Two of them say, "This is what we agreed on." The third one says, "No, it's not."
No one else is able to confirm what really happened, and two against one is not considered a legal definition of proof.
So Canadians are left wondering whether Stephen Harper did or did not agree to lead a coalition-like government with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton back in 2004.
It was one of those rare moments during an election campaign where there appeared to be a true version of what happened and an untrue version; where someone was telling the truth, and someone was not.
More often, things are not so clear cut. In politics, as we all know, we are dealing with a sliding scale of truth, somewhere between "the whole truth and nothing but" and Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook."
Reality checking
This is my third campaign writing Reality Checks for CBCNews.ca.
This time, we added a new feature. We graded our assessments as pass, fail or 50/50.
To date, after more than 70 investigations of campaign statements, ads and party platforms, only five have rated a "pass." Twenty-six were 50/50, the benefit of the doubt.
Is that surprising? Not really.
At Reality Check, we take what politicians say at face value. Maybe that's a mistake.
Maybe they don't really intend their statements to hold up to the kind of scrutiny that we try to apply to them. So it's probably predictable that so few pass the test.
'A culture of lying'
Columnist Andrew Coyne wrote in Maclean's recently that "a culture of lying has overtaken our politics, and every party has been caught up in it, to a greater or lesser extent."
Without wanting to channel Bill Clinton ("It depends on what your definition of 'is' is"), I think we need to establish what our definition of "lying" is.
Will the F-35s cost what the Conservatives say they will cost. Probably not. Do they know that? Probably. Are they lying to us?
Saint Augustine established eight different categories of lies. All but one of them are told not for the sake of deception itself but to achieve a larger purpose.
What the person really wants is not to tell the lie, but to accomplish an objective. They are therefore not real lies, in Augustine's view, and the person telling them is not really a liar.
By that measure, politicians who "lie" to us are not really liars either, they are simply saying what they feel they need to say to get elected.
Unless, of course, they are peddling an obvious falsehood.
But that is actually quite rare. Politicians generally avoid saying stuff that is demonstrably untrue.
We expect them to spin, to shape the facts to their own advantage. But we get really upset when we discover they are making things up.
So when the bill for the F-35s comes due a few years from now and it is considerably more than the Conservatives are saying today, unless there's a document somewhere that shows they knew these current projections were out of whack, it will probably just be accepted as part of the normal way that politics is done.
Truth in political advertising
But that doesn't mean this campaign has been like all the others, or that Coyne is wrong when he talks about an increasingly pervasive "culture of lying."
The place where this campaign may have sunk to new lows has not been on the campaign trail itself, but over the airwaves, where demonstrable outright falsehoods are now increasingly commonplace.
If we want to elevate the tone of our politics and take lying out of the mix, this would be the place to start.
This does not necessarily mean getting rid of all attack ads, though that wouldn't be a bad idea. Maybe Michael Ignatieff really "didn't come home for you." Maybe he is "just visiting." Who knows?
The problem is that these ads give the illusion of being fact-based, when they are actually anything but.
They are invariably accompanied by quotes from newspapers, or short video clips that give them the veneer of authenticity, until you examine them more closely.
Far too often they are taken completely out of context and are misleading,or simply wrong.
'Yes, yes, yes'
The most egregious example over the past few months has been the Conservative "yes, yes, yes" ads.
They purported to ask Michael Ignatieff whether it makes sense during a period of fragile economic recovery to force "an unnecessary election" and to "raise taxes on job creators."
They then flashed to a video clip of an animated Ignatieff shouting: "Yes, yes, yes."
The problem is that those weren't the questions Ignatieff was responding to at the Liberal caucus meeting where the video was shot.
The rhetorical questions he was asking and responding to were: "Are we ready to serve the people who put us here? Are we ready to fight for the Canada we love? Are we ready to fight for the Canadian family? What's the answer to that?"
The Conservatives claimed the ads were intended for the web only, and they were pulled after the real context for the quotes became public.
Still, party spokesman Fred DeLorey insisted the ads were "fair and accurate."
"We are accurately representing (Ignatieff's) on-the-record and frequently stated positions," he told the Canadian Press.
Not in the code
If these ads were for a commercial product or service, viewers who questioned their accuracy would have a place to complain.
Since the 1960s, advertising in Canada has been governed by the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards, which is administered by Advertising Standards Canada, an industry association "committed to creating and maintaining community confidence in advertising."
The code declares that "advertisements must not contain inaccurate or deceptive claims, statements, illustrations or representations, either direct or implied, with regard to a product or service."
But the association specifically excludes political and election ads from its mandate on the grounds that it does not want to restrict the free expression of public opinion.
Politicians, therefore, are basically free to say whatever they want.
Approve this message
But what if politicians who put out false and misleading ads weren't able to hide behind spokespeople and shuffle the blame off on to overly zealous junior staffers?
Would Conservatives really have wanted to see Stephen Harper's face on those attacks ads? Would Liberals have wanted Paul Martin directly linked to that controversial 2006 ad that claimed the Conservatives were planning to place soldiers on the streets of Canadian cities?
This is a question that the Americans tried to address in 2002 with a "Stand By Your Ad" provision in campaign reform legislation.
American law now requires that all political TV ads include an on-camera shot of the candidate, and a statement by the candidate that says something like "I'm John Doe and I approve this message."
In Canada, we simply require a very small print acknowledgement at the end of an ad, stating that it was authorized and paid for by the party's official agent.
The print is generally so small, and the message sails by so quickly, that scarcely anyone even notices.
It would be hard to argue that the U.S. provision has so far improved the tone of American politics, which remains far nastier and more mendacious than ours. And at this point, U.S. ads designed exclusively for the internet are not covered by the rule.
But one study conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University concluded that viewers did come away from those ads with more confidence that political campaigns were run in a more truthful and fair manner.
If we really want to address this so-called culture of lying that has characterized the campaign of 2011 on our TV screens and radios, making politicians stand up and take responsibility for their words might be a good first step.
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Not surprisingly, the Liberals, Bloc and NDP reject the label that they are "soft on crime," with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in turn accusing the Harper government of being "dumb on crime."
But finding epithets with which to tar a political opponent seems easier than formulating a coherent policy. Consider what's on offer, particularly the costs.
First, the Conservatives
The government's Truth in Sentencing Act, which received assent in the fall of 2009, will keep criminals behind bars much longer. That's because they will no longer receive as much credit for the time spent in pre-sentence custody.
The government estimates the new law will add about $2.1 billion over five years to the federal treasury.
But the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, says the bill will be at least twice as much over the same period, including an additional $689 million a year in maintenance and operational costs.
The NDP, Liberals and the Bloc have all criticized the incarceration costs associated with the government's crime bills, with Ignatieff recently accusing the government of importing "failed American polices."
Yet the Liberals still voted for the Truth in Sentencing Act (C-25), which critics find contradictory and difficult to understand. Especially as the government has not exactly overwhelmed its critics with concrete evidence.
