Transcript of Two Weeks to Decide: An Interview with Pierre Poilievre

Pierre, welcome to the show.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Beyond the Headlines

SHANE PARRISH: Many Canadians know you from the headlines that often compare you to Trump to focus on conflicts. But your friends and family describe you as caring husband and father and someone deeply committed to serving Canada. What do you want voters to know about you that doesn’t make the headlines?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: You know, being opposition leader by definition requires that you fight a lot. I mean, it’s two sword lengths apart in the House of Commons, and the system is deliberately adversarial so that you can hold government to account. But I think it’s important for people to know what I’m fighting for.

And what I really want is to give everyone the same chance I had. You know, I started from very humble beginnings. I was adopted by a couple schoolteachers in Calgary, and yet I’ve been able to make it here. And the story is the same for my wife. She came here as a refugee from Venezuela, and she’s been able to have a great life, as has her family.

And we believe in that. We believe that this is a country where you can start anywhere and get anywhere. So that’s what really motivates me. That’s my purpose in politics. That’s my why. And if there was one thing that I want people to know about me as they consider their decision, it’s why I’m doing this, why I do what I do. Then you can get into all the specific policies about how you get there, but that’s really what pushes me forward and gets me out of bed in the morning to do this job.

SHANE PARRISH: Do you think the comparison to Trump is fair?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No, I don’t think so. I don’t. I mean, we don’t really share anything in common. I mean, he comes from an extremely privileged background. You know, he was born into a very wealthy millionaire family, and I was born in very humble beginnings. There’s a lot of policies that he has that I disagree with. And I think I’m distinctively Canadian in my outlook and in my goals. So I don’t really see the comparison. And I’m a Canadian. I’m Pierre Poilievre. I’m no one else. I’m just me.

Uniting a Divided Country

SHANE PARRISH: You mentioned being the head of the opposition and the adversarial role that that necessarily entails. As the leader of the country, you have to unite everybody. How do you envision doing that?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, that’s a big job. I mean, I think right now, people are more divided than ever in Canada, and I think it’s a bit by design. The government of the day has sought to divide people in order to stay in power, and I think that’s the wrong approach. We need to unite people around what I call the Canadian promise. Make everyone feel like they can achieve something in this country by being part of the community and by working hard. That’s what’s missing right now.

I also think we have to get away from identity politics, which divides people based on their group origins and separates them into categories. The reason why we haven’t had big sectarian divisions in Canada is because we judge them as people, as individuals, on their personal character and conduct, rather than, you know, their gender, their race, their religion, which has increasingly become a vogue approach by the modern progressive left.

I think the opposite approach is better. I think it’s better to treat everyone like an individual and give them a chance. We should stop the divisions that we see between different groups. And basically, look, you’re Canadian first. If you come to Canada, sure, bring your culture, bring your language, your food, your traditions. But the problems from abroad have to stay at home. We bring here a place where we leave all that behind and unite for our flag.

SHANE PARRISH: We always thought of that as assimilation when I was growing up. Right. So welcome people. But also assimilating into our culture, have we forgotten that?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think there’s been, I think the government has tried to encourage people to divide into different camps and that has metastasized onto our streets with these horrible protests that target Jewish places of worship and schools and businesses. And I think that’s wrong. I mean, we’ve always had immigrants from the Middle East and that never led to any kind of violence or firebombings of places of worship. They might have debated if they were in a university class together, but it never went beyond that.

And I think lately there’s been this emphasis on dividing people into different categories and what you naturally get as a result is a lot of hostility, group based hostility and even violence. And I think we need to put an end to that. I think you can. Everybody can keep their own cultural traditions. I think that’s fine. But at the end of the day, we’re Canadian first, above all our other identities. And every single person should be judged based on what their conduct is, not where they came from or where their grandfather or grandmother was born.

Family and Perspective

SHANE PARRISH: Has becoming a parent changed what you think is important for the future of Canada?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, it has. We have two great kids. We’ve got little Cruz, he’s three years old. He’s very ambitious, curious, inquisitive, and I know that he’s going to do great whatever he does. I think he’ll be a merchant or something. He likes to trade. If he wants something from you, he’ll pick something else up and bring it over and offer it as a trade. So maybe he’ll be a commodities trader or something.

And then little Valentina, she has some special needs. She’s six years old and she’s non verbal right now. And so she has a hard time communicating with us but we’ve learned to take her cues and really celebrate the raw authenticity that she has. She’s totally real. Like what you see is what you get. And that’s what I love about her. She has none of the games that people play to put on an air of this or that feeling. She’s just like, you get exactly what she’s, what’s inside her is what comes out of her. And what’s special about that is when she gives you that burst of love, it’s like really powerful.

But I also think about, what’s her life going to be like? How is she going to pay her bills when she’s older? What will her life look like when she’s 60? And I probably won’t be around by then. I was a late bloomer. I think I was 39 when we had her. So when she’s up in her years, I won’t be there. So I think, how do we build up a nest egg for her so that she can have a good life? And then I think about a lot of other families that are perhaps not as fortunate as us who have a child with a disability. How do they pay their bills? So I think it’s given me a lot more empathy to the different challenges and hardships that families have to fight through.

SHANE PARRISH: There’s a lot going on in everybody’s world, and we only see what goes on in our world.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. Yeah. That’s true. So I think having kids and experiencing some of those challenges, it helps you to empathize with other people who are out there and fighting their own battles.

SHANE PARRISH: I know being a single parent, some nights I go to bed and I’m like, I don’t even know how I survived today.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah.

SHANE PARRISH: Or how I did it. And then I look at other people, I’m like, how do they do it?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: How many kids do you have?

SHANE PARRISH: I have two. 15 and 14.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Okay. They go to school nearby.

SHANE PARRISH: Yeah.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Okay. So you don’t have to chauffeur too much. Or do they have sports?

SHANE PARRISH: That’s why we moved here, is just so we could reduce commuting time and so they could walk to school.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Do they have sports as well?

SHANE PARRISH: Well, they have extracurriculars with the school, so between that and homework, they’re pretty wiped.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Wow.

SHANE PARRISH: They’re getting 90 minutes a night, usually of homework.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s a lot of homework.

SHANE PARRISH: That’s a no. No.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: But they’re doing it.

SHANE PARRISH: Yeah. Well, most of the day.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s important.

Political Differentiation

SHANE PARRISH: You’ve been campaigning against the liberals for years, and to many voters now, the promises sound very similar on carbon tax, crime, energy and investment. So how are you different now?

Economic Differences and Policy Approaches

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, to the extent that they are the same at all, the difference is sincerity, because I’ve been saying the exact same thing the whole time. And they’ve been. In the last two months, they’ve adopted pale imitations of my policies to try and kind of trick people into thinking they’re getting conservative policies by voting liberal.

But on the carbon tax for example. The Liberals have not gotten rid of the carbon tax that they brought in. They’ve just made it disappear from the gas pumps through a regulatory command that they can easily reverse if they’re re-elected. The law is still in place and they do admit they want to increase it on Canadian industry, which I think will be extremely destructive given that we’re already in a trade dispute with our biggest market where there is no such carbon tax. So I will get rid of the entire tax for everyone and for real.

