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TOP STORY
As the Liberal leadership election solidifies into six contenders, the race has repeatedly featured the odd spectacle of candidates completely reversing themselves on policy pledges.
The winner will have to take the helm of a wildly unpopular party set to be plunged almost immediately into a general election. Thus, many candidates are taking the tactical step of feverishly distancing themselves from a government whose tack they were defending as recently as last month.
Below, a gallery of some of the most obvious examples of Liberal leadership candidates reversing themselves on something they claimed to support just a few weeks ago.
Karina Gould on Canadians not trusting the Liberal Party
The main quote from Gould’s campaign thus far is that Canadians have lost trust in the Liberal Party of Canada. She’s said it several times. “Canadians have lost trust in our party, and part of it is because I don’t think we responded to the issues that they were telling us mattered to them,” was one example, issued at a Thursday press scrum.
Since 2023, Gould has been government house leader — which means she’s the MP most often called upon to defend the government’s record in the House of Commons. This awkwardly means there are dozens of examples of her telling Parliament that the Liberal government knows what it’s doing and has Canada’s best interests at heart.
There are multiple examples just from Dec. 17, the last day of Parliament. “That is what the Liberal government is squarely focused on: Canadians, protecting the Canadian economy and protecting Canadian jobs,” Gould said in response to one question from the Conservatives. “This government’s objective is always to protect Canadians, Canadian jobs and the Canadian economy,” she said in response to another from the NDP.
Chrystia Freeland on the carbon tax
Freeland has turned so decisively against the carbon tax that her campaign has issued social media posts mocking the Conservatives for suddenly being stuck with boxes of unsold “axe the tax” merchandise. Even before she had officially announced her candidacy, sources were telling the press that Freeland would scrap the consumer carbon tax, “a policy (Canadians) have been clear they do not support.” Although, just like Carney below, she has signalled she will preserve other forms of carbon pricing, including an industrial carbon tax.
Freeland has tabled four federal budgets that re-affirmed the Liberal government’s commitment to carbon pricing. The most recent, in 2024, repeatedly cited the carbon tax as a means to make “life more affordable,” as lower-income Canadians receive more in carbon rebates than they pay in taxes.
Four separate times in 2024, Freeland repeated this specific word-for-word defence of the carbon tax in the House of Commons: “Carbon pricing is widely recognized as the most efficient means of reducing our greenhouse gas, or GHG, emissions, which is why the Government of Canada continues to make sure that it is not free to pollute in Canada.”
As recently as last month — just one week before she was ousted as finance minister — Freeland told a House of Commons committee, “the fact is that eight out of 10 Canadians get more back through the Canada carbon rebate.”
Mark Carney on the carbon tax
Right out of the gate, former central banker Mark Carney hinted that he would preside over the end of the consumer carbon tax. In the Edmonton speech announcing his candidacy, Carney promised to replace it “with something that is at least, if not more, effective.”
Carney, however, has been one of the world’s most vocal proponents of climate change policy — including the taxing of carbon emissions. As of this writing, he’s still the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and there are any number of public speeches and interviews in which he’s advocated the necessity of penalizing fossil fuel usage.
It’s even in his 2021 book, entitled Value(s): Building a Better World for All. “The Canadian federal carbon pricing framework is a model for others,” he wrote, calling carbon pricing “one of the most important initiatives” to address climate change.
Chrystia Freeland on the capital gains tax
Last week, Bloomberg News reported that Freeland, if elected leader, would scrap a proposed hike to the capital gains tax.
Freeland didn’t just introduce the capital gains hike as finance minister. She was its most vocal defender. This included an April 2024 budget speech in which Freeland said that opponents of the hike were seeking nothing less than a stratified, near-feudal society.
“Do you want to live in a country 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?” she said.
IN OTHER NEWS
It’s typical for political parties to experience at least a little bit of a boost in the polls after discarding an unpopular leader. A new Abacus Data poll finds that this seems to be true for the Liberal Party, except that they’re still poised for an utterly crushing defeat at the hands of the Conservatives. Abacus found the Conservatives way out in front with 43 per cent, against just 22 per cent for the Liberals. With those kinds of numbers, it would only be a matter of whether the Conservatives would score a majority in the next election, or a super-majority.
One of the last actions of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be to fill the remaining 10 seats in the Senate, according to a source who spoke to CBC. This is actually standard behaviour for any outgoing prime minister (with the notable exception of Stephen Harper). But as has been noted before in these pages, Trudeau’s appointment of nominally independent senators that aren’t beholden to any party could make for an Upper Chamber that is uniquely willing to stonewall the policies of a new Conservative government. In prior Parliaments, partisan loyalties were generally quite good at ensuring that senators didn’t unilaterally obstruct the will of the House of Commons, lest it look bad for the party overall.
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