To the Point for the Week of April 26, 2026
To the Point for the Week of April 26, 2026
Recent Ontario polling trends aren’t the consequence of controversy, but the absence of action. The key to understanding the federal government’s economic update this week is to completely disregard the ten years prior to it.
ONTARIO
Is a Course Correction in Order?
The Ontario section of To the Point has been the most difficult to write over the past few weeks. To put it bluntly, it’s felt like the pace at Queen’s Park has slowed considerably, making for slim pickings of topics to discuss and analyze. The legislature took an extended 14 weak break from December to March 23, 2026. The House will only have met for about a month’s worth of legislative activity, well short of a typical legislative calendar. What significant or notable pieces of policy or legislation could get executed or passed in that short amount of time?
This is not to say the government hasn’t been doing anything of value. Budget implementation Bill 97 received Royal Assent last week, activating all the budget vehicles, including the Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund. The government has also introduced Bill 100, the Better Regional Governance Act, and Bill 105, the Protecting Ontario’s Workers and Economic Resilience Act, 2026. The latter bill affords the province more control over regional councils, including appointing “strong” regional chairs and adjusting council composition, while the former is an omnibus bill geared toward cutting red tape, speeding up permitting, and expanding certain worker protections. These pieces of legislation don’t make for big headlines tied to the day-to-day issues affecting Ontarians. The problem for the Ford government right now isn’t that nothing is happening. It’s that nothing feels like it is.
Juxtapose the “all quiet on the Western front” political atmosphere in Ontario with the frequency and perceived scale of moves the federal government executed this week alone, as well as broader positive developments for the country. Essentially, the federal government looks like it’s moving. Ontario doesn’t. The federal Finance Minister, François-Philippe Champagne, presented the Spring Economic Update 2026: Canada Strong for All, which included notable measures that made big headlines this week, including the establishment of the Canada Strong Fund and Team Canada Strong skilled trades supports, against the backdrop of a dodged recession that will see modest, yet resilient growth in the Canadian economy. It also claims Canada’s fiscal position is stronger than expected, with deficits smaller than projected in Budget 2025.
This isn’t an endorsement. In fact, there are serious holes to poke in virtually everything the federal government has claimed this week, especially around the Canada Strong Fund as a so-called “sovereign wealth fund.” Whether these are sound policies isn’t what’s important. The perception of what these policies embody is what’s important. The once strong “get things done” brand that embodied Ford Nation is now perceived as more of a “what have you done lately?” Canadians now associate strong execution with the federal Liberal Party.
One can make a strong case that this brand spillover from the federal Liberals is giving a boost to their Ontario counterparts, as a Liaison Strategies poll released this week shows the leaderless Liberals have taken the lead in the party horse race by two points, 38% to 36%. “The trend is always more important than the snapshot,” said David Valentin, Principal at Liaison Strategies. He’s right. The trend since October has been the Progressive Conservatives slowly bleeding support to a party with no leader. Worse, the Liberals are buoyed by 44% support in Toronto and 43% in the broader GTA. The personal numbers for Ford aren’t better: 68% disapprove of the job he’s doing, and 65% of Ontarians think the province is on the wrong track. The only saving grace is that the Ontario NDP have seen a commensurate rise in support as well, putting into play vote splits in certain Liberal vs. NDP ridings.
Liaison attributes the PCs’ recent slide to the jet controversy dominating the last two weeks of political headlines. Our take is that it’s more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” in the absence of significant, positive news.
While no public poll has measured how the federal brand is shaping perceptions of the provincial brand, one thing is for certain, the overwhelming and consistent support the Prime Minister is personally receiving can’t be hurting their provincial counterparts. Ontarians may be cooling on the Ford Nation style of populism and are seeking someone with stature, molded by corporate boardrooms or at the cabinet table. Essentially, someone like Mark Carney.
In the context of the Ontario Liberal leadership race, who stands to gain the most from this shift in voter preferences? Martin Regg Cohn seems to think it’s not Nathaniel Erskine-Smith. Word is that NES’s star has been fading on the ground. Navdeep Bains (who we profiled in To the Point two weeks ago) is now expected to enter the race after recently announcing he will be leaving his Chief Corporate Affairs role at Rogers Communications to launch a leadership bid, with the backing of many party veterans and grassroots organizers. Bains has the most to gain from a potential shift in style and experience preferences among Ontario voters. While not a former central banker, Bains would still benefit from his experience at the federal cabinet table and in the corporate world. He could frame his leadership campaign as essentially the provincial spinoff of the federal Liberals. Voters may find that very appealing if they can get past some of his past conversies.
June 7th marks the eighth anniversary of Ford’s election as Premier of Ontario. Looking back, the Premier has a strong record of big projects and growth, but politics is almost never about what you did as much as “what have you done for me lately?” Conversation among politicos has been consistent in the belief that it may be time for a course correction for the Premier and his PC government. No panic yet, but the Premier and his caucus need a shake-up. Perhaps a cabinet shuffle is in order? Whatever it is, the Premier is well advised to think of something in the near term to stymie the loss of support and confidence from the public. Because right now, it doesn’t feel like anything is happening.
FEDERAL
Out with the Old, in with the “New Government”
As government relations consultants, we are always seeking to identify and understand the underlying assumptions of a particular policy, legislative initiative, or budget commitment. Understanding the basic premises of the government’s actions allows us to advise clients on where governments are overpromising. This week’s federal Spring Economic Update 2026: Canada Strong for All reveals an enormous underlying assumption that will underpin the government’s priorities and actions for the foreseeable future. The update and its message rollout rely upon the notion that Canadians have largely forgotten, or have consciously put, the Trudeau era behind them. That includes amnesia relating to the political and fiscal habits that characterized that administration, which has allowed Prime Minister Carney to rebrand the same habits as something novel.
