Pierre Poilievre’s Interview @ Diary of a CEO Podcast (Transcript)

And Canada has been the other one where it’s been incredibly adversarial over the last couple of months. Is this just all about oil?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Frankly, we don’t really understand what the dispute with Canada is about, because we’ve been a very good and friendly partner to the United States ever since the early 1800s, before we even formed as a confederation.

What I would say to Americans, though, is you shouldn’t have to worry about all of these countries. If you are working collaboratively with Canada and you’re trading freely with a separate country to the north, then you will not be bound by what happens in these other, less stable and arguably more hostile countries.

What I believe we as Canadians need to do is use our natural resources as leverage to get what we want from this administration and future ones. What we want is tariff-free trade for our steel, aluminum, lumber and automobiles. And in exchange for that, we can produce more oil and sell more of it at better prices to the United States of America.

Oil is only one part of it. There’s also the strategic minerals that are necessary for, God forbid, modern warfare, and we have those as well. We are a resource superpower, and I want to leverage that to get what we want from the US and from other nations.

Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and the Bombings

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m looking at the third vial there in the row, Iran. Has Trump taken the right course of action in bombing Iran in the way that he has? And the other question that’s on everyone’s mind is, how do you get out of this? Is this going to end well?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The Iranian government has been extremely hostile and very dangerous to Canada. They killed 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents by shooting a civilian aircraft out of the sky — PS752 — for reasons I still do not understand, and with no explanation whatsoever.

They have unleashed agents into our communities and streets to harass the Jewish and Persian communities of Canada. And they are the leading world sponsor of terrorism. It is absolutely unacceptable for the Iranian government to ever acquire nuclear weapons. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the only reason they are enriching uranium is for martial purposes. There’s no need to enrich it to the degree they have in order just to have nuclear power plants. I have no doubt that they were doing it for the purpose of developing a weapon. And if that were to happen, it could be catastrophic for neighboring countries, but also for faraway lands if given the ability to develop long-range missiles.

My view, and the view of the Canadian government, is that the Iranian government cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. And any action to stop them from doing that is necessary for world peace.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was this action necessary to stop that, in your view?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think that the initial actions were definitely necessary, particularly the bombings four or five months ago to target the nuclear development sites. But I think any actions to degrade their nuclear capabilities, and prevent them from ever achieving them, is favorable. And I hope that it will weaken the regime enough for the people to overtake it and claim control of their country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It doesn’t look like that’s the case. I think they’ve appointed the son of the Ayatollah to lead the country now, and they seem to be firing at everybody in the region. There were some reports that they might have ballistic missiles that could reach Europe as well.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, and this is what we have to stop. The idea that they are carrying out this aggression simply because they’ve been attacked is false. They would have eventually carried it out. The question is when and with what means. And if we had just sort of slept and waited, we would have ended up with a catastrophe.

This is different than North Korea. North Korea was allowed to get nuclear weapons, but they don’t have the same celestial fundamentalist ideology there. Ultimately, the regime in North Korea is interested in its own survival and its power. The regime in Tehran has a theocratic dream. They believe that there’s an afterlife in which they could be rewarded for carrying out mass destruction on what they call the infidels. They don’t respond to deterrence the same way that Pyongyang in North Korea would. There’s a far greater risk to them having a nuclear weapon than even having that in a communist totalitarian state like North Korea.

But for Canada, in this environment, our superpower is again our resources. And that’s why it has been one of my major obsessions to unblock our resources, get them to tidewater, accumulate them in a strategic reserve that would allow us to really flex our energy muscles in environments like this, and also reduce dependence on regimes like Iran, like Saudi Arabia, like Venezuela.

Canada’s Position and What Trump Should Do

STEVEN BARTLETT: If Trump had called you and asked for your support, had you been leading the government of Canada, would you have given the support? This is the big conversation at the moment in the UK because Keir Starmer was reluctant to send troops originally, and it seems to have irked Trump in an interesting way.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Our Prime Minister did support the attack and I agreed with Prime Minister Carney on that point. That is distinct from contributing Canadian soldiers, sailors and air crew. I’m not proposing that we send ground troops to Iran, and we are not in a position right now to supply a lot of the demands that this conflict would require. It depends on what they ask for before we get an answer from Canada on what it is that we can provide.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re someone that knows a lot about history. You seem to know a lot about a lot, frankly, and I don’t know a lot about a lot. So when you think through how this could go — it doesn’t appear that the Iranians are going to roll over very easily. The Iranian leadership are going to roll over very easily. Trump doesn’t appear to be a man that likes taking hits to his ego. So it doesn’t appear that he’s just going to pull out and let things unravel. And then the third option one would say is that they double down even further and send troops to the region. How do you think this plays out based on everything that you know about both history, about Trump, and from your pattern recognition?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, it could go a variety of ways. Remember the first Persian Gulf War? George Herbert Walker Bush decided that he had downgraded and penalized Saddam Hussein enough for the invasion of Kuwait. He declared victory and he moved on. And ultimately that left a lot of stability in the region. His son then went and pursued a full out-and-out regime change. And that was a much longer enterprise.

The president will have to decide which of those two Bushes he uses as a model. But I think the important thing is to know what the objective is. For me, the objective has to be to make sure that the Iranian government never gets the capacity to send long-range nuclear missiles to countries, or even short and medium range to Israel for that matter.

Beyond that, I think it’s up to the Iranian people to take advantage of the weakness of the regime and rise up and reclaim their country. I don’t think this regime has popular support. I know a lot of Iranians. We are blessed to have a lot of very secular, pro-Western Persians who live in Canada, are proudly Canadian. And they will tell you that there’s almost no support for the regime among the people of Iran. They need to find a way to overturn the regime, and that would give a lot of comfort and peace to the rest of the world, but it would also give democracy to a deserving people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would you do if you were Trump?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s a good question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No offense to Tim.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Like I said, I would focus on the core objective of making sure that there’s not a nuclear-armed Iran, without getting involved in a permanent quagmire.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So everything’s been bombed now. Fordow’s been bombed. So is this the time to pull out then?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think it all depends on the intelligence they have about the nuclear capacity. That is the hinge point. We cannot allow a nuclear-powered Iranian military. That is what they need to determine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For me, at the moment, it looks a little bit like it’s lose-lose for Trump in an interesting way. And I think this is also reflecting the fact that nobody really has a perfect answer for what to do next, because it’s all just trade-offs.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right, that’s right.