Consider the following exchange between Rob Nicholson, the justice minister, and the NDP's Libby Davies in 2009 on the proposal to impose a mandatory minimum sentence for drug offences, a bill that is still outstanding.
Nicholson: "It's been a long time, Ms. Davies, since we've had a number of these mandatory penalties here, but we're absolutely convinced, from our consultation with Canadians, that this is exactly what Canadians want us to do."
Davies: "Do you have evidence?"
Nicholson: "We have the evidence that Canadians have told us that."
Davies: "Any studies?"
Nicholson: "With respect to resources, I can tell you that this bill is welcomed across this country. You can check with the attorneys general in British Columbia and other jurisdictions."
Davies: "I take it you have no evidence, though, about mandatory minimums."
Nicholson: "You have to send out a strong message to the people who are in the business of destroying these things there. We have the mandate of the Canadian people."
The NDP plan, more police
For its part, however, the NDP also faces challenges producing evidence for its crime-fighting proposals.
During the English-language leaders' debate, Jack Layton talked about hiring 2,500 police officers as a "current" fix in the battle against crime. This, despite the fact that there is little evidence that putting more officers on the streets actually reduces crime.
What's more, a Statistics Canada report called Police Resources in Canada, 2010, makes it clear that the number of police officers is already on the rise, up 11.5 per cent over the decade in the number of officers per 1,000 population.
And yet, during the same time period, the overall crime rate has been decreasing.
As Statistics Canada put it: "At the same time that police officer strength has been increasing, the volume and the severity of police-reported crime have been on the decline.
"Both the 2009 police-reported crime rate and the Crime Severity Index decreased from the previous year, in keeping with a general trend observed over the past decade.
"In addition, the 2009 national weighted clearance rate rose to 38.4 per cent, the fifth consecutive annual increase. The clearance rate represents the proportion of crimes that are solved by police."
What would the Liberals do?
The NDP and the Bloc voted against Bill C-15, which died on the order paper at the end of 2009 when Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament for the first time.
What was surprising was that the Liberals initially supported the bill and then did an about-face at the end of the most recent session when it announced it would not be backing the bill in its renamed version (S-10).
The Liberals criticized the government for failing to come clean about the price tag, which in light of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's estimates, is a fair concern.
But apart from attacking the government's plans to put more people behind bars, the Liberals fail to spell out what they would do to deal with crime, and how much they'd pay for it.
"No one disagrees that criminals must be punished," the party says in its election platform.
"But more prisons alone will not make our communities safer and stronger. That approach has failed in the U.S. Evidence and experience suggest it will take much more than prisons."
Though there has been a lot of talk about crime, prisons, price tags and police, there's been a lack of coherent discussion about realistic proposals to deal with the problem. This makes if difficult for voters to decipher which party has the best plan.
This is a shame because crime and punishment have been studied extensively. European countries experiment with progressive strategies. The U.S. on the other hand appears to be backtracking from many of the kinds of initiatives the Conservatives are championing.
So given the amount of time, energy and money experts around the world have spent putting crime under a microscope, it's unclear why Canadians have been offered such little insight into a problem that all parties claim that voters are very concerned about.
You can reach David McKie at david_mckie@cbc.ca
With the New Democrats surging in the most recent pre-election polls, Canadian consumers might want to take a closer look at the party's centerpiece plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The end result could be sticker shock on the average family's hydro bill.
The NDP wants to implement what is called a cap-and-trade system of financial penalties and rewards, aimed at forcing the country's largest polluters to clean up their act.
Under the plan, an industrial plant exceeding government-set pollution limits would have to buy "carbon credits" - essentially a penalty equal to $45 a tonne of excess emissions.
(The $45 figure doesn't come from the platform itself but from the party's "costing document," which anticipates government revenues from cap-and-trade auctions of $7.4 billion by 2015.)
As that plant cuts its emissions, it would be able to recoup some of the money paid in penalties by selling its accumulated carbon credits to other companies that need them.
In theory, it all sounds harmless enough.
But there is one overwhelmingly inconvenient truth about any cap-and-trade system designed to cut GHG emissions.
Someone has to pay for it, and the most likely candidate is the Canadian consumer.
Industrial pass along
The NDP is specifically promising not to punish consumers at the gas pumps or on home heating, claiming that cap-and-trade would only be applied to large industrial polluters.
Of course, the NDP promise to consumers turns on the bold assumption that an oil company, hit with a hefty new environmental expense on production, would not pass it along at the gas pump. (Even the environmentally sympathetic Pembina Institute suggests the NDP plan might bring about a four cent a litre increase at the pump.)
There's another catch: By far the country's largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions are public utilities, mainly electrical generating plants powered by coal, oil and gas.
Together, those facilities are responsible for about 40 per cent of all Canada's annual GHG emissions.
The short-term financial impact of subjecting those power utilities to a cap-and-trade system could be very large indeed.
For instance, Ontario's five generating stations that run on fossil fuels produce about 28 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
A cap-and-trade system would cost those utilities alone hundreds of millions of dollars a year in penalties until they could significantly reduce their emissions.
Those increased annual costs, of course, would ultimately have to be borne by consumers, provincial taxpayers, or future generations stuck with massive debt.
The penalties could go on for a long time - building a new nuclear plant to replace a coal-fired electrical generating station, for instance, can take upwards of 15 years.
And, of course, someone has to pay for those new plants.
The NDP is promising to cut Canada's overall greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent over the next decade, or roughly 280 million tonnes from current levels.
At $45 a tonne in cap-and-trade penalties, that's billions of dollars a year someone would have to pay.
Many of the country's largest polluters have long said that if they are going to get hit with emission penalties, they would prefer a cap-and-trade system to a flat carbon tax. It gives them more flexibility.
Still, it is unlikely any party in power would hit Canadian industry with a cap-and-trade system or any other substantial environmental tax burden unless the U.S. also subjects its businesses to a similar regime.
And with the U.S. economy in the dumps, that likely won't be anytime soon.
The NDP platform:
We will put a price on carbon through a cap-and-trade system, which will establish hard emissions limits for Canada's biggest polluters to ensure companies pay their environmental bills and to create an incentive for emissions reductions;
We will work closely with the Obama administration in Washington to ensure a coordinated response to climate change, and we will seek at every opportunity to advance an integrated continental cap-and-trade system that ensures a level economic playing field for North American businesses.
But there was plenty they disagreed on, too, as they tried to outdo each other with their promises.
The NDP, whose platform has come under closer scrutiny of late, maintains that it is the party Canadians should trust to strengthen our health-care system.
Leader Jack Layton has been critical of his opponents' promises to forgive portions of student loans for those new doctors and nurses who are willing to practice in rural areas, saying these do nothing to address the shortage of health-care workers.
His platform contains a pledge to address this shortage "by training 1,200 new doctors over the next 10 years, adding 6,000 new training spaces for nurses over six years and substantially increasing the number of training spaces for other health professionals."
