Front Burner - How different are the party platforms?

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

The Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP have released their platforms. What exactly are they promising to do on issues like housing, climate change, crime and justice and the cost of living?We’ve gathered a collection of experts to break down all the details and hear from economist Mike Moffatt, climate journalist Arno Kopecky, CBC senior business reporter Anis Heydari, and CBC Senior writer Peter Zimonjic.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. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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. Before we get rolling today, just a note to say that we're doing this live stream on election night, which is actually coming up this Monday. It starts

at 8 p.m. You can find it on the CBC News YouTube page and the CBC News TikTok page that night. We'll drop links in our show notes. We've got lots of fun guests coming by to watch the election with us, and we're going to be taking questions and thoughts from you guys too. So you can contribute live in the TikTok and YouTube comments, but also if you want to send us any questions for

the night beforehand, drop us an email at frontburner at cbc.ca. We're really looking forward to hanging out with all of you on election night. Okay, onto the show today. Alright, so we now have costed platforms from all the major parties in the election. What does that mean? It means that the parties have put out their plans and promises and have told us how much they think it's all going to cost. The Liberals announced spending and tax cuts that would result in $225 billion added to the national debt at the end of four years. Liberals announced spending and tax cuts that would result in $225 billion added to the national debt at the end of four years.

Mark Carney has said that this is a plan to get Canada through a crisis that invests in our future growth. His critics say that it's more big liberal spending. The Conservatives also projected deficits that would end in less debt at the end of four years, $100 billion for them. But their plan was immediately criticized for using creative accounting. The end results, for example, relied on some very rosy projections for the economy. There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of spin around all of this stuff. We're

looking at these costed platforms carefully right now, and we're going to try to cut through some of this and have more for you this week fact-checking the big picture claims about spending. But today, we also know that you care about what exactly these parties are promising to do when it comes to some specific domestic issues that we haven't had a ton of time to talk about in a campaign that's been dominated by trade wars and our neighbors to the south. So climate change, cost of living, housing, crime and justice. To do that, we've been calling up experts across the country and asking them where the daylight is

on all of these issues. Here is that episode. First up here, something I know that a lot of our listeners care a lot about, housing. Mike Moffat is an economist with the Missing Middle Initiative, an organization focused on understanding and addressing the challenges Canadians face around housing.

You might remember him, he's been on the show quite a few times. Mike's going to walk us through the party plans to tackle the housing crisis. Mike Moffat, thank you so much for coming by, I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. Okay, so why don't we start with how the parties differ when it comes to proposing policies that would increase housing supplies. So getting more houses built. So I know that the liberals are saying that they would build off the success

of their housing accelerator fund, which is currently a $4 billion fund that gives money to cities that agree to higher density housing and faster permit approvals. Worth mentioning here, I think that the NDP wants to double the fund to $8 billion. The conservatives are saying that that fund has been a failure, has it? Well, it certainly hasn't worked as well as intended. What the federal government did was sign a bunch of unique deals with dozens of municipalities. So every city got a slightly different deal. And what that meant was it was hard for the federal government to enforce these deals or at least monitor performance.

And in fact, I think even the liberals would acknowledge that because one of the planks in their platform is better monitoring of municipal performance. And the only reason you would need to do that is if the monitoring currently was subpar. Right. The conservatives are saying that instead, I think their plan, it certainly feels like more of a stick, right, than a carrot. Requiring municipalities permit 15% more homes per year as a condition of getting federal funding. And I'm just curious to hear what you think of that approach.

Could it work better? Well, I do think there's room for improvement. Though, again, even the liberal approach does have targets for cities. But I would suggest that the difference is largely one of tone where the conservatives are framing this as a stick, the liberals are framing this as an incentive, but at the end of the day, it's the same thing where it's like, do what I say and perform the way we want you to perform or else you're not getting our money. The liberals are also proposing to create a crown corporation called Build Canada Homes.

According to their costed platform, which they released, as I mentioned, this weekend, it'll cost $3 billion a year for each year of the next four years. The goal of the corporation would be to finance affordable housing construction across the country. Among other things, the agency would provide financing to the builders of prefabricated homes.

