GOLDSTEIN: Trudeau Liberals say they were wrong about almost everything so re-elect them

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Call it the great deception – the federal Liberals suddenly claiming they’ve seen the light on all of the mistakes they’ve made in governing Canada for almost a decade.

Throughout the ongoing Liberal leadership race, the candidates have been tacitly admitting that on major issue after major issue, their outgoing boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was wrong and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was right.

The Liberals will never acknowledge this, of course, even though their political strategy heading into the next federal election is obvious.

Their plan is to anoint self-proclaimed “outsider” (insert laughter here) Mark Carney as leader and campaign hoping Canadians will buy their claim they’ve had an epiphany on the issues that drove their public support down to near record low levels.

This while promising to do better if they’re given a fourth electoral mandate.

It might even work, if voters are easily deceived and by the fact that the wave of patriotism sparked across the country by U.S. President Donald Trump’s bizarre attacks on Canada helps the Liberals as the incumbent government more than Poilievre and the opposition Conservatives, who risk being accused of disloyalty for doing their job, which is to critically question government policies.

Never mind that the best indicator of future performance is past practice, meaning the Liberals will inevitably revert to their old ways should they pull off this political miracle.

Never mind that this will include a continuation of the widespread political corruption in their government that exists in any government that has been in power for too long, without voter correction.

The predictable puff pieces about Carney are already underway in the liberal media, touting him as the new Liberal saviour who will rescue Canada from the reign of the current Liberal leader who will be gone before the election.

They mock Poilievre for having to pivot away from his “axe the (carbon) tax” campaign slogan given the threat of a tariff war with the U.S., while studiously ignoring that the Liberals have been pivoting away from most of their major policies.

Indeed, the Liberals’ sudden about-face on everything, everywhere, all at once illustrates that if you don’t like Liberal principles you should hang around for five minutes because they’ll have new ones.

With regard to the Liberals’ great deception, consider the evidence to date this is exactly what they’re doing:

Carney, says he’ll scrap the carbon tax (he won’t, actually, but that’s a different issue), as does his major challenger Chrystia Freeland.

This despite both of them advocating for carbon taxes for years – Carney globally, Freeland domestically – with both now basically admitting Poilievre was right to oppose them all along.

Carney and Freeland also say they oppose now postponed government legislation to increase capital gains taxes, which Freeland introduced in June.

At the time, she argued that failing to do so would result in a dystopian nightmare for Canada where “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.”

Carney has said that over their decade in power the Liberals lost control of immigration, the federal budget, deficits and debt, overspent and overtaxed the middle class. He promises a tax cut to help families cope with tough economic times.

Those are all positions Poilievre took long before Carney decided he wanted to become prime minister, indicating yet again that the Conservative Leader was right.

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The list goes on:

Poilievre says the federal civil service has grown too large under the Liberals and he will reduce its size and budget by attrition, thus helping to pay for government services without going further into debt.

Carney says the federal civil service has grown by more than 30% under the Liberals “and I think we can over time be in a position to increase productivity” to help pay for government programs such as dental care and pharmacare.

Poilievre said the Liberals were no longer trusted by the public because they failed to engage Canadians on issues people actually cared about, long before Liberal leadership contender Karina Gould made exactly the same criticism of her own party.

Freeland has pledged to export liquified natural gas to Canada’s allies abroad if she becomes prime minister while Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says it may be time to consider building an east-west oil pipeline, when the Trudeau government normally describes Canada’s vast oil and natural gas reserves as the root of all evil.

To top it all off, Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc told Bloomberg Television last week that the Liberals need to consider reducing the size of government and spending less.

This after 10 years of doing the opposite.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com