Let’s go with investment. Mr. Carney wants to keep C69. This is the no development law. Like all the major businesses that do development say that this law will strangle their ability to dig mines, build pipelines, LNG plants. They just won’t happen with this law in place. So while he makes a lot of kind of hints that he might like to speed things up, when you actually look at the things you need to do to achieve that, he’s against them all. He wants to keep C69. He’s not prepared to commit to what to six month permitting. He won’t get rid of the industrial carbon tax. He wants to keep the energy cap in place, which doesn’t exist in the States. I want to get rid of that.

So on the specifics of what we actually get done, the differences are actually very stark. On the sort of marketing side, he’s tried to adopt similar words to trick people into thinking they’re getting my policies by voting for him. So that’s ultimately it. I think if the Liberals are reelected, you will see a continued outpour of investment to the United States. You will see that we do not build LNG plants, pipelines or any other self-reliance projects that will break our dependence on America.

So I really want to unleash enterprise in this country. We can do it. We can bring our money home. We can make this the fastest place in the OECD to get building permits. We can have lower taxes on investment.

One idea that I think a lot of your listeners would find interesting is that I want to pass what I call the Canada First Reinvestment Tax cut – zero capital gains when you reinvest in Canada. So if you’re building homes or you’re opening a business or buying a CNC machine or a 3D printer, a conveyor belt with the money here in Canada, then you get that tax deferral. But if you take the money out of Canada, you don’t.

So you think of a guy selling a business after 40 years, right now, there’s no incentive for him to keep it in Canada. His incentive is to put it abroad where there’s lower taxes. This would mean that he’d have a massive tax deferral advantage if he reinvested the money in Canada. It would also mean companies that are already invested abroad would have a tax free way to bring the money back. I think this is going to be a real like rocket fuel for our economy.

SHANE PARRISH: Well, let’s dive into the economy a little bit because when I talk to people who maybe work in government or they’re older, they don’t necessarily understand how natural resources go into fulfilling an economy. So how do we create economic value as a nation and then translate that into a better life for all Canadians? How would you explain that to somebody?

The Value of Natural Resources

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, if you’re not working in the natural resource sector, you might say, well, why do I care about this sector? Well, the answer first and foremost is it is our single biggest export sector. So when we’re selling more of our raw materials or better yet, value added to them and then selling them, it brings our dollar up, which means we have more purchasing power and that means we have a higher quality of life and standard of living.

Secondly, these resource companies pay an absolutely enormous amount of tax. So if they are firing all cylinders, it means that your kids, when they graduate, they won’t have to pay as much for the roads and hospitals and schools because it will be paid for by a booming resource sector which is probably the biggest. If you combine the resource industries, they are the biggest by far.

And then all of the people who work for them, they too pay taxes and eat at local restaurants and feed into our overall economy. So without our resource economy we would be an economic ruin. That’s happening slowly. It’s kind of like we’re the frog in the warming water. But every year we get poorer and poorer. But we can reverse that as soon as we want. Decline is a choice. It’s not my choice.

My choice is to unlock the power of our resources to make this the fastest place to get a permit. To reward first nations by helping them have a stake in the royalty revenue that comes out of these projects and to train up 350,000 young people to fill the trades jobs. And they’re incredible jobs. Like often people see someone in work boots and a hard hat, they say well that’s a tough maybe he’s making 30, 40 grand. These jobs can be 2, $300,000 a year. So let’s train up the young tradespeople to fill those jobs. So we could become the richest country in the world.

SHANE PARRISH: Do you think we could ever get to a point where we had no income tax if we really unroot our natural resources?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well of course income tax were only temporary to pay for world war so we saw how that worked out. I can’t make that promise. I’d love to definitely make some headlines if I promise that right now. But we definitely need lower income tax. I call income tax the fine we pay for the crime of hard work. Every time you go out and put in a little more effort, you get punished more. So I’m committing to lower income tax by 15% on the average worker and senior. And as our financial situation improves, I’d like to lower them even more.

SHANE PARRISH: One of the differences between you and your opponent, Mr. Carney is you’ve said no to the WEF whereas he’s heavily integrated into that. Why do you have such strong feelings on that and how does that impact everyday Canadians?

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Governance

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I just think it’s an organization that has a very top down mentality. I don’t believe in top down. I don’t believe that there’s this sort of group of globe trotting experts that can tell us how to live our lives, that can tell us which industry should go up and which should go down, what cars we should drive and what words we should speak and how our money should be spent. I really believe in distributed decision making, personal freedom, letting people live their own lives and chart their own course.

The other thing I found is that, I mean, I’ve been around politics a long time, so I’ve met a lot of these people who are considered part of the elite and I talk to them and I ask them questions and then I go out to my constituency and I talk to truck drivers and mechanics and farmers. And I find the latter group is actually smarter. Now they don’t use all the same fancy language, but if you ask them just sort of nuts and bolts type questions, they’re smarter.

Like, you know, Mr. Carney, for example, told us in 2021, don’t worry about inflation, there won’t be any inflation, we should print even more money. Well, he was totally wrong, like utterly wrong. You know, it’s a jaw dropping mistake and with huge human consequences. In my riding, when the money printing started, the quantitative easing, I was getting farmers and small business owners saying, there’s going to be inflation, there’s going to be inflation.

So how is it these people who don’t attend lectures and don’t go to international summits knew more about the real functioning of the economy than all of these so called experts? What I think is we need a government that’s humble and leaves people their money, their freedom of choice, control of their lives and lets them make their own decisions. And that’s my philosophical difference with that group. And I believe in the common people.

SHANE PARRISH: I think when you say that, what a lot of people might hear is, well, that means cutting services and that would have an impact on lower income families. So can you share how a free market approach would help our economy while still protecting vulnerable communities?

Protecting Vulnerable Communities

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I don’t see those two things being a juxtaposition. What we have seen, first of all, I want to protect all of the social safety net we have, particularly for the most vulnerable. But what we see is that when government grows beyond a basic social safety net, it actually doesn’t benefit low income people. It starts to massively transfer wealth from the working class to the extremely rich.

And this is sort of the irony that I always say, like I say, Robin Hood has been kidnapped. And in reality Robin Hood was fighting against taxes. He wasn’t fighting for a bigger government to take from the working people to give to the aristocrats, which is what we, I think increasingly see.

For example, the government’s now spending $21 billion on consultants. That’s twice what they were spending 10 years ago. Are these consultants waitresses and welders? No, they’re very high priced, extremely wealthy people often getting paid to do work of little or no value. $21 billion, for context, is $1,400 for every Canadian family. So we’re not talking about small sums of money.

Look at what happened when the government printed money over the last four years. It decimated the poor. Poverty went up. Now 25% of people are in poverty. Food bank lineups increased by over 100%. One in four of our kids is going to school undernourished. When the government spends money it does not have, it drives enormous inflation. And that always hurts the poorest people. The rich are not only inflation proof, they’re inflation positive, they benefit.

