Carney’s theft of Poilievre’s platform turns into a farce

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If Mark Carney and the Liberals are best equipped to take on U.S. President Donald Trump in a tariff war, why have they stolen their election platform from Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives?

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This ongoing theft has reached farcical levels, given that the Liberals’ economic record of their 10 years in power, as well as Carney’s own statements before entering politics, indicate they don’t believe in what they’re promising and will abandon most if not all of it if re-elected.

They’ve done it before.

Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father, mocked Conservative leader Bob Stanfield in the 1974 election for proposing wage and price controls to break the momentum of inflation, with the phrase “Zap. You’re frozen,” before bringing in wage and price controls in 1975 after he won.

Then-Liberal leader Jean Chretien promised in the 1993 election to get rid of the GST and replace it with “something else”? Chretien was PM for a decade and we’re still waiting.

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Then-Liberal environment minister Catherine McKenna assured Canadians before the 2019 election that Trudeau’s carbon tax wouldn’t go above $50 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas elections when it reached that level in 2022. After winning that election, Trudeau boosted it to $170 per tonne in 2030.

How many times are we going to be a nation of Charlie Browns believing that this time the Lucy Liberals will hold the football for us so we can kick ourselves into prosperity via their campaign promises?

Not when the primary measure of prosperity – real GDP per person – has contracted over the past two years, is almost 50% lower than in the U.S. and the Liberals have the worst record of economic growth of any Canadian government since R.B. Bennett during the Great Depression.

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The latest example of the Carney Liberals pilfering the promises of the Poilievre Conservatives occurred late last week, when Carney announced his government would cut the GST for first-time homebuyers of new or substantially renovated homes valued at under $1 million, saving then up to $50,000.

Poilievre promised that in October, 2024 – pledging, “You will pay no GST on new homes of under $1 million, saving up to $50,000.”

During the Liberal leadership campaign, Carney said that over their decade in power the Liberals had lost control of immigration, the federal budget, deficits and debt, hired too many civil servants and overspent and overtaxed the middle class, and for that reason he’s promising a middle class tax cut.

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Every one of those positions was advocated by Poilievre while Carney was in the private sector being the world’s leading global corporate shill for higher carbon taxes and “shadow” carbon taxes.

This while now claiming he will scrap Trudeau’s consumer carbon tax – another position he stole from Poilievre – but keep Trudeau’s industrial carbon tax, which will raise consumer prices instead of the taxes on them.

Poilievre also promised last week to scrap the industrial carbon tax while Carney is promising an additional new carbon tax – a tariff called a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” – which will see Canadians pay higher prices for imported goods from other countries.

Carney promises the Liberals won’t go ahead with increases to the capital gains tax they announced in their April, 2024 budget – increases Poilievre opposed from the start.

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By contrast, then-Liberal finance minister Chrystia Freeland said at the time that the $19.4 billion it would raise over five years was needed to prevent Canada from descending into a dystopian nightmare.

Or as she put it, a Canada where “those at the very top live lives of luxury, but must do so in gated communities, behind ever-higher fences, using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot.”

So, where are the Liberals going to get the money to prevent this nightmarish scenario?

That was followed by the Liberals’ fall economic statement in December 2024, where they overshot their deficit target of $40.1 billion for the 2023-24 fiscal year by 54%, coming in at $61.9 billion. This despite Freeland having described the lower deficit as a vital financial guard rail against excessive spending.

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Parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux, in assessing the Liberals’ fall economic statement, said their economic scenarios lacked transparency, downplayed risks and contingent liabilities facing taxpayers and made demographic assumptions likely inconsistent with government policies.

He warned the Liberals’ “ability (or willingness) to produce high-quality, timely financial statements continues to deteriorate.”

Based on their record, how can anyone believe Carney/Trudeau Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc who recently told Bloomberg Television that the Liberals are serious about reducing the size of government and spending less?

Anyone who agrees with those principles should be voting for Poilievre and the Conservatives, who authored the positions Carney and the Liberals stole, and who actually believe in them.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com

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