Canada’s Oil Sector and Economic Independence

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I mean, that’s what the great Thomas Sowell said. There are no solutions, just trade-offs in life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s hitting the price of gas at the pumps in a big way.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A way that concerns you?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, it’s funny you should ask because it shouldn’t have to concern Canadians. Our enormous supply of oil should actually insulate us from it. Normally, what used to happen in Canada is when the global price of oil rose, our dollar would rise with it because people would be buying more of our oil, which meant they had to first buy our dollar. A more powerful Canadian dollar meant that we had more buying power for internationally priced commodities like oil and food.

So we used to be protected from international oil price increases in a way that we’re not anymore because our sector is no longer as strong and as big as it was as a share of our economy. And so what I want to do is unleash oil production in Canada, clear the regulatory bureaucracy, the government gatekeepers, get rid of industrial carbon taxes and have a stronger dollar that makes life more affordable and much more geostrategic power in the world.

On Trump, Trade, and Canada’s Foreign Relations

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a quite significant probability that you could be Canada’s next leader. And for you to achieve all those things you’ve just described, you’ll need to have a productive relationship with the United States. Trump, if all follows the law, won’t be able to be elected. So it’ll probably be a different leader by the time that you were in power. Although I know that there could be a vote of no confidence, which means that you could get into power earlier. Your relationship with Trump — good, bad, indifferent?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I’ve never met him.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Never met him.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I’ve never spoken to him. I’ve made the decision that we have one prime minister at a time. And because we are negotiating a trade deal — it’s more like a review of an existing deal — I don’t want our side as Canadians to be divided. Even though I obviously disagree with my prime minister on a whole range of policy issues, I don’t want to undermine in any way the Canadian side of the bargaining table. I would only do that kind of conversation in teamwork with the current government.

But what I’ve said is that our approach vis-à-vis Trump should be to focus on what we can control. So why not focus on what we can do at home? Unlock our resources. Build up a strategic reserve of minerals that are important to our American friends, but also to our other allies. Clear the way to export more goods to overseas markets. Build alliances with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, to diversify and become more self-sufficient.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You keep using this word “unlock.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And “clear the way.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are you referring to when you say “clear the way” and “unlock”?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Removing bureaucratic obstacles. The resources we have are massively profitable for the private sector to mine, refine, store and ship, as long as they can get the permits and low enough taxes to do it. So we need to remove those obstacles so that it now becomes possible for private investment — not subsidized by government, no handouts for business — but private investment to unlock and unblock those resources.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re just saying that you don’t want to get in the way of Mark Carney.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I don’t want to get in the way of negotiations with a foreign country. Obviously, my job is to be his opposition in the House of Commons on domestic issues and even on international issues, but not to do so in a way that undermines the national interest.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of countries aren’t like that. It was interesting because you were on Joe Rogan’s show — it’s got a global audience. So if you talk about him there, you’re talking about him all over the world. And you said you wouldn’t criticize the leader of the opposition unless you were in Canada, but you know that you’re reaching everybody, everywhere, all the time.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s true. But I just think it’s a good principle to follow, particularly during a negotiation that’s happening across the border in that country. I think it would be a little different if we were in normal times and there was no trade dispute, or if we were in a country with which we have no particular contention — for me to say something critical about the government’s policy back home would not have any repercussions for the nation.

But particularly over the next several months, while these talks are hopefully going to go on, I want to get the best outcome for Canada. And I have to put my country above myself.

Pierre’s Vision for Canada and His Humble Beginnings

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why are you better than the current leader of the Canadian government, Mark Carney? What is it you offer that is better than what he has to offer?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: My mission is to make Canada the most affordable, freest, and richest country in the world. My upbringing — I grew up in very humble beginnings. I grew up surrounded by working class people. These are my folks.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Got a photo of you there. And your parents and your stepbrother, your half brother.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Half brother, yes. So my dad and my mother, they were schoolteachers. My brother’s my half brother because we came from the same biological mother, but different biological fathers, adopted into the same family. Kind of a complicated story.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your biological mother put you up for adoption at 16 years old.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: She was 16. And then about three years later, she had another little boy. And he, Patrick, was then adopted by the same parents.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they were two teachers that adopted you and Patrick?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, that’s right. I still remember when we went to pick him up. We got a phone call and they said, “Well, there’s a little boy who happens to be half brothers with Pierre. Would you like to adopt him too?” And they said, “Absolutely.” So we went over to this building and we walked into this room and there were all these rows of babies. And we walked past them and then they said, “That’s him right there.” And that was when I met my brother.

I thought that’s where babies came from — there was a store. We go to a store and get your groceries, there’s a store where you can go and get a baby. That’s what I thought, because that was my first experience with it.

And we brought him home and we grew up in working class neighborhoods. When I was about 3 or 4, we lost everything. We got smashed by high interest rates. My mother had saved up enough to buy two little rental properties. We lost those and our home and had to borrow from our grandfather to get a down payment so we’d have a place to live. My dad was driving this Oldsmobile that was falling apart. And our neighbors were working class folks — electricians, oil workers, police officers. Those are the people I grew up with.

And I always grew up admiring those people, admiring what they were able to do and believing that they were generally taken advantage of by government, never listened to, and kept on the outside of decision making. And my mission has been to bring back what I call the promise of Canada — that anyone can achieve anything. Doesn’t matter if you start off as an adopted kid raised by schoolteachers or an immigrant from Botswana who grows up really poor. If you work at it, you should be able to buy a house, launch a business, become a famous global podcaster, or maybe cure a disease. And that was what Canada was all about. And that is what I’m trying to reinstate.

Meeting His Biological Mother and Father

STEVEN BARTLETT: What age do you get to meet your biological mother for the first time?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: 21? 22. My adopted mother was very gracious because I said, “I won’t meet my biological mother without the permission of my adopted mother.” She did all the work of raising me — all the hardships, all of my rambunctiousness in teenage years. She drove me to hockey practice and emptied her bank account to pay for our food and stuff. So I did not want her to feel like she was going to be left behind or forgotten about or replaced.