Acting as a developer, Build Canada Homes will work with industry to build affordable homes at scale, including on public lands. The Conservatives have dismissed it as more liberal bureaucracy. I know that the Conservatives have been talking more about selling off federal lands, for example, and I'm curious to hear how someone like you, who's so steeped in this, would evaluate both of those proposals. Well, I think overall, you know, the liberals are trying to deal with an existing problem that some of their social housing plans in their national housing strategy have taken a very long time to get off the ground. So what they're doing is saying, okay, let's

take what we're doing now out of the bureaucracy and create this arm's length crown corporation with the hopes that it would be able to do things faster, less expensively, and so on. And I do think some skepticism is warranted there because the track record here, not just of the current federal government, but past federal governments on anything dealing with procurement is not fantastic. But the liberals do point out that this is how we did things back in the 1940s and 50s, and it worked back then. So it certainly could work now. And just quickly, what about the conservatives plan to sell off federal land? I think the liberals are proposing to lease off some federal land as well. Yeah, and there's pros and cons to each approach,

that the conservative approach, you get money now, it's a little bit faster in the sense that once that land's gone, the builders and developers have a little bit more control over what's put on there, there's less bureaucracy and so on, but that lack of control is a two-edged sword. It does mean that the federal government control over what's put on there, there's less bureaucracy and so on. But that lack of control is a two-edged sword. It does mean that the federal government can't really dictate anything at that point.

And it also doesn't get the benefit of any kind of land value going up in the future. So you can have a situation like we've had in Ontario with the 407, where a government sold off an asset, lost control of that asset, and it turned out that that asset got very, very valuable over time, but residents and taxpayers don't benefit from it. Okay, so that's the big stuff that they're doing around more supply, trying to get more houses built. That should theoretically, more supply should theoretically reduce the price of homes

eventually. But the parties also have promises to make it a little cheaper to buy a home right now, right? Yeah. So the government has, the federal government at least has very few levers to directly drive down the price of housing, but they do have a big one and it's the GST. Because the GST only applies to new homes, it basically acts as a construction tax that makes building new homes more expensive. The conservatives are proposing taking GST, the federal sales tax off of all homes under 1.3 million dollars. The liberals have something similar. My new government will eliminate the GST for first time home buyers on all new and substantially

renovated homes under a million dollars. The big difference is it only applies to first time home buyers of primary residences. So it's a very small segment of the population. So it's not going to be nearly as transformative, but it's also not gonna be nearly as expensive as the conservative promise. And just to push back a bit on the conservative promise and that it's across the board, could this also just benefit maybe the people

that you don't necessarily wanna see benefit from this situation, like investors that could just go and buy up five new houses, right? Like don't you want to try and help the first-time buyers? Yeah, this would allow an investor to buy up a bunch of new homes and rent them out. It also allows things like a family who wants to build a new cottage, a second home,

they would get that tax benefit. And, you know, I think you can argue that that's probably not the best use of federal money. On the flip side though, I think there is benefit to helping non-first time home buyers. Think of seniors who would like to downsize their home, move into something smaller. I think that is something we're supporting

because it not only helps those seniors, but it frees up their existing home to the next generation of families. So there's kind of pros and cons on both sides. Before we go, let's just talk quickly about renters. What are the differences you see in the promises to make rent more affordable for people? Yeah, so overall, the conservative platform doesn't have much specifically targeted to renters.

The liberals are saying that they will re-introduce a program from the 1970s called the Merb Program. It's a program designed to incentivize small-scale investors to build small-scale apartment buildings, three to six stories. It was quite successful back then. In fact, you could argue we actually built too many of those things back in the 70s. And it's one of the reasons why we got rid of it.

They're saying they'll bring it back. The NDP have promises around rent control. Now rent control is solely in provincial jurisdiction. But what they're suggesting is if any province or municipality wants federal investments, federal funds to build homes, they have to put in place laws that protect renters. We're not going to build affordable homes for those homes to just turn into unaffordable homes because there's no protections.

Okay, this was great. Thank you so much, Mike. Really appreciate it. No, thank you for having me. Okay, so next up is climate change. We're talking to climate journalist Arno Capecchi, another regular on the show. He's been traveling across the country covering the Poliev campaign for the National Observer and as ever is following climate issues really closely. Hey, Arno, thanks so much for doing this. Hey, Jamie.

