Joe Oliver: Shh! Was that the Liberal leadership race getting underway?

financialpost.com:

Anita Anand and Chrystia Freeland recently drew public attention to their contrasting personas and political positioning. Anand, now President of the Treasury Board, was ousted as Minister of National Defence, supposedly for advocating too strenuously to fund the cash-strapped military and for excessive self-promotion. Clearly undeterred, she was quick out of the gate of her new gig with a letter to cabinet colleagues ordering them to come up with $15.4 billion in expenditure cuts over the next five years. For her part, Freeland used a commencement address at Northeastern University in Boston to ask rhetorically whether capitalist democracy is still effective.

Were those the two opening salvos in the campaign for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada? Caution is advised in such matters. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” (Yevgeny Prigozhin should have read his Emerson.) But launching a leadership campaign must be very tempting for would-be Liberal prime ministers. According to the latest Abacus poll, only 27 per cent of Canadians think he should run again, while the Liberals trail the Conservatives by 12 per cent.

As for the salvoes themselves, let’s start with the nothing-burger: spending cuts. You have to hand it to the Liberals for brazen theatrics: the show goes on without a hint of embarrassment over hostile crowds and periodic booing. For almost eight years now, both the PM and PMO have demonstrated clear and strong aversion to fiscal prudence. But they embrace the ineffable whenever it resonates politically, as it does now, since the public understands that profligacy causes inflation, people’s biggest current concern. Making life even more unaffordable, last year the