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Our View: A summer of policies, please?

We’d like to see some actual platforms from the federal parties
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NDP leader Jagmeet Singh talks healthcare with Nanaimo-Ladysmith candidate Bob Chamberlin, left, Deryck Cowling, Edie Cartwright and others at a house in Nanaimo’s Departure Bay neighbourhood on Tuesday. (GREG SAKAKI/The News Bulletin)

With the next federal election coming up in a mere three and a half months or so, we’ll soon be (if we aren’t already) hearing non-stop about how terrible the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Greens all are as attack ads bombard us with messaging from the various parties.

But will we hear what the actual platforms of the parties doing the advertising are? Will we hear proposed answers to the problems in our country, or just how the other parties don’t have them?

Based on past experience, it’ll be the latter.

At least for a while.

The parties tend to roll out their actual policy platforms and, perhaps more importantly for many, their budgets for how these things could be accomplished, during the official election campaign, which will only last for a few weeks prior to voting day in October.

That doesn’t give people enough time to actually try to understand what the parties want to do, how they want to do it, and, most importantly, how their approach will be different from another party’s, should they be elected.

Would most Canadians take the time to go through policy platforms and economic policies and learn this stuff over the summer, when they’re focused on relaxing beside the lake and hiking in the woods? Probably not.

But some will. And any better-informed voters are a good thing.

Why not give us all a head start on becoming those?

—Black Press Media