P.E.I. PCs fulfilled about 60% of 2019 promises, CBC finds

The way P.E.I. Progressive Conservative Leader Dennis King tells it, his government made good on nearly all of its campaign promises four years ago.

"We did a little quick update on our platform commitments from 2019 just this morning," King said on March 3, just before announcing Islanders would be heading to the polls in April.

"We've completed over 95 per cent of those promises that we made in 2019 ... When we tell you what we're going to do for the next four years, you can take it to the bank."

When asked by reporters if the PCs planned to release that analysis, King responded: "You have the platform. Do the math."

So CBC/Radio-Canada conducted an assessment of the 121 distinct commitments included in the PC's 2019 election platform.

By our analysis, the PCs fulfilled 45 per cent of those promises in whole, and another 16 per cent were completed in part or with significant caveats attached. Thirty per cent of the promises, as far as we can tell, remain unfulfilled. The percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.

Some promises were too vague or otherwise impossible to fact-check. A few commitments repeated multiple times in the platform were omitted from this analysis.

CBC/Radio-Canada spent two weeks looking at news stories, government announcements, ministerial mandate letters, transcripts of debates in the legislature, and reaching out to multiple government departments, third parties that would have been involved in some files, and the PC Party.

For the cases in which official sources didn't provide any information and there is little to no information included in public records we could find, we considered whether we could find any evidence the commitments had been fulfilled.

The PC Party did not provide its own analysis to CBC/Radio-Canada despite repeated requests.

The tables below includes all the commitments (minus duplicates included in the platform document itself), together with highlights from the various platform areas.

Replace the Hillsborough Hospital: Promise broken

The very first commitment in the platform is to "replace the Hillsborough Hospital immediately."

There's no way to assess this promise except as a broken one, given the way it's worded. The same goes for the PC promise from the campaign trail to have "shovels in the ground" on Day 1.