Carney’s prospects are excellent. The hard part will be living up to the image.
Posted April 25, 2025
Justin Trudeau declared that he would resign on January 6th. It took a while before the impact showed up in the polls. On January 19th, poll aggregator 338Canada projected 238 seats for the Conservatives and 41 for the Liberals.
As of April 24th, the Liberals’ forecast had risen to 188 seats against 123 for the Conservatives. The Liberal gains include 16 seats from the NDP and 10 from the Bloq.
Trudeau’s departure by itself would have substantially improved Liberal prospects, but a leadership campaign that only involved current members of Parliament would have suffered from his shadow.
Ministers such as Dominic LeBlanc, Chrystia Freeland, Anita Anand, and Melanie Joly would have had great difficulty in distancing themselves from the Trudeau record. They would have to defend the party’s many blemishes, including the carbon tax, losing control of immigration, bloating of the civil service, and crises in health care and housing, to name just a few.
Mark Carney brought a shiny resume to the leadership race and had the crucial virtue of not owning the party’s recent history. He was also blessed by events south of the border.
If Donald Trump had lost the 2024 American election, events in the United States would have had little impact on Canadian voters. Trump’s clumsy deployment of tariffs provided Carney with a golden opportunity to be seen defending Canada’s economic interests. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre could only watch.
The cruelest cut was the Liberals’ elimination of the carbon tax, taking away Poilievre’s favourite target. The government is borrowing to pay a last carbon rebate distribution even though the carbon taxes that would have funded them have been cancelled. The CBC estimates that it will cost $2 billion, bribing voters with their own money.
The platform that Poilievre revealed on April 22nd features substantial cuts to taxes on home construction and income taxes. Like the Liberals, he wants to accelerate housing by freeing up land and simplifying approvals.
He promises 2.3 million new houses in five years, for which there is not nearly enough labour.
Poilievre supports resource extraction and a National Energy Corridor to fast-track approvals for transmission lines, railways, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure.
Carney has likewise promised to create trade and energy corridors for various types of projects deemed to be in the national interest for transport, energy, critical minerals, and digital connectivity, though he has equivocated about pipelines.
On the day Carney won the Liberal leadership process, he inherited Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office, which has been involved in many Liberal fiascos. With an election looming he did not have the time to review and rebuild it on his own terms.
His 2025 platform covers many topics in detail, resembling previous platforms in 2015, 2019, and 2021. Those platforms were treated as a menu from which Trudeau chose to enact some, with the rest to be dropped or left for the future. Promises of fiscal discipline were never honoured.
For example, the 2025 platform commits, for the fourth time, to “Implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
As usual, this platform makes commitments about items under provincial jurisdiction, such as health care, training, and municipal management of construction proposals. They typically achieve this by bribing the provinces.
The platform also makes sure that big emitters pay “while protecting the competitiveness of Canadian industry.” Refineries and carbon-fueled power plants will be affected, adding to the cost of gasoline and electricity. Households will be affected both directly and indirectly, as with the previous carbon tax. The Liberals do not say by how much.
The budget promises to add $500 billion to the country’s debt over the next five years.
Carney’s reactions to two events call his judgement into question. Toronto area Liberal candidate Paul Chiang had suggested that people claim China’s bounty on the Conservative candidate. Carney refused to act, but Chiang eventually resigned of his own accord.
More seriously, two Liberal Party staffers attended a Conservative event wearing buttons that used Trump-style language.
Carney denounced and apologized, but just reassigned them. That is inadequate. He should have dismissed them and any higher ups who had given approval.
Likewise, it is disappointing that he repeats Trudeau’s false assertions that the Conservatives have a secret agenda to attack abortion rights.
A Liberal win is in the cards, probably a majority. Trudeau is gone, but his questionable values remain in his choices of political operatives.
Carney should rebuild the Prime Minister’s Office with people who share and can represent his values.
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