Poilievre attacks Liberal spending plan while yet to release his own costed platform

Canadians continued to head to advance polls Sunday as federal leaders campaigned in B.C. and in the capital.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre continued to campaign in the Vancouver area on Sunday, using the backdrop of a grocery store in the suburb of Surrey to attack the recently released Liberal spending plan with an announcement on inflation.

Poilievre says overspending by the Liberal government has pushed up the cost of living, and to deal with I,t he says he would cut $10 billion from the money the government spends on consultants.

Poilievre maintains that the $130 billion in spending and investments included in Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s platform released Saturday will be inflationary, and would ultimately push up the cost consumers pay for groceries.

“Inflation is what happens when governments spend money they don’t have, so they just print the cash. More money bidding on a fixed supply of goods equals higher prices for everything,” he said.

Statistics Canada reported Tuesday that the annual rate of inflation cooled slightly to 2.3 per cent nationally in March, while food prices increased 3.2 per cent year over year.

With eight days left in the campaign, Poilievre and the Conservatives still haven’t released a costed platform for how he would pay for his previously announced multibillion-dollar commitments, saying only it is coming in the near future.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney pitched his platform as an investment in making Canada more self-reliant in response to the trade war with the United States.

On Sunday, Poilievre accused Carney of “printing money” during his time as governor of the Bank of England, and blamed him for that country’s recent bout of high inflation.

Carney led the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020 and was responsible for little of that country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation surged in both Canada and the United Kingdom in the pandemic recovery period and peaked in both nations in 2022.

Poilievre did not directly answer Sunday when asked whether he would maintain the national freeze on purchasing or transferring handguns, introduced by the Liberal government in 2022.

He claimed handguns on Canadian streets are largely brought in from the United States and said he would crack down on firearm traffickers to address handgun violence.

Owning a registered handgun purchased before the freeze remains legal in Canada, while such guns can be transferred legally only among certain exempted businesses and individuals.

Jagmeet Singh says the NDP will bring in price caps to help bring down grocery bills while instituting tougher rules to stop companies from raising prices on Made in Canada products.

The NDP leader said while Canadians are proudly choosing homegrown products in response to Donald Trump’s tariff threats, grocery giants are cashing in on that patriotism.

“If you’re raising prices on Canadian goods when the producers haven’t changed a thing—that’s not inflation. That’s gouging,” said Singh during a campaign stop in B.C. “We’re going to stop it. And if the grocers won’t play fair, we’ll legislate.”

Liberal Leader Mark Carney has scheduled an afternoon event in Ottawa.

Sunday was the second-to-last day of advance polls, which got off to a record-setting start on Friday.

Elections Canada said nearly two million people turned out to cast a ballot on the first day of advance voting, leading to long lineups at some polling stations.

A spokesperson for the independent agency said polls remained “very busy” on Saturday and workers were making adjustments to reduce lineups.