VAUGHAN, ONT.

— When she takes the stage, Anna Roberts does so to deliver a direct message to Conservatives. 

“We have to stop Mark Carney and the Liberals from winning a fourth mandate,” she tells the crowd at a rally in Vaughan, a city of nearly 339,000 that makes up part of the must-win Greater Toronto Area.

With only days left in the federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is here for two reasons.

He wants to hold what he can, which in this case would be Roberts’ seat in King—Vaughan that the Conservatives won by a little more than a 1,000 votes during the last election.

He also wants make gains in the riding next door, Vaughan—Woodbridge, which the Liberals currently hold.

Poilievre must do both if he hopes to win government on April 28, but not just here, across the region.

It is an outcome other federal party leaders are now openly saying will not happen, after weeks of successive public opinion polls suggesting the Liberals are leading in the crucial battleground of Ontario.

Before Poilievre takes the stage, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh made his

own plea to voters

 to elect as many New Democrats as they can to stop Liberal Leader Mark Carney from forming a “

super majority,” saying voters were only turning to Carney to reject the Conservatives. 

That’s what the NDP candidate in Vaughan—Woodbridge is dealing with, too.

Ali Bahman estimates that

one out of four doors he knocks on, he is informed by those inside that they plan to vote Liberal, even if it’s someone who likes what the NDP has to say. 

“This is something that is very, very, very common,” he says. “Like 25 per cent of the doors that I knock on.”

Diana Dugo could have been on the other side of one of those doors.

Leaving one of the riding’s advanced polling stations, Dugo says she wants the Liberals to win because she wants to keep the Conservatives out.

Her reason?

“Poilievre is too much like Trump,” she said. “That’s why I’m voting Liberal.”

While she was considering voting NDP, her decision came down to strategy. “They will not win and I don’t want the votes to be split.”

While New Democrats have never come anywhere close to victory in Vaughan, not even cracking double digits, losing support to the Liberals could give Carney’s candidates an advantage over Poilievre’s Conservatives, should they not be able to pull in enough of their own support, particularly in tight races.

It is a scenario that worries Tories.

Despite concerns Conservatives are struggling with older demographics, rally-goers like Joseph Gravina has confidence the younger generation he belongs to will turn out.

“Young people are going crazy for Pierre,” said Gravina, who is from Barrie, Ont.

Back on the rally stage, Roberts calls on the crowd to help by volunteering and voting, emphasizing that every person is needed.

“Please,” she says.

While Roberts is thinking about votes, the Liberal challenger in her riding is focused on knocking on doors.

Mubarak Ahmed is running what he calls a “baby campaign,” referring to how he was only nominated as a candidate several days after the federal election was called, meaning his race will be slightly shorter.

He is also not naïve about the challenge ahead. This marks Roberts’ third race after she was unsuccessful in the 2019 federal election.

Her campaign declined a request for an interview.

Ahmed’s focus is on building “door-to-door alliances.” Speaking to one household also opens the door to word of mouth spreading, he says.

“They’re calling their brother, they’re calling their sister, they’re calling their cousins.”

While he may be playing catch up, Ahmed has an advantage of being able to speak upwards of six languages, including Arabic, Pashto and Punjabi, which he credits to his international experience working in telecom.

His ability to connect with voters in their own language is a plus in a riding that is home to an ever-diversifying population, which is true for seats across Toronto’s suburbs.

“You go to every second or third door, there is a different language,” Mubarak says. Win or lose the election, he has set a goal for himself of wanting to be able to have a conversation in Italian.

“I’m meeting so many nonnas (grandmothers) and they are so kind,” he said.

Italians make up the largest ethnic demographic in Vaughan, followed by those who are Chinese, Jewish, Russian and Indian.

Earlier in the day, Poilievre and his wife, Anaida, visited an exhibit documenting the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

Inside his rally, Poilievre gives a shoutout to Italians in the crowd and tells a story from when he spent his Sunday evenings dining with a friend whose grandfather immigrated from southern Italy and spoke no English.

“The old classic Italian family,” he said to cheers.

That evening, Mubarak’s campaign was set to host a meet-and-greet billed as “cannoli (and) conversations.” His team knows it is a sensitive time for the community, given the recent death of Pope Francis and how almost 40 per cent of the city’s population identifies as Roman Catholic.

Still, the campaign carries on.

Out on the doorstep, the diversity of the riding is unmistakable. As Mubarak’s volunteers walk along streets in the neighbourhood of Maple, at least two people who open the door say they cannot vote as they are still permanent residents.