You know Mr. Carney’s CEO, I think you had him on your show. He was talking about how inflation helps Brookfield because they can raise the rent and their asset values go up. So it’s an enormous wealth transfer from the working class to the super rich. I like to say it’s kind of like taking from the have nots to give to the have yachts.

So what I’m talking about is actually creating opportunity, upward mobility by having sound money that protects its value. Having low taxes for working class people, speeding up permits for housing. The obstructionism that blocks home building. Again, very good if you live in a mansion because your mansion is now worth more money due to the scarcity of homes. Very bad if you’re a working class kid trying to buy a house or you’re a new immigrant.

So most of the poverty we’re seeing today is not because of a lack of government assistance. It’s because government is actively tilting the scale against the least fortunate. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve. When I say bottom up, I mean let’s help the working class, the people in poverty, the newcomers, achieve the life of their dreams by enabling their opportunities.

SHANE PARRISH: One of the things that seems different between when I was a kid and now, I think is that I used to feel like there was more equality of opportunity. Not necessarily equality of outcome, but a quality of opportunity. Like I could do anything and I could be anyone. And I feel like a lot of people have lost that.

The Canadian Promise: From Zero to Hero

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, I agree with you on that. And we need to bring that. That’s what I call the Canadian promise. This idea that it doesn’t matter where you start, you can achieve anything you want. You can go from zero to hero in Canada. And we have these stories – I travel across the country and hear about someone who’s retiring at 65 who showed up poor as a church mouse and built it all from scratch. That’s the Canadian dream.

I’ve got a friend who lived just a little ways from here in Little Italy. His family came here with nothing and they paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in seven years on the wage of a road construction worker and his mom making sandwiches at a senior’s home, growing vegetables in the backyard. And their grandkids wouldn’t even be able to make a down payment in seven years now, even though they’re more educated and have good English language skills.

I want to bring that back. I want to bring hope and opportunity back, that anybody who puts in a good day’s work and strives hard and follows the law and is honest and decent can have a beautiful life. That’s what Canada should be all about.

SHANE PARRISH: How do you plan to balance the budgets while ensuring essential services? And what impact do you think this will have? The going from an unbalanced budget, where we’re borrowing essentially from our kids in the future, to a balanced budget on the economy?

Balancing the Budget

PIERRE POILIEVRE: So there’s two questions there. How to balance and then what’s the impact of a balanced budget? We have to stop the growth in government spending. I would bring in a hard dollar for dollar law that says any new dollar of spending needs to be met with an equal dollar of savings. They brought this in in the 1990s in the US under Bill Clinton and they balanced the budget, they paid off $400 billion of debt, and they had a booming economy at the same time. So that law then lapsed in 2001 and America went right back into deficit.

The problem is the great Thomas Sowell said the number one rule of economics is scarcity. People always want more than there is to have. And the number one rule of politics is to ignore the number one rule of economics. And so I think that we’ve got politicians who by the nature of the job, don’t have to experience scarcity, they just externalize it through money printing, taxing and borrowing.

If you had a law that internalized the scarcity, required the government control itself rather than just going to the taxpayer or to the lending markets, that would enforce a value for money discipline within the machinery of government. And so I would reduce the size of the bureaucracy through attrition. We have 17,000 public servants retiring every year. We don’t need to fill every single one of those spaces.

We need to cut back on these consultants. $20 billion for consultants? Really? Like when we have a 50% increase in the size of the public service, do we need consultants to do their work for them? I am going to cut back on foreign aid. I don’t think that we should be sending seven or eight billion dollars out of our country at a time when we can’t house our people or provide drinking water in First Nations reserves. And we’re not going to give money to multinational companies that ultimately take it out of the country in the form of these corporate grants.

So those are some specific areas that we’re going to rein in. And what’s the effect of a balanced budget? Well, first of all, it means less inflation. Inflation is the silent thief that creeps up whenever government is spending more than it brings in. And that’s because there’s just more money chasing fewer goods. We have to stop that because it’s slowly but surely eroding the buying power of our working class people. The only way to stop inflation is to stop the deficit spending that sparks it.

Making Canada the Premier Investment Destination

SHANE PARRISH: I have a theory, and maybe correct me if I’m wrong on this, that Canada can’t be on par with the US to invest. We have to be better than the US to invest in. So when we talk about multinationals, we want Canada to be the premier country in the world. And with all the uncertainty in the US, maybe it’s an opportunity for us to actually become that. What are the steps that we can take to become the investment of choice for companies when they’re setting up a factory?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right? Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s funny you raised that because Wilfrid Laurier a century ago had the philosophy that we always had to be lower taxed than the Americans to compete with them because they had so much economy of scale that would be ambitious to get lower than them. But the principle is sound – capital goes where capital grows. If you can get a better ROI south of the border, you might put your money there.

Now that’s what’s been happening in the last 10 years. There’s been a net outflow of $500 billion of investment to the US from Canada. And that’s partly because our taxes are extremely high. This is a great place for businesses to take money, not a great place to make money. So you can get a lot of grants to do R&D, but as soon as you become profitable, where do you want to declare that profit? Well, a lot of companies choose to do it outside of Canada.

Secondly, it’s very slow to get anything done in Canada. We have the second slowest building permits in the OECD and it takes them 17 years to get a mine approved. Three times longer to get approval for housing development in Canada versus the UK or the US.

I was speaking to a really successful British Columbia businessman and he started up an application for a plaza in BC. Took him seven years. He flew down to Dallas and the mayor met him at the airport and said “what do we have to do to get this done?” And they sat down, hammered it out. He had his permits in seven weeks. So where do you think the next plaza is going to go? It’s not going to be in BC.

So to answer your question, what’s the solution? We should set a goal to bring together all three levels of government and get the fastest building permits in the world. In the developed world, really. You know, sure we can protect the environment and public safety, but we don’t have to take seven, eight, nine years to do that. You can do it in – let’s try getting it down to six or seven months for major projects.

I’m going to incentivize the municipalities to speed up permits for housing developments and of course we’re going to get rid of the no Development Law C-69 and C-48 so that we can rapidly approve massive natural resource projects, nuclear plants, data centers, the associated power stations to feed them electricity. Let’s be the fastest place that gets done.

The other thing I wanted was create these shovel ready zones so that we can do all the environmental research on the front end, publish the specs and the standards that are required and the business can just look online and say okay, well these are the 10 things we need to do to comply. Oh, and look at that. What’s that? That’s a permit. It’s pre-published. It’s a legally binding permit. I don’t have to apply for it, it’s already there.

SHANE PARRISH: There’s no risk.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: There’s no risk. And then the investor doesn’t have to think, “geez, I’m going to spend seven years on lawyers and consultants and lobbyists and we’re going to have to lock down all the capital and collect all the investors to get to a potential no at the end.” If the yes is up front with clear conditions, then problem solved. And then of course we are going to cut taxes on investment, energy, work and home building so that there’s a great ROI to bring the money home here. To Canada.

