EDITORIAL: A lost decade under the Liberals

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Having presided over a lost decade of declining prosperity for Canadians, the federal Liberals are now asking for a mandate to grow our economy over the next four years, which is as ludicrous as it sounds.

This dismal legacy of the Liberal government, now led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, but run by Justin Trudeau, was the inevitable result of a PM more concerned with redistributing the income of Canadians rather than growing the economy.

The proof is Canada’s declining real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, a widely accepted metric for measuring prosperity which, according to Statistics Canada, fell by 1.4% in 2024 following a 1.3% drop in 2023.

By comparison, the U.S. economy left Canada in the dust.

University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe, writing in The Hub, estimated that in 2024, the gap in real GDP per capita between Canada and the U.S. was about $22,000 – $66,300 in the U.S. compared to $44,400 in Canada, in 2015 dollars. In 2024 dollars the gap was even higher – roughly $28,000.

“Real GDP per capita in the U.S. was 43% higher than in Canada in 2023. And in 2024, I estimate this gap will widen to nearly 50%,” Tombe wrote. “This stunning divergence is unprecedented in modern history.”

The Liberals, while they introduced laws and regulations driving away business investment and killing productivity, knew what was happening,

Then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland warned in her 2022 budget that “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that Canada will have the lowest GDP per capita growth rate among its member countries” from 2020 to 2060.

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In the 2015 election, Trudeau accused then-Conservative PM Stephen Harper of “having the worst record of economic growth since R.B. Bennett in the depths of the Great Depression.”

Ten years later, the Liberals own that title, with real GDP per capita growing at 0.3% annually during their decade in power, compared to 0.5% under Harper.

The Liberals argue the economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024, higher than expected.

But that’s because they recklessly boosted immigration, ignoring warnings from their own experts that it would increase the cost of living and strain beleaguered public services, which is exactly what happened.