The Decibel - Campaign Call: Unpacking the final days of the election

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

With the federal election nearly upon us, we’re bringing you the last edition of Campaign Call before Canadians head to the polls. This week, feature writer Shannon Proudfoot and columnists Robyn Urback and Marsha Lederman discuss how the leaders’ final pitches are sitting with Canadians.Plus, The Globe’s economics reporter Nojoud Al Mallees breaks down the costed platforms of the Liberals and the Conservatives and explains why some people are questioning the math.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Welcome to Campaign Call, our election panel show. And this is our last one before the votes are counted. A lot has happened in the past week. The debates are behind us, Campaign platforms have been released. And a lot of you, in fact, over seven million Canadians, have already voted in the advanced polls. Now, in the last few days, the leaders are making their final pitch.

We are a Labour Party and we're proud of it. The only way we win is if we fight. If we fight, we win. If we fight, we win. This is the Canada we know. This is the Canada we love. Let's bring it home. To use a hockey analogy, there are five minutes left in the third period of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. Right? You know what to do. It is time to leave everything on the ice. Today we're going to try and look at the big picture of an election happening at what seems like a pivotal moment for Canada and ask how well the leaders have responded.

So here's today's panel. I'm Robin Urbach. I'm a current affairs columnist with The Globe. I'm Shannon Proudfoot. I'm a feature writer and columnist in The Globe's Ottawa Bureau. I'm Marcia Liederman. I'm an opinion columnist, and I'm based in Vancouver. And later, economics reporter Najud Al-Malese is here to explain what you need to know about the

costed platforms that dropped this week. Yes, we're talking budgets, but we're also talking about why they matter and how you should judge them. I'm Nainika Raman-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Shannon, Robin, Marcia, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us. Great to be here.

So we're only a few days out from Election Day right now. Our political leaders have spent the campaign offering us all these new ideas for the country. So I guess when you step back and look at the last four weeks, what are the visions for Canada that each party is offering here? Robin, let's start with you. I mean, I think actually that the visions for Canada that the parties have been offering aren't all that different from one another. And they hate it when you kind of point that out. But I mean, when you look at them at a broad level, we're talking about building more infrastructure, we're talking about income tax cuts, we're talking about projecting deficits, we're talking about spending more to meet NATO's defense targets. These

visions all look similar. What's really striking to me is I think the outcomes might be very different depending on which party forms government. One thing that I have found really interesting over the course of this campaign, and really since Donald Trump started threatening our sovereignty and economic security, is that a lot of the sovereignty talk in Quebec has been quieted down. At the same time, I think this campaign

has certainly exacerbated, not a sovereignty movement in Alberta or Western provinces. I don't think it's that extreme, but certainly that sense of Western alienation, I suspect and I fear actually that that will get worse if Mr. Kearney wins the election and is prime minister again. Lauren Henry I sort of see two different things going on. One is it almost seems to me like there's two different campaigns fought here. One was the campaign we were supposed to have,

which was supposed to be about a government that was long in the tooth, public fatigue with the liberals. It was supposed to be a referendum on a decade in power and it was set up to be a change election. I mean, we all know what the polls said as recently as December. And that also hinged heavily on cost of living concerns, a general sense that Pierre Poliev was sort of capturing in the public and kind of crystallizing for the public that Canada was headed in the wrong direction. So there was that election. That was one possible fight we could have had. And that kind of got stamped out, got entirely canceled out at least I think for the first three weeks or so of this very quick and dirty election campaign by Donald Trump. And then we had a totally different election. We always talk in the kind of the nerdy pun

to the way about the ballot box question. Donald Trump and the existential threat he represents it. It was kind of amazing right off the top when you sort of talked in kind of a nonchalant, like by the way, part about Donald Trump threatening our sovereignty, it's kind of remarkable that that has become just a footnote to the life we live right now. But so that I see as a fundamentally other election campaign and they both sort of the one overtook the other at the beginning. The other kind of dichotomy I see is I think Carney's campaign is fundamentally forward looking and Pierre Polyev's is fundamentally backward-looking. And I don't mean backward-looking in a pejorative way. I mean, Pierre Polyev's campaign hinges heavily on this idea of nostalgia that, and that is in some ways very classic

