Pierre Poilievre: The Real Story | EP. 191

Speaker 1 I've met with the local government officials at these places and they say we will take your gas this afternoon. But the problem is the Liberals have blocked the construction of liquefaction export terminals, some gas on East Coast. We have no terminal to ship our gas for. Speaker 2 Hold on here, but I could. Justin was very clear. There's no business case. There is no business case to sell natural gas to Europe and we should all shut up about it. He's old, he's bold. It's got a lot to say. This is angry mortgage podcast. Wow. It's a very exciting show. It's so it's a really it's an honor. Just say it is an honor. Can you have the honorable Pierre Polio, who's the leader of his mentions, loyal opposition leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and a member like we're talking about this in a second, a member at Battle River pro foot in our order. So here's an interesting fact. I I built different, right Kevin, I really have. And my son, my eldest son was born in Calgary. Speaker 1 In 1979. Speaker 2 So what a coincidence. What a coincidence. Yeah. And maybe what? What? Speaker 1 What was his birthday? Speaker 2 He's, he's January here. Oh, he's a lot older. Yeah, he's a lot way older. Yeah. But isn't it nice to have somebody who's at least not a boomer? Speaker 1 At the table very happy very after that well I'm a time only moves in One Direction so I'm getting a little bit older every day but it's rich city and well I love Alberta love representing East Central Alberta in Parliament great people out there. You ever been there to that part of Alberta? Speaker 2 He was born there, I. Speaker 1 Was seven years number you were which part like in Calgary both. Speaker 2 Edmonton. Speaker 1 And Calgary, OK, he was born Cal. So you were there in 79? True to what? What years? Speaker 2 We we left in 82, but I was there before that. I was there for years before that. So why did you leave in 82? I'm transferred. Job transferred 82. OK, Plus this. You would have been just about to get clobbered by the National Energy Program. Mid clobber. Mid clobber from the other two, though. Yeah, I suppose. And mid. Speaker 1 Clotter Yeah, that's right. Well, my earliest memories are of that because now my folks were teachers. They didn't experience job loss, but we did get hit by that. And you would remember this the insane interest rates thought to that yet and we lost our own. We had like my mother had rented a couple of little rental progress. We lost everything I had to start again. But that was the sort of flood was a formational time for me as a kid because I was just starting to become conscience of what was going on around me and my parents were freaking out about the finances and we had to move suddenly if like we couldn't afford to replace my dad's broke me down car and then years later they explained to me all the things that were happening. And so I was like, that's what happens when governments do seal the thanks. You run people's wives. Yeah, let's do the opposite. Speaker 2 Of that, quite right. I mean, that was there is a definitive reason why it was so hard for a Liberal Party to get a vote in Alburia, Saskatchewan for so many years. Absolutely. You do wreckage. I remember people I know in the real estate business on the commercial side, they said like you know what a see through is. I said isn't a martini. He says no, it's an office building in Calgary now. It's a see through. Like you can look through the one side of the building and you can see right through the other side. There's no activity inside. We can't exactly. It was, it was a disaster. Speaker 1 But we had good times after that, you know, we we changed course, you know, we got more Roomie King and Brian that free trade with the US in the 1015 years that followed, they say could be 15 years. The governments at all levels shrunk. They bounce budgets. They the cost of government went from about 50% of GDP to about 37% of GDP in that time spent at and the economy roared. We had very low unemployment, low inflation. Alberta basically became the richest place in the world. So I guess I say that just as a point, hope that you can turn things around, you do the right things. Speaker 2 You could absolutely turn things around. Yeah, right. Six. But if you keep doing the wrong things over and over, you, you know, we brought we brought a second generation of Trudeau back to do effectively the same thing to Alberta, to the stand did right without our experience. So let's talk about the trade war for a second. I'll spend a lot of time on it because if you, you know, by the time we leave the studio there, something may have changed. It's pretty hard to keep the handle on it. Like you said, some really brilliant things that mainstream media never really reported much on. Way back in in February, your commentary in speech of the Economics Club Canada, we talked about there must be a way to make us as a country the inescapable partner. Speaker 1 The the. Speaker 2 Country with the leverage we have, what the world adds, so experiment of that about what we can do to make it so that we can't. Speaker 1 Be pushed around. The only thing the president cares about is leverage. And he's not going to give us anything for free. We all, we all know that. And he's been very blunt about that. So how can we, how can we use what we have to get what we want from him? Well, what do we want? Let's start with that. We want tariff free trade. We want to be able to sell to the biggest market in the history of the world. It is the biggest economy by far the world has ever seen. It's right next door. As I said in that same speech, even in one thing about geopolitics that is permanent is geography. You can't. We can't hire a realtor and say we're moving to another con. Speaker 2 Yeah, we we're going to move to Europe. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's not going to work. So that doesn't happen. So we're going to continue to be neighbors with the United States. So what? Why do we we want free trade, as much free trade as we can. We want to knock down barriers so that we can sell into that massive hungry market. So what real leverage do we have to get that free trade? Well, we have 10 of the 12 NATO defined minister minerals that you need to fight a war. And most of them the Americans do not have. They cannot economically produce aluminum because there's nowhere in America with surplus electricity. And aluminum is basically boxed electricity. You take a very low cost resource called bauxite and then you elect, you use a ton of electricity to convert it into aluminum. They have aluminum. They can't do that economically, but you need it to make fire jets. You need cobalt for heat, heat resistant alloys. We have the only two cobalt refineries in all of North America. You need Tunsten for armor piercing ammunition. You need gallium for night vision technology. And we have all those sex. The list goes on. What I propose we do is sign a supply agreement with the US and commit to building up a massive reserve of those minerals that we would keep on storage along with the an oil reserve. We don't actually. We're the only G7 country without any oil strategic oil reserve. We have oil beneath their feet but not stored anywhere. Which is ironic is we have far, by far the most oil in the G7. So imagine we're offering dangling before the Americans the possibility that they would have guaranteed access to the minerals and oil that they need at prices we would charge market prices, not gift on the basis of tariff free trade that we would use some of the purchases from our massive military buy for other countries that have tariff free trade. Again, more leverage. These are things that would be extremely attractive and they're things we could take away. So people say, well, what if the president signs a deal and goes back on everything I've just described is contingent on continued respect for a tariff free trade agreement. So what I'm saying is let's build up our leverage at home so that we have unbreakable strength abroad and use that to get what we want. What we see instead by Mr. Carney is just making unilateral concessions while dragging out the process. He's given up 7 or 8 of the president's key demands without getting anything in return. He ought to the bundle goes up and taking them to the bargaining table and then got the things we wanted. Instead, what we've got is twice the tariffs on a Lulu's field that we had. We Curry took off 3 times the tariffs on lumber, broadening of tariffs to everything that contains steel, even if it's not all steel. And now most recently, another 5% of our economy's been hit with a 50% tariff. So everything's getting worse while Carney makes unilateral out of a concessions. What I'm saying is bundle up your leverage, bring it to the table and get something. And we're trying for it. Speaker 2 Because President Trump does understand leverage. He's. Speaker 1 He's a real estate guy. He wrote earlier in his book that was that is the key take away from his book. So you know, he's not going to give us anything. It'd be nice. We all know that. He's very blunt about it. So let's use what we have to get what we want. Speaker 2 OK. So one of the things that we talk about a lot in our business is that Canada is becoming a kind of an unaffordable pledge, Sidney becoming is and growing more so all the time. So when we talk to our mortgage clients, their reflection is that as their renewals go up, it's not so much that they'll lose their house, but their ability to manage their family budget is under constant pressure. Because it's not just the fact that renewal's gone up. As you know, it's the biggest run the gold wave in idiot history and all of those people, almost all those people are expressing. Speaker 1 Increases. Speaker 2 They can manage to keep the house, but everything else gets squeezed because they put out to us the property tax doesn't go down. The food at the grocery store definitely doesn't go down. So this endless affordability problem is is second to life of the Canadians. And I'm sure that's something that you encounter. Look. Speaker 1 People can't afford to live. And every day we encounter people who say they're, you know, they, they're cutting back on their diets, they're selling their house to not necessarily because they're going bankrupt, but because they just can't afford to have 60% of their income going to mortgage payments anymore. Then there's just the, the young people who have lost hope in ever owning a loan. You know, like right now it takes about 53% of pre tax income for the average family to make payments on an average home. And that is the highest it's been outside of the Trudeau era. It's the highest it's been since the 1990s. And this is pre tax income. So think of this. You have to make 53% of your gross is needed to make payments on the average home, and then you have to pay taxes on top of that and then you have to pay for food. There's nothing less left after that. And that's why home ownership is completely out of reach for the youth for the first time in Canadian history. And then of course, the food bank use is up 100% in seven years. The same people who were donating to the food bank are now now having to to take donations. People are emptying their bank accounts to fill their tank of gas or their grocery carts. So this is like life after 11 years of Liberal government. And it's actually gotten worse under Carney than it was under Trudeau. Things are not improving. You know, if you ask people about their daily lives, they will tell you that it's worse today than it was a year and a half ago. And the only way we're ever going to change it is by getting a new government who could that completely reverses the policies of this Liberal track. Speaker 2 That is precisely what we hear from our customers. Don't get me wrong, like in any any big city like Toronto or would locate it, there are some people who are doing fabulously well. I mean, this is a, a, a city that contains some of the richest people in Canada. But as soon as you move down from that top echelon, which is a very small group of people in reality, yeah, everybody says exactly the same thing as you just described. Yeah, Like life's getting harder, more unaffordable. And to your point, in 1987, first time homebuyer, average age and first time homebuyer is 27 years of age. 8 year was that 198787? I'm blamed 27 years old today is 40. Yeah. No, that also means if it's an average, there's a bunch of people who are 46 buying their first home. But if some people in their 30s. But that's a startlingly awful statistic. Speaker 1 It's wild and but like I remember when I first got into politics, I'd knock on doors. I would regularly meet 24 and 25 year olds who owned their house. They'd open the door and there'd be a dog at their feet and they'd be either they'd have a kid under their arm or they'd be soon planning to have kids soon and, and they were like 2425 super normal. And now you never meet anyone under 333435. Who? Speaker 2 Owns a house. Speaker 1 And at TAFU, we have a government right now that doesn't actually even believe in home ownership. They have a, you know, the head of the Bill of Canada Homes, Evan Siddell, has said that the dream of home ownership is a