FEDERAL ELECTION 2025 PARTY CAMPAIGN PROMISES

Last updated: Wednesday, 23 April

PURPOSE

• Track the election campaign commitments of the major registered political parties— Liberal Party of Canada, Conservative Party of Canada, Bloc Québécois, and the New Democratic Party of Canada— who meet the threshold of participation for the official leaders’ debate. Criteria for participation is found on the Leaders’ Debate Commission webpage.

• Provide a starting reference point to understand how each major political party plans to address issues that matter to the federation, and to help begin advocacy discussions.     

ADDITIONAL CONTEXT

• • Political parties released their complete, costed platforms late in the election. As such, in addition to the platform documents, the commitments listed in this document are pulled from election campaign press releases, social media messages, media interviews, and campaign events, such as rallies or town halls. Sources are linked to each commitment. 
• • Commitments are included only if:
    • They are made after the election was officially announced on March 23, 2025. Policy positions from the 44th Parliament are not included because parties may have changed their views or strategies toward addressing issues.
    • They are related to CMHA policy priorities, or commitments that could have a meaningful impact on CMHA’s operations or delivery of services, are included.
    • • They are led by the federal government, or the federal party can clearly demonstrate how they would oblige provinces and territories to come to the table.

COMPLETE PARTY PLATFORMS

• • Bloc Québécois. Choisir le Québec. Released 29 March 2025.
    • • The Bloc does not translate documents in English and therefore their platform is only available in French.

• • Liberal Party of Canada. Canada Strong. Mark Carney’s Plan. Unite. Secure. Protect. Build. Released 19 April 2025.
    • • The fiscal and costing plan is separate.

• • New Democratic Party of Canada. Made for People. Built for Canada. Released 19 April 2025.
    • • The cost of commitments is separate.

• • Conservative Party of Canada. Change. For an affordable life. For safe streets. For Canada First. Released 22 April 2025.
• •  

COMMITMENTS BY PRIORITY AND PARTY

MENTAL HEALTH, ADDICTIONS, & HEALTH CARE

LIBERAL

• • Make permanent the Youth Mental Health Fund. (This fund was launched in Budget 2024 to support the delivery of community-based services.). SOURCE.
• • A one-year top-up of $500 million to the Emergency Treatment Fund to support municipalities (in partnership with community organisations) to confront the toxic drug and overdose crisis. SOURCE.
• • Legislate an annual $1,100 refundable Health Care Workers Hero Tax Credit for Personal Support Workers (PSWs). SOURCE.
• • Launch a Task Force for Public Health Care Innovation to invest and scale up made-in Canada public health care solutions, improve the quality of data, and evaluate and ensure accountability in public investments in health care, including the $25 billion bilateral agreements signed with provinces and territories in 2023-2024. SOURCE.
• • Table legislation to ensure Canadians can access their health care data. SOURCE.
• • Recruit qualified doctors through a new global recruitment strategy that will fast track the arrival of doctors into Canada. SOURCE.
• • Establish a new practice fund to help family doctors with the costs of opening a practice, such as new clinic spaces and medical equipment and technologies. SOURCE.
• • Invest $4 billion to construct and renovate community health care infrastructure like hospitals and clinics. This commitment would be cost-shared with provinces and territories. SOURCE.

CONSERVATIVE

• • Fund treatment for 50,000 Canadians. Provide treatment centres with set amounts of funding based on the number of months they keep their clients drug-free. Funding this program would come from making cuts to the federal government’s existing safer supply programs and launching a $44 billion lawsuit against opioid manufacturers. SOURCE.
• • End federal funding to organizations running harm reduction programs. SOURCE.
• • Distribute 300,000 nasal naloxone kits. SOURCE.
• • Ban supervised consumption sites from being located within 500 metres of schools, daycares, playgrounds, parks, and seniors’ homes and impose strict new oversight rules. SOURCE.
• • Pause new federal exemptions for new sites and prescribed alternatives programs by allowing an exemption issued under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to expire in 2025. SOURCE.
• • Existing federal consumption sites will have to focus on connecting users with treatment, meet stricter regulatory standards or be shut down. SOURCE.
• • Prevent provinces from unilaterally opening overdose prevention services (Overdose prevention sites are lower-barrier and easier for provinces to open without federal approval than supervised consumption sites). SOURCE.
• • Eliminate the escalator tax on wine, beer and spirits back to 2017 levels, and end automatic annual tax increases. SOURCE.

