If, as the Liberals say, Pierre Poilivere is a terrible leader and the Conservatives are bankrupt of ideas, why does Prime Minister Mark Carney keep stealing them?
The latest example of Carney’s political plagiarism is
his support for a new pipeline to deliver bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands to tidewater in B.C. and from there to Asian markets by ocean-going tankers.
But that’s just one of many instances of Carney governing like a Conservative – including reversing previous Liberal policies – using ideas first advocated by Poilievre and the Conservatives.
Others include
ending the consumer carbon tax, the middle class tax cut, killing the capital gains tax hike, reducing immigration levels, postponing the EV mandate, bail reform and cutting the GST for new home buyers.
All of these policies – and policy reversals – by Carney are designed to win over Conservative voters to the Liberals in the next election in pursuit of a Liberal majority.
Of course the Liberals will argue they carried out their policies – and policy reversals – in more responsible (= watered down) ways than Poilievre and the Conservatives would have done. But that doesn’t change the fact that the political momentum for these policies came from the Conservatives.
Poilievre, for example, was warning that the high immigration targets the Liberals implemented post-pandemic would inevitably lead to a housing crisis, which is exactly what happened – while Liberal immigration ministers were suggesting anyone who criticized their ill-advised policy was a racist.
That was until they finally conceded Poilievre was right, that they had indeed
allowed their immigration, international student and temporary foreign worker programs to expand beyond Canada’s capacity to absorb them and belatedly, if somewhat half-heartedly, started to lower them.
Even so, it will take a long time for the Canadian economy to recover from that Liberal blunder.
Indeed, during the leadership race he eventually won, Carney himself cited the fact the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau he now hoped to lead, had allowed immigration levels to get out of control, one of the reasons he said, that the Canadian economy was weak long before U.S. President Donald Trump launched his trade and tariff war against us.
Carney also agreed with Poilievre and the Conservatives during the federal election that under a decade of Liberal rule, the government had allowed its spending, deficits and operating costs to spiral out of control, another reason for Canada’s weakened economy, pre-Trump, that he promised to fix.
The fact he didn’t fix it in
his November budget doesn’t change the fact that Poilievre was right on these issues.
Recent policies – and policy reversals – by Carney are designed to win over Conservative voters in the next election in pursuit of a Liberal majority
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To be sure, there’s nothing new about the Liberals stealing their ideas from the Conservatives, and for that matter from the New Democrats as well, as we all saw during the Trudeau era.
It’s one of the reasons they are Canada’s most successful national party – in power more than 70% of the time since 1900.
Liberals grow and shed their political policies in much the same way a snake sheds its skin, or Trudeau sheds personal responsibility.
A cynic would say that’s because they have no political principles, a supporter that their positions evolve in response to voter concerns. In one sense we should be thankful, given that without the presence of the Conservatives, many Liberal policies would be even worse than they are.
That said, the best way to ensure the delivery of Conservative policies, for those who are in favour of them, would be to elect the Conservatives and eliminate the Liberal middle men and women.