And I asked her, “Would you be okay if I met her?” And she said, “Yes, of course, because I won’t always be here. And I always want you to have a mother.” And I thought that was a really incredible thing to do, because it’s such a big part of a mother’s identity that they are the mother of that child. But to have a love that’s so much deeper than that personal identity or interest is something I’ll always remember. It’s one of the most gracious things I’ve ever seen.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can see the emotion in your face as you say it. Yeah, it’s still there.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that in a while.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What beautiful people.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, we’re very blessed. And it’s people like these that inspire me, that keep me going in this crazy world of politics.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you get to meet your biological mother at 21, 22?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, around that, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does one say? What are the questions one needs to ask, if any?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We went on a bit of a road trip from Ottawa to Montreal, and we just got to know each other. She had a lot of questions about how my life had been, and I had a lot of questions about our biological family — about her father, who was a really great man. I would go on to meet a great Irishman, and the circumstances that led to my conception and birth. And I really came to understand her decision to put me up for adoption. And I’ve never been resentful for it at all. She was 16. She had just lost her mother to a heart attack. She didn’t have a lot of means. And she just made a selfless decision that we would have more opportunity if we were raised by someone else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you ever learn anything about your biological father?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes. He works at a concrete plant in British Columbia. And so I went and met him. He’s a great father with children that he subsequently had and raised. And so he’s a very good man as well. And my adoptive father is a teacher and he gave me a lot of wonderful lessons and I think is responsible for my way with words.

His Adoptive Parents’ Divorce and His Father Coming Out

STEVEN BARTLETT: Marlene and Donald.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Marlene’s your adoptive mother, Donald’s your adoptive father. They divorce when you’re 12 years old?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It would be around that time. I was in grade 5.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Very difficult time for parents to divorce. Very difficult time. I remember that period of life very, very clearly because I remember one day my parents coming to me and telling me that they didn’t love each other anymore and that they were going to get a divorce. They didn’t. But I remember it, which I think did enough damage. It was around that age. And I remember where I was stood in the house. I remember what I was wearing when they said that to me, because it’s earth-shattering.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It is, actually.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I just can’t unforget it. It was traumatizing.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, my dad told me and he wanted to tell me alone. So we got into the car. He said he wanted to take me for a drive. And we drove to the local corner store and we parked in the car. And he told me there. But it is very traumatizing. But at the same time, they were very good parents. So I don’t judge them for how they ended up apart. We were very blessed. They gave me a great start in life. Even though they weren’t together, they loved us very much and they gave us all they could.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And Donald would eventually come out as gay.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One would assume that he was dealing with the conflict of feelings.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes. He had been raised in a very devoutly French Catholic household. And that’s why we have a French name. And before he got married, he’d even considered going into the priesthood. So he was very devoutly Catholic. He genuinely loved my mother. But obviously he wasn’t programmed that way. He has a wonderful partner and we’re very close with him and his partner Ross right now.

The Influence of Strong Women

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you see how that’s changed you as a man, as you’ve grown up, whether it’s your sort of your perspective on what love and romance is or anything else?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think that if everything had just been white picket fences and totally predictable, then I wouldn’t be the kind of person I am today. It’s like you. Would you have been as successful as you are if you had had a very easy childhood? I doubt it. I bet all the hardships that you had and the twists and turns that took you from Botswana to the United Kingdom and then onward probably gave you some superpower.

And so I think it gave me the chance to understand that you don’t judge people. You love them for who they are. My parents also taught me an important lesson that Shakespeare says, “To thine own self be true.” My mother, when she was a small baby, was in a car accident and her fingers were burned off, and she had horrible scars, horrible burns on her hand at the time. And as I got to my adolescence, I said to my dad, “Did it ever bother you when you started dating her that she had this injury?” And he said, “No, because it didn’t bother her. She was totally at peace and she never hid it. It wasn’t long after we met that I forgot it was even there.”

And the message that I took from that is, be yourself. Don’t try to hide the scars. Scars are the trophies of survival. So those are some of the lessons that my mother and father taught me. And my dad was the same about who he was. He just lived his life unapologetically and openly, and he never apologized for who he was. And that has stayed with me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you speak of Marlene, you speak with her with a great fondness and expression in your face that — I’ve sat here 600, 700 times, so you get to see who matters most to people in their lives just by looking at their face. And she’s clearly on the podium.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, she’s a very feisty little lady. Very short and very, very forceful. She taught me a lot about being pugnacious and fighting for what you want and what you need in life. And we argued a lot when I was a kid, and I think that maybe forged some of my current political argumentation as well.

My wife is a big part of it as well. She’s a very strong, feisty, intelligent lady, with an incredible upbringing as well. She’s a refugee from Venezuela and came with really nothing. And so she has this sort of MacGyver-like skill set to get anything done, no matter how difficult the logistics. So I’ve been very, very blessed with strong women around me at a very young age.

The Path Into Politics

STEVEN BARTLETT: It appears that you took a liking to politics. I mean, you mentioned hockey first and Marlene taking you to hockey. I’ve found a couple of photos of you playing hockey, which I found to be quite interesting. But yes, politics. When did politics come into your psyche?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I would have been kind of in my mid-teens. I got into football, hurt my back in football, so I couldn’t stay on the team. My mother had always gone to these sort of local conservative meetings, sometimes just bringing baked goods or attending a volunteer meeting. And I said, “Well, why don’t you bring me to one of those? Because I’m bored out of my skull.” And she did. This gives me meaning. This gives me purpose. I want to go and pursue this. So I started getting more and more involved. I got an internship making almost no money and dressing up in a used suit, and really threw myself fully into this mission.

Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the books that I realized you’d read at that time, from some research, is this book, Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes. So this book has to be accompanied by its more famous sister book, which is The Wealth of Nations. That’s the book that most people know Adam Smith for. They think of him as kind of the father of capitalism. Because in 1776, he wrote this book which described what we now call the free market system. And this was a really revolutionary idea because up until then, we basically had various forms of feudalism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Where a small group of lords and knights and aristocrats control all the land and the great masses do all the work. And so you called them serfs. They would do all the heavy labor, and then the lords of the manor would take all of the benefit.

Along came the system of free enterprise that Adam Smith describes, which has a very simple premise. Voluntary exchange of work for wages, product for payment, and investment for interest. And that the economy, rather than being guided by the iron fist of the king or the state, is guided by the invisible hand of the free market. And this had been thought to be crazy. How could the economy just sort of run itself?

