Given their track record, can Liberals really be trusted to get homes, pipelines and other infrastructure projects built on an unprecedented scale?

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If we look past all the name-calling, scandals and competing tax cuts, this election fundamentally comes down to one question: do Canadians trust the Liberals to do now what they have failed to do over the past decade? Judging by the party’s newly released housing plan, the answer should be a resounding “no.”

“We used to build things in this country,” lamented Liberal Leader Mark Carney in an online campaign ad released earlier this week. “It’s time your government got back into the business of building affordable homes.”

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You heard that right, folks: the government that was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget building the Trans Mountain pipeline, the same one that still hasn’t managed to construct a single deepwater port in the Arctic that was supposed to be completed in 2012, thinks it would be better at developing houses than the private sector.

On Monday, the Liberals unveiled what they’re dubbing the “most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War.”

It promises to build 500,000 homes a year, both through the private sector and a newly created, and unimaginatively named, agency called “Build Canada Homes” (BCH), which appears to be modelled off the Crown corporations responsible for building cookie-cutter houses and state-owned rental complexes during and after the war.

BCH will “act as a developer,” developing and managing projects, provide........

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