GUNTER: Carney Libs could never deliver on policies stolen from Conservatives

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Mark Carney is stealing Conservative campaign promises, which isn’t by itself a bad thing because theirs are better than his.

Lower taxes, less government spending and fewer bureaucrats, more affordable housing, quicker approval of major projects, better national defence, pipelines east and west; all of those are commendable. (The only Conservative policy missing is lower crime and tougher bail.)

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The problem is, for every Conservative pledge Carney plagiarizes he adds a Liberal caveat that makes it unlikely a re-elected Liberal government will implement any of the good ideas he has copied off Pierre Poilievre’s campaign papers.

To see what I mean, take a look at a campaign announcement Carney made in Victoria on Monday.

“Quebec uses 350,000 on average barrels of oil a day,” Carney told a news conference, “70 per cent of which comes from the U.S. There is a big advantage to Canada to push that out, use our own oil …”

So far, so good. More Alberta oil for Quebec, less American. For one thing, that would lessen the Trump administration’s leverage over us in a tariff war.

But here comes the Liberal caveat: Carney would only favour replacing American oil with the stuff from Alberta, IF Quebecers and Indigenous peoples overwhelmingly approved of a pipeline to bring Western crude to their province, and IF the environmentalists could be brought on board.

Carney and his Libs, like Poilievre and his Conservatives, say they favour faster approval of major energy projects and just one set of hearings/approvals. But Carney has also said he will not get rid of the Impact Assessment Act, also known as the No More Pipelines Act. It’s called that because that’s what its goal is — to tie up pipelines and other megaprojects in so many hearings and so much red tape that they never get built.

By contrast, in Terrace, B.C. on Monday, Poilievre proposed a new office to speed up regulatory approval of big projects and pledged to assign it the task of swiftly authorizing 10 resource projects that have been stalled for up to a decade. These include the second phase of the northern B.C. LNG pipeline and terminal, a new port for mineral exports in Quebec, a new uranium mine in Saskatchewan and probably even a $21-billion Teck Resources oilsands mine in Alberta that had the approval of all 14 Indigenous communities around it but was cancelled by the Liberals anyway.

While both leaders’ promises are similar, who do you think is more likely to follow through?

Of course, Carney followed through on Poilievre’s promise to axe the consumer carbon tax, but then immediately followed up with a promise to create a new corporate carbon tax that will just get passed on to consumers.

Both Liberals and Conservatives have promised to encourage new home construction, but only the Conservatives have promised to use tax incentives for homebuyers and builders to pick up the pace.

The Libs want to put the government in charge of building tens of thousands of pre-fab homes across the country. No thanks, Mr. Carney, the solution to the doubling of housing prices thanks to your government’s policies is not to put your government in charge of building new homes. Yours is the same government that couldn’t produce passports in under six months, can’t produce tax slips this year nor equip an army for overseas missions, and increased the federal bureaucracy over 40 per cent in nine years while the population only grew by 15 per cent.

It’s understandable that a lot of Canadians are worried about this country’s prosperity in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s entirely unnecessary, destructive tariff experiment. But to put back in charge the government that gave us the worst economic growth rate among developed nations in the last 10 years makes as much sense as putting them in charge of housing affordability.