And the answer is through price signals. If the price of something goes up, people just automatically start making more of it. And if you need more workers to make that thing, you raise the wages and all of a sudden, what do you know, the workers arrive. And this system is absolutely ingenious. Like, it’s why when you go into a coffee shop and you buy your coffee, you say “thank you,” and they don’t say “you’re welcome,” they say “thank you.” Because they have something worth more to them than they had before — the money. And you have something worth more to you than you had before. And this voluntary exchange puts everyone on equal scale.

Even if you’re a massive corporation, if you want to sell something to a 15-year-old kid, you have to convince them that it’s worth more than the cost. So everybody has to be better off in the exchange for it to occur. And that was how free enterprise formed. And it has led to a spectacular increase in the quality of living and the economic growth — a 200-fold increase in economic growth in the free enterprise era versus the feudal era.

So a lot of people thought Adam Smith is only interested in a system where people are out serving their self-interest. That’s what they took from the statement in The Wealth of Nations that “it is not from the benevolence of the brewer, the baker or the butcher that we get our meal, but from his own self-interest.” But that was only half the story.

The other half was in this book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he explains how self-interest overlaps with virtue. So what he said is that we have something called fellow feeling, which is to say we feel for the other person and we feel good when someone else does good. It’s why people donate to charity, or they leave the door open for a stranger, or they might help an injured person on the street — because they feel bad when they see someone else, their fellow, suffering, and they feel good when they see him succeeding. And that’s why it’s called sentiments, because you feel these things.

I saw this in my own son. For the first time, he got a little toy and he gave it to his sister. It was the first gift he’d ever given in his life. And he was so happy — he literally ran in a big circle around the foyer of our residence, just laughing and screaming. It just made him so happy. Happier than she was to even receive it. And this is the best of human nature — that his interest, his happiness, was served by seeing his sister better off.

And this is really laid out in some detail in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For me, it’s like it brings together all of human nature in one place. Now, he’s not naive. He does accept that there are bad, dark angels in our nature. But he gives the only plausible explanation that I have seen about how you intersect self-interest with altruism.

Socialism vs. Free Enterprise

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how did that change your perspective and therefore your policies and your career?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I have found that those who push a socialist ideology have a gross contradiction in their view of human nature. They say that human beings are wretched, self-interested, and greedy when they’re in the private voluntary economy, but they’re angels when they’re in the governmental economy. And therefore they argue that the government should just control everything, because then we have all these angels that will decide for us — decide what we get to wear, how our money is spent, what we’re supposed to believe in the modern day, what kind of vehicles we drive, what we should think.

But that is a huge contradiction. If man is not capable of deciding for himself, surely he’s not capable of deciding for others. And I think the worst vices in human nature come out when there is too much power concentrated in their hands. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So my ideology is that we should disperse power, that it should be a bottom-up system with as much freedom and agency as humanly possible, that people should be free to choose for themselves, and that the purpose of the government is to do only those things people cannot do for themselves.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess if there are socialists listening now, they might think, “Well, we tried this sort of capitalistic approach to the economy and it’s resulted in us being able to buy less food and vegetables for our money. The price has gone up at the pumps. People are struggling. It seems that inequality has widened and the working class seem to be struggling more now than ever before. They can’t buy homes anymore like my parents or my grandparents could have. So clearly we need socialism,” they would argue, “because the current system has not worked.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, what we have now is socialism for the very rich. We have governments that are actively redistributing wealth from the working class to the very, very wealthy. And that is why we see record inequality. Government is actively intervening in the economy to forcefully redistribute wealth up the chain.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Up the chain?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely. And there are countless examples of it. When they block home building with heavy regulations, they limit the supply of homes. Those who have mansions are therefore richer because their houses are worth more. But young people, newcomers, and working class people can’t actually get a home. That is one example of state intervention. Well, we could do an illustration here.

The Housing Crisis: A Visual Demonstration

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so this is the total amount of land in Canada.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where homes could be built. And actually, this is quite reflective, I think, of much of the Western world, even the UK. And this is a penny.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you understand this demonstration?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes. I think what you’re trying to say is that this is about how much land we live on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: So Canada is a great example of this because we have 10 times as much land per person as the second closest G7 country, and yet we have the fewest homes per capita to live in. And why is that? It’s because the vast majority of the cost that goes into building a new home is not land, labor, or lumber. It’s government. It’s government taxes, fees, charges, bureaucracy, lobbyists, consultants.

So if you think of this home here — when you buy this house in Canada, more of the money for your purchase would go to bureaucrats in office buildings than to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who actually build the home.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? How?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Because the bureaucracy has grown like any organism in nature which seeks to survive and multiply. They give us the second slowest building permits of any country in the OECD. They charge enormous development taxes which started out just to pay for plumbing and roads for the related housing, but now have grown into just a huge cash cow for local governments, because sales taxes still apply on most new homes. And all of that gets sponged up by government and means that we have extremely expensive housing.

In fact, we are the most expensive in the G7, even though it should be dirt cheap to own a home in Canada because we have the most dirt to build on. And my goal is to remove all of that bureaucracy, speed up permits, have the fastest permits in the world, and make it tax-free to build homes so that everyone can afford one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was reading some stat that said — again, I might butcher this a little bit — but it said that Canada needs to build between roughly 450,000 new homes every single year until 2035 just to restore affordability.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. And we’re building about 240,000 per year. So we need to roughly double our home building to do that. The good news is — well, it’s not good news — we have 100,000 unemployed construction workers who’d be happy to pick up a hammer and start building. We have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that’s ready to do it. We have an abundance of land. What we need are fast permits and low taxes so that we can unlock that building.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the case for slow permits?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: There isn’t one.

The Housing Crisis, Monetary Inflation, and Economic Policy

STEVEN BARTLETT: There isn’t one.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Zero. There is no benefit to having slow permits. They do not protect the environment. They do not protect public safety. We used to build houses a lot faster and they didn’t fall down. After the Second World War, permits were almost instantaneous. We had a massive buildup of homes so that our returning veterans could have a place to live. In many neighborhoods of Canada, those homes are still standing. They have not collapsed.

I’m not saying we get rid of building codes. They should all have to follow standards of environmental responsibility and be fire resistant and safe. But it shouldn’t take seven years to approve a subdivision to do that. We know how. The developers know how to build according to the rules. They just need quick permits and freed up land to do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’d think now with AI you’d be able to approve these permits within minutes.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: With all the technology, housing should be so much cheaper than it was before. In fact, everything should be so much cheaper. But this is another area where government is redistributing wealth from the working class to the super rich. It’s the monetary inflation where we’re creating cash at a far faster rate than we’re creating the stuff that cash buys. We’ve in Canada increased the number of homes over the last 10 years by 13%, but we’ve increased the money supply by 100%. In other words, the growth in the money supply is eight times faster than the growth in the housing supply, which means for the average person that it bids up the price.