kind of small L liberal, small C conservative. He talks a lot about how things used to be, that they used to be better in Canada, either very specifically in the days of Stephen Harper or just before Justin Trudeau got to us. Whereas Mr. Carney has been much more sort of, frankly, if we're being kind of honest, in quite a vague way talking about how the future will be better.

We can give ourselves more than the United States can take away. And so it's a very forward casting kind of vision. So those are kind of the distinctions I see. And if I can jump in here, that's a really interesting way to put it. I think Polly is also backward looking in terms of he's campaigning against a reality that no longer exists, very much focusing on the Trudeau legacy that, you know, Carney has pointed out more than once is not actually what's happening right

now. And on the vision thing, I think it's hard to have a vision when everything is so murky, when the person in control is not part of this. The person in control really is Donald Trump in many ways. This is the election campaign about Trump and about how we're gonna respond to Trump and survive in this very weird new reality that we're in. And so I think any sort of attempt to stick

with the vision that was initially going to be what people were gonna be talking about, as Shannon pointed out, it has or should have gone by the wayside. What I find interesting, if I can jump off of what Marcia said, because I think she made a good point about, you know, it's a vision that should have sort of gone by the wayside. But what's interesting too is if you look at the demographic divide in terms of who's supporting who in this election, and I'm thinking like there are lots of divisions we've seen East West, urban rural, men, women.

But the one that I find particularly interesting is when you look at support among Gen Z and Millennials versus Boomers. Nanos came out with a poll just a couple of days ago and they found that support for Pierre Pelliev among people 18 to 34 was somewhere around 47% compared to 30% for Mark Carney, which is really interesting when you think about the dynamic in the 2015 election, for example, when Justin Trudeau is this millennial whisperer, and all the boomers were flocking to Stephen Harper.

And it seems like it's almost the flip side of that. But I think there's a really rational explanation for it. Because if you are a millennial or if you are Gen Z and you're trying to find your way in Canada now, you want to maybe start a family, you want to find a good job, you want to be able to purchase a home one day. These are all the things that are of immediate concern to you. The threat that Donald Trump poses is certainly there. Right.

But if things weren't so great to begin with for you, the threat that Donald Trump poses is certainly there, right? But if things weren't so great to begin with for you based on all of those things I just mentioned, then the threat that Donald Trump poses almost isn't quite as significant as it is, for example, if you are a boomer and you're looking at your retirement savings dwindle because Donald Trump decided to tax half the world. So I understand from a strategic perspective why for Pierre-Paul Lleve, it makes sense to keep talking about those issues when for a certain demographic in Canada,

those are the foremost issues affecting their daily lives. The problem for him is that as we've seen over the polling of the last couple of weeks in particular, he's lost that support among boomers and boomers, as we all know, go to vote. So he's in a really tough spot in these final days. Yeah, I guess I wonder then if, you know, we're talking about how the visions maybe aren't so different, but, you know, different demographics maybe are seeing things through slightly different lenses. Is this election, as we've talked about before, more about vibes then? Like, more about

the leader that is making you feel a certain way rather than actually promising big change. Is that, I guess, what's happening here? Gabbard I think that's more a factor with Carney. I mean, look, I'm not going to be cheap. The guy has a serious reputation and a serious CV. I'm not going to brush that aside. But the reality is people don't know that much about him and his plans for the economy, which is his area of specialty, to my eye have not been more specific or more pinned to the ground than they usually are in an election campaign. I don't think he's been unusually detailed there.

