7 hours Ago By Brandon Sun
With less than a week until election day, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has finally released his party’s “fully costed” election platform. Read this article for free: Already have an account? As we navigate through unprecedented times, our journalists are working harder than ever to bring you the latest local updates to keep you safe and informed. Now, more than ever, we need your support.
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With less than a week until election day, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has finally released his party’s “fully costed” election platform. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Opinion With less than a week until election day, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has finally released his party’s “fully costed” election platform. The document contains a number of surprises, beginning with the size of deficits that a newly elected Conservative government would incur during its first full term in office.
Under the Tory plan, the deficit for the current fiscal year would be $31.4 billion, followed by deficits of $31.5 billion in 2026-27; $23.
6 billion in 2027-28; and $14.2 billion in 2028-29. Four years from now, the nation would still be billions of dollars away from the balanced budget that Poilievre has repeatedly promised since becoming Conservative Party leader in 2022 — and that’s the Tories’ best-case scenario under the plan.
The platform also assumes a $20-billion revenue boost derived from counter-tariffs imposed on imports from the U.S., as well as the scrapping of the federal government’s clean electricity regulations, the electric vehicle mandate and the carbon tax on industry and residents.
The document promises $34.3 billion in new spending, along with $75 billion in tax cuts over the next four years. All that spending and cutting would apparently be financed in part by a $56-billion reduction in government spending over that same time period.
Those cuts would include ending funding for the English-language division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as reductions in foreign aid spending that would start at $1.3 billion during the current fiscal year and grow to $2.8 billion in cuts by the 2028-29 fiscal year.
Poilievre says his government would also save billions more each year by reducing spending on consultants and shrinking the size of the federal bureaucracy. Beyond the spending cuts, the Conservative platform also assumes that other government revenues would increase dramatically over the next four years, including a massive $21-billion increase for the 2028-29 fiscal year. The platform also promises to cut the lowest personal income tax rate from 15 per cent to 12.
75 per cent. As a result, Poilievre claims that the average Canadian dual-income family would save $1,800 annually. The document repeats Poilievre’s commitment to build 2.
3 million new homes, and to eliminate the GST from the purchase of new homes under $1.3 million. It also promises to “incentivize” municipal governments to cut development charges in order to reduce house prices.
In his remarks yesterday, Poilievre made clear that the “incentivization” would take the form of forcing local governments to reduce or eliminate development charges — which exist in order to offset infrastructure costs incurred by those governments as a result of construction projects — or face the prospect of having federal funding for local infrastructure projects cut. The Tory platform also contains a commitment to pass a “Taxpayer Protection Act to ban new or higher federal taxes without asking taxpayers first in a referendum.” That may sound attractive, but Manitobans will recall that courts in this province decided a decade ago that such legislation cannot bind future governments.
Finally, Poilievre’s plan promises to lower education requirements for federal civil servants, saying that a Conservative government would “eliminate university degree requirements for most federal public service roles to hire for skill, not credentials.” Reaction to the Conservative platform has been far from positive. Marc Levesque, the former chief economist at the Public Sector Pension Investment Board and chief economics strategist at TD Securities, says “So, let me get my head around this.
The party who has been screaming against ‘inflationary’ deficits as recently as yesterday has made so many costly campaign promises that it can’t eliminate the deficit during a first mandate.” Economist Dr. Mike Moffat says that “The Conservative plan is out and, ooof, is this costing a disaster .
.. I haven’t seen ‘fun with numbers’ costing like this in a Conservative platform since the 2014 Ontario campaign.
” Andrew Leach, an economics and law professor, adds that “The Conservative platform definitely reads like a platform you cobbled together in a week or two after you determined that your plan to not risk your big lead with a costed platform wasn’t going to work.” That’s harsh but, given that almost eight million Canadians had already voted prior to the release of the Conservative platform, the plan will not have the impact on the election that it may have had if it had been released prior to the period for advance voting. As to whether it influences the preference of Canadians who have not yet voted, positively or negatively, that remains to be seen.
That is because it is far from clear as to whether it will help or harm the Conservatives. Advertisement Advertisement.
