EDITORIAL: Next federal election about more than Trump

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It’s obvious why the federal Liberals want to make the next Canadian election all about U.S. President Donald Trump.

It’s because they need a villain to distract from their policy failures since coming to power in 2015 on the most important issue the federal government is charged with — ensuring the prosperity of Canadians.

Trump, with his unprovoked and misinformed threats of launching a tariff/trade war against Canada, poses an immediate threat to our economic well-being, as well as that of our American neighbours.

For now, the approach advocated by both the Liberals under outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre is similar — the strategic launch of counter-tariffs on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

That said, the Trudeau government has undermined the Canadian economy in numerous ways — a serious concern with regard to its competence going forward.

Even Mark Carney, the frontrunner in the Liberal leadership race to replace Trudeau, has said the Liberals lost control of the federal budget, deficits and debt, overspent and overtaxed the middle class.

In her 2022 budget, former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, Carney’s main opponent, warned “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects Canada will have the lowest per-capita GDP growth (a common measure of prosperity) among its member countries” from 2020 to 2060.

The Trudeau government ignored warnings from its public servants that massively hiking immigration would increase the cost of living, exacerbate Canada’s housing shortage and put additional strain on public services such as health care.

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It ploughed ahead regardless, with predictable damage to the economy, before Trudeau admitted, too late, that it was a mistake and cut back the numbers a bit.

On energy, the Trudeau government all but stood on the sidelines for a lost decade — save for intervening to save the Trans Mountain pipeline — costing our economy billions of dollars of revenue from our oil and gas resources, while other countries came begging to ask us to sell our energy to them.

We couldn’t because we had no way of getting them to global markets and thus had to sell them at bargain prices to the United States.

The fact the Liberals are only now considering support for another east-west pipeline demonstrates how out of touch they’ve been.