So in that case, I feel like people are responding. When you talk to people at rallies, it's all about how he's a calm head. I kept thinking of the tariff threat as a very strange thing because I think it can be hard to conceptualize for individual people how this will affect them until it starts working its way through the economy. But it was a thing that felt and feels still present, like a very major threat that could affect each of us. But none of us can do anything about it. There is nothing at the pay grade we all live at that we can do about it. So there was sort of that very funny moment at a, I think it was a rally in Scarborough earlier in the campaign where some woman hollered out, lead us. What was it? Big daddy by building the strongest economy

in the G seven. And that's what we're going to do. But yeah. So it was that idea of like, I can't do anything about this. I can't handle this or mitigate it in any way. So you take it. So I feel like vibes were very relevant for him. Polyev, I think has kind of lost the perfect foil for his vibes. He was excellent. He is excellent as a prosecutorial politician. He gnaws on people's ankles until he reaches bone. That was really, really useful for him, and I think cathartic and people felt heard back in the fall when they were up to their teeth, just done with Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. But once the tension went out of that balloon and Trudeau left and then even the carbon tax left, it was sort of like he was left shadow boxing

without a partner, like without someone to throw the punches at. Marcia, what about you? What does the view look like from from the West? You know, I still think there's a desire for change. But I think ironically, in some ways, Carney is more of a change candidate for a lot of people. Even if he is still, you know, he's leading a party that's been in power for 10 years and he's campaigning right now with some of the same people like Gerald Butz, who helped Trudeau get elected,

but he's a fresh face and he's not a politician who's been around for a long time. And Poliev is still going on about the same things. How long have we been hearing him gripe in slogans? So I think Carney offers a fresh approach. And I think that's really appealing to a lot of people that I've been speaking to. That's got to be pretty frustrating for the Poliev camp, who, you know, were wanted to run on change for so long, are still trying to run on change. Right. But maybe not resonating. Oh, yeah. Everything's for a change. Changement right there on their podium.

But I'm sure there are many things that are frustrating for the Poliev camp right now. Yeah, there was an abacus put out a result maybe two weeks ago, after the point where people would have noticed gas prices going down because the carbon tax had been zipped down to zero. And abacus asked people, who do you think is responsible for getting rid of the carbon tax? And 55% of them said Mark Carney and 28% said Pierre Poliev.

Oh, boy. Like, I don't know what you do with that kind of political black magic. I mean, that is technically true. But Mark Carney, with a great flourish to make sure people noticed on his first day as prime minister, killed the carbon tax because Pierre Poliev had made it so politically unpalatable that there was nothing else to do. So it's kind of an amazing two step there. Yeah. Poliev's gotten all the change he wanted or some of the change he wanted. The tax was axed and Trudeau's gone. Yeah. But not the big change, him being in government.

And it's a be careful what you wish for, right? Because now, like I said, I think he, he, that prosecutorial posture comes very naturally to him and his maybe his, you know, strongest gear. And then he prosecuted so effectively that he convicted them and off they went. And now what are you supposed to do? AMT – Which is why I thought it was also interesting too. I mean there was a lot of talk during this campaign about Poliev needing to pivot to Trump. And I think to a certain extent he did that. He got rid of the slogans, axe the tax, boop the snoot, whatever else he said there. And he would – he sort of calmed down a little bit, right?

He was less prosecutorial. He was less antagonistic. We saw it during the debate too. For Poliak to go out there and to stand up straight in his polished little suit and to sort of give this monotonous, I don't know, announcement about one thing or another and to look like a prime minister. I almost thought it was a bit unnatural for him. Like he excels when he is an attack dog, when he has a foil, as Shannon said,

he's gotta be shadow boxing with someone in order to really look effective. It would have been a huge risk for him, I'll grant, because we know that there are a lot of people within the conservative support base who actually like what Donald Trump is doing. But I think there may have been an opportunity for him during the campaign to turn his knives

from Mark Kearney for a little bit and actually towards Trump. And not in a way, I mean, he did a little bit. Like he'd say something like, oh, Trump needs to knock it off or something. Or unjustified and unjustifiable was sort of the most spicy he got at critiquing the tariffs. Thank you very much. I want to start by condemning without equivocation the unjustified and unprovoked tariffs that President Trump has now announced against our auto sector. So he was sort of like beating him up with a feather.