At another household, visitors are greeted with a Turkish greeting placed on the front door. One of the volunteers also switches from English when they encounter a woman with a list of largely municipal concerns she wants fixed.

Anna Gerrard has called Vaughan home for the past 12 years and has been visited by both Mubarak’s and Roberts’ campaigns in the past two days.

After a polite conversation with Mubarak’s volunteers, whom she tells that she considers herself a “Liberal at heart,” Gerrard acknowledges afterwards that she hasn’t fully made up her mind.

She remains a fan of former prime minister Justin Trudeau and was pleased to see Singh work with the Liberals to pass policies.

Earlier that day she also saw Poilievre release his platform and thought to herself, “Oh, OK sounds interesting.”

“They’re offering the best that they can, just like Mr. Carney is offering the best that he can,” Gerrard said.

“We’ll see how things go.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article described Ali Bahman as the Conservative candidate in Vaughan—Woodbridge. He is the NDP candidate.

National Post

staylor@postmedia.com

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

TOP STORY

With the release of the Liberals’ costed platform, the party is not just prescribing a huge increase to the deficits already planned under Justin Trudeau, it’s prescribing a peacetime debt splurge like few seen in Canadian history.

Over the next four years, the Liberal platform proposes to rack up $224.8 billion in new debt; an average of $56.9 billion per year.

Or, an average of $4 in new debt per day, per Canadian, for four consecutive years. It’s also roughly $100 billion higher than what had been previously tallied in forecasts set out by the prior Trudeau government.

Even when adjusting for inflation, that’s a rate of structural peacetime debt accumulation that’s really only been matched by two prior Canadian prime ministers: Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney.

And in that case, the sustained 1980s Trudeau/Mulroney spending spree would directly precipitate Canada’s 1990s sovereign debt crisis.

Although Carney’s predecessor presided over the largest spike in net sovereign debt in Canadian history (Justin Trudeau effectively doubled the debt in 10 years), much of that can be attributed to the overwhelming expense of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021 alone, Canada posted a $381.6-billion deficit.

While Trudeau’s non-COVID debt accumulation still reached generational highs, it fell far short of what is now being proposed by the Liberals under Carney.

In the Trudeau government’s last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the deficit of $25.3 billion was high enough that Statistics Canada cited it as the “largest deficit in seven years.”

Just a few months ago, it was considered scandalously high that Trudeau’s government had forecast an unexpected deficit of $48.3 billion for the current fiscal year.

The spending overrun was so controversial, in fact, that it would ultimately precipitate Trudeau’s January resignation. His then deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned in December citing the government’s inability to keep its “fiscal powder dry” in the face of economic threats from the United States.

Freeland’s departure would set events in motion for Trudeau to be pushed out in favour of Carney.

But with Carney laying out average deficits of $56.9 billion, he is proposing to rack up a level of non-emergency debt that will not have been matched since Mulroney’s second term, which ran from 1988 to 1993.

In the four final budgets tabled by the Mulroney government, Canadian debt swelled by the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $280 billion.

Aside from that, there’s really only two other prime ministerial terms with that level of new structural debt: Mulroney’s first term (1984 to 1988) and the final term of Pierre Trudeau (1980 to 1984).

Mulroney’s first term, which ran from 1984 to 1988, racked up deficits equivalent to about $300 billion in 2025 dollars. Pierre Trudeau’s final term broke all spending records before and since by amassing the 2025 equivalent of $377 billion.

What’s different with the proposed Carney budgets is that Canada has a larger economy and more people, meaning that the burden is more widely shared.

However, Canada is also sitting atop an existing debt burden far higher than anything that existed in the 1980s. Sovereign debt has now peaked at about $1 trillion for the first time, with interest charges now costing Canadians $53.7 billion per year as of last count.

Canada continues to rank relatively low in international rankings of overall federal debt, but this measure often omits the fact that Canada’s subnational provincial governments are also carrying massive debt burdens.

When countries are ranked by “general government debt,” Canada emerges as one of the most indebted countries on earth. According to 2023 figures published by the International Monetary Fund, the total debt carried by Canadian governments is equivalent to 107.5 per cent of GDP.

The only countries with higher overall debt burdens are Japan, Italy, the United States, Venezuela, Greece and France.

The Conservative budget proposals put out this week also forecast four consecutive years of deficits, but at an expected total of $100 billion — about 40 per cent of what Carney is proposing.

ECONOMIST FIGHT

The University of Calgary’s Trevor Tombe has published probably the most detailed critique of Liberal spending plans. In a column for The Hub, Tombe wrote that “the entire fiscal trajectory of the federal government is now pointed in a potentially unsustainable direction.”

