EDITORIAL: Liberals, you can’t handle the truth

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Maybe the truth is too hard to take for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals with regard to the lesson they should have learned from president-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory on Tuesday in the U.S. presidential election.

That is, they’ve been using the same failed strategy to attack Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in Canada that Kamala Harris and the Democrats used to try to defeat the Republican presidential nominee; it not only wasn’t effective, it literally derailed their campaign.

The Biden/Harris White House in the U.S. — mimicked by the Trudeau government in Canada — decided to address middle-class citizens who were fed up with the high cost of living, housing and immigration levels — both legal and illegal — by blaming their political opponents, who weren’t in power, for electing bad people as their leaders.

Lacking any coherent response to the issues that voters were and continue to be angry and worried about, their mantra became that no rational person could vote for the only opposition parties with any chance of replacing them — the Republicans in the U.S. and the Conservatives in Canada — because their leaders were, take your pick, racists, misogynists and fascists.

And if you supported parties led by racists, misogynists and fascists, they implied, then you must be a racist, misogynist and fascist with no right to have an opinion.

Unsurprisingly, suggesting the real problem with people complaining about the American and Canadian dreams of upward economic ability disappearing right before their eyes was their own vulnerability to falling for simplistic solutions proposed by right-wing populist demagogues, failed to impress those against whom the allegation was made.

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It failed because it didn’t answer their questions or address their concerns as they were dismissed by politicians, bureaucrats, pundits and political strategists far higher up the economic ladder than they were, insisting they should disbelieve the evidence they were seeing with their own eyes.

The lesson U.S. Democrats and Canadian Liberals should have learned — which they haven’t — is that if they can’t seriously and coherently address the genuine economic concerns of ordinary citizens that their own policies helped to exacerbate, then they should get out of the way and let someone else give it a try.