The update maintains the Liberals’ year-long message track on sovereignty, nation-building, and long-term competitiveness. At its core, it frames Canada as strong, resilient, and stable through global economic uncertainty, pointing to nominal GDP that is roughly $46 billion higher than previously forecast in part due to higher oil prices, a 2025-26 deficit now projected at about $66 billion—roughly $11 billion lower than in Budget 2025—and a 10.2 per cent net debt-to-GDP ratio compared with a 101.8 per cent average across the rest of the G7.
Highlights include $25B over three years in seed funds for the Canada Strong Fund (marketed as a Sovereign Wealth Fund, more on that shortly), a Team Canada Strong initiative to recruit, train, and hire 80,000–100,000 new Red Seal skilled trades workers by 2030–31, and a $1.7B package tied to the Improving Housing Supply Act, tabled in March, that is intended to be a one-time transfer to cut development charges and other barriers to juice housing supply.
Notions of strength, sovereignty, and resiliency peppered throughout the update are a contrast to the Trudeau-era notions of fairness and inclusion that defined virtually every policy position from economic growth to climate change and Indigenous reconciliation. Superficially, the differences between the Trudeau and Carney eras are marketing and branding. The underlying fiscal habits from the Trudeau era, namely spending beyond Canada’s means and borrowing the difference, continue to inform the new Liberal government’s approach to financing their priorities.
Observers are taking note of Carney’s explicit promise to not only spend less, but to restore fiscal discipline to the federal government’s finances. The Spring Update suggests that is not the case. The update adds $83.2B more spending over 2025–26 to 2029–30 than Trudeau’s last plan before leaving office. It also doubles projected five-year deficits to $309.2B compared to the $154.4B previously forecasted. Moreover, the federal debt is projected to reach $2.9T by the end of the 2020s, a continuation of borrowing that already doubled net debt from about $687B to nearly $1.5T between 2014–15 and 2025–26. If memory serves, Chrystia Freeland resigned over a much lower deficit.
Economists and political analysts are also pointing out that windfall oil prices and tax revenues provided Ottawa with $60B in fiscal leeway, but the economic update allocates $37.4B of that to new initiatives rather than materially paying down the deficit. For example, the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit that replaced the old GST/HST credit has been increased by 25% for five years up to June 2031, and more money is being committed to climate initiatives rather than reducing overall spending. The expanded spending will materially impact debt servicing. Debt servicing charges are expected to rise from approximately $55B per year now to roughly $80–81B by 2030–31. This means more will be spent on interest than federal health transfers and more than is currently raised from the GST.
The rebranded initiatives in Carney’s update are reminiscent of the old Liberal government, relying on Canadians to look past the continuation of its fiscal habits. The new Canada Strong Fund, touted as a Sovereign Wealth Fund akin to Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (also called the Oil Fund), is a rebranded and tweaked version of the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) and the Canada Growth Fund. Unlike Norway’s Oil Fund, which is funded by net cash flow from oil industry activities such as taxes, state direct ownership income, and licensing fees, the Canadian version has no such revenue stream. The Oil Fund’s capital also grows from investment returns on its global portfolio, which are then reinvested. Money only flows back from the fund to the budget to cover the non-oil deficit, and withdrawals are constrained by a fiscal rule: over time, the government can spend only about 3% of the fund’s real value per year, the estimated long-run return.
The Canada Strong Fund is the opposite of the Oil Fund. Norway’s fund is buoyed by taxes on oil companies, cash flow from the state’s direct financial interest in the sector, dividends from oil companies, and various licensing and production fees. The Canada Strong Fund is financed by… more debt. The Spring update includes $25B in new federal borrowing to launch the fund. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Prime Minister Trudeau also leaned on the federal balance sheet to stand up arm’s-length funds and use public dollars to de-risk projects. The Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund launched under Trudeau rely on the assumption that private and institutional money will follow once Ottawa signals its willingness to absorb losses. And while each of these vehicles has its own mandate and toolkit, in practice they all amount to more programs, more entities, and more bureaucracy layered on top of existing structures to chase broadly similar goals.
It may be too early to assess the impact of the Canada Growth Fund. The CIB, on the other hand, has been operational since 2017 and has taken heavy criticism for the sloth-like pace at which projects are delivered. With $35 billion in federal capital, it has also failed to live up to the roughly $140B in private capital that was once projected.
So, here we go again. Another attractive-sounding arm’s-length agency, fund, or what have you, funded by public borrowing and deficits, with promises of big benefits. The Carney government is making a big assumption that Canadians will treat the past decade of fiscal policy and grand projects as an aberration and instead be inspired by a new narrative around strength, resiliency, and sovereignty, rather than fairness, inclusion, and equity.
Christopher Mourtos, writing on behalf of ONpoint Strategy Group
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ONpoint Strategy Group is all about helping clients make an impact where it counts. Specializing in government relations and strategic execution, our team—Nico Fidani-Diker, Mariana Di Rezze, David Morgado, Christopher Mourtos, Ellen Gouchman, and Brandon Falcone—works closely with clients to navigate complex political landscapes and bring their goals to life. With a practical, results-driven approach, we build strong relationships, craft winning strategies, and make sure every step brings clients closer to meaningful outcomes. We’re passionate about making sure our clients are heard, supported, and positioned for success.