William Watson: If you’re thinking of voting Liberal, read their platform first

Canada's Prime Minister and Liberal Leader Mark Carney speaks during a campaign rally in Nepean, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on April 20, 2025. Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images

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Thoughts on reading the Liberal election platform, which dropped Saturday. Dropped heavily, considering how jam-packed it is.

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Chrystia, we hardly knew ye. The platform is like a Chrystia Freeland budget — which is not praise. Maybe Mark Carney wanted to thank the former finance minister for single-handedly disposing of Justin Trudeau. It has four grand themes: Unite, Secure, Protect, and Build. These presumably tested well in focus groups as the four most beautiful words in current Canadian politics. Into these four categories are squeezed at least 286 action items (“at least” because several items have sub-items). If you favour micro-managing intrusion into every aspect of Canadian life, you should vote for the party of “no lobbyist left behind.”

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It’s my party now. The word “Trudeau” appears not once in the platform. The words “Mark Carney” 94 times. Same cult, different personality.

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Witness protection plan. The former Dear Leader Who Shall Not Be Named may be in witness protection as far as the party is concerned but even they can still see his footprints in the sand. “Since the pandemic,” the platform reads, “the previous federal government has let immigration levels grow at a rapid and unsustainable pace, with our housing and social infrastructure failing to absorb all the people arriving.” They-a culpa, clearly. But that blundering “previous federal government?” It wouldn’t be the same one providing most of the candidates and cabinet ministers for the “Mark Carney government,” would it?

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Peak gall, even for Liberals. “On April 1, gas prices went down for tens of millions of Canadians. That’s because, as his very first act as Prime Minister, Mark Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax … the first step in ensuring that Canadians can keep more of their hard-earned money.” It’s quite breathtaking, isn’t it? In effect: “Our government’s signature program of the past 10 years, which we flogged relentlessly, turns out to have been ‘divisive,’ as the opposition repeatedly warned, so we’re undoing it. Now please re-elect us.” It’s as if in 1984 new Liberal leader John Turner said that this whole business about a charter of rights and repatriating the Constitution had been an unnecessary distraction, or if in 1993 new Conservative leader Kim Campbell had run on revoking the GST and cancelling the Canada-U.S. FTA. How is democracy helped if cynicism this spectacular is rewarded?

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And Carney claims to be an economist. Regarding carbon taxation, the platform promises to make “big industrial polluters pay their fair share for emissions.” And they won’t pass it on to consumers? They’ll just swallow it in lower profits? That’s like Donald Trump saying his tariffs won’t raise prices. No platform approved by a PhD in economics should peddle economic dishonesty this deep.

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Fund, fund, fund. “Maîtres chez nous” (the Quebec Liberal slogan from the 1960s). More funding for the National Film Board. “Co-operative federalism,” the term Lester Pearson made famous. There’s a real 1960s vibe to the Carney campaign. Reading about all the new funds he’s planning, I found myself humming the Beach Boys’ 1964 hit, “Fun, fun, fun.” (“She’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-bird away.”) Carney proposes: a Trade Corridors Diversification Fund ($5 billion), a Strategic Response Fund ($2 billion), a Domestic Food Processing Fund (only $200 million!), an Arctic Fisheries Fund, a “new-practice fund to help family doctors with the cost of opening a practice,” permanence for the Sexual and Reproductive Health Fund, a Youth Mental Health Fund, $500 million more for the Emergency Treatment Fund, a new Canadian Nature Protection Fund (up to $250 million), permanent funding for the 2SLGBTQI+ Community Capacity Fund, and so on. If you’re a banker, as Carney is, the solution to every problem is a fund. “He’ll have funds, funds, funds till the markets take his T-bills away.”