On the campaign trail

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This article was published 29/08/2015 (3665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ballot Diversity

Women’s issues — and the attention they’ve received on the campaign trail — have made headlines this week. Here’s a look at gender and cultural diversity among the candidates so far.

SBlt Female candidates — national

Liberals: 100/317

NDP: 135/314

Conservative: 62/317

Green: 68/215

Bloc Quebecois: 18/70

SBlt Female candidates — Manitoba

Liberals: 5/14 – 36%

NDP: 3/10 – 30%

Conservatives: 3/13 – 23%

Green Party: 3/14 – 21%

SBlt Aboriginal candidates — Manitoba

Liberals: 3/14 — 21%

NDP: 1/10 – 10%

Conservatives: 0

Green Party: 0

SBlt Visible-minority candidates — Manitoba

Conservative: 1/13 – 8%

NDP: 1/10 – 10%

Green: 1/14 – 7%

Liberal: 0

Candidate Quirks

Rhymes with vote

After four years as the MP for Elmwood-Transcona, people still frequently fluff Lawrence Toet’s name. We’ve heard the two-syllable “Tow-et.” We’ve heard “Toot.” Sometimes, people really over-think things and try “Tate.” It’s “Tote,” as in “designer women’s tote bag.”

Small screen to ballot

Now he’s in business, but Winnipeg North Conservative candidate Harpreet Turka was briefly a television star. Two years ago, he starred in the first episode of the mock-reality series Siberia on NBC, where he played an American grad student. The show was described as Lost meets Survivor and was filmed at Birds Hill Provincial Park.

Selby speculation

NDP MLA Erin Selby, one of the Gang of Five who rebelled against Premier Greg Selinger, is thinking about running federally for the NDP in Saint Boniface-Saint Vital. Sources says she’s reluctant, but the party is polling in the riding in an effort to convince her it’s winnable. The riding is a traditional Liberal stronghold, held most recently by outgoing Tory MP Shelley Glover. Liberal Dan Vandal, personally popular, has been campaigning there for the Liberals for a year. The NDP typically runs a distant third in the riding.

Propaganda fact-check

A semi-regular feature scrutinizing candidate campaign bumf. Today, we tackle a recent news release from Winnipeg South Centre Conservative MP Joyce Bateman in which she needles Liberal candidate Jim Carr for his tax-increasing ways.

1. True. Jim Carr was a public advocate for raising the PST by one point as long as the new revenue was dedicated to core municipal infrastructure.

2. True-ish. It was a small online poll done by Angus Reid in 2013 for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business that found 72 per cent of respondents opposed the PST hike. Other polls have been larger and more nuanced. In 2013, Probe Research found 65 per cent of Manitobans thought the PST hike was unnecessary. In a later poll done for the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, nearly 70 per cent agreed with Carr’s position the new PST revenue, since the hike was a done deal, ought to be given to cities. And 70 per cent said earmarking the new revenue only for core infrastructure made them more likely to support the increase.

3. False. Carr repeatedly, in public forums and in editorials, called for the province to hold a vote on the PST increase. “A referendum should be held to settle the matter,” he wrote in May 2013. “There is a law on the books requiring it and a spirited debate across the province would assess it.”

4. Semantics. “Justin’s massive payroll tax” is really a pension contribution. The Liberals are proposing to boost the Canadian Pension Plan, which many believe isn’t offering adequate security to seniors. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is looking to model national CPP expansion on a provincial one recently introduced in Ontario.

5. True. Ontario’s new pension plan, whose phase-in starts in 2017, asks workers and employers to contribute a total of 3.8 per cent extra on earnings to a new pension top-up plan. For a worker earning $60,000, their additional paycheque deductions will total $1,140. Ontario’s plan applies only to large workplaces where employees don’t have a workplace pension. “We’re looking at… a mandatory expansion of the CPP of the type that (Premier) Kathleen Wynne put forward in Ontario,” said Trudeau this spring.

6. Half true, contingent, in part, on whether you believe increased mandatory CPP contributions are a tax. The Liberals are proposing to cut income taxes for those earning between $44,701 and $89,401. The tax rate for that middle-income bracket would go from 22 per cent to 20.5 per cent. Trudeau is also proposing a new tax on the wealthy (those earning $200,000 or more) and the elimination of income splitting for families. And, the Liberals will replace the monthly per-child universal child-care benefit cheques with a tax-free version that shrinks once family income tops $150,000.

Promises so Far

The campaign is now a month old, but the promises have been sparse. Here’s the tally, as of Aug. 26.

Conservative 16

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Liberals 8

NDP 6

Green 3

— Mia Rabson, Kristin Annable and Mary Agnes Welch