Now you might say, well, if everybody’s equally getting their share of that money, then who cares? But they’re not. There’s something called the Cantillon effect, which is that the first people to touch the money in a monetary expansion are those who are already wealthy and already connected to the financial system. So when government creates cash to fund its deficits, it doesn’t just dump the bills out of an airplane into a suburban neighborhood. It injects it into the banking system by buying government bonds at inflated prices. And those who trade in those bonds are the first to get the cash. Those connected to the financial system are the first to borrow it. They get to deploy it before it loses its value. By the time it trickles down to the working class people, it’s lost its value and their wages have been destroyed.

And this has been happening on and off throughout all of human history, but it’s been particularly bad in the last 55 years. And that is why I think the working class across the Western world is so angry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Canada have consistently dropped down the sort of happiness league table.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, actually from 2015 we’ve gone from 5th to 25th. We went from 18th to 25th just in the last year.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you were the fifth happiest country in the world and now you’re 25th?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. And part of it is food. We have the worst food price inflation in the G7 today. It’s due to a lot of hidden taxes that are baked into food production. We have an industrial carbon tax that charges on farm equipment, fertilizer and food producers. We have a new fuel tax that’s just come in. Single use plastic is now banned, which makes it so that food goes bad about five days quicker. So it sounds kind of very virtuous — we’re not going to use plastic anymore. But it ultimately means food goes bad and somebody pays for that.

So I want to get rid of all of those taxes and fees and unnecessary regulations that do nothing for our health and safety so that we can have more affordable food. But more broadly, we have to get rid of the monetary inflation that I described. As I said, we’ve doubled our money supply in Canada from 1.4 trillion to 2.8 trillion in 10 years. So it is not actually that these things cost more, it’s that the money with which we buy them is worth less because we’re creating so much of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And why are you doing that? To fund deficits, to pay for debts?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. And that’s why — it’s not just Canada, by the way, it’s across the Western world — they’re creating cash to fund deficits.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the deficits come from having a big government.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, a big government.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s too big.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s too involved.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. And the result is that we’re creating cash faster than we grow food, build homes or produce energy. And my mission, Steven, is to flip that. I want us to create more of what cash buys by unblocking food production, energy production and home building so that we add those things faster than we add the cash to the system.

GDP Per Capita and Canada’s Economic Stagnation

STEVEN BARTLETT: I saw this graph here, this chart, which is GDP per capita with international counterparts. So on there it has Canada, United States, OECD. And it shows, it’s quite stark, it shows that Canada has basically plateaued in terms of GDP per capita. What does that mean for the average person? What is GDP per capita? What does that actually mean?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s your income, really. Ultimately the GDP, the gross domestic product, is the value of all the things that you produce. If you’re producing more per person over time, people will see their wages rise, their real wages rise. If you don’t produce more per person, then your wages are flat. And so that is what we’ve effectively had in Canada over the last 10 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Because we are not unlocking our resources. Our biggest industry is oil and gas and it’s locked behind very aggressive anti-development laws and bureaucracies. Because we’re blocking home building and because we’re overtaxing our population, we’re punishing initiatives with high taxes.

The good news is that we can reverse all of these things if we have the most pro-development and the fastest permits in the world. If we cut taxes on work, investment, home building and energy, then we can massively increase our output of the things that we need to have a good life and the wages that people earn to buy it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This seems to be a familiar story across some Western nations.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are those Western nations and what is the thing that they’ve all gotten wrong in common?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I think that it’s probably true in the UK and the European Union as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did they do wrong?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, let’s take Germany. They shut down their nuclear sector and they tried to effectively drive oil and gas out of their country. The end result was extremely high energy costs. And this was another intervention that took from working class people and gave to the very rich. Those who were able to get the subsidies for windmills and solar panels got fabulously wealthy — all very powerful people. But the workers in the plants and the mines of rural Germany ended up losing their jobs and paying higher prices for electricity. All of which, by the way, has been reversed because now the Germans are back to burning coal. So it did absolutely nothing for the environment.

This is another example of government intervention totally screwing over the working class — a phenomenon across the Western world. And this is the big lie. The big lie is that when government gets big, it gives people their fair share. What it does in fact is it gives the money and the resources to those who have the most political power. Those people are all rich, and it pays for it by taking from the working class.

So my mission in politics is to reverse that entire approach. Have a small government with big people, a meritocracy that rewards work and a free enterprise system that requires businesses compete for workers with higher wages and consumers with lower prices.

Lessons from Singapore and Switzerland

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m looking here at the GDP forecasts for various countries around the world. In the United States, GDP forecast looks like it’s been pretty strong relative to others. Canada looks like it’s going down — 2025 estimates 1.7%, 2026 estimates 1.3. The United Kingdom as well seems to have been lagging both the United States and Canada. And Germany, as you said, in 2024 their GDP growth was only 0.2, which is hundreds and hundreds of percentages lower than the United States, Canada or even the UK. But clearly there is a problem with GDP growth here for Canada, for the United Kingdom, relative to a country like the United States. It looks like the United States are doing something right, if you look at GDP growth as the main measure.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, there are some policies that we can learn from. It’s not just the United States though. Look at Switzerland, for example. The Swiss are among the wealthiest in the world. They have the best money, the lowest inflation — they have almost no inflation in Switzerland, by the way. They have very strong money. The Swiss franc is the best currency in the world, better than the Euro or the American dollar. What do they have? Free enterprise, small government. The share of the economy consumed by government spending is significantly lower than anywhere else in the Western world outside of Asia. And so they do very well.