Cutting Regulations

SHANE PARRISH: You mentioned regulations. I mean, it sounds like regulations just only increase. Like there’s a natural entropy to regulations where they just keep growing and we never get rid of them. Is your government considering a policy that would be, you know, for every new regulation, we get rid of five or ten?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, that’s good. I went with two. Now it’s two for one. That’s after initial cut of 25%. So our commitment is cut 25% and then bring in a two for one rule overseen by the Auditor General, not by the government. And the reason that’s important is because currently there is a one for one rule right now. So what the government is doing is they’ve kept the number of titles down, but they’ve merged more regulation under each title.

And so if you don’t have an independent audit of how much actual regulation there is, not just in rule count, but in compliance cost, then you’ll never actually reduce the size. Every creature in nature seeks to survive and multiply, and that’s the first law of any organism. And bureaucracies are no different. They set up and then they expand and they enlarge.

And I’ve never in all my years on the finance committee, had an agency come before us for the budget consultations and say, “you know what? You hired us to solve a problem five years ago, and we’re happy to report the problem is solved so you can shut down our agency and we can move on.” That’s never happened. They come back and say, “you know, the problem we set out to solve, it’s bigger than ever before. So you need to double our budget and reward us for the failure that we caused.”

So you actually need hard, binding restrictions on their growth. When we were last in government, we had the economic crisis and we needed to get projects done quickly. So our Minister of Infrastructure said to the bureaucrats, we need the application forms for projects to be one page long. And they wrestled and they fought. They said, it can’t be done. They got it down to one page.

And then he said, we want one environmental review. And they said, no, this will be a disaster. There’ll be species that will go out of existence and water will be destroyed. And, well, they got it down to one review. So what happened? 23,500 projects got done from concept to completion in two years. And the environment commissioner, an independent officer, went out and did a full study and review and couldn’t find a single environmental problem that had resulted from it.

So that means that all the other pages of bureaucracy, all the other environmental reviews, they weren’t actually providing any incremental protection for Mother Nature. They were just giving work for consultants and bureaucrats to do. Well, that’s not what we need. We need to get projects done. So let’s cut the bureaucracy and the waste. And as Bob Stanfield said, “stop stopping and start starting.”

SHANE PARRISH: Why do we default to no?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s safer. It’s safe just to say no to everything, right? And nothing can go wrong on the surface. I mean, obviously there’s enormous negative consequences to saying no, but you can’t see them. It’s all the wonderful things that would have happened but didn’t. So it’s just easier for a bureaucrat to say no, you’re not going any further. And it takes boldness and audacity to push through that.

SHANE PARRISH: Canada’s economy creates less value per worker than America’s. And the difference in the last 10 years has grown quite a bit to a meaningful degree. Most people don’t understand this on their day to day lives. So what is this productivity gap and why should ordinary Canadians care about it?

Productivity and Economic Growth

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, productivity is a very simple concept. You know, eyes glaze over when they hear it, but it really is measured in a very simple way. It’s the GDP of the country divided by the total hours worked in that country. And so today we generate $53 USD for every hour we work. As Canadians, the Americans generate $78. So you can see that they’re making almost 50% more economic value in an hour worked. Why is that? I mean, if you put two workers side by side, an American and a Canadian, I would argue we have better workers. So why is the American generating more value? The answer is that he has more tools and technology.

And we know that because of another calculation. Take business investment in Canada. Divide it by the number of workers. In Canada, we get $15,000 of investment per worker per year. In the states it’s $28,000. We’re way behind even the OECD average. We get 65 cents of investment per worker for every dollar an OECD average worker gets. So we’re capital starved. Our workers are not getting the same CNC machines, the same large heavy equipment, the same factories and mills and other things that actually generate output.

And why is that? Well, again, we go back to the same two problems. Very high taxes, very slow permits. This is not a place where you can get things done. And even if you do, you’re punished for it. So by removing those penalties and making this a rewarding place to invest with a green light that gets you off to the races quickly and then a low tax environment where you benefit from what you do. I think the money is going to pour in.

I think of my grandfather who came from Ireland. I don’t know the exact date now, unfortunately, he’s no longer with us, but it would have been about 60-65 years ago, I think, because Ireland was poor. That was what it was known for at the time. Now Ireland’s per capita GDP is twice Canada’s. And why? Because they opened up to free enterprise. They have very low taxes, very fast permits, lots of free trade, and they don’t have any of our resources. They’re not next door to the biggest economy in the world, so they shouldn’t be anywhere as rich as Canada. But they’re twice our GDP. But it shows that if you unlock free enterprise, then you can achieve incredible boosts in your living standards in a very short period of time. And that’s what I think we can do in Canada.

SHANE PARRISH: We should be the wealthiest country in the world.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely. You got the most, third most oil, the fifth most gas, the first in uranium, first in potash, the biggest oceanic coastline in the world, the most fresh water, the fifth most farmland per capita, the fifth most lithium, the abundant rivers for hydroelectricity. Like we have so many resources. It should be a cornucopia of wealth. And that’s what we will be.

Responding to US Tariffs

SHANE PARRISH: I want to talk about what’s on everybody’s mind. Tariffs. How should we respond to the US? Is tit for tat the right approach in a situation where one trading partner is significantly larger than the other?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I do think you need to retaliate because if not, there’s no deterrent value. The offending country, in this case it’s the US Administration needs to know that there’s a cost for its producers in tariffing Canada. So I do believe in retaliating on day one.

What I would propose to the President is let’s put the tariffs on ice. Let’s sit down and renegotiate the CUSMA in a very quick turnaround. And in the meantime, let’s be tariff free. No chaos, no market ups and downs. End the daily stock market drama. No tariffs for, let’s say 100 or 120 days. Let’s try to get a deal. In that deal, I would seek a permanent end to the tariffs, protection for our sovereignty.

The things that I would put on the table as offers, I would make sure they’re all things we can pull back immediately if the president again breaks his part of the bargain and starts tariffing us again. There are some things that I think most Canadians would be comfortable offering. For example, if you poll most Canadians want to rebuild our military anyway. So this is not something we need Donald Trump to tell us to do. We can do that.

And what we can offer the Americans is that the more they trade with us, the more powerful our economy will be and the more national defense we can fund. And I will put that defense money into the defense of our shared continent, which is I think what they really want. They’re saying, you know, enough of this situation where we protect your Arctic waters and your arctic skies.

SHANE PARRISH: We want to be your partner, we don’t want to carry you.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, exactly. So do your part. And Canadians agree with that. And I think we can offer that our two countries can build the hardware of defense together in ways that are good for both of our economies. And I think if we put that on the table and we do it in a way that we can pull back any commitments we’ve made to them at the instant the deal is violated, then we will be in a strong position not only to nail down a deal but to crystallize it so we don’t end up with this chaos again.

Reducing US Dependency

SHANE PARRISH: How do we become less dependent on the US at the same time as being their partner. We don’t want to end up in a situation where somebody can turn off our economy on a tap on this.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And that’s where we are right now. We have to build pipelines for sure. Our single biggest export is oil and gas. If you add gas, it’s by far orders of magnitude our biggest net export. But unfortunately 100% of our gas goes to the Americans. About 95% of our oil goes to them. And that is a function of not having any way to get it off to tide water.

