Enough With the Immigrant Tax Credit Already

There are bigger things to worry about, such as basically everything else in all the parties' platforms.

Ontario's political parties have been campaigning for a week, and yet they – and far too many pundits – are still hung up on the Liberals' proposed $10,000 tax credit for employers who hire new Canadians. The Windsor Star's Chris Vander Doelen, for example, thinks the tax credit was merely bait laid by the Liberals to get the PCs to say something stupid (say, such as calling Canadian citizens “foreign workers"), a cynical tactic that suggests the rest of the campaign ought to be a dirty affair. If it's true that the Liberals planned to lure Tim Hudak & Co. into this trap, then that's awfully cunning politicking, even if it means hoping for the right's more xenophobic tendencies to rear their ugly heads. “What does it tell you when the incumbent government plays the race card in the first week of a campaign?” asks Vander Doelen. “If they're that desperate at this point, the next three weeks could get really ugly.” And we wonder why only one in two eligible voters bothers to cast a ballot in Ontario.

The Globe and Mail's editorialists are fed up with the tax-credit fixation, calling out both parties to offer voters something more substantive than the merits of what amounts to “a rounding error in the province's finances.” Considering the province's persistent unemployment, uncertainty hovering over its manufacturing sector, and myriad healthcare concerns, there is no shortage of more pressing issues to discuss than the employment prospects of 1,200 newcomers. Likewise, the parties have spent little time explaining “the signature pieces of their economic plans,” which ought to be how we decide how we're going to vote. The Liberals claim investments in education and renewable energy will keep Ontario competitive, while the Tories say lower taxes ought to spur growth. But have you heard much from either leader since the writ was dropped on just how those plans will get Ontario out of its “have-not” status? Yeah, neither have we.

Granted, it's still early in the campaign, so there's still hope yet. But if the Tories' platform, Changebook, is anything to go on, the Toronto Star's Martin Regg Cohn doesn't hold out much hope for logic to enter the campaign anytime soon. “All platforms take shortcuts to win votes, but these Progressive Conservative planks truly lack timber,” writes Cohn. From Hudak's claims that seniors have to do their laundry in the middle of the night because of “mandatory smart meter tax machines” to the platform's, umm, rather skewed interpretations of the province's finances, “Changebook goes beyond oversimplification to outright manipulation.” Cohn figures voters in Toronto, at least, won't be keen to fall for the “tax cuts without service cuts” mantra a second time after experiencing some serious voter remorse over electing Mayor Rob Ford. Perhaps that lack of depth to his platform has been why Hudak has been so reliant on condemning “foreign workers” since the campaign's beginning. Oh, and though they don't seem to be playing to win, the provincial NDP is also a part of this election race.