Front Burner - Cuts, spending, spin: The economics of party platforms

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

With just days until the federal election, we’re cutting through the political spin and confusing math of the major parties’ costed platforms.Web Copy/DAVE: Within the last week, the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP have all released their costed platforms, detailing their plans for the country and how they will pay for them. While the question of who will be Canada’s next prime minister remains, it’s certain they’ll face a challenging economic outlook, with a Canada-U.S. trade war in full swing and a recession looming. Who’s spending more and on what? How does the confusing math work? Today, we’re breaking down the details with Aaron Wherry, a senior writer with CBC's Ottawa bureau. Make sure to watch our election night livestream on Monday, April 28 starting at 8pm Eastern. You can find it here on the CBC News YouTube channel and on the CBC News TikTok.

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at rom.ca. This is a CBC Podcast.

Hey everybody, it's Jamie. Today Aaron Wary from our Ottawa Bureau is back. Aaron, I think when you and I last spoke after the debates, I said that I would see you on election night, but here we are, you're back. I'm sure you're very sick of me. Thank you for basically co-hosting this show with me in these last couple of weeks. Yeah, is this sort of like squatters rights? Like if I appear in the times I become co-host? Yes, yes you do.

I'm also gonna say, speaking of election night, that we are actually going to see you again on election night for our live stream. Everyone listening can find the links to the YouTube live stream in the episode description. It'll be on the CBC news TikTok page as well, so you can follow both. Come join us during the night. Please come participate. We want to hear your questions. We want to hear your comments. For today's show though, we are going to try to cut through a bunch of spin and frankly,

very confusing and frustrating math around the party's costed platforms that were all released this week. So who's spending more and why? Why does it matter? How are all these magical numbers achieved? We'll squeeze in some other politics stuff too. Okay, let's do it. Let's start with the Liberals, Erin. And we're going to really focus on the Liberals and the Conservatives today because this has really become a two-horse race, essentially. So the Liberals released their costed platform on Saturday. Now today, I'm proud to launch Canada Strong. Our plan, our plan to unite, to secure, to protect and build Canada. And in those first few days after its release, what were the big headlines around it?

What were analysts saying? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a tendency when these things come out to focus on the big numbers and the sort of big number with the liberal platform was about 130 billion of additional investments, measures, however you want to phrase it. Like I framed a bit sort of, I guess, imprecisely as 130 billion in new spending. It's probably more accurate to say 130 billion in new measures because within that 130 billion, you know, two of the biggest items are an income tax cut that's about 22 billion over four years and doing away with the capital gains tax changes, which is another 12 and a half billion dollars. But the sort of the

immediate focus was on over this four year plan. Mark Carney is proposing these these new measures and this is going to lead to higher deficits and for a leader who has Sort of sold himself as change from Justin Trudeau and and taking a different approach Does this undermine the argument that he has been making that he's you know more fiscally responsible that he's not You know another version of Justin Trudeau. Yeah, I saw people criticizing even specific line items in it. For example, increasing funding to the CBC,

funding in vitro fertilization. Obviously, this isn't a question about whether you think those things are good things or bad things. But as you were saying, the criticism is that these kinds of promises make it harder to make the argument that he's different from Trudeau, that he's more fiscally prudent. I heard the former liberal political strategist, David Hurley, the other day on his podcast, The Curse of Politics, saying that the liberals should have put together a mini platform that

was exclusively focused around dealing with the crisis. I would have said I haven't had time to put together my plan for X, Y, or Z issue, but I'll get to that. Right? But the issue that everybody needs to focus on is how we're going to deal with Donald Trump. And here's my plan for that. And do you think that would have been a smarter idea, at least strategically? I sort of see the argument. I think the problem is that we have, you know, particularly in the media world, become very wedded to the idea that parties should have a fully costed platform that looks, you know, four years ahead of time and explains, you know, in pretty close detail what the parties

