EDITORIAL: Liberals sabotaged us in Trump’s tariff war

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Canada has one hand tied behind its back in fighting U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs because of a lost decade of economic growth while the Liberals were in power. 

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is right that Canada can only control what we do in fighting tariffs, not what Trump does. 

But Carney also knows our economy was in bad shape before Trump’s tariffs hit, he said so during the Liberal leadership race. 

He pointed specifically to runaway immigration and — his words — “government spending that grew over 9% year after year after year, twice the rate of growth of our economy.” 

The Liberal government he now leads has the worst record of economic growth as defined by real GDP per capita— a widely accepted measure of a nation’s prosperity — since the government of R.B. Bennett during the Great Depression. 

This was the predictable result of the Liberals under former PM Justin Trudeau strangling our economy through anti-growth legislation such as their unrelenting attack on Canada’s energy sector.

Yet Carney vows to continue those policies — for example, the Liberals’ Bill C-69, the “no pipelines” legislation — which stands in the way of getting our vast oil and natural gas resources to tidewater and from there to energy-hungry global markets. 

Instead, we’re forced to sell them at huge discounts to the U.S., costing the Canadian economy tens of billions of dollars annually. 

In their last economic statement before calling the election, the Liberals overshot their deficit target of $40.1 billion for the 2023-24 fiscal year by 54%, coming in at $61.9 billion. 

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In her resignation letter to Trudeau, then finance minister Chrystia Freeland, citing the looming Trump tariffs, said Liberal spending on “costly political gimmicks” meant they had failed to keep “our fiscal powder dry … so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.”

That war is now here and for the Liberals to claim it’s good news Canada wasn’t hit as hard as other countries is absurd, because a federal government bleeding red ink in a weak economy means we’re behind the eight ball in this tariff war.

For the Liberals, having gotten us into this mess, to claim they’re the best choice to get us out of it, is nonsense.