So let's start here. Where is there the most daylight between the party's platforms when it comes to climate change? Well, I think there's maybe two things. One is that the Liberals would keep the climate policies they currently have in place, whereas the Conservatives are promising to dismantle them wholesale. And secondly, Mark Carney has expressed a lot of enthusiasm about building an east-west electricity grid for Canada that would run on clean electricity. Whereas Polyev really only wants to build pipelines in every conceivable direction. So I'd say that's where the bulk of the daylight is.

The Conservatives platform that just came out mentions climate change five times. What are they saying that they would do to fight climate change? Right. Well, really it boils down to exporting more natural gas. National Bank has calculated that we could displace 2.5 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in India if we would supply them with our clean Canadian natural gas rather than having them power their economy with coal. And the idea here is that Canadian natural gas would displace coal,

and of course natural gas does burn more cleanly than coal, and so Canada, in their estimation, would get credit for other countries lowering emissions. One of the problems with that is that under the current accounting rules of the Paris Agreement, it would be India who gets the credit for lowering their emissions, even if they use Canadian gas to do so. And so that's why in the platform, you see conservatives saying we want to amend Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which covers exactly that glitch. And that's what they want to fix so that Canada would get credit instead of India. Gotcha. I know that you've been following Poliev on the campaign trail. How much has

he spoken about the climate and how much have you or other journalists been able to ask him? Yeah, it has not come up once. I've been to, I believe, 12 press conferences now. He never brings it up himself unless it is to mock what he calls... Radical net zero environmental extremism. Net zero, of course, being a pillar of the Paris Agreement. I have been unable to ask a single question

at 12 press conferences so far. as I think is well known. They're only allowing four questions per conference and they have not chosen me. So yeah, this subject has not come up on the campaign at all. It only came up briefly at the debates. Right, right. At the English debate last week, I know he answered a question about climate change.

He talked about, well, what you just talked talked about exporting Canadian liquefied natural gas to India to replace the coal. That's right. And I just want to add maybe one other thing, even if you put aside the glitch with the Paris Agreement accounting mechanisms, it really relies on some dubious math to assume that Canadian gas would, in fact, lower emissions in India, even if you could pull all that off, because it doesn't take into account the intense energy required to liquefy natural gas and then ship it across the ocean, which just that adds so much emissions to the whole process. Okay. All right, let's go back to the liberals here for a little bit.

What is Kearney proposing or doing that is actually different from the Trudeau Liberals' climate plan? Not too much, to be honest. You know, I think the, that east-west electricity grid is the big thing. That would be a major nation-building project, as they like to say.

You know, it would be, it would cost tens of billions of dollars. That would be a major nation building project, as they like to say. It would cost tens of billions of dollars. It would tick a lot of boxes in terms of producing electricity for all Canadians from clean sources. It would be creating a lot of jobs. It would provide us independence from Americans, which is of course a huge thing right now. So that's that. We have an emissions reduction plan already in place. That's a huge part of the difference between liberals and conservatives. Like I said, Canada is on track to achieve about 90% of our Paris target at the moment. Now, there are some big ifs attached to that. That is if we keep tightening up things like our EV mandates and our industrial carbon price,

home energy, home retrofits. All of these things are on the books, an emissions cap for the oil sands. And Carney is basically gonna leave them in place, he says, but that's a big deal because if those things are scrapped, as the conservatives are promising to do, that there's no way we're going to get anywhere close to our Paris targets. And right now, like I said, we're on track to get, you know, optimistically for sure. But there's a good chance we could get about 90% of the way there if we apply a full

court press from here on in. Right. And just to be super clear here apply a full court press from here on in. Right. And just to be super clear here, that's if they follow through on their plan, right? It doesn't mean that they're actually on track to get there. That is a capital I F if, yes, for sure. Okay. Lastly, I know there was a letter signed by 128 mayors and other city officials

calling for climate action from the five main federal party leaders. One of the big things that they did call for was that east-west electricity grid that we talked about. But another big one was climate resilience measures, things to help their communities adapt to fires and floods. Two of the mayors who signed on were Valerie Plante of Montreal. They had massive floods last summer, and Richard Ireland of Jasper, Alberta, which was hit, of course, with devastating fires last year. Have any of the parties made clear promises on climate adaptation? Well, that's exactly right.