And I think people could feel that. So I think that came off as inauthentic. And I also think this sort of reserved held back, you know, prime ministerial, Pierre Poliev seems a bit inauthentic as well. I think there really was an opportunity for him to go guns blazing, raise hell against Donald Trump in a way that would be cathartic to the wider population because he did that so well before all of this stuff happened. Like he was so successful at channeling our collective anxieties and our frustrations about the Trudeau government, about the carbon tax, about crime, about all these

other things. He could have done that too with Trump. I don't know how it would have fared. It would have been a big risk, as I say, but I think that was an opportunity for him. If he wanted to do a real pivot, that would have been it. We're almost out of time, but I want to pick up on this point that Robin talked about, this missed opportunity for the Poliev camp.

Marsha, Shannon, do you want to weigh in here? Was there a chance for them to lay out the vision here? And did they go wrong somewhere in actually doing that? I think this is really a question of circumstances. And I'm not sure that Poliev is the right politician to be able to pivot to these new circumstances. I mean, so many people compare him to Donald Trump. I'm not saying that, but I've heard so many people call him Trumpy, Trump-lite. And for some people, that might have been attractive at one point, but it sure isn't now. S1 0530 I think what's so notable, it's interesting, is kind of what Robin was getting at is that

where Pierre Poliev's political talents, and I would argue his appetite and energy lie, you don't have to wonder if he's going at someone with his knives. You're not like, hmm, was he trying to insult that person or dismantle them in some way? You know. And so the fact that he was kind of docile, a little bit polite about it with Trump, sounded both, like to Robin's point, I think inauthentic and it also sounded like it was being dragged out of him. And I think that is absolutely what she's pointing at, that some portion of his base thinks Trump is not so bad. And so he was kind of trying to walk this impossible knife's edge. I think he's been in a better place in the last week or two because as the Trump thing has sort

of cooled off a bit, like our economy in reality is no better off than it was. Everything is status quo, but it feels like less of a sort of howling emergency. And as that has become a little bit less salient, I think the other campaign that we might have had has surfaced a bit and he has looked considerably less out of step prosecuting the change election that he wanted all along. But all the way through, I thought it was notable that at no point did he sound like he thought Donald Trump was a greater villain than Mark Carney, the Liberal Party or the ghost of Justin Trudeau. And I think that might have been a problem, a central kind of unsurmountable problem for him. Although you know what, after living through the last four months,

I make zero predictions about how this is turning out on Monday. I am counting no chickens until they like have grandchildren of their own. I don't know what's gonna happen. Watch us see an NDP majority or something, just something bananas. Sure, I believe it, fine. You never know. All right, let's leave it there. Shannon, Robin, Marcia, thank you so much for being here. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Up next, I'm going to speak with economics reporter Najud Al-Malise. She'll help us understand what the parties say about their spending plans. Najud, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I do really appreciate having you here because you've essentially done our homework for us.

You've actually studied the party's platforms, how they'll pay for all of these things that they're promising. And when we're talking about such big numbers like these, I think a lot of people wonder because they can seem so far removed from our daily lives, right? So Nijude, do Canadians actually end up feeling the effects of these government finances? Najude DeVos Not in the immediate term. And that's the challenge for politicians when they are putting together platforms and budgets and trying

to remain fiscally responsible, whatever that means to any given person. But fundamentally, I think the concern that those who care about fiscal management would say is that whatever you're spending today will have to be paid by someone at some point. And frankly, that's often the younger generations will have to bear the burden of the country's debt load. There's a lot of room for debate about where is that line? At what point do you overburden one generation over the other? At what point are you spending too much? But the big red line is definitely when you start spending to the degree that you're no longer fiscally sustainable,

which means that credit rating agencies and economists would say that you can't pay your debt and we can't trust you to actually follow through on your obligations. Okay. And so from what I understand, Canada is not at risk of that right now, it seems. No. But we're still looking at some big deficits in these platforms. So let's look at the specifics here, Najude.