How is it that the Singaporeans have become one of the wealthiest nations on Earth? They have no resources, literally nothing. They have to import their water, for God’s sakes. They took a swampy, mosquito-infested island and three peoples who were struggling to survive in their homelands and they came together and created the wealthiest country in the world outside of the Gulf States. Why? They have free enterprise, they have low taxes, it’s easy to start a business. You’re rewarded for your hard work. This is the kind of thing we could be doing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So looking at the numbers of Singapore — Singapore operates in a league of its own, outperforming both the UK, Canada and the USA in terms of growth and per capita wealth. As a hub economy, it is currently riding the wave of the global AI boom because they’ve enabled entrepreneurship, and it is more than — from a GDP perspective, last year more than double the United States GDP growth. And it’s left Canada and the United Kingdom and even Switzerland in its tracks in that regard. Interesting.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s a spectacular achievement. Lee Kuan Yew, who founded the country and created this miracle, should be studied by every leader in the world because I don’t think there’s anyone who’s been able to generate such a massive increase in the quality of life and to do it with literally no resources whatsoever except for geography. And they managed to exploit their geography, as you said, to be kind of like modern day Nabataeans. They’re a trading hub for all of Asia.

The Trade-Offs of Free Market Economics

STEVEN BARTLETT: Every sort of economic policy or philosophy does have a trade-off. I mean, it’s one thing you learn as a podcaster — there’s just always trade-offs. And if you’re not clear on what the trade-offs are, then they might surprise you. You can talk about socialism or you can talk about capitalism, whatever — all of them have trade-offs. What are the trade-offs of your economic strategy and philosophy?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the leadership has to have humility because it has to let go of power and turn it back to the people. And that is a very hard thing for politicians to do. No politician wants to have written on their gravestone, “He stayed out of the way, left people alone so that they could do great things without him.” Although I think we’d be better off if more of them did.

But I should also say that there is a role for government. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t. There should be a basic social safety net that provides the things that people who are less advantaged would not be able to have for themselves — to make sure that everyone has health care, even if they can’t afford to pay for it, that there’s basic schooling and roads and infrastructure.

But what happens is that once you get beyond providing those basics and government starts to metastasize into all kinds of other things that are not its core responsibility, each dollar spent has less and less return and then it turns into a negative return where the more they spend, the more damage they do. And I think we’re beyond that point on the curve.

Immigration, Birth Rates, and Economic Growth

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking about how immigration ties into all of this and to GDP growth. I think in Canada, from the research I was doing, there has been a decline in birth rates.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So there’s significantly less people getting married, there’s significantly less people being born. So how does one run their economy when you’re not having new children being born without bringing in lots of immigrants to help support that economy?

Immigration, Wages, and the Future of Work

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, first of all, I think we have to ask ourselves, why has the birth rate gone down? And I would argue that it’s economic reasons. If you cannot afford a home, then you have no place to raise children. We have this phenomenon in Canada of 35 year olds still living in their parents’ basements. And how do you even get a date? How do you bring a date home? It’s a challenge if you’re 35, and these are great high achieving people who’ve got jobs, but they just can’t afford a place to live, or they’re stuck in a small apartment because that’s all their paycheck will buy them in the way of rent. And so I think for those economic constraints, we have a lot of young people who otherwise would love to have children in their late 20s, early 30s, who simply have nowhere to raise them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Am I right in thinking that a lot of these Western economies have allowed a lot of people into their countries to make up for the willingness or desire or the availability of people to do the sort of low wage jobs? Is this what’s happened globally? Because it’s what people tell me in the UK, yes.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Frankly, I think that a lot of multinational corporations have abused the immigration system in order to drive down wages. In Canada, for example, the government massively expanded the international student and temporary foreign worker programs, and that allowed corporations to pay artificially low wages to people who do not have the same mobility rights and opportunities. And that drove down wages, displaced people from their jobs, and ultimately ballooned housing costs. And so my position is that we need to cap numbers and ensure that the economy, healthcare and housing grows faster than the population at all times.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you cap numbers, does that mean that these corporations, these entrepreneurs, these companies, don’t have enough people to fill the roles in their companies and therefore have to move somewhere else? What does it mean?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No, we have unemployment, we have people without jobs, but some multinationals just don’t want to pay full wages. So they think, “Well, I’ll just undercut the wage by bringing someone in from a very poor country who’s willing to work for a lot less and who has fewer rights because they can’t leave the job to go to another employer.” So it’s kind of like Easy Street. And so my view is that when you’ve got unemployed people and you’re trying to fill your workplace, pay higher wages, give people a better return on their work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve got unemployment. Are those people trained and skilled and willing to do the jobs that Canada needs them to do?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, absolutely. I mean, we have 100,000 unemployed construction workers. They could be building the homes that we need built. We have young people coming out of high school without a job. We have 30 year highs in unemployment among youth. They should be getting those jobs. And Starbucks says, “Well, they don’t want to take them.” Well, maybe you’re not paying enough. If you’re not paying the right wage, then you’re not going to get the right worker, but pay an equivalent wage and you’ll attract a worker who will do the job.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Again, I’m trying to play devil’s advocate here. So Starbucks increases wages.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which means that Starbucks then will increase the cost of a cup of coffee, presumably.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, unless they can find more efficient ways to run their systems. More competition in the system will allow the worker to gain more and the consumer to pay less. And the entrepreneur in the middle has to find ways to save and operate more efficiently. That’s the magic of the market, is that everybody has a vested interest in driving the most value for the lowest cost.

The AI Revolution and Job Displacement

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the interesting ways lots of employers are finding ways to drive efficiencies is this new technology called AI.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And again, maybe somewhat ironically here, Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, released a report two weeks ago. I’ll throw the graph up on the screen, but it shows where job disruption will take place based on how people are currently using their tools. And one of the things they noticed is that there’s been an increase by roughly 14% in youth unemployment, because entry level jobs are the ones often in white collar industries that are being taken out first.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you hear these things and you go, “Oh, that’s some stats and whatever,” and it’s not necessarily tanked the economy yet. But as an employer of hundreds and hundreds of people all over the world now, I have started to notice that the case for hiring certain groups of people is becoming much more tricky now because of these tools. And it doesn’t make me sound great saying that. It’s not that we’re not hiring hundreds of people, but there’s this certain set — when I look at specifically entry level grads, if they aren’t really AI proficient, they are a lot less appealing in some roles than young grads that are extremely AI proficient. The problem is not many of them are.

And just in a company like mine, if you are AI proficient, really irrespective of age, and you know how to build this thing called AI agents, it’s kind of like you come with 50 team members of your own. That’s what it’s like. So I’ve got a kid called Kaz here. He’s a young guy in his 20s. He’s built a team of agents that now work for him. So hiring Kaz means I get Kaz and his team of agents because he’s proficient in that technology. Most of the workforce hasn’t been trained, because of the education system, to know a thing about this.

