No good deed goes unpunished, but the Liberals are hoping bad deeds will be forgotten. Thus their leadership candidates are running against their own party’s record. For that to work, they’ll have to convince Canadians not to believe their lying eyes.

The current campaign is unusually disingenuous, even by the cynical standards of politics. The candidates have all effectively repudiated Justin Trudeau’s abysmal economic record and failed signature policies, even though they either advised or served under him and enthusiastically defended his dysfunctional performance for the better part of a decade. The renunciations include: the carbon tax, the hike in the capital gains inclusion rate, the GST holiday, bloated government and profligate government spending — i.e., just about everything that defined the past nine and a half years.

When candidates discard cherished beliefs and a lengthy legacy, it raises an obvious question: how real are their recantations? Especially since they remain unrepentant climate alarmists and believers in big-government solutions to every problem real or imagined. That is the question for Canadians who yearn for competence, integrity and common sense from a federal government that focuses on prosperity, affordability, safety, social peace, national pride and international respect.

The presumptive Liberal winner, Mark Carney, has been exploring the leadership off and on since 2011 and was repeatedly approached by the prime minister to be his minister of finance. He is a charter member of the Davos and Laurentian elites, with close ties to United Nations bureaucracy and the World Economic Forum. Yet to avoid being labelled a global technocrat far removed from the concerns of the average person, he now claims to be an outsider. Good luck with that masquerade, especially with his recent admission that he is an “elitist and a globalist.”

Recent polls indicate Carney is luring back Liberal voters who abandoned the party because they disliked Justin Trudeau and resented the damage he inflicted on them.  But Carney was Trudeau’s close economic adviser and shares his hostility to resource development, which explains why climate radical Steven Guilbeault supports him and Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, Trudeau’s closest political operatives, are running his campaign.

In the rest of the world, climate alarmism is dying. The new United States administration has dismissed it and it’s collapsing across Europe, too. The world’s largest money manager the largest global banks, including Canada’s five biggest, have abandoned two U.N.-sponsored, Carney-initiated financial organizations created to support decarbonization by effectively strangling fossil fuel financing. Yet Carney persists in climate alarmism that would condemn Canada to further economic decline in a futile and prohibitively expensive pursuit of net zero.

Donald Trump’s tariff threats and 51st-state insults, which have rekindled Canadian patriotism, have been a political lifeline for Carney. Even Justin Trudeau, who spent nine years belittling the country he governs, has donned the mantle of Captain Canada (his latest and last costume change).

Carney will portray himself as a bulwark against the now widely reviled American president. But he is the incarnation of everything Trump loathes: a left-leaning, climate-obsessed, condescending woke globalist. And he just poisoned negotiations by accusing Trump on X of “suspending the laws” of the U.S., thus putting his own partisan advantage over the national interest. Canada would be far better served with a firm response to Trump that is not insulting.

No one can be sure whether securing the border will change Trump’s mind about tariffs. He seems genuinely concerned about drugs, criminals and terrorists crossing the border — even though the southern border is a much greater source of all three. Unless the border is fixed, we’ll get tariffs with a vengeance. If serious money is to be spent on the border, however, Parliament needs to meet.

In its continuing panic, the government announced it will add to its new $1.3-billion border plan: a fentanyl tsar, a Canada-U.S. joint strike force, an intelligence directive and round-the-clock surveillance and will list organized crime cartels as terrorist entities, which it has now done. Minister of Public Safety David McGuinty boasted, dubiously, that “Canada and the United States share the most secure border in the world.” At the same time, however, he said illegal crossings from the U.S. into Canada fell 89 per cent in the second half of last year — so it seems the border being so secure is a recent development.

Meanwhile Mark Carney, who has never held elective office, is running hard against both Trump’s tariffs and Trudeau’s record. The Conservatives are still ahead in most polls, however, Pierre Poilievre just laid out a comprehensive Canada First vision and the landslide defeats of John Turner and Kim Campbell are unsettling precedents for a new leader following an unpopular prime minister. Nothing can be taken for granted in politics and campaigns matter, so hold on to your hat.

Joe Oliver was minister of natural resources and minister of finance in the Harper government.

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