LILLEY: The Liberals put Canada in this mess, not Trump
A decade of Liberal mismanagement is why we have rising unemployment, a broken immigration system and unaffordable housing
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It appears that for some Canadians, the only issue on the ballot for the upcoming federal election is Donald Trump.
That’s odd because Trump doesn’t live here, he’s not Canadian, he doesn’t vote here, and he doesn’t invent or implement Canadian policies.
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Yet, after nearly a decade of the same party in power, a party that was quite unpopular until recently due to their policies, we could very well re-elect the Liberals – not because of them or their leader but because of Trump.
I was speaking with a friend in the United States recently who said he could never imagine voting for a particular politician or party, effectively deciding an American election based on the actions of a foreign leader. But, in Canada, that is what a significant portion of the electorate seems to want to do – reward the Liberals with a fourth term because of who is in the White House.
While the Liberals have changed leaders from Justin Trudeau to Mark Carney, the team around Carney is the same. The thinking that Carney is putting forward is mostly the same as we saw under Justin Trudeau.
So, why reward them by giving them another mandate just because of Trump.
It wasn’t Donald Trump who gave us rising unemployment, it was the Liberals. The unemployment rate rose to 6.7% in the report released Friday compared to 5% two years ago.
A big reason for the change, the out-of-control immigration that the Liberals allowed to happen.
The working age population, counted as everyone 15 years of age and older, increased from 32,211,000 in March 2023 to 34,440,000 in March 2025. That’s an increase of 2,229,000 people. And from February to March of this year we added 52,000 more people.
This isn’t due to some new baby boom; this is due to a broken immigration system. A system that still allows too many people, especially temporary foreign workers and foreign students, to flood into Canada.
The Liberals brought this on and more than a year ago said we were bringing in people faster than we can absorb them. They haven’t fixed the system; they’ve allowed the abuse to continue, which puts further stress on health care and housing.
These aren’t the policies of Donald Trump; these are the policies of the federal Liberals.
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Mark Carney has said he would lower immigration slightly to pre-pandemic levels, but that would still see us bringing in roughly 400,000 new people a year as permanent residents plus the students and temporary workers. It’s not enough to fix the impact that out-of-control immigration has had on housing and healthcare.
As for housing, the Liberals have been talking for years about putting more government money into making sure housing gets built. And Mark Carney rehashed some old Trudeau plans this past week. But let me tell you a secret – as the Liberals have pledged billions in new government money for housing, housing starts have fallen.
The Liberal policies simply don’t work, even if you put a slim and sleek looking banker at the front to lead the party.
Before the Liberals took power in 2015, the Canadian dollar was trading at 80 cents U.S. It’s now hovering between 69 and 70 cents. This doesn’t just mean trips to Florida or Arizona are more expensive in the winter, it means we have less buying power, including for goods that may not come from the United States but are priced in U.S. dollars.
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Trump didn’t give us a 69-cent dollar. The Liberals did by showing the world that doing business in our most lucrative industries, like mining or oil and gas, was more expensive and more cumbersome with the Liberals in Ottawa. When the Harper government was in power and supporting those industries, the dollar was often near or at par, and a few times even more valuable than the U.S. dollar.
The low dollar won’t change under a Carney-led Liberal government that believes in net zero and leaving oil and gas in the ground.
Over the last decade the Liberals have weakened our economy, decimated our armed forces, broken our immigration system, shattered national unity and now some people think the thing to do is give them another shot.
Trump didn’t do any of this to Canada, the Liberals did.
And the Liberals won’t fix their mess in a fourth term, no matter how many times they yell “elbows up.”
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