What are the key takeaways if we're looking at the liberals and the conservatives' costed platforms in terms of how much new spending they're actually promising? Yeah, so neither party is promising to balance the budget over the four-year horizon. I don't think anyone was really expecting that in any case. Even the conservatives were not suggesting before the election campaign that they would balance the budget. And balancing the budget is going to become all that much harder with a trade war with the U.S. going on. But in terms of new spending, there's a lot of similarities between the liberals and conservatives in the sense that

the focus is really on increasing defense spending, something that has become politically challenging to avoid essentially because of the pressures from our allies to increase defense spending. It's interesting because we haven from our allies to increase defense spending. It's interesting because we haven't heard that much about defense spending in recent years, but all of a sudden like this year it's a big issue. That's exactly it. And so with the tensions with the United States and, you know, the war going on with Russia and Ukraine, other geopolitical forces, this has become kind of a non-negotiable for Canada at this point. And then you

layer on the need to address the housing crisis in Canada and the desire to give tax cuts. And so you combine all those together, those are decent spending commitments. And so I believe for the Liberals, they're promising about $130 billion of additional spending over four years, four fiscal years. And with the Conservatives, it's about $109 billion. Both are promising savings. The Liberals are promising $28 billion that they're going to find through government efficiency, quite vague at this point.

With the Conservatives, there are some vague suggestions on cuts, but there's also some more specific ones, like cutting international aid or cutting funding to crown corporations, including the CBC. And so you get a little bit more detail there, but fundamentally, both of them are projecting deficits over the next four years. And so at this point, there has been a move away from balancing budgets, not only in Canada, but around the world. Even for example in Germany, they're kind of moving away from a very strict rule that they had on spending because

fundamentally there's a lot of changing forces in the world and a lot of countries are having to grapple with the United States and a lot of countries have gotten the habit of just spending by borrowing. That's interesting that it seems to be a bit of a trend. It's not like Canada's really an outlier here, but other countries are doing similar things then. That's exactly it. And if you compare our deficit to GDP ratio, which is oftentimes a metric that economists look at to get a sense of how big is the deficit, can we handle it?

In Canada, I think it's somewhere between 1% and 2% right now of GDP, whereas in the US, I believe it's like at 7%. And so that's another challenge is when the country south of your border is spending by borrowing so much that puts pressure on Canada to somewhat do the same. And Ajud, the liberals in Carney are now making a distinction too between operational spending and capital spending. Can you just explain what they mean by that? Yeah, so Mr. Carney wants to take a different approach with the way that the government does its budgeting and accounting essentially,

to separate the expenses that the government has day to day, for example, the money it sends to provinces, the money it spends on itself to run government departments. So separate that from what he's calling capital expenses. And those are supposed to be investments in the economy that would result in some sort of economic benefit.

For example, you build a bridge or you spend on defense infrastructure or what have you. Something that would have benefits over many, many years that if you borrow to build that, then it makes sense because you're spreading the burden over the country over a period of time. So there are some countries that do this in the UK. They have a similar model. And some economists are a big fan of separating the budgets in that way because it helps give you an understanding of how much the government is spending on its own, I guess, consumption in a way and how much it's spending on things that will reap benefits over a longer period of time. But the critique has been that it's difficult to know

what exactly you're classifying as operational spending versus capital spending. So it can also become an opportunity for a government to sell something as, oh, this is an investment when really maybe it's not. And so in the liberal platform, they promise to balance the operational budget, but keep a deficit in the capital budget.

