Carney accuses Poilievre of using ‘phantom numbers’ in campaign platform

Liberal Leader Mark Carney, second from left, walks with Liberal candidate for Louis-Hebert Joel Lightbound, left, Liberal candidate for Quebec Centre Jean-Yves Duclos, second from right, and Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand in Quebec City on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

TROIS-RIVIÈRES — Liberal Leader Mark Carney is accusing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre of relying on “phantom numbers” and lowballing the cost of his party’s platform, released Tuesday.

Both Carney and Poilievre are looking to poke holes in each other’s platforms — Carney by claiming the Conservatives wouldn’t spend enough to counter a looming economic crisis, and Poilievre by accusing the Liberals of presenting a high-spending plan that would weaken the country’s fiscal position.

Poilievre said Tuesday a Conservative government would chop away at the deficit over the next four years, and claimed Carney would inflate government debt.

In a press conference in Trois-Rivières, Que., Carney said the question is which party is best suited to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump and manage Canada’s finances.

“Is it going to be a group that made it up on a napkin, released it a couple days before the election and has never taken responsibility for these types of decisions in the past?” he said.

Carney’s platform would add roughly $129 billion in new spending, including a one-percentage-point tax cut to the lowest income bracket that would add to the deficit over the next four years.

Carney also has pledged to separate the budget into operating and capital streams, and to balance the operating side by 2028-29. But he would still run a $48-billion deficit on the capital side for that fiscal year.

The Conservative platform projects a $14-billion deficit by 2028.

Carney said if his party had “made the assumptions that the Conservatives did about growth in our platform, we’d be in a fiscal surplus in five years.”

“We are in a crisis. And in a crisis, you always plan for the worst. You don’t hope for the best. And so you don’t make those types of assumptions,” he added.

Carney’s tour moved through battleground Quebec on Tuesday, hitting Quebec City, Trois-Rivières, Shefford and St-Bruno.

His stops included breakfast and a walkabout around a drizzly Quebec City with Mayor Bruno Marchand, and a stop in a Granby canteen where Carney made poutine.

He finished the day with a rally in Laval, where he leaned on his existing Quebec bench strength. Video featuring testimonials from key Quebec cabinet ministers played on a loop and the crowd waved signs prominently featuring faces of Quebec MPs.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly introduced local candidate Annie Koutrakis, before Carney came onstage — sporting a Montreal Canadiens jersey.

Earlier in the day, Champagne joined Carney in Trois-Rivières, where the two toured a factory owned by Marmen, an equipment and machinery manufacturer.

Champagne told reporters before the press conference that the Conservatives’ platform shows “the world has changed but Pierre Poilievre has not changed.”

“It is clear that in the DNA of the Conservatives is cuts,” he said. ”The DNA of the NDP is about taxing. We chose investments.”

The Liberal campaign, which has been sounding the alarm on the threat posed by U.S. tariffs, has its eye on three ridings held by the Bloc Québécois.

Mont-Saint-Bruno-L’Acadie and Shefford are districts where the Liberals placed second in the last election, and Trois-Rivières was a tight three-way race in 2021.

A Leger survey for The Canadian Press, published Tuesday, suggests the Liberals are well in front in Quebec at 42 per cent, followed by the Bloc at 26 per cent and the Conservatives at 22 per cent. The poll was conducted between April 17 and 21. The Canadian Research Insights Council says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

At the start of this year, the Bloc seemed to have a shot at forming the official Opposition. It’s now at risk of winning fewer than the 12 seats it will need to keep official party status.

Carney told reporters Tuesday his message to Bloc voters is that he would protect supply management and the French language in negotiations with the United States.

“Within a week, the prime minister of Canada is going to be sitting down with the president of the United States,” he said.

“Only the federal government can make those protections in these negotiations.”

Written by Anja Karadeglija in Trois-Rivières and Kyle Duggan in Ottawa.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 22, 2025.