EDITORIAL: Carney’s honeymoon like Trudeau’s in 2015

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Prime Minister Mark Carney is currently experiencing the same liberal media honeymoon that Justin Trudeau benefitted from during his first campaign as Liberal leader in 2015 that put him into the PM’s office.

We all know how that turned out.

What’s happening isn’t surprising.

For more than a year, the liberal media were facing the prospect of a massive Conservative majority government headed by a leader — Pierre Poilievre — they don’t much like and who doesn’t much like them.

Now they’re delighted to be covering a horse race between the Liberals and Conservatives — U.S. President Donald Trump’s irrational and idiotic tariff war against Canada having revived the Liberal brand in a way the Liberals had been unable to do for themselves.

Given this, expect an ongoing double standard in liberal media coverage throughout the campaign.

For example, both Poilievre, who said it first, and now Carney, who lifted it from the Conservative playbook, say Trudeau’s Liberal government overspent, lost control of the debt and deficits and that the middle class needs a tax cut given tough economic times.

Guess which candidate is going to face tougher questions on how to square that circle during the campaign?

Second, the Liberals have repeatedly alleged that Poilievre’s promise to scrap the consumer carbon tax would amount to “letting the planet burn” — an idiotic phrase Carney is now using as well.

But when will Carney be asked how abandoning the consumer carbon tax won’t cause the planet to burn when Liberals do it, but will cause the planet to burn if Conservatives do it?

Carney has promised a new carbon pricing system to replace the consumer carbon tax with what he says will be a magical new carbon tax system requiring “big polluters” to pay the costs of carbon pricing, but not pass them on to the public.

That’s an absurd claim, but to assess it requires far more specifics than Carney has offered to date.

So does Carney’s planned introduction of a second carbon tax — a tariff — to be paid by Canadians purchasing imported goods from foreign countries that the federal government determines are lax in fighting climate change.

All these questions need to be answered during the coming election campaign. Don’t hold your breath that they will.