canard. Now we have to let go of it. They, they want everybody to be renters that pay the mortgage for Brookfield or some other multinational corporation or in government housing, which ultimately will keep the people down and prevent them from from us for us from ever having a property owning democracy in the future. So we have to fight back. And one of my major priorities in the next election platform will be restoring the dream of home ownership, letting people own a house, pay off the mortgage in a reasonable fine period and and build a family where they're in charge of their lives. Speaker 2 It's probably the most meaningful issue it is might even probably it is simply is yes, meaningful issue in a real estate Canada today is the inability for young people to buy and the same points that you make Bill. That's the illusion that unfortunately made people suffer under where they hear the stories of Bill Canada homes in the media. There is no home that you're going to ever own is going to come out of Bill Canada homes. Yeah it's exclusively created to deliver rental properties to Canadians. I I've called it Carneville modular yurts Nina in the past but but but to little rentals had to deliver social housing. You don't have any problem with social housing. There's a need for social housing. I can't right. But when we combine Bill Canada homes with the most significant. It's a little bit of history here too because it was Evan Civil who when he was at CMHC developed a program to promote rental buildings through CMHC and it moved along slowly. But in the last three years it has exploded and that is where most of CMHC's money goes today. Most of their activity, most of the Canadian Mortgage Bond, which is a government sponsored program, it goes to building rentals exactly across Canada, rentals, rentals, rentals. So not only have we got a a group of people who are now have to be their average age of 40, could they take a shot at mine, but the priorities of the government have switched entirely to building rental properties. Speaker 1 Look, I I don't mind seeing more rentals built. What I, what I bemoan is the fact that we're building less ownership housing. We should be, frankly, first of all, we should be building twice as many homes as we are right now. We're, we're right now this year we'll probably build fewer homes than we did back in the early 70s. So with the, with the population almost doubled, we are building fewer homes. So it's not that I'm against the rental construction, it's just that we should be building far more ownership housing at the very same time. And here are the facts. 10 years ago, 80% of big city building was for ownership. Today it's 42%. So the share of construction going to ownership is has been halved in a decade. And that's not an accident. The, the, the Carney Liberals do not believe in home ownership. They do not believe you should own your home. They believe you should rent from a multinational corporation or from the government. And that is that is part of their ideology of concentrating powered and fewer and fewer hands and leaving people with less control over their lives. I believe that obviously for some people, renting is the best option, that perhaps they're moving, perhaps they're a student, perhaps they haven't built up enough savings for a down payment, perhaps they have a career that will keep them moving for many years and it's not worth going through the transaction cost of buying. That's all fine and they should have low rent, but the vast majority of Canadians aspire to own a home, and for good reason. Because home equity is the basis of family wealth, it allows you to take out a loan to start a business. It gives you the security that if, God forbid you lose your job, you've you own the the walls, roof and floor around you and that you won't be out on the street. And it makes you have a stake in the country. So we need to encourage and foster home ownership. And the reason the way to do that is to make it more affordable for developers, for builders to build homes that we can buy. And right now, the combined cost of development charges, fees, zoning, permitting, delays, lawyers, consultants and other other people who don't actually swing the hammers or lay the foundation is making it unaffordable to construct homes that people can actually live in. So we now have this Frankenstein market where buyers can't afford to buy, builders can't afford to build, and in many markets, sellers can't afford to sell. Like it's never happened before. We've heard of a seller's market. We've heard of a buyer's market. This is neither. This is a case where in the GTA you have people who are going to lose money if they sell, so they can't afford to sell, but the buyer on the other end can't even afford to buy at that price. And then the builder looks at the at the math and says, what? Once I've done paying all these fees, I can't recover and earn a basic profit to build. All of this is the result of government interference and Arkit, and we need to get the government out of the way to build the homes we need that people could buy. Speaker 2 To your point, yeah, mathematics is undefeated. There's so there's there's one thing that you can't escape from. It rules the universe. Speaker 1 As as the Pythagoras said and. Speaker 2 When you talk about the fact that all these programs are exclusively oriented to rentals, there's no denying it. We see with trend lines, we look at charts, it's inescapable. You cannot pretend that there isn't a a fundamental suppression of homeownership going on in Cali this last year's You can you can talk your way around it. You can point to other Oh well, we still have a first time home buyers program. We still have these things, but if they're not usable to your point, if they if you if wait, I can never get that much down payment together to handle the price of this house. I can. My wages have accelerated adequately to get to that point. And when my wages do go up, it's eaten up by food cost, by property taxes, by something else. Eats up that increase I got. Speaker 1 Yeah, and I don't feel I'm getting. Speaker 2 Ahead so so y'all but. Speaker 1 Like, but this is like, you don't have to be you. Can you look at Evan Sedell's words? He has said that he believes that the dream of home ownership is a canard. That was his word and he's now the guy that Carney named to head up Build Canada Home. So you wouldn't. That is obviously Mr. Carney's agenda. He doesn't believe in home ownership and I fundamentally disagree. This is a fundamental disagreement that he and I have. I believe in the dream of home ownership and that it should be totally realizable