NDP

• • Launch a new plan to cover services like psychotherapy and counselling for those who are currently not covered by work plans. SOURCE.
• • Ensure all Canadians have access to a family doctor by 2030, by incentivizing provinces with an additional 1% in Canada Health Transfer funding if they deliver on “guaranteed access” to primary care. SOURCE.
• • Work with provinces to reduce the administrative workload, such as filling out sick notes, that can take up time that could otherwise be spent with patients. SOURCE.
• • Fund 1,000 additional family medicine residency placements for internationally-trained doctors living in Canada and waive testing and licensing fees, with the intention of keeping doctors in underserved communities. SOURCE.
• • Implement a pan-Canadian licensure to help medical professionals practice where they are needed across the country. SOURCE.
• • Provide housing and facilities for family doctors and primary care teams to keep healthcare providers in the North. SOURCE.
• • Pay student nurses during clinical training so students are not doing unpaid work. SOURCE.
• • Hire 35,000 nurses by 2030. SOURCE.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

LIBERAL

• • Create a new entity called the “Build Canada Homes” (BCH) to build affordable housing at scale (including on public land) and providing financing to affordable homebuilders. SOURCE.
• • Transfer all affordable housing programming (such as the Affordable Housing Fund and the Federal Lands Initiative) from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to the new BCH. SOURCE.
• • BCH will provide $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to affordable home builders. $4 billion will go towards long-term fixed-rate financing for affordable housing builders. $6 billion will go towards rapidly building deeply affordable housing, Indigenous housing, supportive housing, and shelters. SOURCE.
• • Develop homelessness reduction targets with every province and territory to inform Housing First investments, improve access to treatment, and end encampments community by community. SOURCE.
• • Facilitate the conversion of existing structures into affordable housing units by reducing the tax liability for private owners of multi-purpose rental when they sell their building to a non-profit operator, land trust, or non-profit acquisition fund, so long as the proceeds are reinvested in building new purpose-built rental housing. SOURCE.

CONSERVATIVE

• • Sell 15% of the federal government’s 37,000 buildings, and require these buildings be turned into affordable housing. SOURCE.
• • End federal delays by cutting the bonuses, salaries and possibly terminating the employment of staff at the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation if they fail to approve housing applications in 60 days or less. SOURCE.
• • Require cities to free up land, speed up permits and cut development charges to build 15 percent more homes each year. If they miss their target, their federal funding will be withheld, equal to how much they miss their target by. SOURCE.
• • Return to a housing first approach to homelessness, ensuring people get off the streets into a stable place to live with the support they need to rebuild their lives. SOURCE.

NDP

• • Create a new $8 billion Canadian Homes Transfer over four years that will reward cities that build quickly, allow more townhomes and apartments, and prioritize homes near transit. The Fund will also commit to 20% non-market housing in every neighbourhood. SOURCE.
• • Create a new $8 billion Communities First Fund over four years that will support provinces in building the housing infrastructure needed for growth—like water, transit, and public services—while requiring rent control, inclusive zoning, and homelessness strategies. SOURCE.
• • Table a “Renters Bill of Rights” under which federal funding for housing will only be given to provinces and municipalities that put in place some form of rent control. SOURCE.
• • Build over 100,000 rent-controlled homes by 2035. SOURCE.
• • Ban fixed-term leases, reno-victions, demo-victions, and other landlord practice. SOURCE.
• • Boost the Rental Protection Fund by an additional $2 billion to help non-profits such as tenant associations and housing co-ops purchase affordable apartments and to keep them affordable when they come onto the market. SOURCE.
• • Establish a Housing Insecurity Prevention Benefit to help 50,000 people in critical need find homes. This program will be piloted and delivered through existing Reaching Home community entities, ensuring a community-based approach to helping Canadians experiencing chronic homelessness. SOURCE.

JUSTICE & PUBLIC SAFETY

LIBERAL

• • Introduce legislation to protect children from online exploitation and sextortion. SOURCE.
• • Make hate-motivated murders including femicide, a constructive-first degree murder offence. SOURCE.
• • Raise the penalty for the distribution of intimate images without consent and make it a criminal offence to distribute non-consensual sexual deepfakes. SOURCE.
• • Automatically revoke gun licences for individuals convicted of violent offences, particularly those convicted of intimate partner violence offences, and those subject to protection orders. SOURCE.
• • Amend the Canada Post Corporation Act to allow police to search for and seize fentanyl and other contraband in Canada Post mail with a general warrant. SOURCE.
• • Expand the Court Challenges Program. SOURCE.