How exactly is the NDP going to get more health workers on the front lines. And how much is this going to cost? Here's a closer look.
The NDP plan
In the first year of its four-year fiscal plan, the NDP is budgeting $145 million for front-line health-care workers.
It breaks down this way: $25 million for training; $20 million for a repatriation fund to bring back Canadian doctors working abroad; $20 million for an "equity program" to support low-income, rural and aboriginal medical students; and $80 million for infrastructure needs for medical and nursing schools to help increase capacity.
Like the Conservatives and Liberals, the NDP also plans to forgive student loans for professionals who stay in a family practice for 10 years. But they now say that program is at least four years down the road and so is not included in their current fiscal plan.
Over the next decade then, the NDP says it will get 1,200 more doctors into the workforce through a combination of these initiatives to create new spaces in medical schools, bring Canadian doctors home, speed up credential recognition for foreign-trained physicians and improve access to medical school for disadvantaged groups.
Layton has slammed the Conservatives for trying to boost the doctor workforce by only 100, saying thousands of doctors are needed now to fill the gaps.
Before the election was called, the government announced $40 million to create about 100 new residency spots across the country, the bulk of them in Ontario.
The NDP plan - 1,200 versus 100 - is over a span of 10 years. That's roughly 120 a year if spread evenly over the decade.
Added costs
But whether it's $40 million or $145 million a year to get more health-care workers on the front lines, the long-term costs probably have to be recognized as well.
The federal government can spend its money to help the provinces get more doctors. But the provinces will be on the hook for paying their salaries for years to come.
Rising drug costs are often blamed for bulging health budgets. But according to a 2010 report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, expenditures for physician services represent the fastest-growing category of health spending.
The average family doctor billed the system $235,420 in 2009, according to CIHI, while total, payments to doctors exceeded $17 billion that year.
That represented a 9.6 per cent increase in the total amount at least partly because of an overall increase (2,700 more than 2008) in the number of doctors, CIHI said.
Let's do a little math. Let's assume family doctors continue to bill $235,420 a year and let's assume the NDP plan would add 120 more doctors per year.
That's an extra $28 million coming out of provincial health care budgets every year to pay doctors, not including what they will cost the system in ordering tests and other services. That's a lot of money
Now, perhaps, as more doctors are added the patient load per doctor will decline and individual physicians will be billing the system less.
On the other hand, the population is growing and aging, and even adding 100 doctors a year may not keep up with future demands, so that overall cost could be much higher.
Bottom line? More health-care providers isn't a bad thing, but failing to calculate their costs in the long-term is.
But there are probably just three scenarios that will play out, regardless of which party takes the most seats in the next House of Commons.
Courtesy of Queen's University professor and parliamentary expert Ned Franks, here are the scenarios Canadians could see following May 2.
1. A majority government. If it's a Conservative majority, then Stephen Harper continues as prime minister.
He retains the title throughout the election in any event and it's actually up to him to resign if another party wins a larger number of seats on election night, which is what he said he would do in his interview with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge.
2. A minority government with an opposition party holding the most seats. If the NDP, Liberals or even the Bloc Québécois were to win the largest number of seats - but no majority - Harper could still face the House and try his luck.
"Even if the Tories win fewer seats than the Liberals or NDP, they are entitled to meet the House and face it in a vote of confidence," Franks said. "Prime ministers in Canada do not normally exercise this right."
But there was at least one famous instance of this taking place: Mackenzie King in 1925 when his party fell to second place in a minority Parliament, more than a dozen seats behind the Conservatives, but stayed on for some months anyway with the support of the Progressives.
3. A minority Conservative government. Harper could continue as prime minister, perhaps much as he has for the past five years by cajoling and/or coercing support issue by issue.
Still, he could lose a confidence vote soon into his term if the other parties gang up on him, something he has been warning about constantly throughout this campaign.
Would this gang-up be more or less likely to happen if the NDP turns out to be the second-place finisher? That is, would the Liberals want to make Jack Layton prime minister and so affirm their third-party status? We leave that to the analysts.
All we know for certain is that in this third scenario, a minority Conservative government would have to table a throne speech to lay out its priorities and a budget (the one in March was never passed), presumably within the next month or so.
Months and months
If a minority Conservative government were to lose either of those votes, or any confidence vote within, say, four to six months, Harper would have to resign. But he would have the option of asking Gov. Gen. David Johnston for another election.
Normally, the governor general is supposed to act on the "advice" of the prime minister. But in special circumstances like these, "the reserve powers of the Crown come into play," Franks points out.
"These reserve powers permit the governor general to reject Mr. Harper's advice if he requests a dissolution when he holds a minority of seats in the House of Commons and is defeated early in the session of the new Parliament."
At that point, the governor general would inquire whether another party leader could gain the confidence of the House and govern instead, with the support of one or more other parties.
Franks suggests Johnston might well make the leaders commit to such an arrangement for 18 months to two years; indeed, commit to it in writing and make the agreement public.
Franks is basing these time limits - at least four to six months before Johnston would grant another election, and 18 to 24 months for an alternative government to work - on what Adrienne Clarkson wrote about her preparations in case Paul Martin's minority Liberal government fell back in 2004.
That was the year, incidentally, when Harper, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe and NDP Leader Jack Layton prepared a letter to remind Clarkson that she didn't necessarily need to grant an election if Martin lost a confidence vote in the House.
Overall, Franks says, "the governor general's first and most important duty is to ensure that there is a prime minister."
Three precedents
If we do wake up on May 3 with what the Brits call a hung Parliament and the Conservatives not in a commanding lead, then there are three precedents to keep in mind for when second-place finishers might step up and govern.
Note: Negotiating the accord and defeating the ruling Conservatives on their throne speech took nearly two months to bring about.
For four days, the three parties entered into separate but intense negotiations to determine who would support whom, the result being a formal coalition arrangement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
The deal was struck nine days after the election and Parliament reconvened a week after that, which was a long time for the Brits but incredibly short by Canadian standards.
For more information on coalition governments, click on the Coalition category at the top of this post and see how we've reality checked the issue throughout the campaign.
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We're talking about establishing and meeting the so-called bench marks for how long patients must wait for certain common elective procedures.
On the surface the statistics look impressive. According to the latest report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 80 per cent of Canadians waiting for surgery in four priority areas - cancer, heart, hip and knee replacements, and cataracts - are getting into the operating room within the time frames established by the first ministers in 2005.
"We would view wait times as one of the success stories of the current health accord," says John Abbott, chief executive officer of the Health Council of Canada, a group that monitors wait times.
"Bench marks and targets were set. Governments have been achieving those, for the most part."
But while he acknowledges the validity of that 80 per cent figure, Tom Noseworthy, a physician and professor of health policy and management at the University of Calgary, has a different take.
It means, he says, that there are still "a lot of Canadians, at least one in five, who are languishing beyond waiting-time targets."
