Conservative Party of Canada's leader Pierre Poilievre holds a pamphlet as he speaks to supporters at an election campaign event in Vaughan, Ont., April 22, 2025.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are promising $34-billion in new spending and $75-billion in tax cuts over the next four years in a platform that bets their policies will spur economic growth.
They would help fund these expenditures with $56-billion in spending reductions over the same period, the Conservatives say. More than 40 per cent of these savings, according to the party, would come from one measure: cutting the use of government consultants and other types of outsourcing. They say that would save $23-billion over four years.
The party’s 2025 election platform, released Tuesday, relies on the assumption Conservative measures will generate significant tax revenue for the government. They estimate by 2028-29 this would be more than $21-billion annually. These predictions were made despite Canada’s damaging trade war with the United States.
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The Conservatives are also promising a “Taxpayer Protection Act” that would ban hiking taxes or introducing new ones unless a referendum allows it. Such legislation could however be repealed by a future government.
“This is my plan for change,” Mr. Poilievre said Tuesday in Vaughan, Ont.
Despite the Conservative Leader’s criticism of nine years of Liberal government deficits, Mr. Poilievre is not promising to balance the budget in the next four years. By the fourth year, or the 2028-2029 fiscal, the projected deficit according to their platform would be $14.1-billion.
Spending cuts include ending funding for the English-language CBC, while preserving funding for the French-language Radio-Canada.
They would also cut foreign aid, starting at $1.3-billion in cuts in the 2025-26 fiscal year and rising to $2.8-billion in cuts by 2028-29. The Conservatives declined to specify how they would achieve these reductions except to point to statements from Mr. Poilievre, who said in 2024 he would cut assistance to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and Canada’s stake in the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The annual contribution to UNRWA is measured in tens of millions of dollars and Canada’s paid-in capital in the AIIB is about $220-million.
Mr. Poilievre’s platform was made public after an estimated 7.3 million Canadians had already voted in advance polls and less than a week before the April 28 election. Though most of the policies were previously released, the costing elements are in large part new. The Liberals and NDP have already released their platforms.
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The Conservative Leader pledged to be a prudent steward of government finances, in contrast to what he said was a reckless Liberal government.
“Whenever I spend money, I will think of it as my mother’s money – a retired teacher,” he said.
“If she would not be happy with it coming out of her retirement funds, then I should not be happy spending it.”
The Conservative platform, like that of the Liberals, estimates Ottawa will earn $20-billion in revenue gained from retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods in the 2025-2026 year alone.
Queen’s University professor Don Drummond, a former senior federal finance official who also led a cost-cutting exercise for the Ontario government, called the estimated tax revenue gains from Conservative policies as “highly dubious.” He was referring to the platform’s estimate of the revenue gained from the economic impact of building more homes, repealing clean electricity regulations, eliminating a levy on carbon, and others.
“For 23 years I did budget and virtually every year politicians wanted to add that stuff,” he said of these estimated tax revenue gains. It’s not something they can measure ahead of time, Mr. Drummond said.
He said both the Liberal and Conservative income tax cuts are wasteful, saying these types of cuts to the lowest tax bracket will not encourage people to work harder or save more. “They need to tell people: ‘I’m cutting your personal income tax but you should know I’m funding this out of borrowing money on your behalf.’”
He said it’s disappointing neither party has pledged corporate income tax cuts as a means of sharpening Canada’s competitiveness or attracting more investment.
Some of the Conservatives’ proposals were backed by costing from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which offers that service to all parties. The Tories also relied on input from external economic experts, including Tim Sargent, a former associate deputy minister.
In a statement, he said the way the party accounts for spending and revenue is line with how governments account for promises in budgets.
“Having reviewed and validated the assumptions and calculations made by the Conservative Party of Canada as a part of their platform, I can confirm these numbers are credible and reasonable.”
About half of the Conservative platform spending measures are for defence. Mr. Poilievre is promising to hike military expenditures to the equivalent of 2 per cent of GDP by 2030. It’s the same timeline being pledged by Liberal Leader Mark Carney. Also, like the Liberals, the Conservatives are promising a new system for more efficient military procurement.
Like the Liberals, the Conservatives are also promising more heavy-duty icebreakers and new submarines.
On immigration, the Conservatives are not committing to a specific intake number but say they would “keep the rate of population growth below the rate of housing growth, job growth, and health care accessibility to ensure sustainable immigration levels that are fair for Canadians and newcomers alike.”
Beyond fiscal promises, Mr. Poilievre’s plan sets out political promises targeted at constituent groups he has been courting.
One example: He’d ban the federal government from firing staff who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine – a mandate that has been suspended.
He also promises to repeal a policy laying out how gender diversity is handled in the prison system, which includes housing offenders in the prison that aligns with their own gender identity.
While the platform states a commitment to protecting “law-abiding” firearms owners, Mr. Poilievre does not explicitly say he’ll repeal two contentious pieces of legislation regulating firearms, and declined earlier this week to say whether he’d keep in place the existing ban on the sale or transfer of handguns.
But he also makes it explicit that a Conservative government will not introduce any laws, bills or regulations that could restrict access to abortion – something his critics continue to assert he’ll do.
Economist Chris Ragan, director of the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University, said the Conservative and Liberal platforms overlap. “Both of them are talking about the same defence spending, both of them are scrapping the capital gains tax. Both of them have the same tariff revenue estimate. Both of them are scrapping the GST on new homes. Both of them do a middle-class tax cut.”
He said the Liberal platform relies on a somewhat bigger government and government spending and the Conservative plan, which tackles a number of the same challenges, uses tax cuts instead, coupled with spending reductions for small government.
Mr. Carney dismissed the Conservative platform, saying it focuses on spending cuts rather than a clear plan to address U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
He also said the Conservative platform relies on “phantom” numbers that irresponsibly assume the plan will generate billions in new tax revenue through stronger growth even as Canada is in the midst of an economic crisis.
Mr. Carney said that if the Liberals had used a similar approach and booked revenue from the expected impact of the platform’s investments and tax cuts, the party’s platform could have shown a balanced budget within five years.
“I can show you a fiscal surplus, and in fact, I can make a pretty good argument that the strategy that’s driving enormous private investment – directly private investment – is going to help deliver that growth. But unlike Pierre Poilievre, I’ve actually managed economies before. I’ve actually managed budgets before. I’ve managed central banks before. So you don’t make those assumptions,” said Mr. Carney, during a campaign stop in Trois-Rivières, Que.
The Liberals’ platform did not specify how they will find their promised $28-billion in savings. Mr. Carney cited reviewing spending on consultants and public service attrition as two potential areas, which Mr. Poilievre targeted as well.
The Liberals’ platform proposes nearly $130-billion in spending and tax cuts over four years. Mr. Carney projects a deficit of $62.3-billion this fiscal year, followed by $59.9-billion the next year. It would be $48-billion in 2028-29.
The Conservative Party is also promising to lower education requirements for federal civil servants and shrink the federal civil service through attrition “with only two in three departing employees being replaced.”