During his campaign for the Conservative leadership in 2022, Pierre Poilievre said he would never pivot.
“I am who I am,” he said.
To a great degree, that has held true — despite periodic suggestions from the commentariat that he should change course.
Pierre Poilievre is an ideological conservative who believes there is an inherent value in lower taxes and lower public spending. The campaign platform he tabled on Tuesday broadly hews to those principles.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released the party’s platform in the final week of the campaign, pledging to cut income taxes, remove the GST on new homes and reduce Canada’s existing deficit by 70 per cent.
An income tax cut, reductions in capital gains taxes, the elimination of the GST on new homes and freezing the excise tax on alcohol would reduce federal revenues by $10.5 billion next year and by $20.6 billion in the fourth year of the Conservative plan. On the other side of the ledger, a Conservative government would in its fourth year cut $1 billion from Crown corporations (including the CBC), reduce foreign aid by $2.8 billion and cut hundreds of millions from federal programs meant to support the housing, artificial intelligence and clean tech sectors (Conservatives would no doubt argue the specific programs were wasteful).
By the fourth year of the Conservative plan, spending on outside contractors by the federal government would be reduced by $10.5 billion. Shrinking the public service would save another $2.9 billion. Trying to do those two things at the same time could prove challenging.
‘Woke’ goes missing
The Conservatives commit to an increase in defence spending and would send billions to municipalities to reduce development charges, but the platform does not envision major spending increases in any other areas. There is a commitment to “honour” existing federal-provincial agreements on health care, child care and pharmacare (though only three provinces and one territory currently have pharma deals).
But if there is a hint of a pivot in this platform it is something that’s missing — the word “woke,” at least in the English version of the platform.
Over the last three years, Poilievre has regularly used “woke” as an all-purpose pejorative and his party’s Quebec platform included a commitment to “put an end to the imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research.”
Liberal Leader Mark Carney, speaking from Trois-Rivières, Que., in the final week of the election campaign, criticized Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s costed platform has “many phantom numbers.”
The English national platform that Poilievre released on Tuesday reprints 14 of the 15 items in that Quebec platform, but the ban on “woke” is missing. In the French version, the “woke” commitment is included. The platform also doesn’t repeat Poilievre’s vow to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada or ban his ministers from attending the World Economic Forum.
The word “notwithstanding” also does not appear, though the Conservatives do hint at their intention to use the notwithstanding clause when they commit to “ensure consecutive sentences for mass murderers.”
Poilievre would surely say that he is who he is and those commitments stand (it seems unlikely that he has gone “woke” over the course of the last few weeks).
But at least some of the debate now will involve the Conservative Party’s math.
Working through the numbers
The Conservatives have promised a “dollar-for-dollar” law that would require cabinet ministers to find a dollar of savings or new revenue for every dollar they want to spend on a new initiative. But the Conservative platform adds a new wrinkle to the party’s fiscal approach — projecting higher government revenues from the increased economic growth that the party believes will result from its policies.
In the world of policy wonks, this is a somewhat controversial approach known as “dynamic scoring” — attempting to project the economic and fiscal impacts of a given policy. In this case the Conservatives estimate that a higher rate of housing construction and the elimination of several Liberal policies will result in additional revenues of $59.8 billion for the federal government.
The Conservatives say that their projections are supported by two economists — Philip Cross and Tim Sargent. But the Conservatives explicitly declined to include these kinds of projections in 2021, citing a desire to be “prudent.” And, more pertinently, Mark Carney’s Liberals also didn’t include potential economic impacts in the platform they released this past weekend.
“There’s a phantom growth that comes from the sky in his platform — that arrives and changes his numbers,” Carney said of Poilievre on Tuesday.
Speaking in Vancouver on Tuesday after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released his costed platform, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Canadians shouldn’t believe Poilievre when he says he will keep the federal pharmacare and dental care programs, and reminded people that Poilievre voted against both measures in Parliament.
At the very least, the Conservative Party’s approach complicates attempts to compare the Liberal and Conservative platforms.
On Saturday, for instance, Poilievre lamented that the Liberal platform would “mean a quarter trillion of new inflationary debt added on the backs of Canadians.” To be precise, the projected deficits in the Liberal plan add up to $224.8 billion over four years.
According to the Conservative platform, a Poilievre government would run four deficits that add up to $100.6 billion. But if the projected revenue is stripped out of the platform — for the sake of making an apples-to-apples comparison — the total is more like $160 billion. While the Conservatives say they will ultimately reduce the federal deficit by 70 per cent over four years, that depends on significant revenue gains.
The Conservatives argue that the Liberal campaign’s reliance on unspecified cuts in the cost of public service is equally suspect. But if the Conservatives had used the traditional method of costing a platform, Poilievre would have had to either admit to higher deficits or — in keeping with the principle of his “dollar-for-dollar” approach — propose additional cuts or new tax increases.
As it is, it’s fair to ask what Poilievre would do if his party’s growth projections don’t come to pass — keeping in mind that the Conservatives are also proposing a law that would require a referendum before any federal government increases a tax.
The flip-side of economic growth
There is also the flip-side of that projected economic growth.
The Conservative platform projects revenue gains on nine fronts, and five involve repealing federal climate policies: the federal government’s clean electricity regulations, zero-emission vehicle mandates, the industrial carbon price, clean fuel regulations and the cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector.
The platform does not include an alternative plan for meeting Canada’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — the platform does not commit to any target. The Conservatives say they would “reform” existing investment tax credits to “reward clean Canadian manufacturing and production” and they suggest they would seek to get credit — through Article 6 of the Paris agreements — for helping other countries reduce their emissions.
Climate change is, of course, a major threat to Canada’s economy. But unlike 2021, when the former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole seemed to believe his party had to show Canadians it was serious about climate change, the Conservatives are not laying out a detailed plan for reducing Canada’s emissions.
When Poilievre has been asked about climate change over the last few years, he has periodically said that the solution is simply “technology, not taxes.” On that score, he has not pivoted — if anything, he has followed that phrase to propose eliminating not just the carbon tax, but much of the federal government’s existing policies to reduce emissions.