More importantly, the 80 per cent figure doesn't tell the whole story.
Selective procedures
Under the definition used by governments and the Health Council, a wait time is the period between the moment the surgeon makes the appointment to the day of the surgery. But this definition is limited.
As CIHI puts it, "Before a decision is made, patients may wait to see a family doctor, to see a specialist, for tests and finally, for a diagnosis.
"Following the surgery, they may wait for follow-up treatment or services to assist with recovery. To affect meaningful change, understanding all waits across the continuum is necessary."
CIHI also notes that the surgeries on which its report is based only cover about one-eighth of the procedures performed in Canada and some of these can be fairly selective.
"For heart, it is coronary artery bypass," says Lorne Bellan, co-chair of the Wait Times Alliance, a physicians' group that issues its own yearly report card.
But as Bellan points out, when the health accord was announced, cardiac surgeons and cardiologists asked why pick coronary bypass surgeries as the target, because wait times for these were already on the decline.
"In heart care, the bottleneck is in things like stents, pacemakers and valve replacements.
"The cardiac group tried to lobby to get the bench mark changed to these other problem areas, but that was never done." This is one of the key reasons, Bellan says, why coronary surgeries receive such high marks.
The current numbers
With these caveats in mind, the CIHI numbers from its 2011 report read as follows:
Diagnostic tests such as CT and MRI scans were supposed to be the fifth area to be tracked, but the provinces and territories have yet to agree on benchmarks for these.
Remember, these wait-time bench marks are for elective surgery - emergencies go to the front of the line. They are also national averages.
The wait times for the procedures CIHI measures sound impressive, but they vary from province to province.
This means that, in some jurisdictions, people may wait substantially longer than 26 weeks for a knee replacement.
What are the parties saying?
Not much. The Conservatives, Liberals and the NDP are promising to maintain the six per cent increase in health transfers after 2014. So far, no one is talking about extra money to tackle wait times by either broadening the definition or expanding the number of surgeries that are tracked and measured.
The main parties have also said nothing about accountability; that is, about what to do with those jurisdictions that fail to meet their promises. What recourse does someone have if she waits more than a year to have her cataracts removed?
In their platform, the Conservatives have also pledged to respect "asymmetrical federalism" when renewing the health accord, an apparent reference to Quebec.
But critics like Bellan and Noseworthy suggest that is code for letting the provinces take the money without being fully accountable for how it will be spent.
They also argue that the 2004 health accord failed to set much of a precedent when it came to wait times.
In addition to the fact that the procedures only cover about one-eighth of all surgeries, the accord captures but a small portion on that wait-time continuum.
And while there has been progress in the procedures specified by the agreement, Noseworthy is concerned that even these wait times might begin to creep back up again because the extra money the federal government provided to deal with the problem has now dried up.
David McKie can be reached at david_mckie@cbc.ca
]]>But we never saw the Liberal party willing to take that on. We never saw the Conservatives willing to be serious about it. They're simply protecting those who are inappropriately socking their money away, hiding it from taxation, offshore.
Why is it that the billionaires get to park their money off in some sunny place and end-run our laws?"
Jack Layton - April 27 2011
It makes such a tempting target. All that shady money resting in sunny places.
Tens of billions of dollars sitting in offshore bank accounts, deposited there by wealthy Canadians and corporations looking to escape the onerous tax burden of our native land.
There is an estimated $80 billion in Canadian money in Bermuda, Barbados and the Cayman Islands alone.
If only we could get our hands on some of it; force those rich folk to cough up their fair share of the taxes they've been evading for so long. Think of the money that would yield.
The NDP has certainly thought about it. It fact, it plans to help fund its health-care and other campaign promises with a "tax haven crackdown" that will yield a billion dollars in extra tax revenue in 2011-12, rising to $3.2 billion by 2014-15.
The party is a bit vague on how this will be done. Though in a statement last November, it proposed a three-step plan that included identifying current tax losses, increasing the powers of the CRA and changing the law to force more disclosure from tax filers.
Will it work?
Probably not. According to most experts in the field, the chances of the NDP plan yielding anything close to the amount of money the party is counting on is just about zero.
Audits always capture some money, but usually not enough to finance their promises, which is the object of the exercise.
All the money under the sun
It's not because the money isn't out there. By many estimates, there are trillions of dollars, as much as 60 per cent of the world's money, residing in the more than 70 international Offshore Financial Centres, which is how tax havens are referred to in polite society.
If all that money returned home to be taxed, the home countries would see hundreds of billions in additional tax revenue.
But in a globalized economy, capital is very liquid. Money flows inexorably to places where it will receive the highest return.
OFCs offer the holy trinity of security, secrecy and zero or minimal taxation. Nobody has yet devised a way of stopping that giant pool of money from moving around to its most advantageous location without harming international capital markets.
But if that money is not coming home, why can't we tax it where it lies?
Evasion or avoidance?
The first thing to understand is that most of this money is not doing anything wrong. The NDP likes to describe the people and corporations with money in OFCs as "tax cheats" and "tax evaders."
But tax avoidance is different than tax evasion. Avoiding taxes, or at least deferring them, is legal, and we all do it when we take advantage of whatever opportunities the tax code allows us, such as putting money into RRSPs.
Tax evasion is not legal, though many of us do that, too, on a smaller scale when, for example, we pay cash to a plumber to avoid paying the GST.
According to Andrew Rogerson, most of the money Canadians have stashed offshore is about reducing taxes, or "asset protection," as he prefers to call it, not tax evasion.
Rogerson is a Toronto tax lawyer who has spent 30 years helping wealthy Canadians move their money to OFCs.
"There is nothing legally or morally wrong with having an offshore trust, or any other income producing asset for that matter," he wrote in an email from the Persian Gulf, where he was on a business trip.
As an example, he cites wealthy Canadian grandparents who want to set up a trust for their grandchildren.
They can do that in a Caribbean OFC like the Turks and Caicos islands, perhaps even putting the money in one of the Canadian banks operating there.
In doing so, they pay no income tax on that money, either here or there. But, Rogerson points out, once the trust distributes some of the money to the beneficiaries back in Canada, it will be taxed in Canada and the bank's trustee fees could ultimately find their way back to Canada as well and be taxed here.
"What is the problem?" he asks.
Cracking down all over
Old stereotypes die hard, but the offshore world has changed enormously over the past few years.
A special report on OFCs in The Economist magazine in 2007 concluded that thanks to international campaigns against money-laundering and illegal tax evasion, "today's successful tax havens thrive not because of crookery, but because they are well run and well regulated."
There is now often more scrutiny applied to opening a new account in an OFC bank than in one onshore, and wire transfers of money to and from offshore accounts are closely monitored.
As a result, using OFCs to evade taxes is not nearly as common as it used to be.
That has led many experts to conclude that at this point, the administrative costs involved in pursuing offshore "tax cheats" isn't justified by the amount of money actually collected.