for Canadians. Every person who works hard, gets a job, is responsible with their money, should be able to afford a home. And that is what we need to change. Now, I think if I can move on to another related point, which I think that we have, how do we get here? I think we have a scenario where imagine, imagine someone goes into a doctor. Doctor says, how do you feel? I feel great. Your health is good. Great. Yeah. We checked you. We checked you out, and we can't find any problems. Are you sure everything's OK? Yeah. Well, I stubbed my toe the other day. Oh, you stubbed your toe, we're going to have to give you a tranquilizer so you don't feel right in it. And then the guy comes in the next day and says, geez, that tranquilizer really knocked me out. Oh, that's right, we'll have to give you an amphetamine to keep you going again. Next day he comes in and says I'm having heart palpitations because of that amphetamine. You OK? We're going to have to give you hard Medicaid. Next day he comes in and says, well that heart medication is making me nauseous. Oh, if we're going to have to give you an anti nausea medication and before you know it the guy's on like 30 pills that are all meant to deal with the symptoms that came out of other pills. That is our housing market today. The government took office in 2015 and found what was generally a very healthy housing mark. Not perfect, but the average rent was $950 for a one bedroom. The average cost of buying a house was $450,000. It would cost you. It was about 38% of pre tax income for the average family to make payments on the average home. Again, not dirt cheap, but very affordable. But they said it, you know, we don't think it's perfect. There's a stubbed toe. And then they so they introduced a bunch of obstacles to build it and higher they increase the cost of development charges by 1000% in some markets literally 1000%. And then they intend that that caused a blockage for home building. So then they created government programs to subsidize over and around the bill of the programs that have blocked the home building and the housing. Speaker 2 Decelerator fund, yeah. Speaker 1 The housing, they, they, they, they, the municipalities were blocking home building. So we said we need to send the municipalities, the same municipalities, bigger fatter checks to big up, bigger build, bigger fatter bureaucracies to somehow speed up what they're slowing down. And then they inflated the housing market with immigration and with money printing, fast money printing. And then they said, well, we're going to have to and now bring the prices down by subsidizing the hell out of construction. And then we saw a crash as a result in places like Toronto and Vancouver and said, OK, now we've got a new system, there's a crash and developers are going to go broke. Now we have to bail out those same developers. So like everything, every medicine the government is providing is meant to cure the last round of symptoms that the previous medicine cost. Forgetting that at the very outset of all of this, we only had very, very minor problems to deal with. What do you do with a stepped toe? How do you treat it? You just let it heal. If you have a market that is generally affordable but has a few shortcomings, the price signal goes out to the builders to fill those shortcomings and they build, you know, and, but instead we have a, a housing market that is pumped full of so many government potions that it's turned into Frankenstein. And as I said, the consequences, builders can't build, buyers can't buy, sellers can't sell, and it's an all around hailstorm. But we know what we have to do. We have to get the bureaucracy another way, speed up permits, free up land, cut development charges. We should take off capital gains tax on any money that's reinvested in new housing constructions. Anybody who sells a big asset and they plowed into home building, let them have a cap gains holiday on that. They they'll pay it one day later down the road when they liquidate. You've got you should require the municipalities reduce their their their development charges as a condition of getting infrastructure funds. We should take all taxes off of home building. Get rid of the GST on homes, not rebate. Get rid of it. Get rid of the GST and the HST on all home building in Canada for properties under 1.3 million. Not convoluted short term rebates that apply in one province and not in others. And, and if you do that, we will have a building boom like we've never seen before. And I believe within a short time period to people will be able again to get back into houses in their 20s. And that's my mission. Speaker 2 That's an admirable mission. It's one good week. We can only create a touch to cast, right? Well, every this is the, This is the wild stuff that doesn't get put out through mainstream media because every word is true. The reality is that we had a situation where you said 1000% increase in development fees. I can show you 5000% increase in development fees around worse in 2025 years, 5000% increase. Some people are crazy. First of all, you can't spend the money that fast. Even civic governments can't this money away that fast. It's impossible. But they they got in the city of bank accounts. Believe me, there's billions of dollars in the Toronto City bank account that's earmarked for things that Oh, well, we just overcharged the shit out of people and now we got sitting there like it's so ridiculous. Your point about, hey, we can't be giving the government, we can't have the government say, well, if you promise to reduce these incredibly high nonsensical development fees, we'll give you other taxpayers dollars from the federal treasury to offset that. Your point was the best point. If you don't eliminate these fees, we won't give you any money. Speaker 1 Absolutely. Speaker 2 We've tried the carrot for 11 years. There's only one thing that works convincing municipal governments not to disintegrate money and not to then to stop municipal governments from taxing young people buying new houses. Speaker 1 And, and, and they will say, Oh well, we need the money to build basic infrastructure. Explain me this. How is it that 15 years ago Toronto was able to have pipes and Parks and Recreation and roads and bridges when development charges were 95% lower? They had all the infrastructure back then. The answer is that the increase in in development charges has not gone to infrastructure. In some cases, it's gone to reserves to slush funds for municipal politicians to spend on other things in the future. They metastasize their bureaucracies. So we're spending them on soft costs that are unrelated to to