End of the first week of the election campaign. This campaign has been pretty routine so far. The Liberals went in with a huge lead in the polls and blew it within days.
And now they are in phase 2 of the traditional liberal election campaign, the bluster phase. They are in this weird phase right now where they are slapping each other on the back, bragging and congratulating themselves on their win.
At the same time, they are moving early into phase 3 of the campaign. Usually it's not until the third or fourth week that the Liberals start to desperately retool their campaign platform. This time, it's the end of week 1 that suddenly they are claiming that they don't plan to raise taxes.
Someone should have told their webmaster though, because the old platform is still available for download. Here's a quote from their document on health:
"We will establish a Community Transition Fund, also with
increased tobacco tax revenue, to help farmers
move away from growing tobacco. "
Now perhaps I am misinterpreting the word "increased". Or perhaps they plan to increase their tobacco tax revenue by encouraging more people to smoke. But it sure looks to me like this is a tax increase.
Read the whole document here.