It’s the final week of the federal election campaign, and most parties have finally released their full platforms with costs. First of all, kudos to the Liberals, NDP and Conservatives for actually putting them out—the platforms provide a real chance to understand what promises are actually important to the parties. Anti-kudos to them for only publishing them after a record 7.3 million Canadians had already voted. Let’s dive into the details.

Many people think of budgets—and by extension party platforms—as dry economic documents filled with large numbers that signify nothing. But that’s a mistake—the costed platforms are an essential part of becoming a government. They reveal what the parties are serious about, and what they aren’t. If a party claims to want to eliminate poverty but spends nothing on eliminating poverty, maybe they’re not so serious about that promise. The “power of the purse” is one of the most important mechanisms governments have, and it’s critical to know how a party would wield that power. 

That being said, it’s often hard to understand what the dry tables at the end of a long platform document mean—so here’s one quick and easy way to visualize it. 

Each of the charts below represents one party’s platform—red for the Liberals, orange for the NDP, blue for the Conservatives.  For each promise in the platform, I’ve weighted the words by the dollar value of the promise. Bigger font means it’s worth more, smaller font means it’s worth less. So the font on a promise worth $100 million would be half the size of the font on a promise worth $200 million.I’m including both items that change revenues or expenditures. 

There are more details on methodology below. Let’s go through each party in the order they released their platforms.

The Liberals

The Liberals have the most items in their party platform, at 112 costed promises. While they are all included, the font size gets pretty small for the smallest ones.

Their largest single item is government cutbacks worth $28 billion dollars over their four year time horizon. The document innocuously calls these “savings from increased government productivity.” They want to have AI do more federal work, cut contracting out and consultants, and have a single office to help Canadians where there once was several. Will these result in savings without reducing service levels? I doubt it, given the size of the proposed “savings,” but it’s a key part of the party’s platforms.  

Next up is the reduction in the lowest tax bracket rate and the rate for non-refundable tax credits, which will cost $22 billion over four years. It provides an average of $300 per tax filer for the middle and richest Canadians. It is labeled as “Tax cut: middle & rich” in the word cloud and “cut income taxes for the middle class” in the Liberal platform. 

The third-largest spend is an increase in the military’s operating budget worth $17.2 billion over four years. This is separate and on top of the $13.7 billion they want to spend on military equipment, which is the fourth largest item in their list. 

Corporate tax cuts and the cancellation of the higher capital gains inclusion rate also feature prominently. The fall fiscal update introduced what it called the “Accelerated Investment Incentive” extending lowered corporate rates if profits are reinvested in Canada or abroad. That re-appears in the platform. The federal government directly building homes in the “Build Canada Homes” program also stands out.

The NDP

The NDP for its part has 33 costed items in their platform, and I’ve included all of them. The largest by a fair margin is a wealth tax, which they expect to raise $94.5 billion over four years. This is a tremendous amount of new revenue and is a critical part of the NDP platform, as it pays for many of their other proposed expenditures. Rapidly creating an airtight wealth tax on those with over $10 million in net worth, to whom it would apply, would be critical to their promises.

The second largest single item is the NDP’s version of a tax cut for the middle and richest, which is an increase in the basic personal exemption. This provides on average $400-500 per  taxfiler for the middle and richest, although its benefit decreases slightly for the top 10 per cent. 

Third up is an improvement in Employment Insurance benefits and coverage rates as a reaction to the tariff war. This would cost $41 billion over four years.  And fourth in the ranking of NDP priorities by value is a major infrastructure spend worth $40 billion. 

The Conservatives

Third out of the gate (and just six days before the election) was the Conservative party. They have 49 costed items in their platform, and all of them are included in the word cloud. 

The CPC’s most valuable item is their version of a tax cut for middle and high income earners—which, just like the Liberals, lowers the tax rate in the lowest bracket and for non-refundable tax credits, although by more than the Liberals. This would cost $30.2 billion over four years and would provide on average $600 to $700 per tax filer for the richest 40 per cent of Canadians. 

Next up, the Conservatives estimate they could cut $23.5 billion over four years in federal government consulting. In a sense, this is also likely government cutbacks similar to the Liberals and would face the same challenges: saving substantial amounts of money without also cutting back on service levels. Simply put, there is nowhere near that much federal consulting tobe cut, so reaching that target would require affecting services.

The third highest priority based on spending is the military, with a particular focus on northern security. The party estimates that a Conservative government would spend $17.0 billion over four years. The fourth highest priority is raising $12.9 billion in revenue by investigating tax evasion and tax havens. 

Methodology

In this exercise, I’m Including everything in each party’s platform at the value they ascribed to it. No values are being changed or challenged in the figures above. However, in some cases the costing tables included items on an accrual basis. If the actual cash value was obvious I swapped the accrual for the cash value to better represent how those items would appear in the economy.

To generate these word clouds, I’m using www.wordclouds.com. I’ve shortened and simplified the party planks to make them clearer and have them better fit in the word cloud. All items’ sizes are weighted by the sum of their four year values. Despite shortening and shrinking the text, the top valued items were still too big and had to be scaled down. Otherwise, everything else would have been too small to read. As a result, many larger items will appear similar size even though in reality they can be multiples of one another.

All figures are absolute values of values included in platform costing tables to illustrate both revenue changes and spending changes in the same word cloud.

All parties included various forms of tariff revenue but I’ve excluded those as no party is proposing a different tariff scheme that might produce higher or lower revenues. Suffice it to say that tariffs will become an unexpectedly large revenue source in the years to come for any party’s priorities.