EDITORIAL: Carney’s job one — grow our economy

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Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals now have the electoral mandate they said they needed to take on U.S. President Donald Trump in a tariff war that became the defining issue of the 45th Canadian federal election.

It’s now time to demonstrate that as well as address the other dominant issue of the election campaign — Canada’s affordability crisis.

We congratulate Carney on a remarkable victory given that the Liberals were facing political annihilation from Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives just a few months ago, when Justin Trudeau was their leader, and the Tories held a double-digit lead in the polls.

While Carney and the Liberals were not our choice to win a fourth electoral mandate since 2015, it’s important that they succeed in doing what they promised for the benefit of all Canadians.

That means reversing the decade-long Trudeau/Liberal record of wasteful spending while presiding over the worst economic growth in Canada since the government of R.B. Bennett during the Great Depression.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada is also on a path to record the worse economic growth among all developed nations from 2020 to 2060.

We hope Carney will implement all the policies the Liberals stole from the Conservatives in this election on every issue from controlling immigration, to reducing the tax burden on Canadians, to ending the runaway growth in the size of the federal government, to reining in the federal debt and annual deficits, all of which skyrocketed under the Liberals.

That won’t be accomplished by splitting Canada’s operating and capital deficits in two and pretending the capital deficit doesn’t have to be paid by federal taxpayers, as Carney and the Liberals did in announcing their campaign platform.

Most of all, we urge Carney to rethink his ruinously expensive and economically destructive policy of achieving net zero industrial greenhouse gas emissions in 2050, which would further devastate the Canadian economy and make the affordability crisis faced by its citizens even worse.

It makes no sense to pursue policies that undermine Canada’s vast oil and natural gas resources.

Carney campaigned as an agent of change from the record of the Liberal government he now leads.

Now he needs to show that he meant it.