are planning to do. And there is real value in seeing kind of what they are setting up to do. And there is real value in seeing kind of what they are setting up to do. I mean, there obviously are potential political risks to doing something like that because people are going to look at these numbers and they're going to pour over it and try to find problems. And you can argue it's even more risky kind of casting forward because there's so much uncertainty in the world and in the global economy that you can question how much anybody right now can project out for years. But I think the problem with the idea of the liberals not putting out a fully costed platform in this campaign is that instead of having questions about the spending commitments that

they've made, they would be facing numerous questions about what they were hiding and why they weren't being transparent. Yes, definitely better for democracy to do this kind of stuff. I'm going to, we're going to loop back to that a little bit later. I just want to talk a little bit more about the platform. What are like the big ticket spending items there? Like where is most of that money allocated? Of the spending that that is in the liberal, the new spending that's in the Liberal platform, I think you can sort of divide it, at least the majority of it, into kind of three big buckets.

A boost to national defence spending. We need to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the Canadian Armed Forces. Funds put towards national infrastructure on a few different fronts. In America, in America, healthcare is a big business. In Canada, it is a right. Yeah. And we will protect that right while modernizing the system, recruiting more doctors and nurses, and expanding coverage.

And money put towards trying to stimulate housing development. them, recruiting more doctors and nurses and expanding coverage. And money put towards trying to stimulate housing development. We know that it's time to build housing. It's time to build twice as many homes every year. And the liberal, the Carney argument here is similar kind of to what we were just talking about is there's an economic crisis that Canada is faced with right now. And to get Canada through that crisis, it needs to spend strategically in a way towards these things towards defense towards infrastructure and towards housing. And, you know, while he's taken some heat over whether or not he's being

you know, while he's taken some heat over whether or not he's being sort of fiscally responsible, the other part of Carney's argument is that he's going to essentially split sort of federal spending into two different areas. One is operational, the amount of spending that goes into kind of keeping the government running day to day and in funding programs. And then capital, which is spending that goes towards buying things like military equipment or building things like infrastructure that sort of expand the capacity of the economy. And his argument is, we will balance our operating budget over the next three years by cutting waste, by eliminating duplication, and by deploying

technology. And any deficit spending, any, spending, any accumulation of debt will go towards things that are worth borrowing money for, things that are going to lead to a stronger economy in the long run. And maybe worth pointing out here, splitting these things into two buckets, not like some made up thing. Other countries do this, like some made up thing. Other countries do this, like the UK and Germany. What do analysts think of the argument that Carney is putting forward and how he is responding

to critiques of his cost of platform. I think there's some amount of kind of wait and see at this point to see how it would work in practice just because it hasn't really been done at the federal level. And you get into a kind of discussion about exactly how you're going to split the two, like what what are you defining as operational and what are you defining as capital? And are you dividing things fairly and correctly? It's to a certain extent, not to make another Trudeau comparison, but if you go back to 2015, Justin Trudeau said, I'm going to run a deficit, but I'm going to do it so that I can spend on infrastructure. And that did not quite come to

pass. They did run a deficit, but they didn't solely run a deficit because of spending on infrastructure. And Carney is coming in and saying, I'm going to run a deficit, but it's going to be used smartly for these things. And I think we sort of have to wait to see how it works in practice to know exactly what it's going to look like.

Not to state the obvious here, but I feel like so much of this around these costed platforms just ultimately comes down to whether you as a voter trust them to do what they say that they're going to do and who do you believe more, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And if you look at how when Carney launched his platform, he I think almost explicitly leaned on that idea because one of the things in the liberal platform in terms of balancing the operational budget of the government is that they're going to find these productivity gains within the public

service. They say they're going to cut wasteful spending, but they're also going to use technology and AI and capitalize the public service to make the public service more efficient and cost-effective. They've put some numbers to what they want to save, but they haven't run out a list of items of all the ways they're gonna get to that money. And so when people look at the liberal platform, that's sort of one of the things they circle

