Before the Conservatives unveiled their election platform on Tuesday — the last platform to be released by the main federal parties — more than seven million Canadians had already voted.
That suggests a significant chunk of the Canadian public felt they didn’t need to compare the costed party platforms before casting a vote. But it also calls into question the relevance of such documents.
“The fact that all the key parties waited very late in the campaign to put forward their platform, I think, gives us an indication that they didn’t think this would be what voters would be very interested about,” said Sébastien Dallaire, executive vice-president of Eastern Canada for the Leger polling firm.
Last Saturday, the Liberals and NDP released their full platforms after both leadership debates and a full day of advance voting. The Conservatives released their own platform after advance polls had already closed.
“In the past, those platforms came a lot earlier because parties knew or believed that voters would very much pay attention to deficits and taxes. And this time around, it suggests that parties didn’t think this would matter so much,” Dallaire said.
He said the reason for that is because U.S. President Donald Trump and the tariffs he imposed on Canada have become such central issues in this campaign.
“This is what voters were concerned about. This is what poll after poll was showing was more important,” he said. “It’s been very difficult to get voters to focus on something else.”
David Coletto, founder and CEO of Ottawa-based polling and market research firm Abacus Data, said their polling shows that the country is split in choosing between which party and leader can best deal with the impact of Trump’s decisions and who can best change policy and the direction of the country.
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The Liberals are winning by 40 per cent among those who say it’s about Trump, while the Conservatives lead by 26 per cent among those who say it’s about change, he said in an email to CBC News.
“Instead of looking at the party’s platform in detail, I think Canadians are assessing the character and experience of the leaders,” he said. “At this point, I don’t think the platforms will have much impact on voting behaviour in this election.”
Yet there’s some data indicating that the top election issues may be shifting away from which leader and political party is best suited to face the American threats.
According to CBC’s Vote Compass, ahead of the leaders’ debates, 25.2 per cent of respondents said Canada-U.S. relations was the most important election issue. After the debates, only 19.6 per cent said this was the most important issue. Other issues like affordability and health care rose in importance.
Platforms remain important documents and are a pretty good predictor for how a party will govern if elected, said Richard Johnston, a political science professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
“Parties actually, generally speaking, mean what they say and to the extent that circumstances permit, do what say they’re going to do,” he said. “So the cynicism about party platforms is cheap talk. They actually do take this seriously.”
Mostafa Askari, chief economist at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy (IFSD), echoed that whichever party gets elected, their costed platforms, which include public spending projections and revenue streams will, with some adjustments, be their budget.
“So why not have that idea before you go to vote and get a sense of what they are planning?” he said. “I can’t trust any of these politicians if they just talk without really putting anything on the table and show me what they are planning to do.”
But platforms just may not matter in the way they theoretically should, said Andrea Lawlor, an associate professor of political science at McMaster University.
“If they operated in the way that we would think, they would be subject to scrutiny by the public, and we would make our decisions in large part on the treatment of the issues by the politicians,” she said. “I think in practice, it doesn’t work exactly that way.”
“I’m not sure that many Canadians are consulting these documents or consulting them thoroughly and making their decisions based on them,” she said. “I think there are a lot of people who have a fairly decided vote and they felt comfortable going to the polls even in the absence of a platform.”
Canadians are more likely getting a glimpse of party promises through consistent campaign reporting by media, she said.
“A lot of these promises have already been announced in some way, shape or form through rollouts on campaign stops or in media interviews,” Lawlor said. “I don’t think there was an expectation that there would be a radical shift.”
Yet platforms are important for deliberative democracy because they set out a plan that Canadians should reasonably expect parties to follow should they form government, she said.
“It has an accountability function that allows voters and media and anyone who is attentive to go back and check to see whether parties are delivering.”
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Askari agreed that it is important for people to see exactly where the parties are in terms of their plan, and how those plans are going to affect them.
That’s why the IFSD thought it was particularly important to have the costed platforms released before the debates.
If the parties had done so, much of those debates would have been focused on the differences in their approaches, their ideologies and the way that they put their platforms together, Askari said.
“Since their platforms were provided after the debates, it’s not going to have much of an impact on the results now,” he said.
Andrew MacDougall, who was director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper, said he believes party platforms may be of “a bygone era” when putting them out early in a campaign was based on hopes they would attract attention and build momentum over time.
“Now a platform is cobbled together after the fact, once each idea has been revealed a day at a time,” he wrote in a recent Toronto Star column.
MacDougall wrote that through the prism of social media, releasing a platform is like “sticking your plan into a blender and watching it splat onto the wall. Not only that, each of those splatter marks can transform into a major issue if the wrong end of the algorithm gets ahold of it.
“It’s for this reason [Pierre] Poilievre and [Mark] Carney have waited so long to put their full plans out into the wild,” he wrote.