Adaptation is a huge part of responding to climate change. And the answer is no, with the exception of the Greens who talk a lot about adaptation, but it's hard to take that too seriously given their prospects in this election. The liberals, I think they've given $40 million to climate adaptation, which you could buy 10 houses in Vancouver for that, but you can't protect communities

all over the country. So I'd say that's a huge blind spot for all the parties and something that really needs to be addressed. So I think that's going to be a big part of the conversation going forward, especially if liberals do win this election, that Carney is going to be under a lot of pressure to work with local communities, which is really where the locus of climate action is shifting to, and not just in Canada, but internationally, of course they are on the front lines and that's where the impact is. Okay, super helpful Arno. Thank you. Thanks Jamie, always a pleasure. 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. The Council for Interior Design Qualification administers the NCIDQ exam. This rigorous examination assesses the competency of interior designers to practice in a manner

that protects the health, safety, and welfare of a building's occupants. CIDQ's more than 17,000 active NCIDQ-certified interior designers protect the public through the design of safe, code-compliant, and accessible spaces. Learn more at cidq.org slash design. All right. Now we are going to speak with CBC Senior Business Reporter Anis Hidari about cost of living and economic growth. How do the parties stack up on their promises

to put more money in your pockets, make services more accessible, and actually boost the economy? Let's get into it. Anise, hey. Hey, Jamie. So let's start with platform promises to put money in people's pockets right now. The Liberals, the Conservatives, and the NDP are all promising tax cuts. What do we know about the difference between their promises and which income brackets would stand to gain the most from each?

So if we leave out the carbon tax, which is really already gone, and we talk about income tax, the conservatives say they're going to drop the lowest income tax bracket from 15% to 12.75%. That's the tax that you pay on a little bit less than the first, let's say, $57,000-ish you make. The liberals are promising a similar move, but their promise is smaller than the conservatives. They drop it to 14%. Now, the NDP, they've got a different style on this front all around. They want to increase the basic personal amount. Now, I'm oversimplifying a little bit here. There will be accountants who cringe at this, but essentially that's the amount you make before you pay any tax at all. So, for many Canadians, their first $20,000 in wages would be free of any federal tax under the NDP. Now that move is the one that puts the most money back in the pockets of people who make $50,000, $60,000 a year. That's

according to an analysis by the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. The liberal and the conservative moves though, they don't really help people who make less than $30,000 that much. Their plans help people who make let's say more than $40,000 a year. And the conservative plan does put more money in those people's pockets than the liberal one does. I should also point out there's a capital gains tax increase floating around in here. The liberals had introduced that under Justin Trudeau, but they already got rid of it. The conservatives say that'll stay gone. The NDP say they'll bring it back. Conservatives say they're gonna cut taxes for seniors

and that they're gonna put a referendum in play anytime they wanna increase taxes. So taxes are coming up a lot in this election. You mentioned that the conservatives' plan would put more money in people's pockets than the liberals. How much more money? So the conservatives are promising that their tax plan would put $900 a year back in the pocket of the average Canadian worker. Of course, what is average? It's different for everybody. If we compare to the liberals,

their promises would come out to around $400 a year, a little bit more than that. I should say that gap between them might sound bigger when I put it that way than it is. Really, the conservative tax cut promises are higher, but they are targeting sort of the same group of people, and the gap between them is not as big as it might sound. The conservatives have some promises on tax-free savings accounts that set them apart. What are they saying, and who would this most likely benefit? So what the conservatives want to do

is let Canadians contribute an extra $5,000 a year to their TFSAs, if it's invested in Canadian companies or Canadian investments. The party says they'd use the tax system definition of quote taxable Canadian property, but it's hard to say whether mutual funds or index funds would qualify or get listed that way. We don't have a lot of the details

on how this would work yet. This is like a tax cut for future you. And it's a tax cut for a future you that had money in the past. Right, because you need the money to put into the TFSA. Yeah. You got to have money to save money. So if you don't have money right now, this is not helpful for you, but they're

also pitching it as a way to stimulate Canada's economy, to invest money here. Okay. The second bucket here is measures that make goods and services cheaper for people to access. So stuff like daycare, pharmacare, dental care. And just what are the key differences in what the parties are promising on these? So for those three programs you listed, daycare, pharmacare,

