Make no mistake: The Conservatives have revved up their chainsaw. They are just hoping that voters won’t hear it over the soothing muzak of wildly optimistic budget projections.
Desperate to recover the ground he has lost to the Liberals, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has solemnly pledged to maintain federal transfers for health care and education to provinces and income supports for individuals like Old Age Security (OAS). He has even said he would maintain new programs like pharmacare, dental care and $10/day childcare programs, just months ago he “rejected.”
Behind closed doors, it is another story altogether. A member of Poilievre’s transition team let slip that if elected, they plan to hit Canadians hard and fast with a flurry of cutbacks modelled on Mike Harris’ government, whose Common Sense Revolution devastated Ontario’s social safety net and public services.
Media leaks from a recent closed-door conservative confab lend credibility to these sources. At the Canada Strong and Free conference, top Conservatives said there is “no reason why we can’t move more quickly” than Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in slashing government programs and laying off public employees. And Conservative-aligned tech billionaires have been yearning for a Canadian version of DOGE – until they realized it was harming the party’s prospects.
The Conservatives have used the last-minute release of their costed party platform to crank up the soothing mood music. They are trying to conceal the scale of the cuts they are preparing, by wildly overstating the revenue side of the equation.
The Conservative platform’s costing is based on the assumption that, under their leadership, economic growth will essentially double and federal government coffers will overflow with new revenues. In reality, most economists expect growth to crater in the midst of the uncertainty kicked up by Donald Trump’s trade war. As Globe columnist Campbell Clark points out, Conservative projections are built on “magical thinking” that “relies on the hope that their policies would cause a big economic boom, mostly in the oil and gas sector.”
Poilievre never tires of repeating that he will slash foreign aid, shrink the federal civil service, and defund the CBC, among other measures. These cuts, amounting to $56 billion over four years according to the Conservative platform, are bad enough. But the platform’s “exceptionally optimistic” revenue projections are papering over up to $24.7 billion in additional cuts that the Tories don’t want to cop to.
Long before the platform was released, economists were warning that the Conservatives’ promises didn’t add up. “It’s not at all clear how Poilievre will make the fiscal math work,” observed the CCPA’s Marc Lee, way back in January. “Bringing in tax cuts and growing military expenditures and balancing the budget together imply massive cuts in federal spending.” Since its release, economists have judged the Conservative numbers harshly, saying they are “just [not] particularly realistic” and based on “heroic assumptions.”
Conservative party officials have defended the number games being played in their platform. When pressed by journalists, they have said the document was vetted by two external economists and found to be credible. The two economists in question, however, are not exactly neutral. Both hail from corporate-backed, hard-right think tanks, the Fraser Institute and the Macdonald Laurier Institute, kindred institutions that share Poilievre’s lifelong revulsion against the welfare state.
Even worse, one of the two economists (Tim Sargent of the Macdonald Laurier Institute) was on stage at the Canada Strong and Free event, promoting a Canadian version of DOGE and giving advice on how to defeat opponents of the drive to dismantle what remains of Canada’s social safety net. Federal cuts will come so fast and hard, Sargent told the audience at the closed-door event, that critics “won’t know which way to look.”
Not exactly reassuring.
Liberals’ Austerity Lite Agenda
Mark Carney’s Liberals are less obviously austere, with their platform projecting larger deficits over the next four years than the Conservatives. But pay attention to the details, and Carney’s mantra of “spending less, investing more” looks a lot like socialism for the rich, and austerity for the rest of us.
The Liberal platform’s big-ticket items are pipelines, ports and other infrastructure, measures to “derisk” private sector investment, and an extra $18 billion for the military, on top of the planned increases in defence spending that Justin Trudeau had committed to.
The Liberal platform indulges in many of the same evasions as the Conservative plan. It assumes, for instance, that applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the public service will magically save $23 billion in federal spending. If this rosy projection doesn’t come true, deeper cuts are likely. Not without reason, union leaders in the federal civil service have described the choices offered in this election as a choice between “DOGE” and “DOGE lite.”
Perhaps the most revealing tell of the austerity lurking behind the Liberal platform’s reassuring numbers is the inclusion of a “comprehensive program review.” This is one of the key demands of Canada’s corporate elite, which has been agitating for the federal government to put the squeeze on “operational spending” (i.e. programs that don’t directly boost corporate profits) for some time now.
While Carney has wisely avoided spelling out the implications, corporate lobby groups like the Business Council of Canada have not. To make room for more fighter jets, nuclear submarines and hypersonic missiles, federal cuts on the order of $90 billion over three years are needed, in the eyes of the Business Council – comparable in scale to the devastating cutbacks under Jean Chretien in the 1990s. Canada must “make difficult trade offs – such as limiting spending on politically popular social programs – to meet [military] obligations,” according to the corporate lobby group.
The Liberals’ strong rightward shift under Carney has won plaudits from conservative columnists who are usually allergic to deficits. The National Post’s John Ivison has lauded the Liberals’ commitment to privileging corporate subsidies and military spending over investment in public services as proof that Carney “wants the best of his country.” “It is an ambitious platform, commendable in many ways.”
The Globe & Mail’s John Ibbitson has described the Liberal platform as “further confirmation that both the Liberal Leader and the Conservative Leader would govern Canada in the same way, largely because Mr. Carney has pilfered the best parts of the Conservative playbook.”
This alignment extends beyond spending to issues like discredited “tough on crime” policies, clamping down on immigration (and thus blaming immigrants rather than corporate investors for the housing crisis), and fast-tracking resource extraction projects. Both also favour negotiating a new trade deal with Donald Trump, even though his threats of annexation and trade aggression are ongoing, Ibbitson noted. “For better or worse, the Grits and the Tories truly have become Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
The Task Ahead
It’s clearer than ever that we cannot count on politicians to get us out of the multiple crises we face. The lack of imagination displayed by Canada’s political elites – who are intellectually downstream from the billionaire class and their lobbyists – is staggering.
Faced with a wholesale disruption of our economy and threats of annexation from the declining empire to our south, the best the two dominant parties can seem to come up with is a re-run of 1990s-style austerity for the many, and a doubling down on climate-killing extractivism and militarism for the benefit of the few.
All is not black, however. The grim spectacle of Trump’s assault on democracy, and the fear that Canada could follow a similar path, has woken up many people. The dangers of allowing oligarchic wealth to overwhelm our political system are clearer than ever before.
There is a palpable desire among Canadians to gather and make sense of the harrowing political times we are living through. Canada’s place in the world, our military alliances and our relationship with the U.S., our corporate-friendly trade deals and our neoliberal economic path more generally – all of these questions, considered settled for nearly a generation, have been thrown wide open.
If Mark Carney is elected Prime Minister as expected, his main political task will be to subdue and domesticate these potentially destabilizing popular rumblings. Our task is to do just the opposite.
It will be up to organizations and movements outside of parliament to federate our forces, resist the coming attacks on working people, Indigenous rights and the climate, and forcefully put forward an alternative path, whoever is elected.
Nikolas Barry-Shaw
Nikolas is the Trade and Privatization Campaigner for the Council of Canadians and author of the book “Paved with Good Intentions.”
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