Government 'worries' over potential election after Bloc, Conservative budget demands

OTTAWA — Liberal House Leader Steven MacKinnon said Tuesday he is starting to worry that Parliament’s two main opposition parties are signalling that the government should not count on their support for its upcoming budget.

Should that spending plan fail to pass, it would cause Parliament to fall and pave the way for Canadians to head back to the polls for a second time in the same year.

“If an election is necessary, we would obviously, reluctantly, because we don’t think Canadians want an election, but election there will be,” MacKinnon told reporters on his way into the government’s weekly cabinet meeting.

Carney’s government is set to table its first budget on Nov. 4.

“What I’m seeing in Parliament worries me,” MacKinnon said, noting that the date is two weeks away.

As a minority government, the Liberals must find another party willing to pass its budget.

Opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre released a letter on Monday addressed to Carney, laying out his party’s demands.

Most notably, he said the Liberals must keep the federal deficit below $42 billion.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, an independent watchdog of government, recently predicted the deficit could grow to nearly $70 billion for 2025-2026. That included the $5 billion in spending Carney promised last month to flow to industries hard hit by U.S. tariffs, including the auto sector. 

While his government has asked all federal departments, except for national defence, the RCMP, and Canada Border Services Agency, to find 15 per cent in savings over three years, Carney has also vowed to spend billions more on bolstering Canada’s military capabilities to meet its NATO spending target of two per cent of its GDP.

Poilievre, in his letter, also called for a slew of tax cuts, including to the industrial carbon price, which remains a core plank of the government’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking to reporters, MacKinnon called the Conservatives’ demands “ludicrous.”

“We have two opposition parties, principally that aren’t taking this matter very seriously,” he said.

MacKinnon also criticized Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, who has dampened expectations that his party would be willing to support the government’s budget.

The Bloc has also laid out a list of demands, including six that the party has presented as being “non-negotiable.”

They include an increase in provincial health transfers, as well as a 10 per cent increase in Old Age Security payments to those aged 64 to 75. Both proposals would result in billions of additional government spending.

The Bloc is also calling for the federal government to send Quebecers around $814 million to account for the rebates Canadians living in provinces subject to the now-cancelled federal consumer carbon tax received as the spring federal election got underway, which those in Quebec did not receive because the province has its own system.

Interim NDP Leader Don Davies has also called for more health spending and told reporters the party would not be willing to support a spending plan that takes an “austerity approach.”

Davies has met with Carney, with MacKinnon adding on Tuesday that Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has had additional conversations. 

-With files from The Canadian Press and Financial Post’s Jordan Gowling

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