Tombe noted that the Liberal platform abandons two benchmarks that were previously used to set spending levels under the Trudeau government: Keeping deficits below one per cent of GDP, and ensuring that debt would continue to decline as a share of GDP. “Higher debt means higher interest costs — an estimated $2.3 billion more by 2028,” he wrote.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is also an economist, which he mentioned immediately upon being challenged with the Tombe report at a press conference. “I have more experience than he does and it’s important to state that,” he said.

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE

There’s an obscure federal agency called Policy Horizons Canada whose entire job is to try to imagine the future. Their most recent forecast, profiled by Postmedia’s Bryan Passifiume, predicts a chilling dystopia in which social mobility becomes so shattered that an underclass of propertyless Canadians are forced to forage for food. “People may start to hunt, fish, and forage on public lands and waterways without reference to regulations,” it reads.

It also warns that by 2040, Canadians may see “inheritance as the only reliable way to get ahead.” Thus will begin a kind of neo-feudalism of strict class barriers, with “algorithmic dating apps” used to prevent intra-breeding.  

The report came up on the campaign trail, with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre reading out whole sections of it at a press conference.

Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.

• Conservatives channel Viagra as record Ontario voters risk killing their mood: Election Power Meter
• Michael Higgins: We are heading for a nightmare — even the government thinks so

OTTAWA — A year-and-a-half before he became leader of the Liberal party, Mark Carney took on a daunting job. In August 2023, he

was appointed chairman

of a revamped board of directors at Bloomberg LP, a U.S. financial information and media company.

In a memo to staff, Michael Bloomberg, the co-founder and majority owner of the eponymous company, said he had previously worked with Carney on “climate finance initiatives” and

described the new team

as “the best and brightest.” Carney had finished his term as governor of the Bank of England three years earlier and had also taken on a role with the United Nations to promote climate initiatives.

But Carney was joining Bloomberg LP at a time of significant controversy.

Since the mid-1990s, the New York City-based company had faced a bevy of lawsuits alleging discrimination and harassment, some of which would later overlap with Carney’s time as chair. Sexism scandals had initially burst into the public eye during Michael Bloomberg’s run for the presidency in 2020.

Media reports show almost all of the lawsuits —

some reports found 40 cases involving up to 60 women

— recounted incidents that allegedly happened before Carney was appointed board chair. But one employee, who alleges in court documents she alerted her bosses about gender-based pay discrimination, says she was fired and marched out of the building nearly a year into Carney’s tenure.

“There’s no scenario where, as the chair of the board, Mark Carney wouldn’t have been briefed on ongoing litigation. He would have been aware, and he certainly would have been aware of some of the (alleged) systemic cultural issues at Bloomberg LP, specifically around the systemic pay and equity issues and sexism,” said Kathryn Marshall, a human rights and employment lawyer.

In fact, four employment lawyers National Post spoke to argued it’s a board chair’s job to set the direction of the company, and that a company’s culture can only be dictated from the top.

“If you’re going to take a job and there’s already a public scandal, as there was here, you either refuse to take it, or you take it on a condition that you’re allowed to deal with the scandal and end it. That’s clearly not what happened here,” said Howard Levitt, a senior partner at Levitt LLP, which specializes in employment and labour law, and who writes a regular column for Financial Post.

Carney is currently leading the Liberal party in an election he called shortly after being elected party leader to replace the unpopular Justin Trudeau.

National Post asked his campaign team whether he had made any effort to change the culture at Bloomberg LP or whether the company’s alleged problems raised any red flags before he took the job. His campaign staff pointed to his track before accepting the position.

“Mr. Carney brings a long track record of pushing for stronger women’s representation in business and finance and has consistently championed the benefits of diversity and inclusion,” said Mohammad Hussain, a spokesperson for Carney’s campaign.

“As prime minister, he will continue to lead with a strong commitment to respectful, safe, and empowering workspaces.”

Labour lawyer Annamaria Enenajor, a partner at Ruby Shiller Enenajor, said Carney’s role as chairman amid the allegations against Bloomberg LP is worth examining.

“I think the culture of an organization does start at the top. So to the extent that he saw and knew and understood the problem, what steps did he take to transform the culture? I think that’s a fair question,” said Enenajor.

But Enenajor also said it would have been extremely difficult for Carney to make any impact on the corporate culture in the short time he was there.

“These companies are such big beasts, so to expect a change within two years is challenging, unless he was brought in for that specific purpose,” she said.

