Canada election: Poilievre releases platform with promise of referendums on new federal taxes

I’m a senior reporter following the Bloc Québécois campaign this week.

If politics is theatre, then entertainment industry veteran Yves-François Blanchet really leaned into his roots during this morning's news conference.

While mocking Carney's speech, Blanchet imitated a hypnotist's cadence. "Your eyelids are getting heavy; you like fossil fuels," he repeated three times in answer to a question about whether the national interest supersedes Blanchet's proposal to protect all Quebec environmental laws from federal infringement.

Fielding another query about the newly released Conservative platform, he accused it of “hocus pocus,” and said, “Elon Musk, sors de ce corps,” likening the Conservatives' cuts to the controversial DOGE initiative south of the border (the rhyme does not quite translate smoothly into English, but it is effectively an exorcist's chant urging the American billionaire to leave a body).

But the biggest magic trick Blanchet will have to pull off is still ahead of him — urging as many Quebecers as possible to check BQ at the ballot box. Polls have had him on a slight upswing this week, but even with the bump, the CBC Poll Tracker still projects 10 Bloc seats could disappear.

Poilievre has promised in his platform to maintain existing dental care coverage, plus agreements on pharmacare and child care — all programs that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has projected a Conservative government would cut.

“Do Canadians honestly believe that Pierre Poilievre will keep these programs?” Singh said during a campaign stop in Vancouver. It’s unclear at this point whether Poilievre will let new users, and not just those who are already covered, access the programs.

“He’s fought against them. He’s opposed them. And now we’re to believe that he’s somehow going to defend them? I mean, I think people know what Conservatives do,” said Singh.

There’s some economist name-dropping happening in the chat today, as Carney defends his credentials against concerns about the spending outlined in the Liberal platform.

A few reporters noted that Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, wrote yesterday that “the entire fiscal trajectory of the federal government is now pointed in a potentially unsustainable direction.”

Asked outright if Tombe is wrong, Carney had this to say in French: “Yes, and I have more experience than he does.”

The Liberal leader defended his plan, saying his government is focused on reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio — a figure that Tombe projected would actually increase by 2027, before dropping slightly in 2028. Carney also reiterated a plan to slow the rate of growth in government spending to two per cent from nine per cent.

An estimated 7.3 million people cast a ballot during the four-day advance voting period from April 18-21, Elections Canada said today.

That’s a new record and a roughly 25 per cent increase from the number of people who voted in advance polls in the last federal election in 2021.

Elections Canada said it is putting together a breakdown of advance turnout in each of the country’s 343 electoral districts, which will soon be available on its website.

As my colleague Janyce McGregor pointed out, however, we are still missing some important context. We don’t know how much the registry of electors has grown since 2021.

Canada’s population has risen since then — so to understand how significant the 25 per cent jump is, we need to know not only how many more ballots were cast, but also the share of total eligible voters the number represents.

We’ve reached out to Elections Canada for more information.

Carney, after giving a general overview of his own platform, criticized Poilievre’s — saying the Conservative leader’s plan for Canada is to “cut, destroy and divide.”

Poilievre’s plan includes “a lot of magic numbers,” Carney said. He claimed a Conservative government would maintain child care and dental care for people who already have it, but wouldn’t offer it to others beyond that, creating “two types of Canadians.”

The Conservative platform isn’t explicit on whether it will offer the programs for new users.

“These numbers are a joke. We aren’t in a joke. We are in the worst crisis of our lives,” Carney said, adding that Poilievre’s plan is to “cut what Canada needs.”

The Liberal leader is currently facing questions over his own plans for spending amidst concerns over the federal deficit.

The Liberal leader is holding a campaign event in the city of Trois-Rivières.

More specifically, the party proposes a Taxpayer Protection Act that would “ban new or higher federal taxes without asking taxpayers first in a referendum.”

This is something Poilievre had not talked about on the campaign so far.

Another promise we hadn’t heard about before: the party is pledging to eliminate university degree requirements for “most federal public services roles to hire for skill, not credentials.”

Poilievre has made various promises relating to the public service, but changing the hiring requirements is a new one.

As my colleague J.P. pointed out, Poilievre’s platform says the government will bring in $20 billion in revenue from Canadian retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods during the 2025-26 fiscal year.

But it doesn’t look like all of that revenue will be set aside to help affected workers and fund tax cuts, which was the initial promise. There is also the question of how future tax cuts will be funded if the Conservative government’s goal is to pause tariffs during early negotiations with the U.S. administration.

The Conservative leader, asked today how he accounts for that discrepancy in addition to the existing federal deficit, skirted the question somewhat, saying his plan is to use all the money collected from tariffs and put it toward tax cuts on work, home building, investment and energy.

Poilievre said the $20-billion figure is based on projections from the current government.

He added that his government would set aside money for the previously announced “Keep Canadians Working Fund,” which he described as a loan program for companies that can maintain operations in the long term, but need some liquidity to avoid layoffs in the short term.

Poilievre said he’ll manage the government purse the way that a small business, a single mom or a senior does. He referenced his own mother, a retired teacher, to make a point about how he’d spend taxpayer money.

“If she would not be happy with it coming out of her retirement funds, then I should not be happy spending it. Canadians have been pinching pennies long enough. It’s time for the government to start pinching pennies as well,” the Conservative leader said.

He contrasted his own approach with Carney’s, framing the Liberal leader as “more costly” than former prime minister Justin Trudeau. The Liberal platform promises $130 billion in new measures over four years, ultimately adding $225 billion to federal debt.

“We can choose change. We can choose hope. We can choose our future,” said Poilievre to applause from the group of Toronto-area Conservative candidates standing behind him.

The Conservative platform includes relatively few surprises in terms of policies.

Poilievre will spend big on cutting income taxes, scrapping the capital gains inclusion rate tax hike and doing away with the GST on new homes. Like in Carney’s budget, another major budget line item is a sizable increase in military spending — with the Conservatives projecting $17 billion more will be spent on the armed forces over the next four years.

There are a few new policies in this platform — Poilievre is promising to pursue a CANZUK free trade and mobility agreement with the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

He’s promising to ban “drug dens” — his name for safe consumption sites — within 500 metres of schools, parks and seniors’ homes.

The platform also calls for a greater focus on Canadian history, with a promise to erect new monuments honouring veterans who served in the Second World War and Afghanistan. A Conservative government will produce new “made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars.”

The platform all books $20 billion from Canadian retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods as the country contends with Trump’s trade war, but it appears not all of that revenue will necessarily be redistributed to help affected workers and fund tax cuts, as Poilievre had initially promised.