as like a source of uncertainty. But when Carney's asked about that, his response is sort of like, well, I've managed things, I've run things, I know how to do this. I can be trusted to do this responsibly. Right. And on the economy, when he talks about significantly growing the economy, he

talks about creating 900 billion by ourselves. Yeah. It's very much the idea of like the federal government spending on things like infrastructure and housing will lead to private investment. He, you know, Mark Carney loves the word catalyze. Uh, he, he talks a lot about using government to catalyze the private investment. Mark Carney loves the word catalyze. He talks a lot about using government to catalyze the private sector. And so I, yeah, there's a lot of sort of projections and there's a lot of sort of ideas, but obviously you

kind of have to wait to see how it would work in practice. Yeah. Also it would be helpful if they didn't release them just a couple days before Election Day and also did some interviews about them to talk about it, but I digress. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts, and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen.

On now exclusively at ROM. Tickets at ROM.ca. Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy.

I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yep. And now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha. Right on. When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit nomoredets.org. Let's talk about the conservatives' costed platform. What were the big headlines that

came out of that one when it was released earlier this week? Yeah, so I think a few things. One, on a sort of broad level, you can look at it and say, this basically is in keeping with what Pierre Poliev has pitched, which is lower taxes, lower spending. It is a plan that will lower taxes and debt by getting rid of bureaucracy, consulting fees, waste, and excessive foreign aid to dictators, terrorists, and global bureaucracy is a plan to build... You know, the biggest item is a tax cut.

Conservatives will cut your income tax by 15% to save almost $2,000 for the average working family for a change. On the other side of the ledger, he's promising to cut spending from the federal government's budget for outside contractors and consultants. And he is also looking to get savings from attrition within the public service. And his pitch is also based on the idea that he would run smaller deficits than the Liberal government is currently running and that Mark Carney would run. With a responsible plan to save $125 billion and put us back on the path to growth and security. This is my plan for change. First, we will cut the Liberal deficit by 70 percent. But part of the basis for, and where this gets a bit complicated, is that the conservatives

have done something that parties don't usually do, which is that they've projected how much economic growth is going to result from their policies, such as building houses, for instance, and then projected how much federal revenue is going to increase because of that increased economic growth. And then they have essentially booked that projected federal revenue into their platform. And this results in about $60 billion more of revenue and then the flip side of that being less debt than if they had kept those projections out. And parties typically don't build in projections like that into their platforms.

And so voters are in a bit of a place where if you look at just on paper, the conservative numbers and the liberal numbers, you're kind of looking at apples and oranges because they're using different calculations. Has anybody tried to use the same math here? So you can reverse engineer it and I saw Kevin Milligan, he's an economist in British Columbia, did this calculation. So if you take the revenue out of the conservative platform, you get deficits over four years of about $160 billion. And if you compare it, so that would be sort of the apples to apples comparison with the liberal deficits,

which is about, I think, $225 billion. So the difference between them shrinks a fair bit. And then if you look at it even on a larger scale in terms of debt to GDP, that is like the size of the national debt compared to the size of the national economy, the difference between them shrinks even more. And it's really just a couple of kind of percentage points

either way. And, you know, it's not an insignificant difference, but it's not quite the difference that the conservatives are making it out to be. Yeah. Is it fair for me to say on the big ticket spending items, military, tax cuts, big social programs, there's a lot of overlap between the two parties on spending?

Yeah, they're not. On certain files, they are definitely similar. As you say, defense spending, the numbers are broadly similar. They both have an income tax cut, although the conservative tax cut in year four, it's much bigger than the liberal tax cut, although the liberal tax cut has a bit more of a more immediate impact. Both parties want to use sort of federal money to help municipalities cut development charges. Both parties want to find some efficiencies in the public service and they book some savings from that. But there's still, I think, I think one way of looking at these platforms

is that there's still sort of a broad difference between the two in terms of Pyropolyev's approach, which is low taxes, low spending, get government out of the way. And the liberal approach, which is the idea that, and Mark Carney has said this, that when the private sector backs off, when there's economic uncertainty, that's when government should step up and do things and spend on things.

