Today’s Conservative “major policy announcement” of income splitting for families with kids under 18 is a joke, it won’t come into effect until after the budget is balanced. Harper is hoping that people will miss that convenient fact when they got to the ballot box. Even if you go with the optimistic Conservative estimates the budget wont be balanced for another 5 years. How many families voting today would be ineligible for the income splitting by that time? Also, even if Harper wins this time, between now and when the budget is projected to be balanced there has to be at least one more election. It is highly likely that Harper wont even be Prime Minister by the time the budget is balanced making it impossible for him to follow through on it.
Most importantly there is no guarantee that the budget will be balanced in five years. The parliamentary budgetary officer has been very skeptical of these projections as he can’t see where the money will come from to balance the budget based on the information he’s been provided by the government. At the rate the Conservatives have been increasing spending over the past five years I think it would be easy to argue at this point that they will never balance a budget. All this makes it very likely that this in an election promise that will never be kept.
