Poilievre fires at Carney over deficits
- Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre used a video attack on April 28 to press Prime Minister Mark Carney over deficits, spending restraint and housing delivery. - Poilievre pointed to Ottawa’s $25.5 billion April-to-February deficit against a $78.3 billion full-year forecast, while demanding Carney cap red ink at $31 billion. - The clash landed as Ottawa tabled its spring fiscal update after Carney’s first budget projected a much larger 2025-26 deficit. (cbc.ca)
Pierre Poilievre used a video broadside on Tuesday, April 28, to accuse Prime Minister Mark Carney of running up deficits while failing to deliver enough housing. (cbc.ca) (youtube.com) The attack landed the same day Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled the federal spring economic update, which the government had scheduled for April 28, 2026. (canada.ca) (cbc.ca) Poilievre’s central fiscal argument was built around new Finance Department numbers showing a $25.5 billion budgetary deficit from April 2025 through February 2026. The same monthly fiscal monitor said the comparable deficit a year earlier was $19.3 billion. (canada.ca) (globalnews.ca) That $25.5 billion figure is far below the $78.3 billion deficit projected in Carney’s November 2025 budget for the full 2025-26 fiscal year, with only March left to be reported. CBC reported Carney had signalled a smaller-than-forecast shortfall before the update was tabled. (budget.canada.ca) (cbc.ca) Poilievre also demanded that Carney hold the deficit to $31 billion by cancelling or cutting major items, including a rail project and the federal gun buyback program. That demand was public before Tuesday’s update and framed the Conservatives’ line of attack going into the fiscal statement. (cbc.ca) Housing is the second half of Poilievre’s argument. He has tied Carney’s spending plans to a claim that Ottawa is adding bureaucracy instead of homes, while the Liberals have created Build Canada Homes as a new federal housing agency. (youtube.com) (canada.ca) Build Canada Homes was launched on September 14, 2025, and the government says it is meant to build affordable housing at scale, finance projects and speed construction with modern building methods. The agency says it had approved more than 1,100 rental homes in Ottawa as of April 23. (canada.ca 1) (canada.ca 2) Some of Poilievre’s housing and labour claims are harder to verify cleanly from public data released this week. Statistics Canada’s March labour release is current, but the housing starts and completions tables were reissued on April 28 after corrections affecting data from 2010 through 2025. (statcan.gc.ca 1) (statcan.gc.ca 2) The fight is really over what the new fiscal numbers mean. Carney’s team has pointed to a better-than-forecast deficit path, while Poilievre is using the same moment to argue the government should cut much deeper and stop creating new federal machinery. (cbc.ca) (canada.ca) By the end of Tuesday, the headline number had not changed the politics around it: Poilievre treated the smaller deficit as proof Carney can cut more, and Carney treated it as proof his fiscal footing is stronger than advertised. (cbc.ca)