We have now one pipeline that has just started chugging westward still. Some of that oil though actually goes to California. But we need a pipeline west, maybe pipe one north, maybe one through the port of Churchill and Hudson’s Bay. And I would ideally like to have an east west pipeline. So I intend to get the shovel ready zones to create a national energy corridor with pre-approval for pipelines.

Second thing is LNG, we have the fifth biggest supply, but we’re selling it for four bucks to the Americans when we could be selling it for $14 to the Europeans and a similarly high price to the Asians. Now to get gas overseas, you have to liquefy it and put it on a ship. So you need these big liquefaction plants that compress and cool the gas into a liquid. We have an enormous advantage there too, because our cold weather makes it 25% cheaper to liquefy. Liquefaction is obviously a function of cooling things down.

So then the second thing is it’s 11 days to ship to Asia from BC. It’s 20 days from the US Gulf Coast. So again, another massive advantage over the Americans. The final advantage is we have this abundance of hydroelectricity. The Americans don’t have enough electricity to serve their existing demand, let alone to power more industrial activity. We do. We’re net exporters of electricity and we can produce even more.

The biggest infrastructure project in Canadian history is LNG Canada in Northwest BC, approved by Harper, facilitated by First Nations Chief Ellis Ross, who’s my candidate in that area. $40 billion. This is by far the biggest project. Put this in perspective. There were 18 of these projects on the table back in 2015. 18 – these are an enormous amount of investment we could be bringing. But the Squamish people, they took 14 years to get an approval for their project. It’s an indigenous led project and the government made them jerk around for 14 years. We should be approving these things in months.

And then the coastal First Nations in B.C. would become literally the richest people in the world, exporting our gas overseas to Asia and then in the east coast. We could do it out of Saguenay, out of Newfoundland, potentially out of the Maritime Provinces and go around the Americans and say to them, you know, you don’t want our gas, fine, we’ll sell it to the Europeans and then the Asians and we’ll make a heck of a lot more money doing it.

Interprovincial Trade Barriers

SHANE PARRISH: How does the lack of free trade between provinces impact people?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Higher prices, lower wages, things cost more because there are a bunch of hoops to jump through. And then lower wages because we can’t generate as much wealth. You look at the trucking sector, for example. We don’t have harmonized trucking regulations across the country. So you’re going over the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There’s a weight regulation difference. So you know, you can’t move products seamlessly between those two provinces. How can you have free trade in this country?

Obviously the lack of pipelines is a form of a trade barrier and we need to knock down these barriers. I’m committed to sit down with the provinces and say, look, I’ll make you a deal. We can calculate how much GDP boost we get every time you knock down a trade barrier, and that means more federal revenues. I will give you those revenues.

So if, say, Saskatchewan arbitrarily gets rid of all of its protections and lets free trade into its province from other Canadians, well, my officials will sit down and say, this is the GDP boost and the federal revenue haul from that. Let’s give that to the Saskatchewan government. And that will create a powerful incentive for provincial governments to knock down those barriers.

SHANE PARRISH: I like that.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: You like that one? It’s a carrot.

SHANE PARRISH: That’s a good one.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you.

Relations with China

SHANE PARRISH: I want to go back to the Trump and tariffs just for a second. It seems from the outside looking in, a lot of what he’s trying to do is slow the rise of China or to level the playing field between the US and China. And out of the things that you mentioned that you would do, you never used the word China.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, I think we do need to stand up against Chinese interference in our country, whether it’s foreign political interference, whether it’s unfair trade practices that deindustrialize Canada and make us overly dependent on them. There’s a lot of risks to that. We also need to keep China out of our Arctic waters, skies, and soil by having a stronger national defense.

Look, I think if we have to choose between Beijing and the U.S. obviously, the U.S. is our closest neighbor. They’re the biggest economic and military superpower in the history of the world. And up until recently, they were very friendly to us. The president’s wrongheaded tariffs notwithstanding, we still need a strong relationship with the United States.

And one of the things I would say to the Americans is if you want to strengthen yourself vis-a-vis China, you don’t do it by picking fights with Canada, for God’s sakes. Like, what is Canada? How does ostracizing and alienating Canada achieve that? You should give us more access to your market, and we should trade and grow our economies in synchronicity rather than fighting with each other. Because Trump tariffs against Canada actually only strengthen China because they weaken both Canada and the U.S. So the argument I will make is how do we strengthen ourselves as North Americans against the Chinese threat? We need to knock down the crazy tariffs. The Americans need to respect our sovereignty, and we need to separately but cooperatively strengthen our militaries.

Media Independence

SHANE PARRISH: I want to talk about media for a second. I know this is a thing for you. It’s a thing many people don’t understand. So I want to get into it a little bit here. Many Canadian media outlets are partially government funded, not only via the Canadian Periodical Fund, but they get subsidies for journalist salaries. The government is a large advertiser. Not to mention regulatory barriers that are put in place to prevent competition, which, when I think about this, it sort of raises concerns for me about bias and editorial freedom. How would you ensure that journalists can hold all politicians, including you, accountable while preserving a diverse and independent press?

Free Speech and Media Regulation

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, first and foremost, free speech. I would repeal C11. That’s the censorship law, which gives extraordinary powers to the CRTC to control what content is seen, to boost certain types of content they deem to be Canadian in nature, although there’s no real definition of that, and then discourage other content. And I think that will, over time, be a surreptitious way of trying to manage the debate in favor of what the government wants people to see. I would repeal that entirely.

We need to look at the Internet and the rise of social media differently than this government. They think that having too many voices is a threat. I think it’s an opportunity. I mean, you wouldn’t be able to do this. You wouldn’t have been able to do this 30 years ago unless you wanted to invest tens of millions of dollars in a production studio and a distribution plan, and you’d have to sign deals with a broadcaster to get yourself on air. But the fact that you have this voice is the result of social media and the Internet.

The existing media is not threatened by rising costs or a diminishing number of people interested in reading news. Their challenge is there’s massive increasing competition. There’s actually more media today than there ever has been. It’s just that it’s not the traditional media that we think of.

And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think we should open the door and let the lights in. You know, the government’s approach reminds me of Bastiat, the French philosopher. He said, there are some that believe that we should ban windows so that we can sell more candles. Then people will have to buy more candles to illuminate their homes instead of letting the sunlight in. And I don’t believe that. I think we should open up the drapes and let the light come in and let everyone have a voice. And the ultimate regulator of what you read and see is the reader, viewer or listener. And hopefully they tune in big numbers for this podcast.

SHANE PARRISH: Well, we’ll make this available to any Canadian media outlet that wants a copy of it.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Excellent.

SHANE PARRISH: So they can put it on their site.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I like the sounds of that.

SHANE PARRISH: Do you think your position on media allows you to be covered accurately? When one candidate is saying we shouldn’t be offering as many subsidies to media and one candidate is offering more subsidies to media, how do we… I don’t understand this.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think it’s a problem. I think it’s a problem. I think it makes it very difficult for media to make a judgment without keeping in the back of their head, well, which politician is going to pay the biggest subsidy? And I think that’s worrisome. The media should be objectively reporting on the stories. But if you know a politician is coming along and saying, well, I’m going to give more money to this or that outlet than my opponent will, then obviously that could create the perception of bias in the resulting reporting. I don’t think government should control the media. I think the idea of a free press is that it’s independent from the government.

