ANALYSIS: Pierre Poilievre would axe one of Parliament’s primary purposes
Tucked away amid a host pledges in the Conservative platform is a promise to axe one of Parliament’s primary purposes.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre announced Tuesday that under his government a referendum, not politicians, would decide if Canada needed to raise taxes. Poilievre would “ban” any new taxes or tax increases unless the Canadian public votes for them.
The platform commitment is in keeping with Poilievre’s overall theme of tax relief for Canadians, requiring any new spending to be found through savings in other programs, and generally shrinking the size and cost of the federal government.
We can all probably guess the answer if the Canadian public were asked “do you want higher taxes,” and that answer can’t be published by a family-friendly news outlet.
But leaving aside such a referendum would almost certainly fail, Poilievre’s pledge also eliminates one of the House of Commons core responsibilities — to debate and vote on budgets and taxation.
It’s also, in a sense, performative. Any successive government could simply repeal the law and get on with their own agenda.
“One of the commitments the leader made is we would never hold a referendum because we’re never going to raise taxes if we’re elected,” said a Conservative campaign official, who agreed to speak to Global News as long as they weren’t named.
“It’s just a way to signal that we want to provide additional protection to taxpayers to ensure that it’s not going to be easy for a government to come along and raise their taxes.”
Ontario has its own version of what Poilievre is proposing, down to the same name — the “Taxpayers Protection Act.” It was brought in under Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservatives, who then amended it when they needed to raise taxes. It was subsequently embraced by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government, who — you guessed it — amended it when they needed to raise taxes.
In total, Ontario’s law has been amended 15 times since 2002.
And for a supposed fiscally prudent party, any national referendum would also be costly.
In 2016, during the debate over electoral reform, then-chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand told a House of Commons committee that Elections Canada estimated the cost of a single national referendum to be in the $300-million range.
Anytime an unforeseen emergency comes up that would require a government to take the unpopular decision to raise taxes — say, the climate crisis, an international pandemic or a prolonged economic war with Canada’s closest trading partner — the federal government would have to spend considerable time and money putting it to a vote that would almost certainly end with a “no.”
Poilievre was the last leader of a major political party to release his platform, just six days before the general election. As he promised earlier this week, most of what’s included in the 30-page document has already been announced in recent weeks — efforts to boost home construction, cutting the lowest personal income tax rate, eliminating the industrial carbon price and speeding up approvals for resource development.
“We will get Canada building again with a new Conservative economic action plan to unleash our vast resource wealth, build major new infrastructure, bring back investment and turn Canada into the richest country in the world,” Poilievre said at a press conference in Vaughan, Ont., flanked by a number of Conservative GTA candidates.
The platform promises to decrease the federal deficit from $31.4 billion in the first year of a Conservative government to $14.2 billion in 2028-29.
His plan to get there involves a mixture of new revenues as well as significant cuts to program spending. Poilievre had previously announced he would require a “dollar-for-dollar” rule, where any new government spending would have to be found through savings in other government programs.
So to pay for big ticket items like his income tax cuts ($30.2 billion over four years) or boosting defence spending ($17 billion), Poilievre had to find some major savings.
The platform projects to cut government spending on external consultants to the tune of $23.5 billion over the next four years, cut foreign aid by $9.4 billion over the same period, and cut $4 billion from Crown corporations, including the CBC.
In total, the Conservatives estimate their platform has approximately $75 billion in new revenue — including economic growth they project will result from their policies, although they admit there’s some uncertainty there — and roughly $35 billion in new spending, with an additional $75 billion leaving government coffers in the form of tax cuts.
They estimate $56 billion in “savings” — largely through cutting outside consultants and paring down the public service — over their four-year plan.
Like the tax referendum plan, the overall platform is intended to “send a signal” of fiscal prudence amidst the backdrop of economic crisis. Whether those signals will be received as Canadians get ready to cast their ballots on Monday remains to be seen.
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