In 2020, Michael Bloomberg, entrepreneur and former New York City mayor, endured a bruising

and costly run for the Democratic

presidential nomination as the press and his rivals criticized him for the culture at his company,

which was described

in press reports

as a degrading and hostile environment

.

One former salesperson had sued the company for workplace discrimination, alleging

Michael Bloomberg, then the CEO, had said she should “kill it,”

when he found out she was pregnant. Bloomberg denied the allegation and later reached a confidential settlement with the woman.

Bloomberg LP’s pattern of reaching these confidential settlements — enforced by non-disclosure clauses — was raised by Michael Bloomberg’s opponent Elizabeth Warren at a Democratic nominees’ debate and the

exchange was widely seen

as putting in a nail in the coffin of Bloomberg’s bid for the presidency.

In 2020, Michael Bloomberg acknowledged that non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) can create unfairness for women complainants. “I recognize that NDAs, particularly when they are used in the context of sexual harassment and sexual assault, promote a culture of silence in the workplace and contribute to a culture of women not feeling safe or supported,” he said. He offered to free three complainants from their NDAs.

Over the years, even after the revelations in the Democratic primary, Carney

has lavished praise on Michael Bloomberg

for

his “great leadership,”

philanthropic activities and because he “has improved the lives of countless people (in) the United States and across the world.”

Before long, that mutual admiration would result in Carney joining Bloomberg LP as its new chairman in 2023, while the company was still battling several harassment and discrimination lawsuits. Because Bloomberg is a privately held company, Carney’s compensation was not publicly disclosed.

A few months before Carney assumed his chair position, one senior employee had said she revealed information to her bosses that the company was underpaying women.

Su Keenan, a veteran news anchor, alleges in court documents she had discovered shocking disparities in pay between men and women at the company.

One example she showed

her boss in 2023 was a male colleague, 20 years younger than her and in the same role, allegedly making more than US$100,000 more per year and getting nearly double her annual bonus.

Keenan said she showed this information to her bosses in mid-2023, just before Carney was appointed chairman. After complaining about what she saw as discrimination, Keenan alleges she was moved to a desk in “a vacant lower floor on the far side” of the building.

She was later fired in February 2024, and the 25-year veteran of the company says she was escorted out of the Bloomberg LP building by security guards. Carney had been chairman for six months by then, although there is no indication of his role, if any, in the decision.

In June 2024, Keenan sued the company, alleging she was fired because she had complained about discrimination and gender pay discrepancies at the network.

Keenan’s lawsuit alleges the company used “discriminatory job codes” to hide the pay gap between male and female TV journalists in company systems. The lawsuit argues women in on-air TV roles were sometimes classified with codes that normally were reserved for off-air producers. Bloomberg LP had sought to have the case dismissed as invalid, but its motion

was denied last month by the New York State Supreme Court

.

Asked specifically about allegations of gender pay discrimination at Bloomberg LP, and more broadly in the corporate world, Carney’s team responded with the statement that he has “a long track record of pushing for stronger women’s representation” in the business world.

Indeed, Carney

made speeches when he was governor of the Bank of England

complaining that progress on gender equality in the workplace has been slow.

“For too long the representation of women in middle and senior tiers of management has lagged that in other leading sectors. For too long, results have fallen short of good intentions,” said Carney.

Carney’s team didn’t respond to a question from National Post about whether, when given the chance at Bloomberg LP to put his good intentions into action, he followed through with it.

Another gender discrimination case continues to

work its way through the American courts

. A former national security reporter at Bloomberg, Nafeesa Syeed,

alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2020

(before Carney’s time) that she was “demeaned” because of her Southeast Asian heritage and that the workplace was toxic.

The lawsuit alleges that Syeed was often mistaken for another Southeast Asian woman in the office and that, when she was rejected for a promotion, she was told it was because the job wasn’t a “diversity slot.” Bloomberg has sought to have the case dismissed and argued that it had no record of any complaint from Syeed while she worked there.

According to Business Insider

, it’s just one of nearly 40 civil suits against Bloomberg LP since 1996, brought by more than 60 women. Bloomberg LP has publicly denied systemic issues of pay inequity and sexism and a few of the cases have been settled out of court or dismissed.

Bloomberg LLP has denied allegations that it has a sexist corporate culture. The company told Business Insider it “strongly supports a culture that treats all employees with dignity and respect, and enforces that culture through clear policies and practices. Our diversity and inclusion efforts are designed to foster a culture where thousands of people are proud to work every day. It’s also why Bloomberg is consistently ranked at the top of surveys about inclusive workplaces, and why we’ve been rated the top company for career growth opportunities in the US.”