So it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hire entry level people, but actually all the way up the board, unless you have deep expertise in a domain, which would mean that I can get Kaz to make you the agents. So like my CFO, for example, 50 years working in finance, deep expertise — I just need her, and then she can build out a team of AI agents to work with her. Five years ago, I would have needed her and a massive team of people.

I say all this to say that there’s a certain group in society — people that have deep domain expertise and people that are technical — that I think are in higher demand than ever before. And everybody else, as AI continues to replace them through things like autonomous driving and robotics around the corner, I think there needs to be a real conversation about what happens to these people.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Can I ask you a question? So throughout history we’ve had these scares where new technological developments have threatened to replace, and in reality have replaced, certain human labor. During the Industrial Revolution, machines were replacing muscular power. And then you had the Luddites who came and tried to smash those machines to protect their jobs. In the end, they just got different jobs with higher pay because they could do more with these machines, and they didn’t have to walk behind a mule’s ass pushing a plow in the hot sun all day. They had a tractor that would pull the plow, and so on and so forth. And then in the dot com era, we were told again that people are going to lose their jobs to computers. In fact, they were made more productive by computers. Do you think this time is fundamentally different than those prior technological revolutions?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would say, first thing is nobody knows. The second thing I’d say is yes.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the reason I’d say yes is just the speed of disruption. So unlike in the Industrial Revolution, where it takes some time for the new technologies to become adopted because of the nature of what those technologies were, this technology is built on the Internet, which has global distribution. So OpenClaw is a good example of a technology that — to simplify it for the audience — it can do anything on my computer. So if I put a computer here on this table, I can text OpenClaw on WhatsApp and tell it to go on this podcast right now, look at the part of the conversation that was most replayed by the audience, clip it, add subtitles to it, tweet it, or send it to my Slack channel.

I’ll tell you something I did the other day. I was in my house in Los Angeles and it was very, very hot because there’s a heat wave at the moment. So I said to it, “Can you go on, take a look at my house online, buy me an umbrella that I can put” — because I like to work outside. I actually voiced it. And what it did is it went on Google Maps, it looked all around my house from all around the outside, because it knew where I lived. For some bizarre reason, it knew that a charcoal umbrella at a certain size would suit that table out there. It went on Amazon, found the charcoal umbrella, it ordered it, it arrives at my house —

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And it transacted? Like, you didn’t —

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because it had my login details to transact on this particular website. But it’s just — the framing is it can do anything that you would do on a computer. A lot of people work on computers, and the speed of adoption that we’re seeing is staggering.

So my concern is actually the sort of near term displacement before we figure out the types of new jobs. And then with robotics on the way, you hear someone like Elon Musk saying that there’ll be more humanoid robots than humans. And people say, “Well, he’s saying that because he’s got a vested interest.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: However, what I’d say is his timelines have sometimes not been right. But when he said he was going to make those spaceships land on chopsticks, the spaceships eventually landed.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s incredible. He’s a brilliant mind. Don’t underestimate him.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And my car out there drives itself. Without intervention. So I don’t know, it’s a really interesting time. I can both see why this technology is going to change the world for the better, and I believe it will. But then I’m just really concerned about certain economies and countries that aren’t taking it seriously because they’re so distracted by other things. A lot of them are race baiting. A lot of them are like, immigration seems to be the winning lever — like, “the brown people are the problem.” But I’m like, maybe the alien is something else. Maybe the alien is these agents that are actually going to take our jobs.

Guiding Technology Toward Human Purpose

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I believe the basic human need is meaning — to have a purpose in life. And often the question we have to ask is, how can we guide this revolution in technology so that it empowers people to do things that continue to give them meaning?

I think it was John Adams who said something to the effect of, “My father studied warfare so that I would have the security to study commerce. I study commerce so that my children will have the prosperity to study arts.” If these new systems give us the ability to focus on the things that we love doing that give us meaning in our lives — and that could be a different thing for each person — while at the same time supplying us with a lot of our material needs, it could be very positive. If it simply strips away our own utility and leaves lots of people without the ability to work at all, then it could be very, very dangerous to our lives. So I think that the public policy objective is to ensure that it becomes an enabler of humanity, not a replacement for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you could come into power in — is it 2029? If there’s no overthrowing of the current leader, 2029 is going to be an interesting time if these sort of forecasts that we’re getting from some of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence and robotics come true. Have you thought much yet about how you would counteract that? What you would do to make sure that there isn’t huge job disruption?

Because a lot of people like Sam Altman have suggested through their actions that they might support things like Universal Basic Income. In fact, Sam Altman, being the founder and co-founder of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT — I think his other startup is called Worldcoin, which uses your retina scan to validate that you’re a real human being so that they can distribute money to people. Because in a world of AI, we’re going to need to find a way to distribute wealth. And if you listen to Elon, he says we’re going to live in the age of abundance where working is going to be optional. He says, now if you’re a surgeon and you’re training to be a surgeon, he says absolutely don’t, because in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be no human that’s better than any AI surgeon.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Wow.

AI, Immigration, and Global Threats

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if these things are true, surely you should be making plans. And I know they have an incentive — they’re raising money and they have a certain narrative which helps them raise money. But if they are right, the future looks very different from the past.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you have a plan?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I have principles that I would apply as these technologies present themselves. And the principle for me is: how do we make sure that AI enables and empowers people to make more decisions for themselves and have more freedom and to pursue their own meaning, rather than replacing and rendering them, giving them a sense of lost meaning and purpose?

Do I think it’s great that every minimum wage worker might have a personal assistant and a chauffeured vehicle? I do. Because that would give them more of their life to spend on the things that thrill them and make them happy. Less of their life would be spent on the drudgery of having to drive in a traffic jam or sweep their floor.

But at the same time, we have to make sure that people have the ability to work and contribute and give themselves a sense of meaning in their lives. The other thing I would say is that as these technologies bring down costs, those savings should be passed on to people. They should not be inflated away. The government should not use this as an opportunity to just print more cash to reflate the cost of living. We should actually seek, as our goal, to lower the cost of living, make life more affordable, make our dollars go further — which hasn’t happened in generations. And so if technology is going to allow us to produce more for less, then let’s make sure that the working class people actually enjoy that benefit rather than having it inflated away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It is quite concerning that if wealth does accrue to these big companies and people like Elon — who is an incredible entrepreneur and is going to become the world’s first trillionaire, and I don’t think he’ll be the last — the way things are going with artificial intelligence, there is potentially going to need to be some government intervention, corrective government intervention. Do you not think so? I don’t know.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen. I mean, it was Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who embarrassingly predicted that the Internet would have no more impact on our lives than the fax machine. And he’s a Nobel Prize economist, I think from Princeton or Yale or something. So nobody’s Nostradamus on these things. But we have to have guiding principles, and mine are: the rules around technology should always be geared towards giving people more agency, more meaning, and more control over their lives — and not less.

