Poilievre isn't pivoting, but he's stepping lightly around a few things

During his campaign for the Conservative leadership in 2022, Pierre Poilievre said he would never pivot.

"I am who I am," he said.

To a great degree, that has held true — despite periodic suggestions from the commentariat that he should change course.

Pierre Poilievre is an ideological conservative who believes there is an inherent value in lower taxes and lower public spending. The campaign platform he tabled on Tuesday broadly hews to those principles.

An income tax cut, reductions in capital gains taxes, the elimination of the GST on new homes and freezing the excise tax on alcohol would reduce federal revenues by $10.5 billion next year and by $20.6 billion in the fourth year of the Conservative plan. On the other side of the ledger, a Conservative government would in its fourth year cut $1 billion from Crown corporations (including the CBC), reduce foreign aid by $2.8 billion and cut hundreds of millions from federal programs meant to support the housing, artificial intelligence and clean tech sectors (Conservatives would no doubt argue the specific programs were wasteful).

By the fourth year of the Conservative plan, spending on outside contractors by the federal government would be reduced by $10.5 billion. Shrinking the public service would save another $2.9 billion. Trying to do those two things at the same time could prove challenging.

The Conservatives commit to an increase in defence spending and would send billions to municipalities to reduce development charges, but the platform does not envision major spending increases in any other areas. There is a commitment to "honour" existing federal-provincial agreements on health care, child care and pharmacare (though only three provinces and one territory currently have pharma deals). 

But if there is a hint of a pivot in this platform it is something that's missing — the word "woke," at least in the English version of the platform.

Over the last three years, Poilievre has regularly used "woke" as an all-purpose pejorative and his party's Quebec platform included a commitment to "put an end to the imposition of woke ideology in the federal civil service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research."

The English national platform that Poilievre released on Tuesday reprints 14 of the 15 items in that Quebec platform, but the ban on "woke" is missing. In the French version, the "woke" commitment is included. The platform also doesn't repeat Poilievre's vow to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada or ban his ministers from attending the World Economic Forum.

The word "notwithstanding" also does not appear, though the Conservatives do hint at their intention to use the notwithstanding clause when they commit to "ensure consecutive sentences for mass murderers."

Poilievre would surely say that he is who he is and those commitments stand (it seems unlikely that he has gone "woke" over the course of the last few weeks).

But at least some of the debate now will involve the Conservative Party's math. 

The Conservatives have promised a "dollar-for-dollar" law that would require cabinet ministers to find a dollar of savings or new revenue for every dollar they want to spend on a new initiative. But the Conservative platform adds a new wrinkle to the party's fiscal approach — projecting higher government revenues from the increased economic growth that the party believes will result from its policies.