servicing the new communities that are getting built. And then the federal government is rewarding this cash grab by giving more tax federal tax dollars to the same city politicians who caused the problem in the 1st place. What I'm proposing to do is incentivize cities to cut development charges and make their federal infrastructure budget contingent on housing completions, not just on promises to change processes. And you know, there are places in the country where the development charges are extremely low. And they managed to service those communities. And, and in my riding at East Central Alberta, I have communities where they charge seven, $8000 for a, for the construction of an individual home. That's it, 7000. And they still are able to build the roads, They have parks, they have community centers. The only thing that they don't have is, well, in septic. But even if you add an extra 8 grand farewell in septic installation, we're talking 16 grand a home, which is not even a fraction of what many of the big city politicians are charging. So let's deal with the government imposed obstacles that are standing in the way so that we can unleash a building boom and restore the dream of home ownership. Speaker 2 Exactly. The city of Winnipeg is not bankrupt, right? And yet their development fees range somewhere between 3500 and $6000. Wow. So there's there. They just didn't destroy the money. They just didn't light the money on fire. Exactly. And they understand. They understand they have a budget that they have to meet. So I I can't emphasize this more to people who are listening. This is not political rhetoric. These are facts. There are many, many cities in Canada that get by on rational development fees. And your point about no tax on new construction? This is simply the most reasonable consideration you could ever have. So why are we taxing new construction when we want to give young people a chance to buy a house? Speaker 1 The the question is, does the government actually want people to buy a house? I'm not sure that it does. I think the policy of this government is to force everyone to rent from, from a very small elite of, of landlords. And I had no problem with small, you know, investors who want to be a landmark. That's great. They're that's a terrific thing. But that's not what Mark Carney has in mind. He has is the big multinational corporations own everything that what what they don't own is owned by government housing and every single person is a renter. And that's that's the policy of this Liberal government and it's exactly the opposite of what we need to pursue. You know, if you look you look at how much it has changed in Canada, we've got I was in a coffee shop in PEI and I asked this lady how much does your espresso machine cost? And it's just a small, like it wasn't a fancy machine, 11 grand. There's a little old lady on the other side of the counter. She said, I bought my first house in Montreal for $9000 back in 1969 or something like that. And I said, well, you know what I'm asking, what did you and her husband make that year? She said oh, we made about 17 K so. Speaker 2 It was like. Speaker 1 Six months income to buy a house in Montreal at that time. And now it's 567810 time 10 years income for the average family to buy the average home. And so basically what we've seen is housing costs have vastly outstripped income growth. And that's partly because our governments are blocking building, but it's also because our the federal government is destroying the purchasing power of our money. You know, housing costs should have gone down. In fact, they have gone down if you measure if your money is gold, if you if you had that's true, it's. Speaker 2 True, it's true. It's allow for. Speaker 1 The gold cakes less gold to buy the same house today than it would have the gold meal had a great article on this. They said if, if you had, if you, if you had your money and if you were you, you, you had a gold money today, you would pay less today you than you did back in the 70s to buy the same home. And I'm not saying that to propose to propose that we go to the gold standard. I'm just saying as a relative measure of what's happening here, it's not that the cost of things is going up, it's that the value of our money is going down. In 1970, we had $35 billion in the Canadian economy. That was the money supply is measured M2. That's bills, coins, bank deposits. Late last year we had $2.7 trillion, so it's gone up by 8000%. The number of dollars in our economy has got up by 8000%. The number of homes has gone up by 167%. So you're basically growing the money supply 50 times faster than you're growing the number of homes that are bought with that money. And that simply destroys the working class, the youth, anyone who doesn't yet have is shut out forever. And if you want to to to build an economy where aspiring hard working people can buy things again and own things again, you need to stop prinking, plugging. And that's what my government will do. Speaker 2 Nothing is as tragic in my mind as the experience that we get when we talk to some young people who have a Jeopardy inquiry about a mortgage and what they learn that it's maybe functioning impossible for them to ever buy a home because they find out the math does not support them in any way. They talk about leaving Canada. Now we we see real experience of this, like a friend of mine in Vancouver. His, both of his kids graduated university Successful. He's a successful person. The kids got a great education in Canada. Both left. Yeah. Both left Canada. I really believe this is possibly the most tragic thing. Look, I'm an old guy. When I was in my 20s, I thought about moving to California. Only for the weather, right? Only for the weather I never thought about. Oh, I, I think there's just much more opportunity for me. I never thought that in my 20s. I never thought Canada has stopped being a country with opportunity for successful young people. But. Speaker 1 We hear this theme from people that we we talk to and. Speaker 2 Are. Speaker 1 Pretty constant. Well, I'll let me give you some incredible facts. So my grandfather came from Ireland, I think in his 20s. And the Canada used to place be the place you go to in your 20s. Ireland was extremely poor. And I grew up, you know, with a lot of Irish blood in me always thinking, jeez, it's, it's too bad that Ireland's so poor. You know, that Ireland's per capita GDP is twice Canada's. Oh. Speaker 2 God. Speaker 1 They're twice the Irish are twice as rich as Canada. They have none of our oil, none of our resources, none of our landmass. And yet they've somehow, in a matter of about 35 years, leapfrobbed