OTTAWA — Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives will run $100 billion in deficits over four years thanks to a bevy of tax cuts and $34 billion in new spending, according to their costed platform released hours after millions of Canadians have already cast their vote.
Over four years, a Polievre government would incur a roughly $31 billion annual deficit in 2025-2026 and 2026-2027, $23 billion in 2027-2028 and nearly $15 billion in 2028-2029, according to the platform published Tuesday morning.
As the election campaign enters its final stretch and advance voting begins, some Conservatives are voicing concerns that the party’s messaging of focusing heavily on the cost of living and not enough on the pressing American trade war reflects a troubling disconnect.
They warn that this misalignment is putting the party at risk in key strongholds, and opening the door to serious Liberal challenges in seven ridings in Alberta, long considered the bedrock of the Conservative base.
For Cole Theule, age 19, voting day on April 28 will be his first time casting a ballot in a federal election. The Winnipeg native who is studying at the University of Ottawa, comes from a family with a tradition of supporting the New Democratic Party, provincially and federally. His father even worked to help local NDP candidates.
“Acceptance, inclusion, encouraging immigration, those kinds of ideas, as well as wealth distribution such as higher taxes for the rich and more government-assisted programs, were all things I was taught growing up,” Theule said.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has thrown his weight behind withholding federal funding from Canadian universities who don’t do enough to fight antisemitism.
Speaking in French at a news conference in British Columbia on Sunday, Poilievre said public funds should not be used to support hate.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre dodged questions Sunday about whether he would repeal the federal government’s handgun ban, a measure brought in to tamp down on the diversion of legal firearms into the hands of bad actors.
Poilievre hasn’t said much during this campaign about what he would do with the Liberal firearms legislation he voted against while in Parliament, but he has blasted the last government’s “assault-style” firearm buyback program as a “gun grab” that he would scrap.
TORONTO — On a bright early spring evening, a queue of Canadian rallygoers snaked through a hotel lobby and around the block. Some had waited in the cold for an hour. Cars jammed roads and parking lots. So many people had shown up that the venue could not accommodate them all.
Inside the hotel ballroom, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre served up a polished 35-minute set of the classics, kicking off his bid for prime minister. He assailed a “radical, borderless, globalist ideology” and “net-zero environmental extremism.” He promised a “big, patriotic, bold and beautiful” tax cut and to stop “crime, chaos and disorder.”
Mainstreet has the Cons ahead again …
Canadian Federal Daily Tracker Poll, Day 28https://t.co/GX6aCyCtT1 pic.twitter.com/JoTWjBzC2b
— Mainstreet Research (@MainStResearch) April 20, 2025
h/t DS
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s election promise to use the constitution’s notwithstanding clause to give judges the option of imposing consecutive life sentences on those who commit multiple murders has prompted predictable outrage from Canada’s chattering classes.
Ditto his promise of a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out law,” which would deny criminals convicted of three serious offences bail, probation, parole or house arrest.
OTTAWA – It’s a Monday evening in an industrial building just south of Edmonton. Pierre Poilievre is on stage, surrounded by a massive crowd of supporters.
He’s been talking for nearly an hour and his speech is hitting some of his biggest applause lines.
“What binds us together is the Canadian promise that anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, that if you work hard, you can have a great life in a beautiful home on a safe street under our proud flag. That is the promise that I hold out as hope to those who are on the brink of giving up,” he says.
Over the 40 years he spent in elected politics, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has seen it all.
Yet, the 91-year-old career politician admits the current federal election is unique among the many he’s observed in his lifetime.
While he’s been part of campaigns fought over important, country-defining issues – like free trade in 1988 – this one has a more existential quality about it, he says. That, of course, is the doing of U.S. President Donald Trump.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been threatening to cancel funding for some universities unless they accede to his demands to change ideological policy, similar to a pledge Pierre Poilievre has made for Canadian post-secondary schools.
But so far, the Conservative leader has been sparse on details of exactly what kind of action he might take.
Trump’s demands, which have sparked condemnation about interference in academic freedom, made headlines this week after the White House said it’s freezing more than $2.2 billion US in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University.
Trump is simply refusing to fund whacko academics propagating whacko ideas.
That’s not a threat to academic integrity it’s common sense.
The whackos remain free to be whackos just not on the public dime but of course Carney’s CBC paints this as a conservative attack on academic freedom.
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised to strike down a key element of the Liberal government’s environmental policy Friday as he and other party leaders got back onto the campaign trail following the national leaders’ debates in Montreal.
Related …
BREAKING: Liberals confirm that the carbon tax is coming back.
Only Conservatives will axe the carbon tax for good, for everyone, for a change. pic.twitter.com/N8zQZIavo1
— Branden Leslie (@BrandenCPC) April 18, 2025
h/t Mauser
Giancarlo Zorrilla attended a campaign rally for the first time in his life in March. It was a rainy night near Vancouver — typical weather for Canada’s west coast — but that wasn’t stopping the 29-year-old Canadian from seeing Pierre Poilievre speak.
“It’s time for a change,” Zorrilla said on his way in to see the Conservative leader give a fervent, hour-long speech on skyrocketing housing prices and the failures of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Sure, Trudeau has stepped away from politics, but even a Trudeau-less Liberal Party is “still the same rock band,” Zorrilla mused.
Let’s start with what isn’t true, what never happened and what’s upside down and backwards about which party in the federal election campaign has been most keen to introduce American manic disorders into Canadian politics.
Joining other leaders around the world in extending pro-forma congratulations to U.S. President Donald Trump on his narrow electoral victory last November, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is said to have said: “I congratulate President Trump on his victory and look forward to joining him in his war against woke, leftist ideology.” Except Poilievre never said that, despite what you might have read on social media. Poilievre is not an admirer of Trump, and Trump certainly isn’t fond of Poilievre.
Any feasible path to victory in the federal election for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party runs through the Greater Toronto Area, a region dominated by the Liberals since 2015.
There are 31 seats up for grabs in this election in the GTA, often nicknamed the 905 for its area code. These suburban cities stretching in an arc around Toronto from Burlington through Vaughan to Oshawa are home to more than 2.5 million eligible voters.
The Conservatives came into this campaign with just four MPs in this region, so making gains here is essential to their success at the national level.
On Monday, during a campaign stop in Montreal, Pierre Poilievre had the audacity to suggest that his government would use the notwithstanding clause to overturn a Supreme Court decision that ruled that consecutive parole ineligibility periods for multiple murderers was “cruel and unusual punishment” and violated the murderer’s human dignity. For most reasonable Canadians, this is a no-brainer. Liberal Leader Mark Carney, however, rushed to condemn the move as “dangerous,” while CBC’s Power and Politics host David Cochrane and his panel guest Rob Russo suggested it was a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. But the problem of light murder sentencing does exist, and not just for mass murderers.
