GOLDSTEIN: The nightmare prospect of another Liberal majority

Article content

If the Liberals win a majority government based solely on the faint hope Prime Minister Mark Carney will be a better tariff negotiator with U.S. President Donald Trump than Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, then we’re going to get everything we deserve.

That is, four more years of Liberal scandals, wasting taxpayers’ money, idiotic decisions on issues such as carbon taxes and more woke politics reminiscent of Justin Trudeau’s almost 10 years as prime minister.

The idea that a political neophyte like Carney, surrounded by former Trudeau advisers and Trudeau-era cabinet ministers who wouldn’t know a conflict of interest if it hit them in the face, is going to be able to navigate the Liberal Titanic toward anything but hitting the iceberg all over again, is a farce.

All governments have a best-before date and it’s roughly 10 years in power.

That was true of the Brian Mulroney/Kim Campbell Progressive Conservatives (nine years), the Jean Chretien/Paul Martin Liberals (13 years, because the conservative movement was divided for a large part of it), the Stephen Harper Conservatives (nine years) and the Trudeau Liberals (almost 10 years).

By then, regardless of their political ideology, a government in power inevitably becomes all of the things it said it despised when it was trying to get into power.

Of all of Trudeau’s tweets that haven’t aged well, his observation on Oct. 17, 2013 — “It’s hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal” — has aged the worst.

The promises Trudeau made in his 2015 election platform that brought him to power are only good for a laugh today.

Remember when Trudeau and the Liberals said a decade ago that they despised government secrecy as the default position of the Harper regime and promised they would deliver “open and transparent government?”

“It is time to shine more light on government and ensure it remains focused on the people it is meant to serve,” they told us in 2015.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

“Government and its information should be open by default. Data paid for by Canadians belongs to Canadians. We will restore trust in our democracy, and that begins with trusting Canadians.”

The Aga Khan, SNC-Lavalin, WE Charity and foreign interference scandals alone rendered those early claims absurd.

So do years of the Liberals hysterically proclaiming Canada would burn without Trudeau’s consumer carbon tax, which is no longer operative, they say, now that they’ve killed it.

Carney is running on pretty much everything Poilievre promised first — a middle-class tax cut, killing a planned Liberal corporate tax hike, reducing government spending, deficits and debt, capping immigration, cutting the size of the public service and on and on and on.

Remember when former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, now transport minister, argued that failing to raise corporate taxes would result in a dystopian nightmare for Canada?

A nightmare where, she claimed, “Those at the very top live lives of luxury, but must do so in gated communities, behind ever-higher fences, using private health care and airplanes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less privileged compatriots burns so hot.”

What happened to that?

This is what the federal Liberals always do — steal ideas from the other parties leading up to an election, offer them up as their own and then fail to implement them once elected because they don’t really believe in anything they’re promising now.