By Ray Rivers
November 19th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Scheer, claimed his voting app wasn’t working then cast his negative vote for the record – once it was clear the budget would pass.
It was an unremarkable event – Mark Carney’s budget. The political leaders were doing what they do best – pretending. Mr. Poilievre pretended he really wanted to defeat the budget, yet positioned a couple MPs to abstain in addition to the ones who had legitimate reasons. In fact the former CPC leader, the duplicitous Andrew Scheer, claimed his voting app wasn’t working then cast his negative vote for the record – once it was clear the budget would pass.
Poilievre has retreated to his nasty old attack-dog outer self. Apparently that appeals to his base and there is a leadership review coming up. But the more he plays up that side of his personality, the more his public acceptability numbers fall – even further, that is.
The last thing Pierre Poilievre wanted to do was face Prime Minister Carney in an election debate.
So the last thing he would want is an election against the popular Carney. But instead of being honest and supporting Carney’s budget outright he pretended he was out to defeat it. And his stated objections to the budget, inflation, were as phony as his proclamation to defeat it.
The NDP fell all over themselves trying to explain how they were opposed to the budget and its cuts to public services but abstained just enough to make sure it passed. Without a permanent party leader and with no official party status, forcing an election, which nobody in Canada wants, might be hazardous to the health of the handful of MPs who still remain to make up that party.
Carney needs some big wins before he loses the fickle mass of voters.
Carney, for his part kept threatening that an election could be in the offing, even though he knew that the budget would pass. His popularity may still be in the positive zone but he knows the electorate is getting impatient. He needs some big wins before he loses the fickle mass of voters. Carney may be one of the most intelligent PMs in Canadian history but he needs to also be one of the more accomplished. To that end he was fortunate that October’s inflation numbers were as low as they are.
Green Party’s Elizabeth May sided with the Liberals.
It was interesting that the Green Party’s Elizabeth May sided with the Liberals. And this in spite of changes and cuts to the environmental agenda implemented by former PM Trudeau. May rationalized that Carney had promised to maintain Canada’s Paris climate targets and, in these times, that was enough for her. She didn’t want an election either.
The Elizabeth May I once knew couldn’t be impressed with some of these ‘Major Projects’ the government has announced. The newly announced LNG project, co-developed by another American outfit, is just more carbon after all. Doug Ford’s pet mini-nukes are a sop to allow him to keep climate friendly renewables out of the provincial grid. And Alberta is on the wish list for another pipeline to the environmentally sensitive west coast. But at least Nova Scotia is getting new wind energy.
Carney is planning for annual fall budgets, which raises the stakes, the risk of a miserable Christmas election, should his next budget(s) get defeated and the government and minority government be forced into election mode.
The NDP will have a new leader next year after the dismal experience of the hapless Mr. Singh. There are some new exciting candidates for the party which throughout history has been so instrumental in promoting programs and policies to make this country so proud – and different from its dog-eat-dog southern neighbour.
Poilievre can be expected to win his leadership review.
Mr. Poilievre can be expected to win his leadership review but that doesn’t mean he’ll be the next PM. His public polling numbers are in the toilet as Canadians ask themselves….”if he is so nasty as opposition leader what would he be like as prime minister”? And then they look south of the border for an answer.
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
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A Budget Criticism – Popularity –
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I particularly like your title containing the words “The political leaders were doing what they do best – pretending”. There’s a lot of that going around these days, at every level of government.
And your last paragraph on Mr. Poilievre is absolutely on track, in every way.
Refer back to Ray’s opinion piece of published November 6th in the comments section. where he acknowledged watching Pierre Poilievre’s interview on the CBC, but then willfully misrepresented the content of that interview in his writings.
It’s clear that we cannot trust comments from Ray regarding the opposition, and in this regard watch Question Period in the House of Commons yourself. Its not easy to watch, but what you will see, contrary to Ray’s assertions and those of the media, is Pierre presenting himself as the adult in the house, cool and composed, characteristics of a leader.
On the opposite side is are PM, the Finance Minister and Minister of Trade and Industry and associated other Liberal Ministers, yelling responses in coherently, repeating the same non-answers and often losing their cool. Look for yourself and make your own judgements, I can provide lots of evidence of such behavior.
Now on to the budget, the Liberals finally presented a budget, but all economic accounts it’s a stinker, manipulating budget guard rails, sinking Canada further into debt, raising the eye brows of financial rating agencies (See letter from Fitch), and doing little to advance the economic well being of Canada.
This is why Liberal pundits focus on the high school level drama and not the content.
All Parties knew well in advance there was never going to be a non-confidence vote around this budget. The NDP are going through their leadership race, heck, Liberals prorogued Parliament to have a leadership race – remember??
The Party that brings down the house at this stage, and forces Canada into a Christmas election will lose – this was calculated by the Liberals, hence a November budget.
The strategy here is to let the Liberals “wear” this budget for the next 6 to 9 months, they have shown they cannot deliver and only offer press releases. The NDP will have a leader, the Bloc will strengthen support in Quebec and the
Conservatives will continue their rise in the polls.
Current polls show the Liberals out of their honeymoon and in a statistical tie with the conservatives, modelling of aggregate polls including the most recent Nanos poll show the liberals loosing 13 seats!
And by the way, don’t hold your breath on a trade deal with the US, the Liberals need to continue to use Trump as the “boogie” man to manipulate Canadians, its they only plan they have, and it’s at the expense of thousands of Canadian jobs, steel, aluminum, auto and lumber.
Carney has a vision for this country…the opposition offers nothing…I dont know anyone who actually likes Poilivevre…I hope he gets to keep his job…
makes Carney’s job easier…
.
Carol, your analysis of the performance of Poilievre, fails to consider his ranking on the “axe the tax” file than resulted in PM Trudeau leaving. Carney now has to fix that mess, no easy task.
Why would the Conservatives want to trigger an election? Currently, the Conservatives are in no position to win a majority. But that may soon change. Fair-haired boy Carney will soon have to deal with the ACCESS TO INFORMATION, PRIVACY AND ETHICS committee as part of an ongoing opposition-driven investigation into whether the current conflict of interest rules need to be expanded due to the “unprecedented extent of the prime minister’s corporate and shareholding interests.” We have already seen that two of the companies in Carney’s portfolio will benefit (as will Carney) from his blessing of the new LNG facility.
Further, Poilievre is not popular with the voters—at least the ones who listen to Liberal propagandists of which Ray is one. The CBC’s “Power and Politics” never fails to run a negative story on Pierre Poilievre; in fact, David Cochran eager to please his Liberal masters seems to revel in it. Of course, if voters actually took the time to listen to Mr. Poilievre, they would discover that he is laser-focused on issues that matter to them, he is quite thoughtful in actually answering questions (when did anyone actually hear a Liberal answer with anything other than a carefully scripted word salad?), and has policy positions to deal with the Liberal-authored crises of the past decade. But again, you won’t hear any of this from CBC or any other MSM for the most part.