And so there's still that kind of basic difference if you compare the two platforms. Right. Like the conservatives are not creating a crown corporation to build housing. They are not, no. One thing I wanted to ask you about that the conservatives were talking about was sort of the savings on consultants. And so, you know, would that be the kind of stuff that there were some liberal scandals around hiring the consultancy for McKinsey, for example.

Between 2011 and 2023, Hogan's audit found 97 contracts awarded to McKinsey and company worth more than $200 million, most handed out in a non-competitive process. Or that scandal many people will remember with these very shadowy companies that were hired to make that ArriveCan app for travelers. According to the Auditor General, if the government of Canada had done this kind of IT work, it would have cost an average of $675 a day.

Instead, with Arrive arrive can contractors it cost nearly $1,100 almost double the auditor general also found the biggest chunk of the money flowed to a company of just two people GC strategies who she says helped the government write the contract requirements Like is that is that what we're talking about here? Yeah This is the legacy of those controversies is that the federal government outsources work in IT, outsources work in a number of areas, also uses management consultants. And I think both parties are sort of broadly agreed that the federal government should do less of that.

I think there is still a question of exactly how much you can save before you start cutting into real things. Like, it's very easy to say, well, you should contact these management consulting firms for fewer sort of reports, but at what point are you like cutting into outsource work that is like going to sort of fundamental government programs? And the other sort of pressure here is that both sides are talking about either capping or shrinking the size of the public service.

And so there's kind of a fundamental tension there that could arise in the next few years where you don't want the size of the public service to grow, but you also don, getting the public service to use less outside contractors might mean hiring more people for the public service. Right. Right. The other one that I think is worth, I'll just quickly mention it.

Obviously, there is an inherent conflict of interest for us in this talking about defunding the English language side of the CBC. But that is one of the ways that Polyev is talking about finding some of these savings. In 2024, CBC Radio Canada received 1.38 billion from Parliament, roughly half of that goes to English language CBC.

So theoretically, if you could cut just the English language services and not the French, and there's actually some reasons why that would be quite logistically complicated. But let's just say that you can. You would be saving around $700 million a year. So about $2.4 billion over four years. And that's certainly a lot of money, but obviously a small portion of that in extra costs over four years.

Yeah. But considering the book, I think it's about a billion dollars per year for four years on savings from Crown corporations. And you would have to assume a substantial piece of that is the CBC, although maybe not quite the billion dollars that they've talked in saving just from the CBC. But in the context of these large fiscal plans, the savings from the CBC are not really,

sort of with all due respect to us, are not really the linchpin of these fiscal costings. You know, we're talking about pretty large deficits and the CBC is not gonna make the difference between a balanced budget and not. ["The Last Post"] Okay, so we talked about how even though these can be rough days for political parties when these come out, because they just open them up to criticism, they're good. They're good for democracy. But at the same time, I found myself very frustrated this week trying to

wade through them, in large part because the math is different on both platforms and also because, as I mentioned, they came late in this campaign. And I just wonder, like, has anybody ever talked about having some sort of rule that the parties are obligated to release these costed platforms at least a couple of weeks before people go to the polls? Like, early voting opened. You know, by the time the liberals released theirs, I think like a million people had already voted.

I'm not sure if that's the exact number, but a lot of people had already voted on the Friday, and that whole weekend was over by the time the conservatives dropped theirs. I think it's like seven million people voted in early voting. So could they do that? And then also that they all have to just use the same math so that we're comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.

Is that too much to ask? It shouldn't be too much to ask, but from a very technical standpoint, it would be hard to legislate. But I think there is an argument to be had that these platforms to be really useful to voters, especially in the context of an election campaign that is five weeks, really need to come earlier rather than later.

