EDITORIAL: Even Carney says Poilievre was right

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So as it turns out, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was right about almost everything.

But don’t take our word for it.

Look at the positions Liberal leadership frontrunner and prime-minister-in-waiting Mark Carney has adopted since announcing his bid for the Liberal leadership via a softball interview on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on Jan. 14.

He’s accused the current Liberal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he wants to replace, of over taxing Canadians, recklessly spending their money and losing control of the federal deficit and public debt.

As a result, he says, it’s time to cap the size of Canada’s bloated public service and put the brakes on spending.

He opposes the Trudeau government’s corporate tax hike.

Perhaps the world’s single largest corporate booster of global carbon taxes, Carney says Trudeau’s carbon tax imposed on Canadians in 2019 is so unpopular it should be scrapped.

He says the Trudeau government boosted immigration to unsustainable levels that contributed to Canada’s ongoing affordability crisis.

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As a result, he says, Canadian families need a middle class tax cut.

Now consider that Carney has been espousing these views for five weeks.

Poilievre, by contrast, has been arguing in favour of them long before Carney decided to enter politics, in many cases for years.

Indeed, it’s not hard to see the Carney campaign’s strategy here.

It’s to renounce Trudeau’s key economic platforms and indeed, his political legacy, while making his new platform indistinguishable from Poilievre’s — even though many of the people now advising Carney were instrumental in advising Trudeau to adopt the policies Carney now opposes.

What it means is that Carney and his advisors now agree — although they’d never admit it — that history has shown that Poilievre was right about almost every major economic platform he’s advocated.

By contrast, they are tacitly acknowledging that until Carney’s very recent conversion on the road to Damascus, Trudeau and the Liberals were wrong throughout their decade in power from 2015 to the present day.

That raises the question of who is more likely to implement needed reforms — Carney who has shamelessly copied Poilievre’s campaign platform, or the Conservative leader who first proposed it and has consistently advocated for it up to the present day?

We think the answer is obvious.