LILLEY: Carney puts together new team of Trudeau has-beens

Mark Carney is showing that he is the agent of change by appointing two former Trudeau cabinet ministers as his top advisers. Marco Mendicino is Carney’s chief of staff, David Lametti is part of Carney’s transition team.

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Mendicino and Lametti were famous while in cabinet for joking about how many tanks were needed for quelling the Freedom Convoy in 2022.

“You need to get the police to move. And the CAF if necessary. Too many people are being seriously adversely impacted by what is an occupation,” Lametti, then the justice minister, texted Mendicino, then the public safety minister.

That was in early February 2022, just days after the convoy arrived in Ottawa.

“How many tanks are you asking for?” Mendicino asked.

“I reckon one will do!!” was Lametti’s reply.

That’s not a good look for Carney and his incoming team. Even people who had no time for the Freedom Convoy recoiled at two senior cabinet ministers in the Trudeau government talking about using tanks to quell a domestic political protest.

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Now, these two men are top advisers to Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney.

Mendicino was dropped from cabinet in July 2023 after a series of missteps. He lied about police asking for the Emergencies Act to be invoked to end the convoy, he introduced gun legislation that would ban common hunting rifles and shotguns and was denounced by Indigenous leaders, and he seemed incompetent when he couldn’t provide answers on serial killer Paul Bernardo being transferred to a medium security prison.

Lametti was a law professor at McGill University espousing bizarre left-wing theories before seeking office in the 2015 election. In 2019, Lametti was made justice minister after Justin Trudeau moved Jody Wilson-Raybould out of the portfolio because she refused to give SNC-Lavalin a sweetheart deal in their prosecution over fraud and corruption allegations.

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Trudeau was found to have violated the ethics rules by trying to improperly influence Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin affair. Lametti defended the government’s actions throughout the scandal.

People at the centre of some of Trudeau’s worst political moments are now the top advisers to Carney, the agent of change.

Carney himself has been the chief economic adviser to the Trudeau government since the summer of 2020. That’s almost five years. His campaign team was made of Gerry Butts, he received support from people like Katie Telford, most of the PMO and the majority of Trudeau’s cabinet.

There is no way that Carney can claim to be the agent of change that he wants to be. Just look at some of the bills that Lametti promoted as justice minister.

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With Bill C-5, introduced by Lametti, the Liberals scrapped mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders for crimes such as gun smuggling and gun trafficking. With Bill C-75, championed by Lametti but introduced by Wilson-Raybould, bail became the default position that all judges and justices of the peace were instructed to take.

Carney has just hired one of the architects of the Trudeau government’s soft-on-crime approach to help him bring change. Do you trust him or his team to actually deliver change?

The Carney team who takes issue with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre saying that Canada is broken wants you to forget about the broken justice system, the broken jail system, the broken immigration system, our that housing prices having doubled.

All the people responsible for those files under Trudeau now support or are working for Carney, the man promising change from the Trudeau government. They’ve changed the guy out front. The rest of the team, the rest of the policies, are the same as the failed policies that have brought Canada to this point.

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