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Carson Jerema: Erin O'Toole's plan for permanent Liberal government

It would be a mistake for Conservatives to listen to their former leader and moderate themselves

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Prime Minister Mark Carney has baffled Conservatives. This can be seen in the party’s failure to update a strategy that was targeted towards Justin Trudeau’s obnoxiously progressive tenure in office. Whether they like it or not, Carney is not Trudeau. All this approach has accomplished has been to permit the current prime minister to remain high in the polls by simply being a different person than Trudeau, who had become so broadly unpopular that anyone displaying a modicum of competence would have succeeded with voters.

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The bigger risk for Conservatives is to fall for the argument that Carney represents a larger departure from his predecessor than he actually does. He certainly talks like a moderate, but that doesn’t make him one. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist, and the greatest trick Mark Carney ever pulled was convincing Canadians that he’s right-wing.

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Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, last seen losing to Trudeau in 2021, has fallen for this argument, telling Global News this week: “If you look at what the Liberals have done with Mark Carney, they have a leader who is more to the centre, centre-right.” O’Toole added that his party should “ignore the culture war issues” and “focus on the long-term prosperity of Canadians.”

These are things that a certain class of Conservative thinks sounds pragmatic and reasonable, yet would result in entrenching the permanent Liberal government that is being constructed before our eyes, because there would no opposition to it.

For starters, the claim that Carney is centre-right is simply not true. Yes, he removed the consumer carbon tax, but the industrial carbon tax remains, along with the “clean fuel regulations” and the Impact Assessment Act.

The memorandum of understanding signed with Alberta commits Ottawa to approving a pipeline — eventually. However, that project will be placed under so many environmental conditions that there is only a very narrow path that leads to a pipeline ever actually being built. Carney removed the electric vehicle mandate, but replaced it with a tailpipe emissions standard that accomplishes much the same thing.

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The Liberals’ Major Projects Office is tasked with selecting infrastructure to build based on what the government considers to be in the national interest, all of which will be subject to the same investment-killing regulations brought in under Trudeau. This isn’t fast-tracking, it’s another layer of central planning on top of everything else.

And the economy is not the only area that the current government has remained more or less aligned with the Trudeau years.

On free speech, the Liberals passed legislation this year making it easier to charge people with “hate speech,” and Carney has created a consulting committee to advise on how to reintroduce the online harms act to further regulate online speech.

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Ignoring the culture war, as O’Toole suggests, would cede massive areas of policy to the Liberals, while failing to energize centre-right voters.

On everything that matters to Conservative voters — from euthanasia, to law and order, to discriminatory hiring in the federal government and other DEI initiatives, to truly eye-watering deficits, to a foreign policy centred around appeasing China and those who support Islamic terrorism — there is no meaningful difference between this Liberal government and the one governed by Trudeau.

It would be one thing if the former Conservative leader’s 2021 campaign platform was aggressive on economic issues, meaning massive tax cuts and massive deregulation, but O’Toole didn’t offer that. Instead, he promised oceans of new spending for social programs and corporate subsides, not to mention a carbon tax that forced Canadians to put money into an account that could only be spent on government-approved items and services.

No wonder Conservative voters were not energized by O’Toole’s economic policy. And no wonder O’Toole thinks Carney is “centre-right.” If you stop squinting, both men are more like Trudeau than they would like us to believe.

Policies that offer a more conservative approach to crime, or immigration, are popular, which is why Liberals make a show of bringing forward legislation that appears to address the underlying concerns, but fails to go far enough to solve Canada’s problems. The promised bail reforms, to use a specific example, don’t come close to solving the problem of repeat criminals cycling in and out of the system. Also, the Liberals rejected a Conservative bill that would have ensured that non-citizens who commit crimes would no longer receive lighter sentences to avoid deportation.

Ignoring the culture war isn’t prudence, it’s a refusal to address much of the institutional rot that’s embedded in this country.

The challenge Carney presents is that he says much of the same things that Conservatives do concerning the economy and adopts just enough conservative policies to appeal to centrist voters. So of course responding to him like he’s Trudeau is not going to land as well.

If the party hopes to be an effective Opposition again, it needs to present a credible alternative that is more than a slightly watered down Liberal platform. Conservatives can start this process by ignoring Erin O’Toole.

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