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Liberal Leadership Candidates Have It Wrong

They can win by countering Poilievre. Instead they’re copying him.

Christopher Holcroft 3 Feb 2025The Tyee

Christopher Holcroft is a writer and principal of Empower Consulting. Reach him by email.

Reminder to Liberals: Trump is your foil, but Poilievre is your opponent.

The next federal election campaign is shaping up to be historic, with Canada’s future well-being and, possibly, its sovereignty at stake.

In part, this is due to the enormous instability of our southern neighbour and the furious unpredictability of President Donald Trump.

The other reason is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

While Liberal leadership candidates, including Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland, are talking tough on Trump, they are quietly capitulating to Poilievre. That needs to end now.

With the party’s roster of candidates set — among them Carney, Freeland and Karina Gould alongside two former backbench MPs — the focus can now be on what the candidates are saying.

For Liberal leadership participants, the temptation to concentrate on Trump must be overwhelming. His tariff actions are a pressing concern, voters are broadly united against him, and he is the perfect foil to the Captain Canada persona Liberal partisans expect their leaders to assume.

But while Trump can damage our economy, he cannot diminish our values. He cannot change how we view and treat one another, nor challenge our commitment to truth and civility. He cannot chip away at our rights and our freedoms, nor cheat our most vulnerable out of their share of the Canadian dream.

Poilievre, on the other hand, very much could.

With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau already directing a robust “Team Canada” plan to deal with the Trump tariffs, the party’s aspiring leadership contenders are spending their time talking about redoing this trackwork while ignoring the speeding train.

By the example of his rhetoric and comportment, proposed policies and political record, Poilievre is threatening a radical departure from the norms of Canadian decency, decorum and democracy.

Poilievre is the erroneously self-titled “candidate for prime minister” who has attacked core elements of the Canadian identity, calling concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion “garbage,” lamenting that “we’ve been too polite for too long” and offering a vision of the social safety net limited to “volunteer generosity.”

He is the career politician who opposes feeding hungry schoolchildren, voted to increase the retirement age to access old age security and boasted that he did not “believe in” providing emergency financial relief to families and workers during the pandemic’s economic shutdown.

He is the “common sense Conservative” who promotes falsehoods on science and economics, opposes banning assault weapons and backed the “freedom convoy” insurrection in all its chaos, cruelty and conspiracy.

Remarkably, the main Liberal leadership candidates are signalling deference to Poilievre rather than defiance.

Carney has repeated the Conservative mantra that the federal government “spends too much” and “taxes the middle class too heavily.”

Freeland — the author of Plutocrats — has pledged to cancel the capital gains tax increase that affects less than one per cent of the population. Gould, like the other leaders, has promised to weaken, if not abandon, carbon pricing, with the candidate arguing she is listening to those who say, “This is no time to increase the price of pollution.”

This begs the question: Would a better time be the next extreme heat alert, flood or forest fire?

In the absence of comparably progressive policy alternatives, the moves proposed by these leadership contenders should be considered not as minor changes in policy born of pragmatism but as seismic shifts in principle delivered in panic, the abandonment of commitments to truth and responsibility, fairness and possibility.

Liberals distancing themselves from a prime minister polls say is unpopular should consider what those same polls say about his government’s — their government’s — key policies, including: fighting climate change, delivering pharmacare, strengthening gun control, regulating social media companies, supporting the LGBTQI2S+ community, pursuing tax fairness and maintaining the CBC.

In each case, Canadians back the government’s policy directions.

By focusing their campaigns on fighting a foreign enemy while remaining silent on, or moving closer to, Poilievre on domestic policy, these Liberals risk making the case to Canadians that Trump is a singular threat demanding an aggressive national defender.

In that scenario, it is very possible voters may shed their apprehension about Poilievre and choose the abrasive apple muncher over a Liberal tactician to represent Canada in dealing with the U.S. president.

If contributing to the normalization of Poilievre’s politics does not worry Liberals, perhaps lessons from the party’s electoral past will: the big red machine does better when it runs from the left rather than as “blue light.”

Fortunately, there is another way.

Rather than tiptoeing around Poilievre, leadership candidates should confront his policies and bluntly connect them to those of Trump and other authoritarian populist leaders.

The Liberals should also reframe — accurately — the origin of the affordability challenge as the COVID-19 pandemic, magnified by income inequality and worsened by climate change.

Consider that, from the time the Liberals were elected in 2015 to the start of the pandemic in 2020, unemployment dropped significantly and more than 430,000 children were lifted out of poverty, the latter in large part due to the creation of the Canada Child Benefit, a program funded by a small tax increase on the wealthiest Canadians.

As the effects of the pandemic dragged on, the inequity in COVID’s impacts on Canadians’ physical health and financial security were laid bare. The pandemic began to be seen by some as a mirror on society’s challenges, wealth inequality most acutely. In response, post-COVID societies were being reimagined as, necessarily, caring quicker, sharing easier and faring better.

The oligarchs and their dark-money-funded think tanks were having none of that, however, and launched successful campaigns to sow disinformation and division. Poilievre is reaping the rewards of those efforts. For example, contrary to Poilievre’s claim, Canadians are not struggling financially now because the federal government did too much to contain the pandemic and resulting widening of income inequality. They are struggling because the government did not do quite enough, including to soften the impacts of inflation caused by supply chain disruptions.

“Everything feels broken,” Poilievre declares, and his solution amounts to a national demolition job.

Poilievre’s opposition to new social programs, his expected Mike Harris-style punishing budget cuts and his plan to “axe the tax” on wealthy polluters while ending carbon rebates for middle- and low-income Canadians will leave the rich richer, the rest of us worse off, and the prospect of more climate disruptions — with corresponding increases in grocery prices — heightened.

It is not too late for Liberals to propose a better alternative, something bold and more naturally Canadian, one consistent with our values: a plan to build back better.

Such a prescription would meaningfully address what is really ailing our country — economic security for middle- and working-class Canadians, health care access and social cohesion.

Immediate steps could include:

Whoever becomes the next Liberal leader will face a daunting challenge in difficult circumstances against a determined opponent backed by the same powerful forces that delivered Trump the U.S. presidency. An electoral battle over values offers the best hope for progressive Canadians concerned about the country’s well-being and sovereignty.

A values campaign would be a fight over whether Canada is a society that defends truths or denies them, recognizes rights or restricts them, embraces differences or exploits them, protects the vulnerable or punishes them.

This fight, should any Liberal leadership candidate have the courage to wage it, would be worth watching — and joining.  [Tyee]

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