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“Let’s think about the jobs that will go, think about the services that will be cut or curtailed,” McKenna said.

She referenced the Conservative platform assessment by former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy. It found that considering the platform’s proposed spending reductions, “It can be expected that there will be a negative impact on the quality of government services to Canadians and/or public service layoffs.”

McKenna posed a question to voters: “Do you want to go back to the time of Stephen Harper where there was no respect for public servants? Where there were cuts across the board that hurt families, but also hurt the critical services that we’re providing to Canadians?”

Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative incumbent in Carleton and the Tories’ finance critic, was quick to fire back at the Liberals.

“We have a fully-costed plan verified by the Parliamentary Budget Officer that protects the current number of public service jobs over every one of the next five years.” Poilievre said. “They’re spreading fear and misinformation on the eve of an election to cling to power.”

He also suggested the Liberals were trying to distract from the grey areas in their own platform, including a “new tax expenditure and government spending review” that’s projected to save $10 billion over four years.

“They have not explained where one penny of that money is going to come from,” Poilievre said. “I suspect that the Liberals will do what they did in the ’90s, when their deficit was out of control. There will be Liberal job cuts and Liberal tax hikes to pay for out-of-control Liberal spending.”