Find me the money
This may be the central flaw with the proposed NDP crackdown. It tends to ignore the enormous costs, logistical difficulties and legal complexities involved in chasing delinquent taxpayers in far-flung locales.
How many tax inspectors can we afford to send to the Cayman Islands, for example, to see if a Canadian has paid his taxes?
In 2007, the Harper government launched its "Anti-Tax Haven Initiative," designed to crack down on "aggressive international tax planning and tax evasion."
The CRA boasted that it audited 1,251 cases and assessed $1.026 billion in federal tax in 2009-10.
Sounds impressive. But there's a big difference between tax assessed and tax collected, and the CRA doesn't tell us how much it actually collected from these audits.
Michelle Gallant, who teaches law at the University of Manitoba, doubts that the CRA collected very much.
She points out that most delinquent taxpayers wind up negotiating a settlement with the taxman for considerably less than the amount assessed, and that the negotiations and the appeal process can drag on for years.
So the NDP plan to collect a billion dollars next year, and $3.2 billion by year four looks like a bit of wishful accounting.
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This is a race between pollsters, not politicians.
For Canada's highly competitive, billion-dollar market research industry, election night is the equivalent of Grey Cup Sunday.
When the votes are all counted, which polling firm will have come closest to getting the numbers right, and how close will that be?
Public opinion polling has been around since the 1930s and has been shown to yield remarkably accurate results, 19 times out of 20.
But for many people, polling still carries the whiff of snake oil.
How can 1,000 people, chosen at random, represent the views of 33 million? How can a pollster know what I'm thinking when none of them have ever asked me?
On the line
That's why the polling industry's credibility is on the line every election campaign.
Many people wouldn't mind seeing pollsters get knocked down a few notches. They can be irritating and arrogant on TV, pontificating about what "Canadians" are thinking.
If nothing else, we want to show that we're not as predictable as we might appear.
Indeed, that almost happened in 2004.
That was not a good election for Canada's pollsters. All the big firms seriously over-stated the Conservative and NDP vote, while under-estimating the Liberals by amounts that lay outside their margins of error.
The NDP won 15.7 per cent of the vote in 2004, far less that the 19 per cent predicted in the final Ekos poll, and the 20 in the SES (now Nanos) one.
The Liberals ended up with 36.7 per cent of the vote, not the 32 per cent predicted in the final Ipsos poll.
Snapshots in time
Despite these results, the polling industry was unapologetic.
Polls, they reminded us, are "snapshots in time." They are designed to tell you what people are thinking when they are asked a question, and are supposed to have no predictive value.
This can be quite handy when doing political polling. Pollsters stop polling a day or two before the voting starts. So if the actual results don't match the latest polling data, don't blame the pollster.
Maybe they're right. Maybe large numbers of people did change their minds at the last minute. We don't know. But it must be nice to be in a business where you can never be proven wrong.
Better results lately
If you are keeping score, the past two campaigns have been better for the pollsters.
2006 was a particularly good year. Nanos won the crown for most accurate polling. Its last poll, taken the day before the vote, came within 0.01 per cent of the final totals for all four major parties.
You can't get much closer than that. Other major polling firms were not far behind.
2008 was not as good. Bragging rights that time went to Angus Reid. Its final, online poll proved to be the most accurate. But it was still about a percentage point off the actual vote total for each of the parties.
Most of the other companies floundered when it came to the Conservative vote, under-estimating it by around three percentage points.
In the spotlight
This year's election campaign comes at a time when the industry is under scrutiny as never before.
A few months ago, two of its leading lights, Allan Gregg of Harris Decima and Frank Graves of Ekos, complained to the Canadian Press that the industry needed to address serious methodological challenges if it hoped to remain credible.
In response, the industry's trade association, the Market Research and Intelligence Association, took out a full-page ad in Ottawa's Hill Times newspaper declaring its "confidence in the results of our polling and in the value that we provide to Canadians."
But the reality is that the polling business is changing dramatically.
Randomized telephone polling, which has been the backbone of the industry for decades, is rapidly giving way to online polling. See my earlier post.
This may be the last campaign where the telephone is the primary instrument of choice for pollsters. Everyone in the industry is scrambling to figure out where things are heading next.
Different approaches
For proof, you just have to look at the wide range of approaches that three of Canada's leading pollsters are employing.
Nanos continues to use randomized telephone surveys.
Ekos also uses the telephone, but it has replaced humans with machines. People who receive an Ekos robo-call are asked to punch in their answers to machine-generated questions on the keypads of their telephones.
Angus Reid uses an online survey. It randomly selects 2,000 people who have been non-randomly selected to participate in the company's marketing surveys, and asks them to answer questions about their political preferences.
All of the companies ask some variation of the "If a federal election were held today who would you vote for" question, but again, there are important differences.
Nanos asks people to name their favourite party. Unlike the others, it doesn't prompt them by providing the names.
All of them follow up the voter preference question with other questions designed to test, among other things, how strong the respondent's commitment is to their chosen party, and how likely they are to vote.
After all, with voter turnout now hovering below 60 per cent, roughly four out of every 10 people surveyed by pollsters probably won't wind up voting at all.
Figuring out who those people are, and properly factoring them into the equation, is critical to arriving at an accurate number.
All of these questions and methodologies reflect the latest in social science research and all are focused on one objective: to come closest to predicting how Canadians will vote on May 2.
Right now, there are still some fairly wide gaps among the polls, up to five percentage points difference in assessments of the NDP as well as the Conservative vote.
Over the next few days, you can expect to see those gaps narrow, as voters firm up their decisions, and pollsters increase the number of people they survey in order to reduce their margin of error.
It's a high-stakes, high-profile game that no one wants to lose.
Which is why politicians will not be the only people watching with sweaty palms as the votes are counted on Monday night.
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The Conservative government says the 65 planes, to be equipped with the latest in stealth technology, will cost $75 million each when the full amount ($16 billion for purchase and maintenance) is amortized over the next 12 years or so.
But now, April 25, National Defence says it's been told by the U.S. that the unit price for each plane may be a little higher, though DND still expects to deliver the program on budget.
A couple of things to keep in mind about this latest development. It looks to be the first time DND is admitting there has been a contingency plan built into the program to deal with at least some cost overruns.
The second is that when DND, and the prime minister, say the unit price may be a little higher, are they referring to both the purchase price per plane as well as the ongoing maintenance cost, which was how the original figure was arrived at.
The reason this important is because these latest cost estimates are based on a report by Bloomberg news service, which says that it is now the ongoing maintenance and operating costs of this next-generation fighter that has the Pentagon concerned.
Bloomberg cites a report, dated April 15 but which has not yet been made public, from the Pentagon to Congress that suggests operating costs may be more than double earlier estimates.
The cautionary note here is that the independent experts hired by the Pentagon are predicting the F-35s will break down more frequently than the fighter jets they are replacing and a Pentagon official is quoted saying the U.S. is still trying to "develop a more refined number."
