Chantal Hébert: For Erin O’Toole, a fight over child care is the wrong one to pick with Justin Trudeau

The Conservative election platform was never discussed on the set of the leaders' debates in 2019. It was released a few days after the curtain had fallen, late on a Friday in the dying days of the campaign.

The exercise had more to do with ticking a box than with injecting momentum in Andrew Scheer's final stretch on the hustings.

By contrast, the 2021 Conservative plan was made public with fanfare and at the very first opportunity.

Its release on Monday was designed to move the Conservatives from reactive to a proactive mode and, more importantly, to shift its leader from the role of chief critic of the outgoing government to that of prime minister in waiting.

O'Toole is the least popular of the main leaders. The next few weeks will tell whether casting him as a man with a plan will convince voters to revisit their dismissive assessment of his leadership.

But the differences between the two platforms go beyond strategic timing.

The Scheer plan was conceived in a time when no one spoke of a pandemic, except in the abstract. The definition of what constitutes a mind-boggling deficit has changed dramatically since the 2019 campaign and, with it, the kind of fiscal policies the times call for.

The latest Conservative platform also tweaks the party's branding on other, non-pandemic-related fronts.

Scheer wanted to cut foreign aid by 25 per cent and redirect the funds to domestic priorities. O'Toole would maintain it at its current level, and his plan stands out from previous Conservative instalments for its focus on foreign policy.

Stephen Harper's government revelled in clipping the wings of the labour movement. In this Conservative platform, big business is more often in the crosshairs of the party than are big unions. O'Toole is promising to make the federal labour code more union friendly

There is little left of Scheer's fighting words on carbon pricing and on the imposition on reluctant provinces of new national pipeline projects.

In principle, O'Toole has vacated that battlefield.

In practice though, the white flag he has waved on the federal carbon levy remains the size of a handkerchief.

A Conservative government would not eliminate Trudeau's carbon levy. The party's current leadership admits - grudgingly - that carbon pricing has a place in the climate change tool box.

But on the Conservatives' watch, the size of that place would diminish so dramatically as to render its impact insignificant. Moreover, the party remains committed to dismantling other key parts of the Liberal climate change infrastructure.

Having misfired on the carbon levy in 2019, the Conservatives have set their sights for this campaign on social policy and Trudeau's $10-a-day child-care initiative.

O'Toole would replace it with a generous tax credit for low-income families.

It may be that after decades of broken federal promises, a critical mass of voters would rather take up the Conservative offer of cash in hand than gamble that the Liberals will come through on their child-care commitment.

But by choosing to fight the Liberals on their child-care plan, O'Toole - like Scheer on carbon pricing - is offside with a policy that is not only popular with voters but also enjoys the support of the other main parties.

It is a battlefield on which he cannot count on most premiers to have his back. More than half the provinces have already signed child care funding agreements with the Liberals.

Ontario remains a holdout but with a provincial election scheduled for the spring, a major helping of federal child care money is not an offer premier Doug Ford necessarily wants to dismiss out of hand.

In Quebec, the Conservatives' promise to kill the Liberal child-care initiative predictably went down like a lead balloon.

In the province that has pioneered the kind of system Trudeau's Liberals are hoping to see replicated elsewhere, a tax credit for parents is no substitute for money to open more acutely needed daycare spots or to attract child-care workers with better wages.

Ditto in British Columbia, where the NDP government is counting on the federal funding to accelerate its implementation of a Quebec-style system.

O'Toole may be hoping that an attending offer of more money for health care will make what could be bitter child care pill easier for some of the premiers to swallow.

A Conservative government would double the annual rate of increase of transfer payments to the provinces for health care from three per cent to six per cent. (Inexplicably, the platform describes this measure as a reversal of a Trudeau-imposed reduction, when what the Liberals did was maintain a cut unilaterally set by Harper during his final term in office.)

Strip away the Conservative variations on the theme of post-pandemic relief and what is left is a platform that still leans more heavily toward erasing signature Liberal policies than to breaking significant ground.

Chantal Hebert is an Ottawa-based freelance contributing columnist covering politics for the Star. Reach her via email: chantalh28@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert