Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney holds a press conference while visiting the Irving Shipyard as part of his Liberal Party election campaign tour in Halifax, N.S., on March 25.Blair Gable/Reuters
For many elections, the Liberals campaigned on the left and then governed from the right, a formula that allowed the party to neutralize the NDP without actually enacting all that much of its rival’s agenda.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney now appears to be attempting a mirror-image of that time-tested formula by co-opting big chunks of the Conservative platform in order to blur the policy differences between himself and Pierre Poilievre.
The federal carbon fuel charge, once the linchpin to the Liberals’ climate change strategy, is gone (or at least reduced by administrative fiat to zero). The capital gains tax hike – once heralded by the government as the only way to stave off class warfare – has been nixed. Mr. Carney is proposing cuts to personal income tax, says he is skeptical about the need for a deadline-driven emissions cap for the oil and gas sector, is talking about making Canada a superpower in conventional energy and is eliminating the GST on some new homes.
And the manner, at least, in which he talks about fiscal matters is strikingly different than that of the Trudeau government, with a nod to paring back the cost of the federal bureaucracy, reducing the rate of expenditure growth and focusing spending in areas that will boost long-term prosperity. (Details are … somewhat lacking to date.)
Mr. Carney is sounding more and more like the business-oriented Blue Liberals of the past – a small-c Liberal, so to speak. So far, his strategy of pivoting to the (slight) right of centre is proving remarkably successful. The Liberals have rocketed from a 20-point deficit in the polls to edge ahead of Mr. Poilievre’s Tories, given a boost by Donald Trump’s histrionics. If the trend holds, Mr. Carney will have engineered one of the most unlikely comebacks in Canadian political history.
But for that to happen, the Liberal Leader will need to resolve a series of contradictions. For progressive voters who have jumped from the NDP to the Liberal column, he will need to provide assurances that he is not simply a Tory in disguise. Perhaps he can add a few billion dollars in social program spending to counterbalance the billions in tax cuts.
If he does so, another contradiction will emerge, this time with right-of-centre voters who have migrated away from the Tories. Will they be happy to see Mr. Carney water down his pledges of fiscal rectitude?
For the moment, Mr. Carney is navigating between those contradictions, helped in part by media coverage that saunters past such incongruities. A case in point: stories about the Liberal campaign continually mention that Mr. Carney has cashiered the federal fuel charge – typically without adding that he has proposed a second industrial carbon tax designed to subsidize consumers’ green expenditures, but whose costs are overwhelmingly likely to flow through to households.
Similarly, there seems to be a marked lack of enthusiasm for questioning the sincerity of the Liberals on their serial volte-faces on the carbon tax, the capital gains tax and other stances that the party spent months describing as foolish and callous – when being proposed by the Conservatives. Up to a point, Mr. Carney has some distance from such questions; he was not in government when those decisions were made.
But most of the cabinet ministers he named were. And Gerald Butts, a keystone of the first Trudeau term, is one of the new Liberal Leader’s advisers.
Mr. Carney, his ministers and the rest of his bench should be asked – was the Trudeau government wrong in its costly interventionist spree? Or are you simply bending to prevailing political winds for now?
There are some signs of the policy fog around Mr. Carney starting to dispel. At a news conference on Monday in Gander, N.L., the Liberal Leader was pressed on how he would pare back spending to pay for his proposed income-tax cut. He was clear to exempt transfers to individuals and to provinces, as well as social spending such as child care, dental care and subsidized pharmaceuticals.
But what would he cut? There was vague talk of efficiencies through artificial intelligence, and setting goals based on outcomes rather than inputs. Sooner or later, Mr. Carney will have to spell out his plans; he is unlikely to be able to coast through even this short campaign on such generalities.
Sooner or later, Canadians will find out which Mark Carney they would be getting as prime minister: the interventionist climate change warrior that has lured progressives back to the Liberal fold, or the conservative-minded fiscal hawk that has purloined the Conservatives’ shiniest objects.