SHANE PARRISH: I want to come back to free speech for a second. How do we protect free speech in the digital age while addressing the spread of harmful content online? And what role, if any, should the government play?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, how do you define harmful content?

SHANE PARRISH: I think on the extremes it’s pretty easy, right? When you have people marching down the middle of streets saying death to a certain group of people, that’s harmful content, right? That’s hate speech. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, I would say is not harmful content. But where I think one of my perceptions here is this might be the last election where legacy media is directing attention. The next one might be LLMs. And if we start regulating free speech, we’re going to start regulating what LLMs can and can’t say. And that’s how we’ll control our… Sorry, LLMs, like large language models.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Large language models.

SHANE PARRISH: People will be getting their information from a different source than they’re getting it from today. Perhaps, I don’t know, hypothesizing here.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Geez, that’s something else. I hadn’t thought of that. So now what if they just replace politicians with the large language models then.

SHANE PARRISH: Well, I think some of them, that might be a good thing. I hope you’re present company excluded.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank goodness. You had me worried there for a sec. Well, there’s already a lot of artificial intelligence in government. It’s just a different kind, the less high tech kind. What was the question then? I’m sorry, I’ve distracted myself.

SHANE PARRISH: What role or if any, should the Government play in the process of regulating speech.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The criminal code already bans incitements to violence and incitement to genocide. Other utterances that are designed to instruct a violent or hostile attack against a particular group of people that is in the criminal code already and that has not harmed free speech.

What I worry about, you know, you’re talking about people marching down streets and shouting, death to this or that group. You know, a lot of that is not the result of free speech, but it’s about a very toxic ideology that has been pushed from the top down. You look at the way the Jewish community has been targeted. Well, governments have pushed ideologies through universities and schools and even government departments that have given grants to extreme racists anti-Semites.

And so the ideology is not coming from Joe and Jane public going online and just blurting out obscenities about a particular group. It’s coming from a really toxic radical ideology that has proliferated in halls of power over the last roughly decade.

We had one guy, Lathma Ruth, who said things about Jews that I can’t even repeat. The guy got a grant for an anti-racism program. The University of Ottawa had hired a guy as a professor who had committed a terrorist attack in Paris before he came to Canada. Some of the schools are pushing kids to go into these awful anti-Israel, anti-Jewish protests. I see that as a top-down phenomenon, not a bottom-up one. So I don’t think that we should use that as an excuse to take away legitimate political discourse on the internet.

Addressing Rising Crime

SHANE PARRISH: Talk to me about crime. I mean, we sort of alluded to it a little bit there, but I mean, it’s gotten to the point where my parents are afraid. It’s a very different country than I grew up in. When I was 14, I was out roaming the streets in the middle of the night and there wasn’t a worry. I’d sneak out of my bedroom and go to the local grocery store and get one of those McCain frozen cakes and I would eat that.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Wow, that’s really badass.

SHANE PARRISH: A McCain frozen cake back in the day.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Now your parents are going to know.

SHANE PARRISH: About that, but now they will. Yeah, but my parents are afraid to go outside. Crime is dramatically increasing. Police officer, we watched with my kids, we watched a guy piss on a police car at a red light a few months ago and the guy didn’t even get out of his car to arrest him.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah.

SHANE PARRISH: What’s going on with crime in Canada?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the cops tell me that, you know what they call that? They call it Fido. Well, I’ll say it the polite way. Forget it, drive on. They say it an impolite way, they see a crime and they forget it and drive on because it’s not worth their time to arrest people anymore.

The liberal catch and release laws make it so that it’s extremely easy to be released from prison. So I’ll give you an example, Bill C75 is the Liberal bail law and it requires judges release the accused under, quote, the earliest opportunity under the least onerous conditions that’s required by law. Now bail is one thing. If you’re a first time accused, you know, never been accused of anything in your life, you might not be guilty of anything. That’s what bail is for.

But what they’re doing now is releasing people who have like 60, 70 prior convictions. And if you wonder about the veracity of that, in Vancouver, the police had to arrest the same 40 offenders, 6,000 times. 40 guys. Each one of these guys was arrested on average once every two days, 150 times a year for one guy. And the police, they bring him in, the judge gives them bail, police are still filling out the paperwork. The guy’s already out in the street. The police then have to catch him again and bring them back in. And you can be, you can have like 16 or 17 live charges waiting trial and accumulating them.

And the good news is we don’t have a lot of criminals in Canada. The bad news is they’re extremely productive or destructive. You take those 40 guys off the street in Vancouver, you eliminate 6,000 crimes. That’s a lot of lives saved. That’s a lot of people’s businesses that are not going to be burnt or smashed or robbed.

If you take 40 guys off the street, then you’ve got house arrest. Under C5 allows serious offenders of really grave crimes to do their sentence in their living room so they can just walk out the front door and reoffend. They’ve gotten rid of mandatory jail time for bank robberies and extortions and serious possession of lots of drugs.

That’s the cause of this crime wave and I’m going to reverse all of it. I will be repealing the catch and release law C75. I will repeal house arrest for serious offenses. I’m going to be bringing in a three strikes you’re out law. If you get convicted of three serious violent offenses, you will be permanently ineligible for bail, parole, probation or house arrest. It will be jail, not bail.

Such offenders will get a minimum of 10 years and they will only be released after that 10 years if they earn their release through impeccable behavior, clean drug tests, and by learning an employable skill. So no longer will we have parole where by law you’re automatically given back release. You’ll have to earn the release and that will make jails into a real repair shop. Let’s fix these people up, get them back into a productive, law abiding mindset before we put them on the street.

We’re going to secure the borders with more scanners of shipping containers, 2,000 more CBSA officers, and we’re going to treat addiction. Addiction is out of control. We’re going to treat 50,000 people who are suffering from addiction, break that cycle, and I think we can really bring back a peaceful, good life on our streets in Canada.

SHANE PARRISH: How much do you think crime, like the lead domino to sort of crime, and maybe addiction is the lack of opportunity or the feeling, the perception of the lack of fairness, lack of opportunity.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think that’s probably one of the causes for the drug crisis. And then the drug crisis does lead into a lot of other crimes. So if you can think, you think of yourself as being 34 years old and you feel like you have no future at all. You can’t afford a house, you’re not going to be able to start a family. You run off your legs, you feel life has become pointless and directionless. You can see how you might end up trying out a powerful narcotic and then getting addicted.

And so I think we need to give our younger generation a feeling of hope again that their energies will not only create great things for the country, but give them a chance at a better life. I do think that’s part of the equation.

SHANE PARRISH: It’s interesting, you sort of said like, you try it. You don’t. When I was driving by one of the injection sites the other day with my kids, the only thing I can ever think of to tell them is like, nobody thought they would be addicted when they started, right?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely. And this stuff is very dangerous. Like 2 milligrams of fentanyl can kill you. So you might be at a party one night and you’re having a few drinks and people say, try this. And your inhibitions are down and you take it and your lungs stop.