dental plans, those three programs, Poliev has said nobody who has them will lose them if the conservatives win. The liberals have talked about maintaining these programs, but haven't really given details on if or how they would expand them. The dentalUNLM plan was just expanded by the Liberals before the election to cover people aged 18 to 64, not just the seniors and kids that it covered in the past. And you know, the NDP, I should point out, has said they will expand child care,

haven't given details on that. On pharmacare, the NDP has said they would want a much more fulsome program within four years covering way more drugs. They imply that they would pay for this by reinstating that capital gains tax, the one that the liberals and the conservatives are getting rid of. I'll just mention, I think, that comment that Polly had made about people who have these services won't lose them. I know there's been like a lot of concern over whether or not that means that you know will anybody else get them. He has not been clear on that one way or the other. We're gonna do a

whole episode on this later this week but just briefly now that the costed platforms are out just tell me more about how the liberals and conservatives are saying that they're gonna pay for these promises. So, I mean, they're both making promises of economic growth and that economic growth will drive their ability to pay for everything they wanna do. The conservatives are promising more budget cuts than the liberals are.

So they sort of lean more on cutting programs or cutting spending that the conservatives ostensibly don't believe in. The liberals lean a little bit less on cuts, but they both parties talk about cutting spending in some areas and then increasing spending in different areas to try and stimulate the economy. But economists will often say,

that's a loose concept at best. It's hard to promise that you're going to create jobs, for example, unless you specifically say you're going to give a certain amount of money to a certain company in exchange for a certain amount of jobs. We've heard that kind of talk when it comes to pipelines and resource projects from both parties. Really, the conservatives lean on that quite heavily in their platform that expected revenue from resource projects will help bridge the budget gap, that building more houses will generate more revenue and that helps bridge the budget gap for them. The liberals talk about similar things though, you know, they both talk about multi-million dollar funds that will stimulate or protect the economy, but we don't really have a lot of details from either party. For all we know, they could be deciding to buy a pony

for every Canadian, and, you know, we'll see all sorts of economic stimulation in, I don't know, horse feed. Yeah, yeah. There is, like, a real level of fairy dust in these cost of platforms. We'll get more into it later in the week for people who are, I don't know, nerds like us, I guess.

One thing that I should point out is that the tariffs do come up in both of their budgets, and they project some revenue from tariffs, at least for the first year of the budget. Yeah. But who really knows what happens with those over the next few years, right? It's part of why there's so much fairy dust in this. These promises that the parties are making to supercharge the economy and how that will bring in all this extra resources, do economists think it's realistic for either leader to promise economic growth right now, given that we are in this major trade war? It's really tricky to say. I mean, you'll get 100 different opinions

from 50 economists on this. But right now, the two biggest economies in the world are fighting, China and the United States. And we've heard a lot of projections that there will be a recession in the US because of what's happening there. But both of those economies are also terrifying Canada. So we've got China and the US fighting.

We've got China and Canada fighting. We've got the US and Canada fighting. We don't even know yet where Canada might pivot what we sell and who we sell to. And it costs money to pivot and it takes lots of time. So can any prime minister do this in a four-year election cycle? Maybe. All right. It was a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Conservatives often put crime and punishment at the center of their campaigns. But with the number of violent crimes rising in the last number of years, the liberals are also spotlighting the issue.

Up next, we're talking with CBC senior writer, Peter Zemanich in Ottawa. Peter, hey, thank you so much for this. No problem, glad to be here. It's great to have you on. Okay, so both parties say that they are serious about tackling violent crime. I've heard them talk about it quite a bit

on the campaign trail. If we look at something like gun control, what are the big differences there? And what do you think those differences say about their larger perspective on justice and reform? That's a really good area to look at gun crime because they have a very different approach each of them. So, and I've classified this as punishment versus policing.

So the conservatives broadly have this plan where they want to punish people severely to deter people from doing bad things. And the liberals have this method where they want to tweak a bunch of the different laws. So for example, when they announced their crime platform, liberal leader Mark Carney said he wants to revitalize the gun buyback program for assault firearms. It hasn't really gotten going for individuals and it's been a bit of a quagmire, so he wants to do that. We will quickly, and I mean quickly, reinvigorate the buyback of assault-style firearms and leave the classification of new firearm models to the RCMP, to the experts, not to the gun

industry. They want to immediately revoke gun licenses from people convicted of violent crimes, including intimate partner violence, tough and oversight of firearms, that kind of thing. We will strengthen firearms licensing and the so-called yellow and red flag laws that keep weapons out of the hands of those who are risk to themselves or others. With the Conservatives you have a very much more simple approach, which is they want to scrap the gun buyback program. They don't believe in it.

