, CanWest's previous efforts to do the Cons' work for them don't seem to have paid off all that much. But the fact that the other parties will once again have to try to correct misleading information from the media can only give Harper an undeserved advantage going into the last week of the campaign.

On benefits

NDP Outsider raises some good points about the need for the New Democrats' campaign to place more emphasis on the party's child tax benefit proposal. But as important as it is to explain the details of what's included, I'd think the even more vital step at this point is to shine a spotlight on the broader effects of the benefit.

After all, the consensus direction for the balance of the campaign seems to involve a ballot question based on the economy. And while Jack Layton and company have built plenty of momentum by pointing out the Cons' incompetence and highlighting the NDP's provincial track record, the New Democrats' message at this point seems to be veering away from an explanation as to how its platform would help.

Of course, it's still a useful step to present specific examples of what the benefit would do for particular families. But it's even more important to mention at every available opportunity that it's by making sure those families can keep their heads above water that Canada can best secure its economy as a whole. And if that message is able to sink in, then the NDP should be ideally positioned to make sure the benefits of a greater focus on family-level economic stability can come to pass once the campaign is over.

Stability from the bottom up

Let's note one more part of the New Democrats' emerging message which both makes plenty of sense on its face, and has the potential to change the debate about effective fiscal management:

(Layton) also responded to accusations from Harper that a NDP government would be bad news for the Canadian economy in a time of global uncertainty.

"If average families are looked after, if they can pay their bills, if they can meet their monthly mortgage payments and keep they jobs, the banks will be just fine," he said.

"Let's get the fundamentals right for Canadian families."

Particularly with the U.S. meltdown threatening to spill over into Canada, it's worth pointing out the factors which led to the current bailout and continued problems. Not only did a combination of upper-class tax cuts and lax regulation give financial institutions both the opportunity and the incentive to focus on short-term profit-taking without much regard for underlying asset values, but a draconian bankruptcy reform also punished consumers who tried to go on paying their bills rather than simply walking away from mortgages.

In contrast, the New Democrats' plan figures to ensure that more Canadians will have a financial cushion every month rather than struggling to tread water. Which means in turn that financial institutions will have less need to worry about the kind of widespread non-payment that precipitated the crisis south of the border.

And of course, it shouldn't go without mention that the effect of the benefit money would potentially go far beyond the recipients themselves. After all, the pool of money now in the hands of families would provide a strong incentive for Canadian businesses to develop new or improved goods and services in an effort to win some of the resulting business.

In other words, the NDP's child tax benefit could serve both as a financial stabilizer and a spur to new commercial development - helping to benefit the economy at large as well as the recipient families. And on election day, it wouldn't be at all surprising if voters decide that's a better model for development than simply cutting taxes at the top and hoping families can find a way to make do for themselves.

Game changing

With the New Democrats' campaign based largely on a contrast between Jack Layton and Stephen Harper obviously working splendidly, I'd wondered whether the party's platform might wind up erring on the side of caution in order to keep the focus on leadership rather than policy. But instead, the NDP's largest platform plank looks to be an ambitious and ingenious way to ensure that pocketbook voters look to Layton first:

The New Democrats will today unveil an ambitious new $17 billion child benefit plan that will pay families up to $400 a month per child, sources told the Star...

Families with a household income of $38,000 or less would receive $400 a month per child.

Those earning less than $188,000 a household would get $250 a month per child.

And families making more than $188,000 a year would receive $100 a month per child.

Unlike the current Tory "universal child care benefit" policy, the money wouldn't be taxed.

Also, the eligibility threshold would be extended from the existing cut-off when a child turns 6 to 18 years old.

In other words, anybody who might otherwise have seen reason to support the Cons on the basis of their monthly allowance - or the Libs for doubling the exact same structure for some households - now has every reason to rank the New Democrats as the top choice. Factoring in the increased monthly benefit, the change to make the money tax-free (which was a rightful criticism of the Cons' plan which the Libs seem to have mirrored), and the length of time in which the benefit would be available, the effect would seem to be to ensure that every parent in Canada is better off under an NDP government rather than the alternatives.

Now, the Cons' response remains to be seen. The most obvious answer would be to try to simply criticize the plan within their existing campaign framework of criticizing the cost of opposition proposals. But the Cons surely can't argue that child tax benefits aren't a worthwhile use of money when much of their 2006 success was based on the one now in place. And the New Democrats will surely be glad to spend the balance of the campaign arguing whether money is better put toward corporations or children.

Conversely, the Cons could try to alter their strategy to date by throwing together a plan which would favour at least some parents compared to the NDP's proposal. But that raises the inherent dangers of changing direction mid-campaign, undermining the message the Cons have spent months trying to build and forcing them to defend the new plan against their own now-abandoned narrative that they had already emptied out the federal coffers.

Either way, the benefit plan looks to be an ideal means of both pushing some current Con votes toward the NDP, and fighting the rest of the campaign on Layton's preferred policy terms. And we'll find out soon whether Canada's supposed chess master has been thoroughly outmaneuvered.