So we really have to stop the fentanyl and treatment’s the way to do it. For addiction, we know treatment works. It’s hard, it’s painful, but the miracles that I hear are really inspiring. And if we can repeat those across the country, like I went to a treatment center in Moncton. And I said to the guys there, you know, often, I’m sure politicians come and say, I’m going to offer this or that help to you, but I’m actually here to ask you for help.

I need you to get better so that you can then go out onto the street and find the next guy and you can pull him up by his hand and you can bring him in here and make him get better, and he can go out and pull the next guy up. And through that virtuous cycle, we can defeat this scourge and bring peace back to our streets.

SHANE PARRISH: I hope you’re right. Healthcare in Canada is primarily a provincial responsibility, but the federal government provides crucial funding and guidance. How would you work with the provinces to ensure consistent, high quality health care across the country?

Healthcare Reform and Licensing

PIERRE POILIEVRE: So we’re going to preserve the funding. There’s a funding increase that’s baked into the Canada Health Transfer right now. We’re going to preserve that, but we think there’s some really low cost things we can do to massively expand the availability of physicians and nurses.

For example, we have 20,000 immigrant doctors, 32,000 immigrant nurses who can’t work because they don’t have a license in Canada. It’s not because they’re not qualified. It’s just there’s no way to prove their qualifications that doesn’t involve years of bureaucracy.

When I got my eye surgery here in Ottawa, the technician was actually a doctor in the UAE. He lives here with his family in Ottawa. He flies to the UAE, does 10 days of surgeries and comes back here. We only let him work as a technician. Are you really telling me that Emirati eyeballs are different than Canadian eyeballs?

Then I went back for my checkup a year later and I brought up the story, and he says, there’s five people like me in this one clinic, immigrant eye surgeons who are forced to work as technicians. In Toronto, they say, if you have a heart attack, don’t call 911, call an Uber, because the driver’s probably a doctor.

So how do we get them licensed? We can’t just let anybody become a doctor. The answer is to have a national licensing test like we already have for the trades. For 72 years, we’ve had a licensing standard in the trades that’s recognized in every province and administered by the federal government. It still respects provincial jurisdiction because it’s voluntary, and it still meets our high standards because there’s a real test.

We could get these people tested, licensed and serving communities right across the country. It would also help Canadian kids who study in Ireland or the Caribbean or the States come back and quickly get licensed. That’s an extremely low cost way to free up doctors and nurses into our system.

SHANE PARRISH: Many voters worry that private care or expanded choice could undermine the principles of universal healthcare. How do you see innovation or reform fitting into the system? And what safeguards would you put in place to ensure equal access for Canadians regardless of income?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: So we’ll protect the Canada Health Act and we’ll make sure that no one is ever denied care because of an inability to pay. I think that’s a basic Canadian value. The provinces really do administer the care itself and how it actually comes through. But the federal spending power is there to basically make sure that nobody’s left behind, that you don’t have a system where someone can’t get an essential treatment because they can’t afford health insurance. And I think we need to preserve that universal healthcare that we’ve all relied on.

What we need to do though is knock down some of these barriers that have made it too bureaucratic and have blocked non-Canadian trained physicians from working. And we also need to speed up drug approvals. We have lots of advanced medications and treatments that are available in the States and EU that are not available yet here because our bureaucracy is so slow. We should speed that up as well by recognizing treatments that are working in other comparable and advanced jurisdictions. I think that would be a way to get faster improvements in the system.

SHANE PARRISH: That doesn’t just apply to healthcare. I mean, that applies to anything, right? Where there’s somebody else who we trust and rely on, has done 100% of the work. Maybe we can rely on that for 80% of the work and reduce our costs.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Exactly. I think we need to see more of that.

The Future of Canada’s Military

SHANE PARRISH: Geopolitics is rapidly changing our spending on defense, but the future of the military looks vastly different than it does today. What does a modern and effective Canadian military look like?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, we are going to have to invest in AI, in advanced robotics, advanced aviation drone technology. I think we need to bulk up the cyber component of our military.

The future attacks might not be a bunch of troops landing on the shores or a battalion arriving to invade, or even aircraft with a pilot coming in. It could be malware that shuts down a power station and deprives a city of electricity. Or scrambles up our banking records so your mortgage is not what you thought it was going to be. Or scrambles up the data in the government so that people don’t get their benefits. Those sorts of cyber attacks might be the norm in the future, and we need to be ready to defend against them.

We should have the most advanced cyber and high tech warfare and defense capabilities anywhere in the world to protect ourselves and our allies. And I also think there’s a great opportunity for our economy.

Look at the Israelis. They have conscription. We’re never going to have conscription. But their young people go into the forces and they learn all about technology and they then leave and they start businesses and they call it the startup nation because they have such incredibly brilliant young people that come out of the military with all these extra skills.

Well, we should be thinking the same way. Our cadets were not obviously the military, but they are obviously being mentored by military and our reservists who are still going to university. Why don’t we find a way to give them the best cybersecurity skills possible? And then when they leave the forces, they have an honorable discharge, they go off and they work for a bank defending the IT network or some similar job. We could use that as a real technological springboard for our economy at the same time.

SHANE PARRISH: As a former employee of one of our intelligence agencies, I would agree with that.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Okay. You probably can’t say any more than that.

SHANE PARRISH: We have great people who work in these agencies and we are the world leader in some of these capabilities. But Canadians have been brought up not to talk about our success too.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Why do you think that is?

SHANE PARRISH: I don’t know. You would know more like, we don’t like the tall poppy, you know, we don’t like the people who stand out or who go for bold ambitions, who go for gold.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

SHANE PARRISH: And I don’t know why, like, we’re content to go for bronze when we could be going for gold and we should be going for gold.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: How do we change that? How do we change that mentality, in your view?

Celebrating Canadian Success

SHANE PARRISH: I think we need to celebrate our successes, for one. I mean, my kids, you remember we used to have those Canadian heritage commercials on TV.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

SHANE PARRISH: Like, when I talk to my kids, they don’t learn about famous Canadians. They don’t learn about Timothy Eaton. They don’t learn about people who start up businesses, who were successful, who drive the economy. They sort of learned some quasi version of socialism in school. And they don’t learn about Richard Feynman when they’re taught math. And I’m like, why don’t like that pulls people in these characters?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We’ve got to change that. I think we have to tell our stories and we have to be more proud of our history because it brings us together. And that shared sense of accomplishment is what binds the country together.

And that’s going to be part of my goal, is to put all our heroes back in the passport. For example, no more tearing down statues. I think we should build new statues. I was meeting with some First Nations people and I said, we should build statues in honor of your greatest heroes. Let’s expand the celebration of history rather than tearing it down. I think that’s how we unite the country.

SHANE PARRISH: I totally agree that we definitely need to look back and, you know, it’s not always pleasant what we’ve done in the past, but also shaming people for something that happened so long ago is not super effective at changing the future.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely. I think we can do this. And as you say, I think we need to tell our young people that entrepreneurs are heroes. That’s the guy who mortgages his house and doesn’t have a good night’s sleep for four years because he’s trying to build something from scratch that has a 10% chance of success. And then it breaks through. That guy should be given a pat on the back and not treated as some kind of a bandit because of the success.

