Lorne Gunter: Mark Carney is just an extension of Trudeau-era policies

The problem with the Conservative campaign in this election has been its lack of identity. It’s been all over the place all at once. It gets started constructing a theme — like the Liberals don’t deserve a fourth term. Then it gets distracted by what it perceives as the need to show spending cuts. Or tax cuts. Or new spending to counter the Liberals’ charge that the Conservatives will hurt working people with mean-spirited cuts to services.

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The other problem for the Conservatives is that the focus of the Liberal campaign is all too clear — it’s to put lipstick on Trudeau’s economic, environmental, debt, crime and tax pigs and parade them through the town square as if they were some new creatures.

This extension of Trudeau-era policies is being given a free ride by most commentators and the bulk of voters in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

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All it took to get this free pass for the Liberals was to get rid of Justin Trudeau. And that’s the only meaningful thing they’ve changed.

The Liberals haven’t jettisoned his core advisers. They haven’t ditched the bulk of his cabinet. And most importantly, the Liberals haven’t gotten rid of Trudeau’s two core policies that led to Canada having the worst growth in the developed world during his decade in office.

The Liberals are still clinging to Trudeau’s insane belief that Canada can lead the world in transitioning from oil and gas to wind, solar and other alternative energy sources, while still attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and generating hundreds of thousands of well-paying new jobs.

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Indeed, if anything, Liberal Leader Mark Carney is even more committed to this fairytale than Trudeau was, as hard as that is to believe.

And the second thing the Carney Liberals are at least as steadfast on as the Trudeau Liberals were, is the idea that if Ottawa simply runs up massive new amounts of debt, that move will pay off manyfold in new economic activity.

As destructive as those policies have been over the lost Liberal decade, many voters and commentators seem disinterested that the Liberals under Carney intend to perpetuate them. All that matters from Ontario eastward (and to some extent in Vancouver) is that Trudeau is gone and Carney (swoon) has replaced him.

That this simple swap has have been the end of the Liberals’ electoral problems is proof that Trudeau had become the most detested prime minister in Canadian history.

In Carney’s platform, released over the weekend, he promised more added debt than Trudeau over the next four years ($225 billion versus Trudeau’s $131 billion). And he made the same sort of pledge as Trudeau to tax the rich to pay for a middle-class tax cut — a promise that ended up costing middle-class families at least $4,000 more per year.

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Over and over and over, Carney is promising to repeat the same mistakes that Trudeau committed, but with an economist’s twist on them so they sound smarter. And he’s wrapping them all up in the crisis of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Older voters in particular (who should be smarter because they’ve seen this all before) are gobbling up Carney’s pitch.

I still hold out hope that the tightening polls will tighten enough that the Conservatives can eek out a win next Monday (or at least hold the Liberals to a minority). But after the Conservatives’ platform release on Tuesday — with its own new spending ($34 billion) and its own deficits about half the size of the Liberals’ –— I can only hope the Conservative tone alone is enough to convince voters they would be better on tax and investment policy, productivity, crime and economic growth.

Because on the surface, there isn’t a solid theme that distinguishes the Conservatives.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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