EDITORIAL: Liberals put us into the economic abyss​on March 29, 2025 at 9:00 pm

The conventional wisdom about the federal election is that concern over U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war on Canada has overtaken concern about carbon taxes as the ballot question.

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But that’s a false framing of what’s at stake.

The defining issue facing Canadians is the high cost of living and our declining standard of living, including the negative impact of Trump’s tariffs and Liberal carbon taxes on our economy.

According to Statistics Canada, real (inflation-adjusted ) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, a widely accepted measure of prosperity, dropped by 1.4% last year, following a 1.3% drop in 2023.

Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies for the Fraser Institute, wrote in The Hub that real GDP per capita in Canada during the Justin Trudeau/Liberal years from 2015 to the present rose by a meagre 1.9%. In the U.S., it increased 14.7%.

Over its decade in power, the current Liberal government compiled the worst record of economic growth of any Canadian government since the Great Depression.

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The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that Canada will have the lowest real GDP per capita growth rate of any developed nation from 2020 to 2050, lower than every other member of the G7 to which Canada belongs, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Japan.

The Liberals tout their new leader, Mark Carney, as Canada’s saviour for the economic problems the Liberals themselves contributed to during their lost decade in power from 2015 to 2025.

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But Carney’s prescription for getting out of the economic abyss the Liberals put us in has been to copy the campaign platform of Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives on everything from reducing government spending, deficits and debt, to cutting government bureaucracy and the size of the public service, to ending runaway immigration and lowering punishing taxes on the middle class.

They’ve even promised to end their signature policy — the consumer carbon tax — which Poilievre has been advocating for years, although they continue to cling to Trudeau’s industrial carbon tax, which the Conservatives would scrap.

By their admission, the Carney/Trudeau/Liberals are saying, in effect, that they were wrong and the Poilievre Conservatives were right on all these issues, underscoring the importance of voting wisely on April 28.

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