Carney’s campaign team, asked whether he was concerned about the culture of the company he joined in 2023, or whether he did anything to correct any problems, did not directly speak to the question.

“Mr. Carney became Chair of the Board of Bloomberg in August 2023. The company is best positioned to respond to the specific incidents you identify, the majority of which were reported years before his appointment,” said Carney’s spokesperson.

Lawyers that spoke to National Post said, at the very least, Carney should have made it a priority to get to the bottom of the problems.

Shalini Konanur, executive director and a senior lawyer at the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, said she couldn’t comment directly on Carney’s time at Bloomberg LP, but said that, in her experience, “the culture and tone is set from the top.”

“Those positions actually have weight in setting the tone and boards have weight in setting the priorities. And their employee is the CEO,” said Konanur. “There are things you can do in organizations, once you collect data, there are very concrete things you can do in an organization to deal with those issues.”

Another Bloomberg LP reporter joined Syeed’s lawsuit in 2020, alleging now-familiar complaints about pay discrepancies between male and female employees. The lawsuits would later be separated while Syeed’s claim was held up by jurisdictional wrangling.

Naula Ndugga, a producer at Bloomberg LP, alleged she had been paid less than her male counterparts since starting at the company as an intern. She argued male interns were paid $10,000 more than her when being hired out of the internship program.

Ndugga also alleges in the lawsuit she suffered racially insensitive treatment at the hands of her bosses and was depicted as an “angry Black woman” by a male supervisor.

The court documents contain an exchange about a subpoena issued to Ndugga’s therapist at the time, because Bloomberg LP lawyers argued the therapist’s notes weren’t sufficient to assess whether Ndugga genuinely experienced emotional distress. Bloomberg LP has sought to have the case dismissed on legal grounds.

Marshall said she has seen companies that use similar legal tactics that can make people not want to come forward.

“(A) defence strategy, which is very popular in the U.S., is just to go full scorched earth, and do whatever you can to make the victim regret the day they ever sued,” said Marshall.

National Post

• He saved the Liberal Party from oblivion. But can Mark Carney close the deal?
• What is a blind trust and why is everyone asking Mark Carney about his?

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Welcome to National Post’s campaign Power Meter, where we will track the shifting tides of the election. As the race unfolds, we’ll rank parties, candidates and other characters based on momentum, performance, and public perception. Who’s gaining ground? Who’s losing steam? Keep checking in as we measure the moments that could shape the outcome.

BATTLE OF ONTARIO:

Hockey’s “Battle of Ontario” got off to a one-sided start on Sunday when the Toronto Maple Leafs spanked the Ottawa Senators 6-2 on home ice. And the battle for Ontario’s 122 federal seats looks to be trending in a similarly lopsided direction with less than a week to go until election day.

Poll aggregator 338Canada

had the Liberals ahead in 82 Ontario districts and competitive in as many as 95 districts on Tuesday. The Liberals haven’t flirted

with the 100-seat mark

in Canada’s largest province since the early 2000s. The Conservatives, meanwhile, could tumble as low as the mid-20s in their Ontario seat count after winning 40 seats there in the last federal election in 2021.

POWER METER RATING: POTENTIAL KINGMAKER 

EARLY VOTING:

Easter long weekend was anything but restful for election workers as 7.3 million Canadians

flocked to the polls

over four days of advanced voting, shattering the old record of 5.8 million, set during the last federal election in 2021. Wait times of well over an hour were reported at multiple precincts, with some voting stations

even running out of ballots

. Some political scientists predicted at the start of the campaign that

the election’s high stakes

, driven by U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to both the economy and national sovereignty, would drive up turnout to levels not seen in decades. The robust early turnout numbers so far back that up.

POWER METER RATING: YUGE!

Targeted ads:

The Conservative Party created quite the buzz with

a 30-second spot

depicting two seniors talking politics at the driving range. The ad caught a number of eyeballs over the long weekend when it was slotted into the

heavily watched first round

of the NHL playoffs. Just in case there was any ambiguity over the target audience,

a casting call dug up

by journalist Stephen Maher shows directors were looking for “two non-union White male performers aged 65-75.” And while the ad contained familiar Conservative blue branding, some viewers

couldn’t help but notice

its generous borrowing of well-worn tropes from ads for

a little blue pill

.

POWER METER RATING: SENIOR STIMULATING

National Post

• A record 7.3 million Canadians voted in advance polls
• Conservatives promise over $70B in tax cuts and $34B in new spending

Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.