As we reported earlier
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, estimated last month that the planes will come in at more like $30 billion, or $128.8 million each, in the wake of Lockheed Martin's recent development problems.
And earlier this week, a U.S. expert, Winslow Wheeler of the Centre for Defence Information in Washington, put the cost per plane "in the neighbourhood of $148 million," which is almost double the government's estimate.
Who is right?
At this point, it is very difficult to say because, as CBC commentator Brian Stewart pointed out recently, unlike the last time Canada bought fighter jets there is no competitive bidding. Which means there are no competing manufacturers laying their costs and projections out there for all to see.
Defending the government's lowball figure, Dan Ross, the assistant deputy minister for procurement at the Department of National Defence, told reporters on March 17 that:
Countering this, recent U.S. reports on the F-35 have generally cited the average cost per jet as being spread across all the three variations and, on March 29, a representative from the U.S. General Accountability Office told Power and Politics that the jets will cost $110-115 million each.
Are there no alternatives?
In his analysis, cited above, Brian Stewart suggests there are other fighters that could fit Canada's need to replace the aging CF-18s. And Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has said the Liberals will scrap the F-35 deal and open the process to competitive bidding.
Not everyone feels that way, of course. The Conservative counter-argument is that to switch to open bidding at this stage, Canada would have to withdraw from the JSF consortium, thereby giving up its preferred place on the production line and the favourable pricing that goes with it.
Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk says the cost per unit is the cheapest for any fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft out there and that any attempt to buy older jets might actually cost more money.
At the same time, both Britain and Israel have cut back on the number of F-35s they had originally intended to purchase, while Australia and Norway are buying in tranches, because of their concerns over runaway costs.
Will we have to pay a cancellation fee if we back out?
Voters will remember that when the Jean Chretien Liberals came to power in 1993, their election promise to cancel the EH-101 Maritime helicopter purchase cost taxpayers about $500 million in penalties. (Plus, we are still waiting for the promised replacements.)
This time is different. The contract to purchase is not signed and is not expected to be signed until 2013. So there is no cancellation fee.
Cancelling the project would mean the loss of the approximately $165 million that the federal government has invested to allow Canadian companies to bid on the project.
Plus, Defence Minister Peter MacKay has argued that cancellation would mean Canada would lose up to $1 billion in royalties, economic benefits and R&D opportunities.
Presumably at least some of that would be regained if the alternative is to buy and participate in the development of a less costly alternative.
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Amanda Lang takes a hard look at the NDP promises and where the money to fund them might come from.
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The Liberals released a new ad Monday that says NDP Leader Jack Layton and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper are "two sides of the same coin." (Not surprisingly, the loonie was the coin of choice depicted in the advertisement.)
According to the Liberal ad, an "unprincipled deal" between Harper and Layton in 2005 put a stop to the Liberal plan for national child care, stronger gun control and better environmental protection (aka, living up to the Kyoto accord).
At a campaign event Monday morning, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff was asked about the ad and he said it simply points out "the recent political history of our country, which is that Stephen Harper and Jack Layton got together to kill child care in Canada in 2005-2006."
The way the Liberals are making it sound, Harper and Layton met in some dark alley and hatched a plot to specifically prevent parents from accessing child care for their children.
However, that's not quite how things unfolded in 2005. Rewind to November of that year when the NDP and Conservatives both voted in favour of a motion of non-confidence in Paul Martin's Liberal minority government. That's the "unprincipled" deal to which the Liberals are referring in their new ad.
An election was triggered and it brought Stephen Harper to power in early 2006.
His minority Conservative government scrapped the funding agreements that the Liberals had been negotiating with the provinces for child-care spaces and introduced the Universal Child Care Benefit instead.
The thing to remember here is that Harper didn't need the NDP to kill those agreements, he just did it.
His first budget was the one that introduced the Universal Child Care Benefit and that budget easily passed with no opposition from the then-chastened Liberals or the NDP.
They had both vowed to vote against it but when the budget came up for a final vote the opposition parties were missing-in-action and it passed unanimously with no recorded vote.
Conspiracy theory
The Tories pretty much "killed" the Liberal plan all on their own when they came to power, yet according to the Liberals, the NDP conspired with them to do it because they voted to bring the Liberal government down.
The NDP campaign sent a note around to reporters in response to the new ad that suggested the Liberals have no one to blame but themselves.
The "scandal-ridden Liberals" were defeated by a majority of Canadians because of "their record of empty promises," the NDP said. That election was the first to be held in the wake of the Liberal sponsorship scandal.
According to the NDP's logic, if the Liberals hadn't been so bad at governing they never would have lost the confidence of the House of Commons, they never would have lost the subsequent election and they would have their mulit-billion dollar national child-care program up and functioning. So, it's their own fault.
The NDP is a new target for the Liberals and Conservatives in the final week of the campaign, since their poll numbers began to rise.
The new Liberal ad also makes a claim that Layton would "jack up your taxes" to pay for $70 billion in spending and cites the NDP platform as the source.
But it is not a fact that the NDP would raise personal taxes, it's an assumption by an opponent.
The Liberals argue that the NDP platform's numbers don't add up and that there's no way they would be able to pay for their promises without raising taxes.
Sound familiar? It should.
That's the same line the Conservatives have been using against the Liberals.
The Liberals deny they would raise personal taxes, they say they only plan on raising corporate taxes back to 2010 levels to pay for their promises, which, incidently, include a new federal-provincial fund for child care.
Child-centred Greens
Ignatieff said Monday that in this campaign, his is the party that is talking about getting child-care spaces built quickly.
But talking about child care was also on the Green party's agenda on Monday, too.
It issued a press release outlining a plan to "restore and revamp" the 2005 agreements, while introducing a tax credit for employers to encourage more child care spots in the workplace.
"Green Leader Elizabeth May is very proud of the fact that all Green Party policies are formulated through the lens of 'Does it address the needs of children?'" the release said.
But the Greens might want to re-think making such a widesweeping statement that all of their policies are designed with children in mind.
Each and every single one takes the needs of kids into account? What about their policy of legalizing marijuana?
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Despite the concerns about unrepresentative samples caused by low response rates and the exclusion of cellphone users, many companies still poll the old fashioned way: they call a randomized sample of people on the telephone.
For example, Nanos Research, which polls for the Globe and Mail and CTV, does 400 new phone interviews every night. Given the broad industry refusal rate of 85 per cent, that means Nanos might be dialling close to 2,600 numbers a day just to reach the 400 respondents it needs.
The Nanos poll is called a "tracking poll," which means the company takes a three-day running sample. Every day, the first 400 respondents are dropped off and a new batch is added, which allows the three-day tally to be based on a randomized sample of 1,200 people.
This yields a respectable margin of error of 3.1 per cent either way, 19 times out of 20.
Like most pollsters, Nanos addresses the concerns about over-representation of older Canadians and under-representation of younger ones, which arise with telephone polling, by "weighting" the result according to age, based on the 2006 census.