over us and become twice as rich. Why? Because they massively cut the size and cost of government. They cut business tax, personal tax, red tape. It's a very easy place to start a business. They opened up their economy to trade. Those are the things that unleash growth and opportunity. Another fact more Canadians is more Canadian founded businesses opened in the United States in 2024 than opened in Canada. Sure, twice as many Canadian launched businesses were opened outside of Canada than inside Canada, which is incredible statement. You imagine that, you know, when you think about the twice as many Canadian business founders are doing it out of our country than they are in our country. And we see now you know roughly half of our manufacturing companies are actively considering departure. Small businesses are closing faster than they're opening to see if I'd be called this a drought. And so look, in the short run, the average person might not notice that because it's so gradual. But in the long run, it means that that kid that that comes out of school doesn't have a job offer. It, it means that wages don't grow. It means that tax revenues start to dry up because there's fewer people contributing. So we can reverse all that. And, and we've got like I've got a plan that would unleash the immense power of the free enterprise system, you know, getting rid of capital gains of reinvestments, cutting back on income taxes, getting rid of the industrial carbon tax altogether so that where our Heavy Industries can produce more cutting back, you can approve rapid approval of the 500 projects, federal projects that are, sorry, federally regulated projects that are awaiting permanence from our government. Speaker 2 Wait a second, hasn't the major projects office approved all these projects? Speaker 1 We're going to move at a pace and not seen in generations. And of course, not a single project has been approved by this new office. And frankly, it's impossible to have one politically driven office micromanage 500 applications. So you got to, there's a, there's a simple way to, to, to speed up projects 1, you have to say 1 pop project 1 environmental approval. So anything that's already permitted by the province should not be permitted by the federal government. Let the province permit it. Secondly, put out a legislated timeline that the bureaucrats have to have to give a yes or a no and and that when you do, you also need to massively reduce the paperwork. In that great global recession. We decided we're going to pull forward a bunch of construction projects and, and Harvard did this and our minister of infrastructure told his bureaucrats, I want a one page application form. And they said, Minister Cantrap, there's no way it's 500 pages and every single one of them, it contains vital information requests. Speaker 2 Can't you say I've said? Speaker 1 One page that came back, minister, you'll be thrilled. We've got it down to 100 pages. So one page, they come back, Minister, we bought it down to 40 pages. One page, Minister, we got it down to 20 pages, one page. So after all this, they got it down to one page. Then he said, I want one, not free, one environmental review, Minister. We're going to end up destroying the environment. We're going to have contaminated water. Could be the end of the world could be gets it down to 1 application, the 111 page one environmental review per project. What happened 23,500 projects went from concept to completion in under 2 years and not a single environmental problem. Jack Layton stood up in the House of everybody was complaining about how the environmental protections were not were were stripped away. So we said Mr. Layton give us one project that had an environmental proper. He couldn't name a single one. The environment commissioner audited them, couldn't find a single environmental growth. All this to say that most of the the paperwork that we apply to our to approving projects is completely unnecessary. It does nothing for the environment, nothing for public health. It is just jumping through hoops. So you've got a you scrape away all of that, you could have a building boom. We should be the richest country anywhere on earth. We've got the fourth biggest supply of oil, fifth biggest in gas, the biggest oceanic coastline, third in uranium, first in potash, 4th in in farmland per capita. Like we should, everything should be dirt cheap in Canada because we have the most dirt. We have the most dirt to build homes on, to dig resources out of, and to grow food on us, but we've got it to unlock the power of free enterprise to realize our potential. Speaker 2 It's unbelievable how long it takes to build anything just to build something simple. To your point about the coastline, we should be good at ships, right? You would think that the greatest contingent coastline in the world, they probably know how to build a ship. Yeah. So we have the prime minister's announcement last week. So we're going to build 10 Ice Breakers. It's going to take 14 years to get to the end of the 10 Ice Breakers. Now I ask you if we took the same approach to building ships in World War Two, we all be speaking German. I mean, I just got to ask that question. I mean, is it, it's unbelievable that our procurement services and our our facilities that our infrastructure is so bad that to build 10 Ice Breakers. Optimistically takes 14 years. Speaker 1 It's we're being devoured by bureaucracy in this country. You know, in the United States in the after Pearl Harbor, they basically went from having almost no military industrial complex to being the greatest military industry in the history of the world in about 8 months. It converted their existing industrial base into a military industrial base. And they did it through highly simplified processes where the, the central government said, look, this is what we need. You figure out how to do it. And a lot of the, the military equipment that the, the American made tanks were not as good as the German made tanks, but the Americans could crank them out in mass numbers that the Germans could never keep up with. And then they outproduced the Soviets and won the, the, the, the, the Cold War. At the same way in Canada, we, we were able to produce what we needed rapidly through very simplified systems of procurement. The, the Wright brothers, when they, when they won the first ever contract for a, a, a heavier than error flying fighting machine, there was a one page RFPA, one page RFP. And that's how we got our first fighter planes in the history of the world. And if you look at the Ukrainians today, they have an extremely simplified system of government