Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s costed platform includes $130 billion in new spending, marking a tone-deaf response to the majority of Canadians who want to see a reduction in both government spending and bureaucracy.
Carney is looking to outspend the Trudeau government, which already infamously saw the highest spending years in Canadian history, excluding COVID-19 pandemic spending.
A recent Leger poll found that 43 per cent of Canadians want to see a reduction in government spending, compared to the 20 per cent who agree with the potential increase.
Another cohort of 16 per cent said they want to see spending maintained while the remaining 20 per cent said they don’t know.
“The poll shows most Canadians want the federal government to cut spending,” said Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s Prairie director Gage Haubrich. “Canadians know they pay too much tax because the government wastes too much money.”
While Carney has promised to “balance the operating budget in three years,” Canadians appear to be skeptical, with 58 per cent in disbelief of his timeline, compared to the 32 per cent who think it can be achieved.
“Any politician that wants to fix the budget and cut taxes will need to shrink the size and cost of Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy,” Haubrich said. “The polls show Canadians want to put the federal government on a diet and they won’t trust promises about balancing the budget unless politicians present credible plans.”
Carney has defended the high spending by telling Canadians in Charlottetown, PEI Monday that “we are in a crisis, the worst crisis of our lifetimes because we are in a fundamental reordering of our relationship with the United States and the global economy.”
“We need to build. We need to invest. We need to use scarce dollars on the federal balance sheet to catalyze that investment, and we’re prepared to do that,” he said.
The poll also asked Canadians to respond to the 108,000 bureaucrats who were hired since 2016, increasing the cost of the bureaucracy 73 per cent.
When asked what should be done about the size and cost of federal bureaucracy, 53 per cent said it’s time for a reduction, compared to only four per cent who would support an increase.
Another 24 per cent said to maintain the status quo while the remaining 19 per cent didn’t know.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre accused Carney of attempting to bury his spending plan in the news by revealing it over the Easter long weekend, when he “thought no one was listening.”
“Whenever Liberals present you with numbers, you should be afraid and very afraid because their numbers are always wrong,” he said, vowing to cut bureaucracy, foreign aid and consultants while boosting revenues by generating more economic growth,” he said in Scarborough, Ont. Monday.
Poilievre went on to say that Carney’s plan reveals “exactly the same `the budget will balance itself’ kind of commitments” as the Trudeau government, saying that it’s “Liberal math” which “doesn’t add up.”
According to Poilievre, Carney’s budget had been previously written under the Trudeau government, with only a few tweaks made to “increase inflationary spending even higher.”
Both the Conservatives and Liberals released their platforms late in the campaign, after millions of Canadians had already cast their ballots with early voting and after the two federal debates.