With a sample size of 1,200 people, Nanos can provide reliable results on a national level. But beware of drawing any conclusions about provincial results - the sample sizes are extremely small.
The NDP 'surge' in Quebec
Let's look at the NDP "surge" in Quebec, which Nanos and others have been reporting for the past few days.
Those Quebec results have been based on very small samples with very high margins of error.
For example, Nanos reported that its survey of April 17-19 showed the NDP had moved solidly into second place in Quebec, with 25 per cent of the vote, versus 21 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the Conservatives.
That result was widely reported in the press. What was less widely reported was that the result was based on a sample of only 164 people, with a margin of error of 7.8 per cent.
So depending on how the margin of error was distributed, the NDP was either solidly in second place, or still languishing in fourth.
Over time, these provincial findings may reflect genuine trends. But to create a headline story out of any single result, is to read into polls more than they are capable of delivering.
Online polls
Increasingly, over the past few years, many polling firms have been abandoning the telephone altogether in favour of the internet.
Until recently, online polling was viewed as a poor cousin to randomized phone surveys, too fraught with potential trouble spots to be considered very reliable.
But as the methodological concerns about telephone polling increase, and the worries about the accuracy of internet polling subsides, internet polls are now clearly the wave of the future.
In 2008, it was an internet pollster, Angus Reid, that came closest to calling the outcome of the federal election.
One of Canada's biggest internet polling firms is Leger Marketing, which is currently polling for Sun Media.
Leger draws on a database of more than 350,000 Canadians who were recruited by telephone surveys to be part of the company's market research operation.
It is a very large sample, but it is not randomly selected. For their political poll, conducted between April 15 and 17, Leger surveyed more than 3,500 people and reported a margin of error of just 1.7 per cent.
Its Quebec sample of nearly a thousand voters was by far the largest of any polling company, and had a margin of error of 3.1 per cent.
It continued to show the Bloc clearly ahead of the NDP, 34 per cent to 24 per cent, with the Conservatives and Liberals tied at 20 per cent. It is the only Quebec poll where the top three positions lay outside the margin of error.
But online polling has its critics. One of them, Paul Adams of Carleton University, told the Canadian Press that online surveys tend to tap disproportionately into young, urban, internet savvy voters, who tend to favour the NDP, but whose support tends to be softer and whose commitment to showing up at the polls on election day is perhaps not as strong as other groups.
The industry's regulatory body, the Market Research and Intelligence Association, also has some reservations.
It asks its members to refrain from reporting margins of error on polls where probability samples are not used, although many internet pollsters, including Leger, continue to do so.
The MRIA has also strongly defended its members, too, noting that opinion surveying is a billion dollar industry in Canada with a very successful track record.
Word to the wise
So what to make of all this?
The NDP "surge" may indeed be real, but it is probably too early to tell for sure. Be wary of jumping to conclusions based on a small handful of polls, particularly in any one province, where the samples are small and the margins of error are large.
If you want to be a savvy consumer of polls, rather than a passive recipient of poll spin coming from journalists, pollsters or politicians, keep the following points in mind:
Don't trust any poll that doesn't tell you how the poll was conducted, the sample size, and the margin of error.
Be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of online and telephone polling.
You are better off putting your faith in the aggregated results of several polls conducted over time, rather than the findings of any one single poll or pollster.
Stay away from seat projection polls, or polls that purport to show how any single riding might vote. There is no scientific validity to those polls.
And finally....
Two words that should keep NDP supporters awake at night: Nick Clegg.
Nick Clegg is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K. and, during last spring's British election, he became the darling of British pollsters.
After a strong performance in the leaders' debates, the perennial third-party finisher shot past the ruling Labour Party into second place in the polls.
Some polls even had him challenging the Conservatives for first place. After receiving 22 per cent of the vote in the previous election, Clegg was now polling at over 30 per cent.
The last polls taken before election day predicted the Liberal Democrats would capture at least 27 per cent of the vote and challenge Labour for second place.
But when the votes were counted, the Liberal Democrats received only 23 per cent, six percentage points behind Labour; the party actually lost five seats from its previous total.
Either voters had swung away from the Liberal Democrats at the last moment, or the pollsters had been wrong about the party's strength all along. It's impossible to know.
As for Nick Clegg, rather than leading a strong contingent of Liberal Democrats on the opposition benches, and positioning himself as Britain's prime minister-in-waiting, he and his 57 MPs are junior partners in an increasingly unpopular and fractious coalition government with the ruling Conservative Party.
Nick Clegg. Jack Layton's worst nightmare?
]]>BQ CON GRN LIB NDP ERROR± FIRM
6 36 6 23 25 2.2 Forum Research
6 43 4 21 24 3.1 Ipsos Reid
6.5 34 7.8 24.7 24.7 2.1 EKOS Research
7.5 39 3.4 26.7 22.1 3.1 Nanos ResearchFour polls, all released on April 20, all conducted by reputable Canadian polling firms. And yet the results, in some cases, are so out of sync it almost appears that the pollsters were interviewing voters in different countries.
How can there be an almost nine-point difference in the Conservative vote between Ipsos Reid and Ekos?
Or more than four points for the Greens between Ekos and Nanos, and more than five for the Liberals between Ipsos and Nanos?
If the pollsters are so far apart, how can we rely on their interpretation of what is happening "out there" in the Canadian electorate?
The question is important because we have reached the stage of the campaign where polls have become the story. The platforms have been released, the promises rolled out, the debates are a fading memory.
This campaign needed a new story line to carry it to election day, and it has found that in the so-called NDP surge.
Campaign coverage is now focused almost exclusively on the horse race and the strategic decisions each party is making to come to grips with the new reality that the pollsters assure us we are now confronting.
But what if they're wrong?
Dirty little secret
It's a question pollsters themselves have been asking lately.
In recent months, several prominent Canadian pollsters have been raising some pretty fundamental questions about their industry.
The most provocative critic has been Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima, which provides political polling for the Canadian Press. He is also a regular member of The National's At Issue panel on CBC TV.
Gregg has been doing political polling since the 1970s and in an interview with the Canadian Press he said that "there's broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media.
"The dirty little secret of the polling business," he went on, "is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada."
Methodological problems
Amongst the methodological problems that Gregg and others identify is the incredible shrinking response rate for polls conducted by telephone.
Thirty years ago, about 70-80 per cent of people called by pollsters agreed to be surveyed. Today, that rate is under 15 per cent and Gregg believes those people tend to be older, less well-educated and more rural than the general population.
But for the purposes of their polling, researchers are obliged to assume that the 15 per cent of callers who agree to spend 20 minutes talking to them are representative of the 85 per cent who are too busy or whatever to participate or who never pick up at all because they can identify a pollster through Caller ID.
The growing number of households without landlines also poses significant challenges.
There are now more cellphones than wired phones in Canada (25 million vs. 17.5 million), and those cellphone numbers are harder for pollsters to get. That leaves a large number of people, many of them younger, whose views may never be surveyed.