You know, I think to understand this from a party perspective, in addition to, you know, maybe trying to minimize a bit of risk, they also want to announce something new every day and they want the platform to come at the end of most of their announcements. And if they put the platform out early, the announcements they make day to day might not seem new and fresh and novel. So you can understand the sort of partisan logic. But as you say, when these kind of come out in the last two weeks, it's really late to be pouring over the numbers and figuring out what it means and having a real debate about what these parties are planning for and are these prudent plans and what does it amount to.

So there's still important documents in terms of telling you sort of what the priorities are and how reasonable are they being in terms of spending and a number of other things. But to be really valuable, you'd have them as early as possible. It's just that the political logic is on the side of waiting a while. And unless there's a price to be paid for waiting, unless, you know, parties think they're going to lose votes by waiting, they're going to wait. I just want to ask this to you straight. Like for somebody who might be listening right now and might be thinking to

themselves that both of these main parties seem to be spending like a bajillion dollars, like a lot of money. What does it matter? You know, what would sort of the argument for and against? So with the significant caveat that I'm not an economist, there is sort of a larger debate obviously about whether the federal government needs to be restraining itself significantly at this moment. Now, the federal finances are broadly sustainable at this point. We're not teetering on the edge of a debt crisis, but there's always going to be an argument about how restrained the federal

government should be and whether it's running deficits that it doesn't need to, which could use up, you know, fiscal room that they could use later in a moment of crisis. Of course, the liberal argument would be that we are in a moment of crisis, and that's why we need to spend a little bit more. These platforms can be a bit dizzying in that it is just a lot of big numbers. And so I think for voters, the best way to sort of piece through it is to sort of look at what they're spending the money on and what it says about their priorities and how they would govern. And so you never know quite exactly whether these platforms are going to exactly come to pass. But you are going to be able to look at them and say,

okay, I see what this party leader cares about how he would govern what his priorities would be. And I think that's sort of the, for voters, that's sort of the final days before the election. We've got the weekend and then we really are going to see you the next time on election night, I promise. What are you seeing from the campaigns in this last week that you think is worth us talking about here? Any interesting new polling you want to talk about? I think there's a few things. I mean, I think the national polls have tightened. That's maybe not entirely surprising. I also wouldn't overstate things. You know,

if you look at the poll tracker on the CBC website, the liberals still have a three or four point lead. That's still a statistically significant lead, but it isn't five or six points. I think it will be worth watching over the next few days how those polls do. I think in terms of where the parties are at, you get into these last few days and they get very frenetic. You know, the parties really kind of lock down their message and, you know, they almost shorten it to as simple an idea as possible. And for Pierre Poliev, that's change. He's gonna use that word dozens of times

in every possible public appearance. And for Mark Carney, the idea is Donald Trump and who do you want leading in a moment when Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And the last thing that people in my line of work focus on is where these leaders go and whether they seem to be playing defense or offense, whether they're going into writings they already hold,

seeming to try to hold those writings and make sure they don't lose them, or whether they're going into writings that other parties hold and trying to pick up. And I think that for political watchers, you know, that even more than the polls will be sort of the tea leaves that we're reading to get a sense of where these parties think they're at.

Yeah, so then explain to me why Pierre Polyev is in Alberta today. Yeah, there's been some eyebrows raised, I guess, about where he's going. And it's, you don't want to necessarily over read it. Read it, but don't over read it. But you don't want to, but it is curious that he's going to Saskatchewan and Alberta to make appearances because you would not think those are particularly unsafe grounds for the conservatives.

I suspect that both parties will, to some extent, end up in the GTA over the weekend, and that will be where the kind of last stands are made. But when you do see parties like Pierre Pauli, for instance, party leaders going into places like Calgary or places that they already hold that should be safe, you do start to wonder whether they are a bit more worried about holding those places. Yeah. Okay, Aaron, thank you. See you Monday.

Anytime. All right, that is all for today. Frontburner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Matt Muse, Ali Jainz, Joytha Shengupta, Lauren Donnelly, Kieran Outtorn, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our video producer is Evan Agard and our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next week.