Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to his former finance minister Bill Morneau and the former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney as “random Liberals” during Wednesday’s question period.
Trudeau made the statement in response to a question posed to him by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre regarding how much funding the consulting group McKinsey and Company received from the Liberal government.
“It isn’t me that said the prime minister overspent, it’s Bill Morneau. Remember him? He’s the one that said the prime minister spent too much and the future Liberal leader Mark Carney is the one, who, along with the current governor of the Bank of Canada says that this overspending is contributing to inflation,” said Poilievre.
In response, Trudeau accused Poilievre of “stumbling over himself” by quoting “random Liberals.”
“You know the Conservative leader is stumbling over himself when he starts quoting random Liberals,” responded Trudeau.
In a recent book, Morneau blasted his former boss saying that he had turned the finance ministry into a “rubber stamp” for Liberal government policies before he was ousted.
“My job of providing counsel and direction where fiscal matters were concerned had deteriorated into serving as something between a figurehead and a rubber stamp,” wrote Morneau in Where To from Here: A Path to Canadian Prosperity.
“We lost the agenda. During the period when the largest government expenditures as a portion of GDP were made in the shortest time since the advent of World War II, calculations and recommendations from the Ministry of Finance were basically disregarded in favour of winning a popularity contest.”
During testimony before the Senate banking committee Carney said that much of the pandemic spending introduced by the Trudeau Liberals was unjustified and went on for too long a period of time.
“There was a period of time where fiscal policy was reinforcing some of the challenges that the Bank of Canada began to see,” explained Carney.
