Liberal MP’s video on budget shortfalls fuels Conservative attacks

A Liberal MP is lashing out at Conservatives after they brought attention to a video he posted criticizing the Liberal 2025 budget, saying it “falls short” of the Liberal election promises.

Source: X (Nate Erskine Smith)

A Liberal MP is lashing out at Conservatives after they brought attention to a video he posted criticizing the Liberal 2025 budget, saying it “falls short” of the Liberal election promises and the expected “wartime effort” Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to deliver.

Toronto-based Liberal MP Nate Erskine Smith is calling foul and saying the Conservatives have taken him out of context after the Toronto-based Liberal MP released a video expressing the “good, the bad and the ugly” in his party’s 2025 budget.

Erskine Smith said the promised “generational investments” were not enough, and climate action was delayed, tax cuts for first-time homebuyers were insufficient for “moving the needle on development charges.”

“Expectations were set at a level that we failed to meet, including on the question of generational investments and the first stalled climate action. I don’t want to be too dismissive here, as the Canadian Climate Institute rightly highlighted the importance of a strengthened industrial carbon price,” he said in the video. “But apart from that, promise, there was nothing new.”

“It falls short of these specific promises in our platform, and it unfortunately falls well short, well short of the wartime effort that many of us thought we’d deliver,” Erskine Smith said in the video.

He also noted that the promise was to “spend less and invest more,” but the budget failed to deliver more capital spending than operational spending.

“The budget adds $140 billion in new spending over five years, $90 billion net after savings, and only 36% of the net new spending is capital,” he said. “There is a lot of deficit financing here to cover non-capital new spending. Yes, honouring our initial 2% commitment to NATO made sense, and a middle-class tax cut was a platform promise. But these are far and away the two largest financial commitments.”

He said the defence spending and tax cuts were “non-capital” expenditures and that his “kids shouldn’t pay for today’s military or for me to save $400 of income taxes and much needed Old Age Security reform.”

He also wasn’t happy with the budget providing corporate welfare to liquid natural gas facilities.

“If there’s a business case for LNG, there is a business case. We do not need more public dollars chasing fossil fuels,” he said. “Worse, we see major cuts of over $2.5 billion over four years to international development assistance, real Keir Starmer energy, that unfortunately caters to a prevailing, albeit short-sighted, current view among wealthy donor countries.”

Erskine Smith added, however, that these were “not easy times”, the budget was always going to involve “tough choices” and this is only Carney’s “first budget” after nine years of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.

“It can’t be expected to solve all problems, and the devil will be in the details of implementation in many cases, as it always is, from infrastructure and housing to innovation spending to the industrial carbon price to finding efficiencies in government in a manner that is fair and effective,” he said.

He said that despite his criticisms he believed the budget “meets the moment in part” on its focus on sovereignty and “focus” on spurring economic growth domestically.

“It’s certainly not a budget that should throw us into an election at such an uncertain time, but fairly it does not live up to its promise of generational investments,” he said. “ I joked that it was a pretty good Progressive Conservative budget.”

He said his point was “a joke” and continued to jest, saying “some conservatives agree,” referencing former Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont crossing the floor to join the Liberal Party moments after the budget was released.

Conservatives seized on the criticism of X. Conservative MP Chris Warkentin said that “even Liberals agree that Mark Carney’s budget is a failure. Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman said the media should be spending the next week discussing “growing cracks” in the Liberal caucus and asked whether Erskine Smith would still vote for a budget he criticized so heavily.

Erskine Smith called the Conservatives’ comments “a desperate lie,” and taking clips from highlighting his criticism of the bill was a “deflection.”

Liberal-leaning columnist for the Toronto Star, Althia Raj, criticized Lantsman as well, saying Erskine Smith was merely “normalizing” independent thought and his criticisms of the budget “isn’t news.”