‘Canadians have lost trust in our party,’ Liberal leadership hopeful says while taking a swipe at Trudeau

Liberal leadership contender Karina Gould said Thursday the government she was a part of for years mishandled the affordability crisis and did not effectively respond to Canadians who were crying out for relief at a time of high inflation.

While criticizing the government’s approach to the cost of living, Gould also repudiated some of the government’s other major policies, namely the capital gains tax hike and upcoming increases to the carbon tax.

“We have to be honest about the fact that Canadians have lost trust in our party,” Gould told reporters shortly after submitting her final paperwork to run for the leadership at the party office in Ottawa.

“I don’t think that we responded to the issues they were telling us mattered most to them. We did not say, ‘Yes, things are really hard right now. Here is how we will fix it.’ It took us a long time to understand that Canadians are struggling to make ends meet,” she said.

Only five days after launching her campaign, the former cabinet minister has collected enough signatures and raised enough money to clear the first hurdles to run, a sign Gould said that her campaign has momentum.

But Gould is running against two formidable competitors: former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.

Carney has a leg up in the race to lock up endorsements from Liberal MPs, with some cabinet heavyweights like Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault either already endorsing him or lining up to endorse him in the coming days.

So far, 36 Liberal MPs are backing Carney compared to 26 for Freeland and two for Gould, according to data compiled by CBC News.

“I can tell you from experience this country is not broken, but it does need experienced leadership,” Carney said in a new campaign video released on social media. Carney has not spoken to the media since he launched his campaign last week.

Freeland, meanwhile, released a policy document on Thursday focused on party renewal.

In a thinly veiled swipe at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who some party members feel stayed on the job too long, Freeland said the future party leader must be more accountable to MPs and party members.

“We can never again be in a position where the leader is the only person who decides who the leader is. And I think Liberal Party grassroots members and caucus need to have a greater say in what we do and how we do it,” she told reporters on Parliament Hill after a Liberal caucus meeting, while promising to implement automatic leadership reviews at biennial conventions.

Freeland said those conventions would be made permanent so that party members must gather every two years no matter what. The leader and cabinet should face the party membership and engage in “robust policy debates” on a regular basis, Freeland said.

To distinguish herself from those two competitors, Gould vowed to make the GST holiday permanent for children’s clothing, diapers, strollers and car seats to help parents who are struggling to get by in this era of higher costs, if elected.

She also vowed to do something the current Liberal government couldn’t get done: exempt Canada’s supply-managed farm sectors like dairy from future trade negotiations.

The former government House leader also took aim at the Liberal Party brass, saying they have allowed the party to atrophy over the last nine years.

She said the party’s leaders “have not given members the space they need” to weigh on the party’s direction. She said campaign strategies that worked in 2015 are now outdated.

Gould said the Liberals “got too focused on being in government in Ottawa” and “lost touch” with “what was happening on the ground.”

“I want us to be that big red machine,” she said. “Ottawa does not know best.”

It’s all part of Gould’s effort to present herself as the candidate who will turn the page on Trudeau’s nine years in office, which might be a difficult sales job given she’s been a cabinet minister since 2017.

Still, Gould didn’t shy away from condemning some of the decisions she was a part of.

She pledged Thursday to halt further increases to the government’s consumer carbon tax, the signature Liberal climate policy.

She said Canadians are already struggling to pay their bills and the government shouldn’t pile on any more costs.

“I am listening to Canadians who say that this is no time to increase the price of pollution. The first thing I want to do as prime minister is cancel the increase expected to go in on April 1,” she said, while also promising to keep the carbon tax in place at a reduced rate.

She sought to distance herself from the government’s handling of the recent capital gains tax hike, saying she’s been talking to business leaders who take issue with an inclusion rate increase that has the potential to drive away investment at a time when it’s needed most.

“I don’t think we got it right,” she said, promising she would have more to say on the issue as the campaign progresses.

Asked why she didn’t do more to dissuade Trudeau and others from enacting policies she disagrees with, Gould said she was bound by cabinet confidence to keep her opinions to herself while in public and she fought against some of these measures around the cabinet table.

Freeland who, as finance minister, championed the capital gains tax hike, is also going to walk away from that policy in the coming days, campaign sources have said.