Canadians voted at advance polls and two more party platforms were released in full, but religion, race and refugees continued to generate most of the election heat.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper asserted at a campaign stop in Richmond, B.C., that there was nothing “exclusionary” or political about his government’s decision to focus on accepting refugees from the most vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities in the Syrian and Iraqi conflict, rather than the Muslim majority with dominates most of the displaced families. The controversy overshadowed the release of the Conservative party platform.
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NDP Leader Tom Mulcair released his party’s complete platform at an event in Montreal, where he vowed that an NDP government would not bring the freshly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact to a vote in Parliament but would instead push to have the massive, 12-country agreement renegotiated. Among the promises in the full NDP campaign platform: making trade talks more transparent, reforming the electoral system and banning bulk water exports.
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Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, campaigning in Toronto before heading to the Northwest Territories, said the first piece of legislation from a Liberal government would be a tax cut for those earning between $45,000 and $90,000 a year, paid for with tax hikes for those earning more than $200,000 annually. Trudeau also tore into what he called “disgusting” behaviour by the Prime Minister’s Office for the role it played in the selection of refugee applications based on religion.
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Zunera Ishaq, the woman at the centre of a polarizing election battle over the legal right to wear a niqab while taking the oath of citizenship, officially became a Canadian. Her lawyer Lorne Waldman said the 29-year-old was granted citizenship Friday in a private ceremony in Mississauga, west of Toronto, making her eligible to vote in the Oct. 19 election.
