Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives released the party’s long-awaited platform on Tuesday. Here are four key takeaways from the CPC plan.
One, the Conservative plan nearly matches the Liberal platform in scope. Poilievre has pledged about $110 billion worth of measures over four years, compared to $130 billion for the Liberals. The Conservative plan is more focused on tax cuts—making up about 70 percent of their new measures. In contrast, the platform released by Mark Carney’s Liberals over the weekend is more focused on new spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of their proposals.
Two, the Conservatives are relying more heavily than the Liberals on savings or spending cuts elsewhere in government to finance their platform. Poilievre’s plan includes 13 measures that would save about $58 billion over four years. The Liberals have pledged to find $25 billion in savings, but Carney is more vague on the details, promising a “comprehensive review of government spending to increase the federal government’s productivity.”
The Conservative plan is much more specific. It includes pledges to reduce operating expenses at CMHC, cut foreign aid, and eliminate about $24 billion in spending on external consultants.
Three, using the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s baseline as a benchmark, the overall spending profile under the Conservatives doesn’t shift much. If all their planned savings are realized, federal spending as a share of GDP would fall by about a tenth or two-tenths of a percentage point on average.
Poilievre’s tax cuts, however, would have a more noticeable impact—bringing federal revenue down to about 16.1 percent of GDP, from 16.6 percent in the PBO’s baseline. That revenue number includes a pledge to crack down on tax havens, which inflates it somewhat.
The Liberal plan would also reduce revenue to about 16.3 percent of GDP. In both cases, that’s still high by historical standards—the federal government averaged just under 15 percent of GDP in revenue in the two decades before the pandemic. And all this assumes retaliatory tariffs will disappear.
Four, the Conservatives would run slightly larger deficits than the PBO baseline—roughly $160 billion over four years, based on my calculations. That includes a projected deficit of roughly $40 billion in 2028. The Liberal plan proposes cumulative deficits of $225 billion over four years, including a 2028 deficit of $47 billion.
These deficit figures are my own calculations (any errors are mine!). They use static scoring–meaning they don’t account for how the broader economy might respond to the proposed policies or generate additional revenue.
The deficit numbers released in the Conservative platform use what economists call dynamic scoring, which does estimate the growth impacts of policy. According to the platform, that includes the revenue impact “from eliminating the electric vehicle mandate, the emissions cap, the clean fuel standard, and implementing the proposed capital gains deferral holiday.” Using dynamic scoring, the Conservatives estimate deficits of $100 billion over four years, $60 billion less than my static scoring calculation.
I’ve calculated the static scoring numbers because it’s more the norm for policy platforms and allows for an apples-to-apples comparison with the Liberal plan.
Theo Argitis is The Hub's Editor-at-Large for economics and business. Theo has been a journalist for the better part of three decades, spending much of his…
