The race to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada has barely begun and the best reasons not to vote for the Liberals in the next federal election are coming, rather hilariously, from the leadership candidates themselves.
Sounding for all the world like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, Mark Carney — up to now a senior economic advisor to Trudeau — says the Liberals over their decade in power overspent and overtaxed the middle class.
In addition, he argued, they failed to recognize how the corrosive effect of Canada’s recent bouts of high inflation and high interest rates, combined with shrinking economic growth per capita, have made Canadians feel as if they are stuck in the middle of an affordability crisis and under economic siege.
Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, said as a result of all this, plus a looming tariff war with incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, he will be laser focused on righting Canada’s listing economic ship if he wins the leadership race.
Leadership contender Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s long-time deputy prime minister and finance minister, wrote in a searing letter to her former boss last month resigning from cabinet, that he was infatuated with “costly political gimmicks” such as boutique sales tax breaks, instead of making serious efforts to get the government’s financial house in order in preparation for the tariff war.
Trudeau’s failure to do so, Freeland warned in a scathing indictment of the PM, “make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”
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Former Liberal house leader Karina Gould, in announcing her candidacy, told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton, “I’ll be very honest with you, Canadians don’t trust the Liberal Party of Canada right now, and I think that’s because over the past couple of years in particular we’ve gotten further away from the grassroots and talking about the things that Canadians care about.”
She also dumped on Carney and Freeland, saying Trump is unlikely to listen to a central banker (Carney) or former journalist (Freeland).
Carney, Freeland and Gould are all throwing shade at Trudeau’s highly unpopular carbon tax, although none has explained what they would do about it long-term.
Gould said she would freeze it at its current level of $80 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to moving ahead with the next increase scheduled for April 1, hiking it to $95 per tonne.
This ongoing spectacle of Liberal leadership contenders trying to win the Liberal leadership race by slam-dunking Trudeau’s political legacy illustrates the dilemma they are in on how to proceed.
Given the unpopularity of the Trudeau government, they have to portray themselves as agents of change and to do that they have to attack Trudeau’s record after having spent years defending it, including the carbon tax.
That raises the question of why they didn’t speak out sooner if things were so bad for so long.
The answer is that they were bound by loyalty to Trudeau, and the party, not do to so as long as Trudeau was insisting he would lead the Liberals into the next election.
The problem is that this is what makes the public so cynical about politics today.
In this case, the Liberals having lined up like trained seals behind Trudeau for almost a decade, and only now expressing what are either their real views, or whatever views they think will help them win the leadership race.