OTTAWA—While the Greens heralded the release of their “fully costed” and “responsible” election platform on Wednesday, an independent analysis by economists at the University of Ottawa delivered the party a failing grade for fiscal transparency and soundness. The analysis was produced by former parliamentary budget officer (PBO) Kevin Page and his team at the school’s Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy, which ran the Green’s “costed” platform through a predetermined set of parameters to judge whether it makes fiscal sense. They concluded the Greens failed on all categories of analysis: the party failed to make “realistic economic and fiscal assumptions,” present a plan with “responsible fiscal management,” and they failed on “transparency” by leaving out significant details on its economic outlook. Page’s team said they found “serious gaps” in the economic assumptions of the party’s platform, including how there is “no background document” to support the fiscal baseline the Greens used to project how they will attain a balanced budget in five years.“We started looking at the numbers and they don’t add up,” Page told the Star on Wednesday.“Literally, the numbers — when you go to the various measures of revenues and spending, on the detailed tables — they don’t even add up,” he said. “There’s something missing that’s very substantive.” Page’s team plans to conduct the same analysis for each major party’s platform during the election campaign. After the report card was published, the Green Party said it was working on a new version of its platform that will be released as soon as possible with further details about their fiscal assumptions and projections. “We will be able to further clarify the assumptions that we made, the baseline that we wer ...
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