Official Opposition parties tend not to support a government’s budget but can vote strategically to avert an election.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The minority Liberal government is counting two kinds of numbers as it prepares its first budget: financial and political.
What the math looks like in terms of spending and cuts will be revealed in Tuesday’s tabling of a plan that Prime Minister Mark Carney says will revamp the Canadian economy.
But it may be mid-November before the Liberals know whether they have the right number of votes to get the budget through the House of Commons.
The budget vote is a confidence motion and, if it fails, the Liberals have been blunt about what happens next:
“A Christmas election that no one wants,” Government House Leader Steve MacKinnon said.
Prime Minister Mark Carney looks to the opposition benches as he rises during Question Period on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Oct. 22, 2025.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The Liberals are three seats shy of a majority, so as they’ve worked to get bills and motions through Parliament since the April election, they’ve drawn on support from other parties each time.
On the budget, though, none have pre-emptively said they’ll back the government.
In part, that’s because they don’t know what’s in it, and in the case of the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois, whether any of their prebudget demands have been met.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s party is still smarting from its failure to defeat the Liberals in April, despite emerging with a larger caucus of 144 seats than in the 2021 federal election.
Man of the moment: François-Philippe Champagne prepares for make-or-break budget
The Conservatives’ demands of the government include ending the industrial carbon-pricing program, removing regulations on clean-fuel standards and food packaging, reducing income and capital-gains taxes and keeping the deficit under $42-billion.
“My message is it’s time to reverse course on the costly decade of deficit spending that has given us more expensive food and housing,” Mr. Poilievre said after emerging from his prebudget meeting with the Prime Minister.
“The Canadian people deserve a break.”
But he also said Mr. Carney made him no commitments.
“We’ll see what he comes up with,” Mr. Poilievre said.
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are demanding the government end the industrial carbon-pricing program, reduce taxes and limit the deficit.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The Bloc, which lost seats in the past campaign and now has 22, put forward a list of 18 demands, six of which they say are non-negotiable: an $11.6-billion increase in federal health transfers over five years; an extension of a boost to Old Age Security benefits; providing Quebec with $814-million tied to Ottawa’s decision to end the federal fuel charge; new interest-free loans for first-time homebuyers; increasing social-housing transfers by $1.4-billion a year; and creating a new provincial transfer program for infrastructure.
The Liberals have sent few signals that they are open to those ideas.
“The Bloc Québécois had a bunch of non-negotiable demands that would cost Canadians $36-billion. The Leader of the Opposition wants us to reduce deficits,” Mr. MacKinnon said in the House of Commons this week.
“The Liberal Party of Canada is right in the middle, exactly where we should be.”
Growing number of economists predict Liberal budget won’t shrink debt-to-GDP ratio
The NDP doesn’t have a list – a departure from the previous minority government where they signed a deal with the Liberals to prop them up in exchange for specific action on housing, dental care, labour issues and other measures.
While the supply-and-confidence deal delivered those measures, it didn’t deliver at the polls.
Leader Jagmeet Singh lost his seat, and the New Democrats were reduced altogether to just seven seats. Mr. Singh quit as leader and the party is now in a leadership race.
Interim NDP Leader Don Davies has said that the party wants to see what’s in the budget before declaring whether it will support it.
What the NDP wants, he said, is a plan that’s good for working families, jobs, affordable housing and health care.
“Now is not the time for an austerity budget. Instead, Canada needs investment, not cuts,” Mr. Davies said after his meeting with the Prime Minister.
Unlike the past Liberal budget, under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, there’s been no extensive rollout this time of prebudget announcements; though a schedule was circulating inside the civil service laying out a prebudget plan, it didn’t materialize.
When pressed for details recently on what cuts could be coming, Mr. Carney demurred, saying he didn’t want to “scoop” his own reveal.
But cuts are coming. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne suggested, for example, that the budget will seek to reduce the civil service to its pre-COVID level – which could mean the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
Ottawa’s budget to include more for retraining, tax credit for personal support workers
Official Opposition parties tend not to support a government’s budget but can vote strategically to avert an election: for example, the Liberals helped pass the minority Conservatives’ budget in 2008 when some MPs abstained.
The question of whether any MPs could abstain this time – from the Conservatives, NDP or Bloc – has been bandied about consistently in Ottawa in recent days.
Beyond that possibility, there exists the potential for some to break with their parties and vote with the government.
The NDP doesn’t have official party status in the House, and their MPs have been peppered with questions in recent days as to whether they’ll vote as a bloc on the budget or if each will be left to make their own decision.
Mr. Davies told reporters in October that he’d expect everyone in his caucus to vote the same way on a confidence measure – but NDP MP Leah Gazan didn’t give a clear answer this past week as to whether that’s actually what will happen.
There is one Liberal taking a decidedly optimistic view of it all.
“I have every confidence that we will pass the budget,” Defence Minister David McGuinty said during a news conference on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in South Korea.
“We will earn the respect and the support in the House. It’s a question of negotiations, it’s a question of making sure that we are reflecting priorities for different members of Parliament.”