CONSERVATIVE

• • Amend the Criminal Code to give police the tools to charge individuals when they endanger public safety or discourage the public from using, moving through, or otherwise accessing public spaces by setting up temporary structures, including tents. SOURCE.
• • Clarify in law that police can dismantle illegal encampments and ensure individuals living in them who need help are connected with housing, addiction treatment, and mental health services. SOURCE.
• • Give judges the power to order people charged for illegally occupying public spaces with a temporary structure and simple possession of illegal drugs to mandatory drug treatment. SOURCE.
• • Allow judges to sentence offenders to mandatory treatment for addiction, giving courts the power to order treatment as an alternative to prison. SOURCE.
• • Require recovery-oriented rehabilitation in prisons, ensuring that more serious offenders struggling with addiction participate in evidence-based therapeutic living programs in prison, where such treatment is available. SOURCE.
• • Ensure safe hospitals with penalties for weapons in hospitals and assaults on healthcare workers. SOURCE.
• • Introduce legislation to protect against AI deepfakes of intimate images and modernize laws against online harassment. SOURCE.
• • Create a new criminal offence of “assault of an intimate partner” to deliver tougher sentences for anyone who abuses an intimate partner. SOURCE.
• • Strict bail conditions for anyone accused of intimate partner violence, including GPS ankle bracelet monitoring, with any breach of conditions resulting in immediate imprisonment. SOURCE.
• • Murder of an intimate partner, one’s own child, or a partner’s child will be treated as first-degree murder instead of manslaughter. SOURCE.
• • Pass a Three-Strikes-and-You’re-Out Law. This law will stop individuals convicted of three serious offences from getting bail, probation, parole or house arrest. Individuals with three serious convictions would receive a minimum prison term of 10 years and up to a life sentence and be designated as Dangerous Offenders. Earned release would be dependent on clean drug tests and through other measures like learning a trade or upgrading their education. SOURCE.
• • Repeal bills C-75 (focused on reducing delays, streamlining bail processes, and addressing concerns about the overrepresentation of Indigenous people and vulnerable populations in the system) and C-5 (that ended the mandatory minimum penalties for certain drug, firearm, and tobacco offenses), and replace with:
    • Life for five or more counts of human trafficking, importing or exporting ten or more illegal firearms, or trafficking, producing or exporting over 40mg of fentanyl.
    • 15 years for traffickers caught with between 20mg to 40mg of fentanyl.
    • Five years for gang-affiliated extortion, four years for extortion with a firearm, and three years for all other extortion convictions.
    • • Six months to three years for a third offence of motor vehicle theft. SOURCE.

SOCIAL SERVICES & TAXATION

LIBERAL

• • 1% tax cut (from 15% to 14%) on the lowest federal tax bracket (the first 57,375 of earnings for all Canadians). SOURCE.
• • Reducing the minimum amount that must be withdrawn from a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF) by 25% for one year. SOURCE.
• • Increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement by 5% for one year. SOURCE.
• • Temporarily waiving the one-week employment insurance (EI) waiting period. SOURCE.
• • Suspending rules around separation for a six-month period, so workers don’t have to exhaust severance pay before collecting EI. SOURCE.
• • Making it easier to access EI by increasing regional unemployment rate percentages. SOURCE.
• • Expand the Labour Mobility Tax Deduction for workers travelling more than 120 km from their home to a job site, and commit to significantly increasing the per-year tax deduction limit. SOURCE.
• • Provide an Apprenticeship Grant of up to $8,000 for registered apprenticesin the skilled trades. SOURCE.
• • Provide a new upskilling and training benefit up to $15,000 for workers in priority sectors—including health care and construction— who are in the middle of their careers who need to access new skills training. SOURCE.
• • Review and reform the process to apply for the Disability Tax Credit (DTC) now that the DTC has become the gateway to key federal programs like the Canada Disability Benefit, as well as consider expanding the eligibility criteria to include additional impairments. SOURCE.

CONSERVATIVE

• • 2.25% tax cut (from 15% to 12.75%) on the lowest federal tax bracket (the first 57,375 of earnings for all Canadians). SOURCE.
• • Keep the retirement age at 65 for the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. SOURCE.
• • Allow working seniors to earn up to $34,000 tax free (an increase from the current $24,000 threshold) SOURCE.
• • Automatically approve veteran disability applications if they are not processed within 16 weeks. SOURCE.
• • Make the caregiver tax credit refundable. SOURCE.
• • Rename and stream the Disability Tax Credit to “Certification of Disability” and make access automatic for related benefits. SOURCE.
• • Double the reach of the Ready, Willing and Able program (funded by the Government of Canada’s Opportunities Fund for Persons with Disabilities), helping 4,000 Canadians with

autism or intellectual disabilities find and keep jobs. SOURCE.

• • Allow seniors to keep their Registered Retirement Savings Plan savings growing in their accounts until age 73. (Currently, Canadians must choose to withdraw their money from their RRSPs, transfer it to a Registered Retirement Income Fund or use it to purchase an annuity by the end of the year they turn 71.) SOURCE.
• • Require banks to recognize apprenticeships for Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs). Financial institutions that offer RESPs will be required to recognize all skilled trades and apprenticeship programs as eligible RESP programs, ensuring that all related expenses qualify for Education Assistance Payments. SOURCE.

NDP

• • Raise the federal Basic Personal Amount (the sum on which taxpayers do not pay federal income tax) to $19,500. SOURCE.
• • Permanently remove the GST from essentials like grocery store meals, diapers and strollers, plus monthly bills including cell, internet and heating bills. SOURCE.
• • Double the forthcoming Canada Disability Benefit. SOURCE.
• • Recognize more than 780,000 nurses and Personal Support Workers with a $5,000 Canadian Health Care Workers Tax Credit. SOURCE.

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