procurement. Effectively, there are people in their garages in Ukraine using 3D printers who are making highly effective, very low cost drones for 1000 bucks a pop, 2000 bucks a pop, that are just harassing the hell out of and emptying the bank accounts of their Russian enemy. So it is through a simplified process of simply of telling the, the the supplier, this is what I need, get it? Get me these needs at this quality level at the lowest possible price and then let the marketplace compete for that business that that's, that's the way that modern militaries are going to be supplied. Right now we're still focused on this old model of massive corporations dealing with massive government departments and going back and forth on changing specifications and rising budgets. And, and at the end of the day, the our our mind has to be shifted back to what are our troops need to deliver on the front lines and how can we get it at the best price for the taxpayer. Speaker 2 It's incredible that while we have a massive futurative bureaucracy in the Department of Defense, yeah, we needed to open a new federal agency to oversee procure. This is the craziest thing you could ever imagine. Back to the Ice Breakers we were building. We had the third largest Navy in the world at the end. Speaker 1 Of World War 2, right? Well. Speaker 2 We could build stuff. Speaker 1 We. Speaker 2 Can we just took to get somebody's got you got to get out of our way to let's. Speaker 1 Build it. Oh, absolutely. And that's been Carney's solution to everything. He's now created 14 new government agents. Right now, bureaucracy is blocking home building solution. A new housing bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is buying military purchase purchases solution. Let's create another military purchase bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is blocking investment. Let's create another how? Investment promotion bureaucracy. Every time Mark Carney discovers a problem that comes from excess bureaucracy, his solution is to create even more bureaucracy. He has not gotten rid of a single government agency since he took office. He's created 13 or 14 new ones. And we need to do exactly the opposite. Get rid of all of these useless, duplicative bureaucracies and then unlock the power of the Canadian people to produce things, make things, invent things and do things. Speaker 2 It's obvious. It is shocking. You know, the Prime Minister who has, you know, it's just got to be honest, he has big support in the country right now. And part of that is the fear of the United States. Interestingly, he was hired in an election 17 months ago to solve the problem with the United States. And so far there's no solution. But setting that aside, it's incredible to me all the travels around the world, like when there's been a lot like there's, there's never been a Prime Minister have been on the road as much as Mercati. All the agreements that have been signed, it turns out the only real treaty, the only real free trade or improved trade treaty out of all these signatures is with Ecuador. Yes. I don't know if we do a lot of business with Ecuador. I don't, I, I think it's a fine country, but I don't think we're doing a shit ton of business with Ecuador. So what have all of these documents decided about? I mean, if they're all MO used, they're already planning on doing it. We're already going to look into it like, what's going on? Speaker 1 Here with them, when you look at these so-called agreements that he signs, you actually would look at them. They're actually very easy to read because they're, they're so short and all they really amount to is we're going to form, form a working group of bureaucrats. Just keep talking about doing something one day and you know, they, they all say there's no financial commitment and they're not legally binding. And so when you hear people will say, oh, he's signed 20 strategic partnerships, they're basically, yes, you do basically press releases that have no legal binding clauses, no commitments to spend or provide any funds whatsoever. You're right. There has been one new free trade agreement negotiated by Mark Carney. It is with Ecuador, and God bless Ecuador. Sure. The nice people. Yeah. The nicest people you'll ever meet, finest people. We are not going to build the future of our economy by exports to that one country. So I think we at the end of the day, we already have free trade with billions of people around the world. Most of the Pacific Rim is open to us through the TPP, all of Europe, ever since Harper negotiated, Canada, EU free trade is already open as we don't need other speech there. Our problem, Ron, is not that other countries won't let our goods in, it's that our government won't let our goods out. The Europeans would buy boatloads of our oil and gas this afternoon. I've been to the ports in Lower Saxony in Germany where and I have witnessed these monster tankers filled with natural gas from Texas and Louisiana. And I've met with the local government officials at these places and they'd say we will take your gas this afternoon. But the problem is the Liberals have blocked the construction of liquefaction export terminals of gas on East Coast. We have no terminal to ship our gas well. Speaker 2 Hold up here, but I could, Justin was very clear. There's no case, there is no business case to sell natural gas to Europe and we should all shut up about it. Speaker 1 No business case. And since Kearney took office a year and a half ago, there's not even a proposed site to build anything in the East Coast to ship our gas. So, you know, we had that. There's the Repsol terminal that's already there. All it needs to do is be reversed into a, an export plant. You've got LNG. Newfoundland and Labrador investors came forward and said the Jandark oil field is full of LF gas. We can pump it to the shore, liquefy on the coast and then put it, pump it into another ship and send it off. The shipping distance from eastern Canada to to Europe is half the distance from the Gulf, US Gulf Coast. They've built 8 terminals in the US Gulf Coast, Louisiana and Texas. We built none in eastern Canada, only one in Western Canada. And of course you can't logically get from northern BC to Europe in a a a realistic time frame. So we we need to be we don't need another speech in Europe. The Europeans, we all we have to do is take yes for an answer. It's they're not blocking us for presenting goods we don't need. The market is open to us. We have to get out of our own way. Speaker 2 Just take the yes and do it. Yeah. I mean, this is the essence. And so listen, people don't know this. I mean, you know, I I'm not a kind