Prime Minister Mark Carney insists the federal budget was crafted to contain a number of measures championed by MPs from other parties, and that those olive branches will become apparent in the coming days.
With one MP already crossing the floor to join the Liberals, Carney now needs only two more votes, or abstentions, to pass his budget.
The unanswered question is whether any of those measures will convince enough opposition MPs that letting the budget pass is in their interests.
“There were differing degrees of input which we received from the various opposition parties,” Carney said in Ottawa, the day after Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled his first budget.
“I know, in fact, that there’s a lot in this budget that reflects the input from those parties from specific projects to certain programs and reinvestment in them,” he said. “So those parties are aware, and part of this is a process of digesting the budget.”
While that digestion takes place, at least one Bloc MP, four Conservatives and as many as three NDP members now face the prospect of getting funding for projects in their ridings if the budget passes.
Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Deschênes will have to consider if the budget’s support for the Exploramer Shark Pavilion in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, Que., and the Chantier Naval Forillon shipyard in Gaspé are worth his vote, or at least his abstention.
NDP MPs and the choices they face
The budget also promises funding for the Filipino Community and Cultural Centre in the Vancouver area. While a specific location has yet to be chosen, NDP interim Leader Don Davies’s riding boasts a large Filipino population that would surely welcome the project.
Vancouver-Kingsway was the federal riding where the Lapu-Lapu Day Filipino festival turned tragic when 11 people were killed in a car-ramming attack. Davies’s riding might not get the centre, but with such a large community in his electoral district, he’ll have to consider whether he really wants to vote it down.
Similarly, the lone NDP MP in Alberta, Heather McPherson, must consider whether support for the Rapid Fire Theatre in her riding of Edmonton-Strathcona will tempt her to either abstain or vote for the budget.
NDP MP Gord Johns, who represents the B.C. riding of Courtenay-Albernihas, been a vocal supporter of implementing a clean technology tax credit for the use of biomass to create energy. The budget pledged to make that happen.
He’s also advocated for the federal government to establish an aerial firefighting fleet. The budget pledges to lease four aircraft at a cost of $257.6 million to “bolster provincial and territorial aerial firefighting capacity.”
Conservatives face personal, party dilemmas
Then there are the four Conservative MPs who might be looking closely at budget measures that hit close to home. They include:
- Kerry Diotte, whose riding of Edmonton-Griesbach has been promised support for the anti-poverty Bissell Centre.
- Warren Steinley, whose riding of Regina-Lewvan will get support for Regina’s RCMP Heritage Centre.
- Vincent Neil Ho, whose Greater Toronto Area riding of Richmond Hill South will get funding for a Victims of Flight PS752 Memorial in Richmond Hill’s Unity Park.
- Conservative MP Gabriel Hardy’s Quebec riding of Montmorency-Charlevoix has been promised money for an Earth sciences centre in La Malbaie.
More generally, opposition MPs have to consider if the overall moves in the budget merit its survival.
In the last election, for example, the NDP promised to create a Youth Climate Corps to help train and employ young people to respond to climate emergencies and gain work in renewable energy projects.
The NDP election promise was to spend $500 million on the program, while the Liberal budget earmarks $40 million over two years.
The federal Greens said that while the program “could be transformational,” its two-year timeline and much smaller budget mean it’s “at best a pilot project.”
The Greens had a lot of criticism for what they said were diminishing climate policy initiatives, but welcomed other measures on affordable housing, school lunches, dental care, high-speed rail and the move to validate foreign credentials.
The question is: are they enough to secure the Green Party’s lone vote in the House?
Conservatives and the Bloc
In the lead up to the budget, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sent a letter to Carney outlining some of his priorities.
The Conservative leader wanted to see a reduction in capital gains taxes, income taxes, taxes impacting homebuilding and the industrial carbon tax.
Poilievre didn’t exactly get what he wanted. The budget doubled down on the industrial carbon tax, held but did not deepen the one-percentage-point cut in the lowest income tax bracket and kept the promise to scrap a planned hike to capital gains made in March.
When it comes to cutting taxes on homebuilding, Carney kept his campaign promise to eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers on new homes up to $1 million, while reducing it on new homes between $1 million and $1.5 million.
Most notably the budget blew past Poilievre’s demand to keep the deficit under $42 billion — with a deficit of about $78 billion.
These measures may not be enough for the party’s leader, but it remains to be seen if they are enough for some of his MPs.
Aside from the Bloc’s Deschênes, who has some decisions to make about his Quebec riding of Gaspésie-Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine-Listuguj, the Bloc as a whole appears unmoved.
The party made six demands of the budget, which it said the Liberal government “chose not to address.”