In both these cases, researchers have developed "models" that they hope can compensate for these and other instances where polls are conducted on an unrepresentative sample. But the accuracy of these models remains in question.
The basic methodological assumption of the polling industry has always revolved around random probability sampling, meaning that everyone has an equal chance of being interviewed. That is now clearly no longer the case.
Commercial pressures
Firms like Nanos, Decima, Ipsos-Reid and Ekos have become household names in Canada because of their high-profile political polling.
But political polling is a loss leader for these companies. They offer their services to media outlets at a deeply discounted rate, or sometimes even for free, because the profile they develop at election time helps them in their core business, which is traditional market research.
They make their money asking people what margarine they spread on their toast, not who they are likely to vote for.
In fact, that voter preference question is often buried inside a longer survey about some completely unrelated subjects.
Over the years, researchers have discovered that where the political question is placed in the survey, and what else is being asked of the respondent, can affect how a person answers the question.
But these placement concerns are rarely factored in to the results.
Many industry veterans now think that too much poorly executed and poorly resourced polling is causing significant harm to the industry.
"I believe the quality overall has been driven to unacceptably low levels by the fact that there's this competitive auction to the bottom, with most of this stuff being paid for by insufficient or no resources by the media," Frank Graves of Ekos told the Canadian Press in February.
"You know what? You get what you pay for."
Unhealthy relationship with the media
Still, no one expects the media's love affair with opinion polls to end any time soon. Polls are the best news that money can buy.
They keep the campaign story moving along, even when everything else has been thoroughly talked out.
In this campaign, there were 19 days between the English-language leaders' debate and election day. In 2008, there were only 12.
Also, in 2008, the last platform was dropped just six days before voters went to the polls. This year, it was more than three weeks before. These kinds of gaps require new story lines.
But the problem with using polls here is that, too often, the reporting of them is based on creating drama where none exists.
In the process, non-trivial issues like margin of error, problems with samples and methodologies tend to get pushed aside.
Is that what's happening with the story of the NDP surge? That will be the subject of the next post.
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The strategy is comprised of the following elements.
1) Develop, assess and cost options for catastrophic drug coverage;
2) Establish a common national drug formulary for participating jurisdictions based on safety and cost effectiveness;
3) Accelerate access to breakthrough drugs for unmet health needs through improvements to the drug approval process;
4) Strengthen evaluation of real-world drug safety and effectiveness;
5) Pursue purchasing strategies to obtain best prices for Canadians for drugs and vaccines;
6) Enhance action to influence the prescribing behaviour of health-care professionals so that drugs are used only when needed and the right drug is used for the right problem;
7) Broaden the practice of e-prescribing through accelerated development and deployment of the electronic health record;
8) Accelerate access to non-patented drugs and achieve international parity on prices of non-patented drugs;
9) Enhance the analysis of cost drivers and cost effectiveness, including best practices in drug plan policies;
10) Undertake research on expensive medications for rare diseases. (A measure added to the strategy in 2005)
The Health Council of Canada, an agency set up to monitor the promises has noted some progress: notably an initiative called a "common drug review" to establish ways of buying drugs more cheaply; as well as help for people with rare diseases.
But as its 2009 report put it, the National Pharmaceuticals Strategy is "a prescription unfilled." Even the Canadian Medical Association Journal weighed in on this recently.
For health policy experts such as Steve Morgan, at the University of British Columbia, what has happened is simple: promises have been broken and your access to affordable drugs varies depending on where you live.
"If the same standards were to apply to medicare that are being applied to this, Canadians would be outraged," he says. "We would be going to the polls voting on this particular issue because it would be such a travesty."
So what went wrong?
The first thing to keep in mind is that the provinces are the ones mostly responsible for prescription drugs. They determine what drugs get covered and for whom.
The federal role is limited to drug approval and monitoring drugs for effectiveness and side effects once doctors begin prescribing them. (Ottawa is responsible for prescription drugs for First Nation's communities.)
Of course, Ottawa also transfers billions of dollars to the provinces and territories for health care under the 10-year agreement, which should ensure it has some say in the process. But as Morgan and others point out, when it comes to pharmacare there are many players in the system.
The majority of prescriptions in this country are handled through private drug plans, so insurance companies determine which drugs they will cover. Most of these companies cover drugs for common ailments, but not necessarily for drugs designed to treat rare diseases, which is why in 2005, this provision became part of the national strategy.
Doctors are key participants as well, and they have been sometimes criticized for driving up costs by prescribing too many pills, and favoring the more expensive name-brand products over the cheaper generic versions.
For their part, the pharmaceutical companies are often accused of flooding the market with brand or generic versions of what is already out there.
Given the number of players, it's no wonder that the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP talk primarily about the need to negotiate, a process that, thus far, has achieved little progress when it comes to extending the reach of the national program or even drug safety.
What are the parties saying?
The Liberals are promising to make prescription drugs a key component in the post-2014 health transfer talks with the provinces and territories, which the party vows to kick-start within a few months of coming to power.
"Prescription drugs are becoming a greater part of patient care," Michael Ignatieff, said in a news release. "We need to make sure all Canadians, no matter where they live, have access to the prescription drugs they need."
But while access and affordability are important components of a national drug strategy, there are other elements as well. What would the Liberals do to improve the monitoring of drug safety? How would the party deal with the prescribing habits of physicians? None of these are directly addressed.
For its part, the NDP covers similar ground but also promises "improved assessment to ensure quality, safety and cost and health effectiveness of prescription drugs; using bargaining power in pharmaceutical purchases; cutting administrative costs through public administration; establishing science-based formularies and clinical guidelines to advance evidence-based practice by physicians."
These are the kinds of ideas that many health policy experts are advancing. But the problem is that much of the administration would have to be carried out by provincial authorities and how would a federal government get them onside?
As for the Conservatives, other than committing to "a universal public health-care system and the Canada Health Act, and the right of provinces to deliver health care within their jurisdictions,"the party is silent when it comes to a drug strategy. The same is true for the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois.
The way forward
When it comes to crafting a national pharmaceutical strategy, there has been lots of talk but little action, or political will, since the big heath accord was signed in 2004.
Last year, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that prescription drug expenditures totaled $30-billion and represented the third most expensive element of the system behind hospitals and doctors.
Growing at a rate of 5.1 per cent a year, drug expenditures are slowing somewhat compared to previous years and other health-care expenditures. But they are still a big component and there are still huge regional gaps in coverage.
Experts like UBC's Steve Morgan suggests that if Canada is serious about getting a national pharmacare strategy together, we should look beyond our borders.
"Australia and New Zealand run interesting and quite efficient systems," he says. "There are examples that can be drawn from Europe where they have reasonably equitable and efficient systems for financing medicines."
You would think a federal election campaign would be just the place to raise some of these examples.
David McKie can be reached at david_mckie@cbc.ca
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