of a guy who says that the mainstream media is in a in conspiracy mode. I'm not a conspiracy kind of guy. I'm not info kind of guy, but I do believe that we can see obvious trips, we can see obvious truths. And when there is tremendous play given to the signing of pointless documents, when there is enormous appreciation pushed at that, oh, that's the solution. We're going to, we're going to trade with the world. We're going to have all these documents, we're going to see all this and there's no terminals built and there's the, the, the logical pipeline to northern British Columbia is pushed aside and we're still waiting to see one of these projects start and they haven't started enough because of raw. They're going to be patient. No, I'm not going to be patient for 14 years to get 10 Ice Breakers built. That's crazy. That is a fundamentally flawed bureaucracy that is not working properly and for and yet that discussion in this country realistically is suppressed. Well, I would challenge. Speaker 1 The media. I would say this to the media. Go through your database of every single story you've done. Speaker 2 About a liberal. Speaker 1 Announcement but construction project and go to the site where the announcement happened and find out if anything's actually being built 'cause I'm willing to wager if there are countless examples of major projects the government has announced, they got all the Tanfare, they vanished, the lights went out and nothing actually happened. And we just, you know, here we are a year and a half into Mark Cardi. His major projects office has not permitted a single new project, not one. And, and the office was set up specifically to expedite, to do things quickly. So I'm encourage the media, if you are going to report to your viewers, readers and listeners that a project is going to happen, then you have an obligation, A journalistic obligation to go back to the same project site and find out if it in fact did happen. And I think if that happened, you know, how's that? Carney announced he was going to double home building. Home building is down by 5%. Speaker 2 It'll go down again next year. Speaker 1 According to his own housing agency, of course, not my. Speaker 2 No, we're not making the sense. Speaker 1 So now the media goes out and reports that Kearney's going to double electricity production somewhere over the Over the Rainbow. Well, you already reported when he claimed he'd double home building and it went down. Why are we believing that he's going to do anything different on electricity? It's headlines without deadlines, it's announcements without action. And at the end of the day, the reality is key. People can't eat a press release. They can't pay their mortgage with a photo op. They need real results if we're going to turn this economy around. Speaker 2 Well, we had the we, we, they sent a a photographer out to one of the projects. They sent a photographer out to the burgeoning space port right in the Atlantic Canada. So what they discovered was then the $86 million is going towards a concrete pad and a Quonset Hut. Yes, that's going to launch what nothing. I mean, right the the level of when you actually take the time to look at it to your point, let's go out and see it. Let's let's see this project and when you arrive. Speaker 1 You are severely disappointed there. It is really no project now. Your money is gone, but the project is not constructed. And so look, the reality is the government really only needs to do one thing and that is to get out of the way. Governments do not build homes. Government do not dig mines. Governments do not construct major projects they need, but they but they can block them. And if we get the government out of the way and off the backs of builders, we can unlock this cornucopia wealth that we have right beneath our feet. We can have the best hospitals, the best schools and the lowest taxes just by taking the incredible abundance that we inherited by living on this this land of ours. So that's why I'm, I, despite the, the state of our government and the weakness of our present economy, I'm extremely optimistic about our future because we have so much potential to, to fulfil. And I, I really believe this will be the richest, the most affordable, the freest country in the world. And it won't take us that long to do because we have all the tools we need to do it. Speaker 2 We have what the world wants. Speaker 1 Exactly. And the world needs energy. We've got more energy than we know what to do with. We have enough natural gas to power the entire world for 200 years. If no other country produced gas and only Canada produced it's what it has, we could literally supply all of the world's demand for two centuries. That is just insane amount of energy. We have the third biggest supply of uranium to power nuclear facilities. The, the, the Indians, the, the Chinese, they're all getting into nuclear and a big we could, we could supply all of the uranium for that production. We have, you know, obviously the oil goes without saying, fourth biggest supply of oil and we're the only stable democracy in the top five. So this is another massive advantage. So let's unlock this and and we there's like the the wealth that we would be able to generate for our people would be. Speaker 2 Mind blowing. That's. And so it should be. Pierre. Thank you. I, I, I'm conscious of your time, but I want to avert people who don't know Pierre Polyev, his ultra schedule on a Saturday like he is. Eddie's got six place events, the place already, he's come here, got another four and it is an extremely tight schedule. Let me say this, if this hard work and diligence would get you elected, I think you'd been elected five times already. I've been you're putting in the time, you're putting in the effort. You're talking to Canadians, you're talking to Canadians. You're not, you're not in Brussels, you're talking to Canadians. You're, you're, you're out here seeing real people with real problems and you're not letting around the world. So I thank you for your. Speaker 1 Efforts. I know why I'm in it. I have a very simple mission. This country, the Americans like to talk about their American dream. We have something way better. It's called the Canadian Promise. Simple deal. Work hard. You get to own a house, you get meat potatoes on the dinner table every single night. You get to pay off your mortgage very quickly. You get to live in a in safety. You get a job with a growing paycheck. That's the promise to the country. I and I want to bring back that deal for the people. So whenever you have a clear mission, it's easy to keep working. Thank you, Pierre. Thank you for having me.