Chris Selley: Carney’s Liberal platform is almost alarmingly Trudeau-esque

Releasing a detailed, costed platform is quite rightly seen as a basic obligation of a political campaign. You don’t necessarily need one to win, but if everyone has one other than you people certainly have a right to ask why you don’t. Every party claims to have a plan; surely they should at least be able to put it down on paper and have some basic idea of how much it will cost.

All that said, the Liberals may well be worse off for releasing their platform over the weekend. Seeing Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s vision on paper, all in one place, is somehow more jarring than hearing it piecemeal. Even straight-up headlines like “Liberal platform promises $130 billion in new measures over four years, adding $225 billion to federal debt” (per the CBC), will likely not have landed well with Canadians looking to move on definitively from a decade of Trudeaunomics.

When he’s at his best temperamentally, Carney is unflappable and doesn’t easily take offence. That was largely on display during both leaders’ debates last week (where Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was also at his calmest). Carney had a couple of unfortunate arrogance eruptions earlier in the campaign, including reacting with incredulity that a reporter might suggest there could be conflicts of interest hidden somewhere in Brookfield Asset Management’s “over $1 trillion (U.S.) of assets under management” — Carney having been chair of the company until mid-January.

But generally he has presented himself — with remarkable success, according to polls at least — as a calm, intelligent, technocratic alternative to nine years of Justin Trudeau’s vacuous, thespian melodrama. When he talks about separating capital and operating spending, distinguishing “investing” from “spending,” you can almost believe it’s something more than accounting trick … until you see the costing and, well, either way it’s still debt.

Carney promises to adjust spending as a percentage more toward capital projects and away from program spending, which few would oppose in principle, the latter having ballooned in recent years. And with “buy Canadian” being all the rage, I suspect most of us have nodded along with Carney (and other politicians) when he says we should use those capital projects to boost Canadian industry and create Canadian jobs.

But then you see it on paper: “We will prioritize Canadian contractors in our defence procurement (and) Crown corporations with major capital acquisitions, like Via Rail, will also be encouraged to meet this standard.”

Canadian military procurement isn’t a mess because Canadian shipyards can’t build ships; it’s a mess because military procurement hasn’t really been about military procurement for decades. Rather, it’s about having something to promise Canadian industry during each election cycle. But if we were suddenly dead serious about having a proper military in order to have a proper military, surely we would prioritize getting what we need over where it comes from. There are plenty of options other than the United States.

The bit about Via Rail is one of my favourite little details in the platform, and a fine example of how thoroughly Trudeau-esque this document is. Via’s biggest forthcoming capital acquisitions include new long-distance train sets for the company’s heavily subsidized cruise-ship-on-rails division. In 2023 taxpayers shelled out $1,015 per passenger on The Canadian, the route between Toronto and Vancouver, and it’s still a very expensive way to travel. It’s crying out for privatization.

But much bigger than that, should it come to pass, will be the Liberals’ back-of-a-napkin plan for high-frequency rail between Toronto and Quebec City, or maybe it’s high-speed rail, or maybe it’s a bit of both. Just tell them what you want to hear and they’ll say it for you. Indeed, out of nowhere, the Liberal platform extends the project westward from Toronto to Windsor! And it says that’ll just be the “start” of high-speed rail plans.

Listen to Carney talk about government efficiency and you might think, well, if anyone knows a thing or two about that, it certainly ought to be him. But then you see the promise of finding a whopping $30 billion in savings across government, which is the sort of thing every party platform always promises, only it rarely pans out. And then you remember Carney has never actually led or been part of any government, and suddenly the promise looks just as suspect as always, if not more.

You look at Carney’s vague carbon-tax plan — big emitters will pay, and somehow consumers won’t — and you remember that Carney certainly supported the consumer carbon tax that he axed out of political expediency as one of his first order of prime ministerial business. You see the promise to “revoke gun licences for individuals convicted of violent offences,” which is already in the Criminal Code, and you realize that Carney is flying just as blind-and-happy as the Liberals always do on guns. You see the platform’s proposal to “allow for consecutive sentencing for serious and violent offences,” which Poilievre has been assailed for supporting, and you realize they’re the same beet-red hypocrites as ever.

Search the platform for your own personal annoyances about Trudeau-era Liberal governance, and you’re unlikely to come up empty.

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