AI, Privacy and Government Accountability

SHANE PARRISH: As AI and other emerging technologies reshape the job market and the privacy landscape, how do you balance innovation with sort of protecting workers, livelihoods and Canadians personal data?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s a very good question. First of all, I think we do need to ban and criminalize the unapproved use of other people’s images in intimate acts. There’s really appalling these AI images that take someone’s person and have them performing different intimate acts. I think that’s really appalling. We need to protect people against that.

I think we need to have stronger protections for our kids against online luring. And, at the same time, we need to make sure that the government doesn’t abuse these new powers. Some people say, well, all the powers of AI need to be concentrated in the government to protect us all. Okay, but we have to make sure the government then doesn’t abuse those powers either.

Because if there can be abuse in the private sector, there can be abuse in the government. So we have to hold the state accountable and make sure that the regulations that the government puts in are truly designed to protect the public interest, not to protect the interest of just the people who are in power.

SHANE PARRISH: How do we do that though?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Like, what does that look like when you say that? When you mean like what kind of regulations would you bring in? Or what are you asking exactly?

SHANE PARRISH: Like if you have power, how do we prevent people from abusing that power? I mean you can put, you can legislate things, but for the past 10 years, I mean we’ve seen scandal after scandal and sort of no consequences to those. So how does that work?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I mean, you talking more just generally about accountability or particularly on the AI front?

SHANE PARRISH: Well, both. Like how do we hold the government accountable specifically with, let’s tackle specifically with AI, like, how do we ensure that the government can be held accountable in a world where they might control information flow?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think transparency – people need to know what rules a government is imposing on the AI companies and what instructions are they giving the companies. All of that should be publicly known. We don’t want sort of backroom manipulations to be allowed. The truth should be public.

And that way the people can say, well listen, in this case I can see that the government is genuinely protecting public interest. They’re protecting my daughter against an online threat. But in that different case, the government is using its regulation to advance a political agenda and then the voter can punish that at the ballot box. So I think the answer is transparency, you know, the sunlight is the best disinfectant.

SHANE PARRISH: I have no data on this other than anecdotal and friends, but trust in government seems to be at a near all time low post-Covid. Why do you think that is? Like, what would explain that if you just entertain the hypotheses that that might be true?

Government Promises vs. Reality

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, you know, I think part of it is the government keeps telling us of all the wonderful things they’re going to do for us and then it results in misery for the people who are, they claim they’re helping. Like, they bring in these, a monstrous housing program 10 years ago and say, well, the government’s going to get back into housing and that’s going to make it affordable. Well then the housing costs double. An entire generation can’t afford a home.

Or the government says we’re going to massively increase spending because we’re trying to help. Well, what happens? Only a small number of largely affluent people actually get the help and everyone else gets the bill. And you got 2 million people lined up at a food bank.

So people say, every time they tell me they’re going to do something wonderful for me, it turns out I get stuck with a terrible bill and my life gets turned upside down. And I think naturally people are very frustrated with that. And I’ve tried to channel that frustration towards a positive outcome, which is, let’s change it. Let’s stop making these ridiculous promises that government is going to do everything for us. Because the government can’t give you anything without first taking it away. The government doesn’t have any of its own money. So every time they promise these things, they’re really talking about taking from you.

What we need to do is have a government that is back to the basics, does a few things right rather than a lot of things poorly, and then lets people prosper and grow and build their lives in the whole country.

Climate Change and Economic Competitiveness

SHANE PARRISH: I want to hit on climate change because we haven’t talked about that at all yet. Many Canadians believe in government action on climate change. And I want to ask a nuanced question on this. So in a world where one country opts into taking action on climate change and others can easily opt out, that risks making us uncompetitive, particularly given the role of natural resources and how they play such a vital part in our economy. How will you ensure that Canada does its part in tackling climate change while also continuing to grow the economy and ensuring Canadian and, well, Canada and Canadians remain globally competitive?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s a good question. I think we have to remember the problem of carbon leakage, which is when you increase taxes and burdens on Canadian industry to a point where production offshores in more polluting jurisdictions, and then you end up with even more global pollution while you have even less Canadian output and industry. And that’s what I think we’ve seen.

Over the last decade, the government has increased taxes on investment, on energy, on payroll. So businesses say, well, it’s cheaper to go produce in some other place where they have no regulations. I’ll give you the most obvious example to me is the Suntech tomatoes. In Manitoba, they’re paying a carbon tax on the CO2 they release into the greenhouse, even though it’s absorbed by the plant life. That’s grade school science. So the Mexican tomatoes is more affordable in Manitoba than the Manitoba tomato.

So the government sends a price signal to the consumer to buy a tomato that had to be transported burning fossil fuels from Mexico by truck and train all the way to Canada rather than incentivizing the local purchase. And that’s an example of, when you punish your own production, you don’t necessarily get lower emissions, you just get less opportunity here.

So I want to bring in a tax break for companies that produce goods below emission levels, like a tax break for investment. Over at the aluminum, the Rio Tinto plant in Saguenay, they produce 1 ton of aluminum with 2 tons of carbon. China, it’s 14 tons of carbon for every ton of aluminum. So by repatriating production of aluminum to Canada from China, you’re not only enriching our economy, you’re actually reducing global emissions. We want to cut taxes on low emitting Canadian industries to bring the production home and bring emissions down at the same time. That’s my overall approach.

Personal Misconceptions and Vision for Canada

SHANE PARRISH: I just have two questions for wrap up. So one is, what do you think other people’s biggest misconception about you is?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think that, because I spend a lot of time with the people in Canada that are suffering the most, the people who can’t afford a home, whose businesses are going under, who can’t feed their kids. And sometimes I find that very upsetting. And it comes off as aggressive, but it comes from, I don’t think people maybe, perhaps they might not know that. It comes from a place of caring for the people that I’m fighting for.

And my challenge is to convert that care into showing people the positive vision I have for the country, the brighter future that we have with change. And that’s what I have to convey in these closing weeks so that people have hope. I want people to go to the polls not because they’re angry, but because they’re hopeful.

SHANE PARRISH: Usually the final question I ask for any guest is what does success look like for you? But I think in your case, I want to change that slightly. What does success look like for Canada four years from now if you’re elected?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think it’s a place where every kid grows up knowing that they can achieve anything they want. Parents sit them down and say, look, what do you want to do? You want to be an astronaut? You want to start a business? You want to cure cancer? You just want to have a nice house with a dog and have a couple of kids that play street hockey in the front driveway? You can do any of that. All you have to do is work hard. And that’s what I want the country to have. I just want everybody to have in this country, and that would be a success.

SHANE PARRISH: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you want to get on the record?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No, I think that’s good. I think that’s all.

SHANE PARRISH: This was great. Thank you for taking the time today.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you for having me. I really enjoy your show and look forward to seeing you next time.

SHANE PARRISH: Appreciate it.

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