By Ira Basen

Chances are you have better things to do with your time than make your way through all 42 pages of the Conservative party platform. Well, that's what we get paid to do here at Reality Check HQ, and here are a few things that caught our eye as we were wading through.

Page 11: Aboriginal peoples

The Conservative platform is surprisingly thin on the subject of aboriginal peoples. In just three short paragraphs, the party offers up some boiler-plate promises, including:

1. "Ensure Aboriginals have the opportunity to fully participate in Canada's economy and society."

2. Improve aboriginal education and "complete tripartite educational agreements" with provinces and First Nations organizations across the country.

3. Address the wrongs of the residential school era for students not covered in the original settlement agreement.

By contrast, the 2006 Conservative platform promised a much bolder approach to aboriginal issues. Nowhere in the current platform is there any talk of settling land claims, or replacing the Indian Act with "a modern legislative framework" to allow aboriginal peoples to govern their own affairs.

And perhaps most significantly, there is no mention of the Kelowna Accord struck by the Liberal government before the last election in 2005. The Conservatives rejected the accord at the time, but in 2006 their platform pledged to accept "the targets" set by the accord and work with aboriginal leaders to meet those targets. Most aboriginal leaders believe that is a promise that has not been kept.

Page 14: Copyright

The Conservatives pledge to re-introduce their federal copyright legislation that died on the order paper when the election was called in September. The platform says the legislation "strikes the appropriate balance" between the rights of artists and the wishes of consumers. But the bill was bitterly attacked when it was introduced last spring as being too friendly to large American media companies, and hostile to Canadian consumers trying to download music from the internet.

Page 25: 'Fair representation in the House of Commons'

The Conservatives promise to increase the number of Commons seats for the growing populations of Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, while protecting the seat counts of other provinces. The idea seems simple enough, but the bill created a firestorm of protest in Ontario when it was first introduced in November 2007. Although Ontario would get 10 new seats in the re-distribution, the province's premier, Dalton McGuinty, argued that it would still leave Ontario significantly under-represented in the House of Commons. In response, Conservative House leader Peter Van Loan famously called McGuinty "the small man of Confederation" for opposing the re-distribution. The premier was not amused.

Page 27: Arts and culture

This surely must be a first in Canadian history; a government pledges not to re-introduce a piece of legislation that it originally sponsored, that received unanimous support in the House, and that the government believed was so important that it considered its passage to be a vote of confidence.

The bill in question is Bill C-10, which passed the House before anyone noticed that it gave the heritage minister the power to cancel tax credits for projects thought to be offensive or not in the public interest. The arts community cried censorship, but until the Conservative platform was released, there was no indication that the government was planning to back away from the legislation. Perhaps Harper figured he had picked enough fights with artists for one campaign.