I do want to get too bogged down into numbers, but can we just quickly hit the numbers when we're talking about the deficits that the Liberals say they're going to run versus the Conservatives and then currently what we're running? So the Parliamentary Budget Officer was forecasting a $46.8 billion deficit for this fiscal year. The liberals are projecting to go above that at $62.3 billion. And the conservatives are projecting a $31.4 billion deficit, which is below the PBO forecast. Now, the liberals say that their deficit would

decrease about $48 billion over that four-year horizon. And the conservatives say they would get theirs down to about $14 billion. But there's some math we have to talk about in terms of the conservative forecast that gets them there, the conservative platform. And so it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison on their projections. Well, let's talk about some of that math then, like what's going on with the conservative conservative platform. And so it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison on their projections. Well, let's talk about some of that math then. What's going on with the conservative platform that people are looking at those numbers with some questions?

So the conservatives used something called dynamic scoring in their platform, which is essentially a budget forecasting method where you try to estimate how much any given policy will affect economic activity. That would then affect government revenues, how much any given policy will affect economic activity that would then affect government revenues, how much tax revenue the government expects to rake in. And so with the conservatives, many of their measures, particularly those pertaining to

like the oil and gas sector, certain rule laws that they're repealing, they include how much they expect those measures to increase government revenues. And that's a huge chunk of where they find, essentially, their savings or the way that they pay for the government's expenses. Now, it's very difficult to actually estimate how much any given policy will affect the economy and then government revenues.

And then specifically with the conservative platform, the numbers appear to be exceptionally optimistic. So like by the final year, they're forecasting that the government would get an additional $25 billion in revenue from their measures. And the finance department usually uses a rule of thumb that for every percentage point of economic growth, the government could expect $5 to $6 billion of revenue. So several economists have raised the issue that this seems to be overly optimistic about how much the conservatives could expect to, I guess, increase growth through their policies. And like I said earlier, it just makes it hard to also compare then with the liberal platform because the liberals don't have that in their numbers.

Yeah. So this is a really important point because because the numbers that they're basing everything on, as you say, are kind of based on these optimistic projections, which sound like there's a good chance that they might not work out exactly as they hope. And I say this in particular because we are dealing with these threats of tariffs from the US, right? This is looming over everything still. Did the platforms actually factor these tariffs

into their math? So they factored in the tariff revenue that Canada is getting this year or expects to get. This is tariff revenue, sorry, for retaliatory tariffs that Canada has on these goods then. Exactly. That's exactly it. But neither of them have taken into account the economic slowdown that many are expecting to come from this trade war. And so whatever projections that they have right now, the risk, not to sound like an economist, is to the downside, which means that there's a chance that actually deficits will be larger as governments

get less revenue actually because of lower economic activity. So just lastly, Najude, do either of these costed platforms really, I guess, rise to the challenge that Canada faces right now? Like we've got these US tariffs, we've got the possibility of global economic uncertainty, maybe even a recession. Do these platforms actually address enough of this? I think it'll all depend on execution. There's high hopes, for example, from the liberals that the money that they will spend on housing,

on infrastructure, on defense, that this will all somehow strengthen the Canadian economy and help combat this trade war and the economic slowdown that will come. And same thing with the conservatives, right? They have those projections on how much they think government revenues will increase from their policies. And fundamentally, that's also based on the idea that you're gonna promote economic growth with your policies.

I think Canadians have heard a lot of bold promises from their governments, but the challenges that Canada faces in terms of housing, in terms of resource development, in terms of climate change are quite daunting. And it's easy to say that, you know, you're going to do X, Y, Z, and we're going to speed up approvals, and we're going to build, you know, half a million homes a year.

But I think we'll all be waiting to see the results and whether whoever forms government can actually deliver and meet those challenges. Najud, always so great to have you here. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. That was economics reporter Najud, always so great to have you here. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. That was economics reporter Najud Almoliz.

And earlier on our panel, I was joined by feature writer Shannon Proudfoot and columnists Robin Urbach and Marsha Lederman. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our associate producer is Azra Souter.

Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.