Conservatives promise to slash deficit and interest rates, but won't provide timeline

Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer insists a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre will commit to balancing the budget, eliminating the deficit, and helping bring down interest rates, but he won’t say how long it will take to accomplish those goals.

In an interview airing Sunday with CTV’s Question Period host Vassy Kapelos, Scheer repeatedly laid the blame for Canada’s 22-year-record key interest rate at the feet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

He said Trudeau’s spending drove up inflation, and therefore interest rates, but he wouldn’t commit to a date by which a government under Poilievre would eliminate the deficit and slash said interest rates.

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“Pierre Poilievre’s common sense plan to reduce those inflationary deficits will ease the pressure on inflation and therefore interest rates can come down,” Scheer said.

Scheer spoke with Kapelos from the Conservative convention in Quebec City on Friday, ahead of a more-than hour-long speech from Poilievre in his first convention since becoming the party’s leader nearly exactly a year ago.

In his address, Poilievre also repeatedly took aim at Trudeau’s economic record, saying “an economy where the people who build our homes cannot afford to live in them is fundamentally unjust and wrong.”

“That's what we're focused on. Pierre and our Conservative team have a common sense plan to bring inflation down, so interest rates can come down, so people can stay in their homes,” Scheer said. “That's what this is all about.”

He added the plan is “absolutely” to “get back to balanced budgets,” but he would not commit to a timeline, with a confidence-and-supply agreement between the Liberals and the NDP — which sees the NDP prop up the Liberal government in exchange for movement on a list of progressive policies — likely to hold off the next federal election until 2025.

“Canadians will see a plan for the next term when Pierre (Poilievre) unveils his election platform,” Scheer said. “But what I can tell you is that it will be a responsible plan, a common sense plan, because the window is closing.”

When pressed to lay out specifics, Scheer said his party has “identified many areas where the Liberal government has wasted money that would be low-hanging fruit.”

Namely, he said, the Conservatives plan to scrap the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Bank. Scheer said the former, a Crown corporation set up to support infrastructure projects through government-private sector partnerships, is not fulfilling its mandate. Meanwhile, he said the latter, a multilateral development institution, is being used to support the Chinese government expand its influence.

“And as I said, as we get closer to an election, when Canadians are going to be making that decision for themselves, we will unveil our plan and our platform, and it will be responsible and it will be prudent,” he said.

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Another issue central to Poilievre’s messaging over the summer has been housing affordability, and it appears to be resonating with Canadians, with recent Nanos Research polling showing the Conservative Party is the most trusted to address skyrocketing housing costs.

A report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) in June 2022 states that to restore housing affordability, “an additional 3.5 million affordable housing units are needed by 2030.” That's on top of the 2.3 million units by which Canada's housing stock is already expected to increase by 2030.

Scheer said the Conservatives are committed to building more homes, adding they’ve promised to incentivize municipalities to speed up approval processes while penalizing those who cause delays, and that Poilievre has promised to sell off thousands of federal buildings in order to convert them into housing.

But when pressed on whether the Conservatives under Poilievre will specifically commit to building 5.8 million new homes by 2030 to reach what was laid out in the CMHC’s report, Scheer didn’t say.

“We're going to lead efforts to ensure that Canadians have the homes they need to meet population growth. That is absolutely a commitment,” he said. “There are lots of ways to do that. We're going to be focusing on ensuring that municipalities do their job, and other measures as well, but absolutely the goal is to dramatically increase the number of homes that are built.”