Joe Oliver: Carney is running hard against Trump and Trudeau
No good deed goes unpunished, but the Liberals are hoping bad deeds will be forgotten. Thus their leadership candidates are running against their own party’s record. For that to work, they’ll have to convince Canadians not to believe their lying eyes.
The current campaign is unusually disingenuous, even by the cynical standards of politics. The candidates have all effectively repudiated Justin Trudeau’s abysmal economic record and failed signature policies, even though they either advised or served under him and enthusiastically defended his dysfunctional performance for the better part of a decade. The renunciations include: the carbon tax, the hike in the capital gains inclusion rate, the GST holiday, bloated government and profligate government spending — i.e., just about everything that defined the past nine and a half years.
When candidates discard cherished beliefs and a lengthy legacy, it raises an obvious question: how real are their recantations? Especially since they remain unrepentant climate alarmists and believers in big-government solutions to every problem real or imagined. That is the question for Canadians who yearn for competence, integrity and common sense from a federal government that focuses on prosperity, affordability, safety, social peace, national pride and international respect.
The presumptive Liberal winner, Mark Carney, has been exploring the leadership off and on since 2011 and was repeatedly approached by the prime minister to be his minister of finance. He is a charter member of the Davos and Laurentian elites, with close ties to United Nations bureaucracy and the World Economic Forum. Yet to avoid being labelled a global technocrat far removed from the concerns of the average person, he
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