And they instead want to introduce harsh crime. So if you're convicted of a serious crime involving firearms, you would face a mandatory minimum jail sentence. And then on top of that, they want to give people life sentences. For human traffickers, for gun smugglers, and for mass fentanyl producers. And would you say that the big differences here are illustrative, right, of their larger perspectives? For sure.

Like this approach, this punishment versus prescription approach, really bleeds through all of the crime policies that they've kind of rolled out. So you know when the Liberals outlined their crime policy it was a list of about 20 different things like tweaks and adjustments and improvements to help police do their job. The Conservatives rolled out a number of announcements on different days all of them really to do with harsh punishment. You know if you're if you rob a senior for example example, with an online scam. We will impose mandatory jail time of one year for $5,000 of fraud, three years for a fraud of over $100,000, five years for fraud over a million, and minimum fines that are

10 times the size of the frauds committed. You commit, you steal 50 grand, you'll pay 500 grand on top of your jail sentence. So it's a very much hard punishment deterrence approach versus this prescription approach across areas even when they agree on things. And just where do they agree on things? Like where is there not daily? Well there's a few areas they both want to take action on.

One is intimate partner violence, another one would be bail reform, and another one is on consecutive sentencing. If you look at bail, for example, there's a widely acknowledgement thing that the bail system as reformed is failing. They're letting too many people out and there's a revolving door of criminals kind of coming through. So the liberals want to make bail harder to get if you're involved in organized crime, violent crime, home invasions, car thefts, stuff like that.

And they're going to do this by establishing a reverse onus to get bail. And the conservatives want to, they have, they want to rip the bail system apart really. And they have serious concerns about how widely it's used. They want to eliminate bail and probation and house arrest for serious criminals. And they want to impose. Three strikes you're out means that anyone convicted of three serious offenses, they will serve a minimum of 10 years behind bars, a maximum of life imprisonment and they will have to earn their release even still. Let's talk about the notwithstanding clause. So one big issue in this kind of crime and justice bucket that has come up in the campaign is that Poliev has said

that he is willing to do an end run around the Charter of Rights and use the notwithstanding clause to allow the courts to stack multiple life sentences. That would mean someone convicted of several murders would have to serve their sentences back to back to back. And when you kill six people to be eligible to go back on the streets only 25 years later, is not only disproportionate, but it is a violation of the charter rights of the victims

and of their families. And I will use the charter to protect the charter. So just for some context on this issue for people listening, in 2022, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that consecutive life sentences violate an offender's charter rights. So if Poliev wanted to do this, he'd have to use this controversial rule in Canada's constitution, the notwithstanding clause, to temporarily override that ruling on charter rights. And if Poliev did do this, it would be the first time the federal government would have used the notwithstanding clause. Provincial governments have, of course, used it in the past. And just tell me about some of the criticism that Poliev has received for proposing this.

Well, there's a real concern amongst similar libertarians, amongst opposition members, amongst the Mark Carney himself, that it's a dangerous slippery slope to get into the stage of saying that, okay, well, we're going to pass a law that we know is unconstitutional. And I'm just going to hand up this, put our hand up and say it's notwithstanding. It'll, it allows for the suggestion that many different laws could be pushed through the books. Okay. So lastly, I wanted to talk to you a bit about what the parties are saying around fighting crime in online spaces and just what are the big notable promises that we are seeing

here from the parties? Right. Well, you know, Mark Kearney, when he came out and gave a speech recently, he said that, you know, he defined the American online platforms as a sea of hate and misogyny and racism. And he said he's going to do something to crack down on it. We haven't heard a lot of what that means practically from them, but he has put a few suggestions on the table, one of which is raising the penalty for distributing intimate images without someone's consent and making it a criminal offense to distribute non-consensual deep fake images of someone. They also want to introduce legislation to protect children from online exploitation

and sextortion. They haven't really kind of put meat on the bone there, but that's something that they want to do to help protect kids. Okay. Peter, thank you for this. It's great being here. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.