Immigration: A Divisive Political Tool?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s funny because I don’t hear it reflected enough in political discourse. I hear us focusing on other things. And one of those things is immigration. Across the Western world, the subject of immigration seems to be a bit of a winning formula for political leaders. If I think about the UK, what Trump said about being invaded by rapists and murderers from the southern border — do you feel that it’s a sort of weaponized, divisive tool for people to get elected, complaining about the brown people or foreigners?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I’ll just give you the Canadian experience. For roughly 200 years, we had the most successful immigration system in the world by far. In fact, other countries — both Republicans and Democrats in the United States — used to say we need to study the Canadian system because it has been so successful. We had a point system that measured whether someone would be a good fit for our labor market, whether they would integrate well into our system. And overwhelmingly, people integrated, intermarried. My wife is a refugee from Venezuela. That is not an uncommon story in Canada.

What we encountered was a very sudden and inexplicable increase in the numbers in the period from 2021 to 2024. That was strictly out of line with our ability to absorb people into housing, healthcare, and jobs. And this upset the social peace on immigration that we had had for two centuries leading up to it. Now everyone across the political spectrum agrees that it went too far, too fast.

The approach that we’re taking is that we have to make it a lawful system. It has to follow the rules. People have to come in legally, in numbers that we can absorb and ultimately integrate into jobs, society, and our way of life. Population cannot grow faster than the housing stock, or you’ll run out of places to live. It can’t grow faster than the number of jobs, or you’ll run out of paychecks for people. And so we need a controlled, orderly system that’s both compassionate and common sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s such a divisive subject. You’ve seen what’s happened here in the United States with ICE, right?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah. It’s a different situation in the US. The immigration problem in the US goes back many, many years — many, many years of chaos at the southern border. We didn’t have that in Canada. That was unheard of. We had roughly 1% of population immigrating to Canada for 200 years. It was uncontroversial in Canada up until this very strange, inexplicable spike that really only helped very wealthy landlords and employers that wanted to drive wages down and rents up. They were the only beneficiaries of the extreme increase in numbers.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you don’t get the replacement rate back up to a level where you’re having enough kids in Canada, does it track that eventually you would have to rely on more immigration to solve for the GDP issues?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, economic immigration of high-skilled people to our country has always been successful and nobody resents that. One of the things that we have to do, though, is when people get to Canada, they have to be able to fulfill their potential.

In Canada today, we have these gatekeepers that block immigrant professionals from even working in their field. For example, we have 20,000 immigrant doctors and 32,000 immigrant nurses who can’t work in medicine because they can’t get a license to practice. There’s this incredibly bureaucratic system they have to go through that takes eight or nine years to prove that they actually have the qualifications.

It’s so crazy that when I went in for my eye surgery, there was a technician there who literally flies to the UAE to do eye surgeries 10 days a month and then comes back to his family in Ottawa, where we only let him work as a technician. The UAE is a more technologically advanced country than Canada in this regard, and eyeballs are the same in the UAE as they are in Canada.

Immigrants in Canada have historically been more educated than our Canadian-born population, just in terms of their credentials, but have not been able to fulfill their potential because our licensing system shuts them out. So I want to fix that with a merit-based test that gets them into the high-paying jobs that will actually strengthen our economy.

The Biggest Threat to the Western World

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the biggest threat, do you think, to the Western world and the Western way of living? Because people often point at Iran, they say China, they say Russia.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think it depends on what China decides to do. China is a spectacular and brilliant civilization with so much to contribute to world harmony, if that’s their choice. If the government decides that it’s going to direct the immense successes of that country towards trading and working with other countries, then there’s nothing to worry about. But if it is a very aggressive, bellicose approach — using technology for espionage, interference in foreign countries as they have done in Canada, invading Taiwan — then China, and Beijing in particular, the regime, could become the biggest risk and threat to our country and our world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does history say about this kind of moment in time where there are seemingly two world powers?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, there is an incredible book called Thucydides Trap, which a professor named Allison wrote. He said that throughout history — he took, I think, 20 occasions where an incumbent superpower was caught up on by a challenging superpower — and in the majority of cases, it did end up in war. He said it’s not necessary, though, and it doesn’t have to happen. It can be avoided. And he lays out a plan in his book for it to be avoided.

I think it can be avoided as well, if Beijing can be made to understand that it is in the interest of China to be part of the community of nations — to work collaboratively, to trade freely, to be a partner rather than an enemy. And I hope they make the right decision.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it fair to say that the United States is really at war with China now already, but just through proxy wars and other types of economic wars? Because now that they both have nuclear weapons, you can’t really have a direct conflict, can you?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, let’s put it this way. Venezuela, Iran, Cuba — these are all countries that were in the realm of influence of Beijing, and they’re the countries where the United States is pursuing a change. So there is the war that we watch on the evening news, and the real interests behind them that are driving it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Canada doesn’t have nuclear weapons, does it?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No, we do not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We made a decision — I want to say about 40 or 50 years ago — not to pursue nuclear armament. We didn’t think we had any need for it. Lots of nuclear power, lots of uranium, but we don’t use it for weaponry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think Canada should have nuclear weapons?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t see a need for that. I don’t know what we would get from it. We don’t have any desire to threaten anyone with nuclear weapons. So I don’t see a purpose for that right now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sounds quite Canadian.

Canada’s Military Buildup & Sovereignty

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s true. But listen, we are a warrior nation. Make no mistake about it. We were in the world wars two years before the Americans. We’re kind of like a golden retriever. We’re friendly, we’re likable, we like to get along, but if provoked, we will fight back.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Canada’s building up its military?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Because there’s a consensus that we have not done enough to protect our territory from the incursions of hostile powers. And we often say in Canada, if you don’t use it, you lose it. There’s large territories of our country that are very hard to live in. We have an incredible Inuit population. But obviously, you can’t heavily populate the Arctic Archipelago with industry and stuff. So how do you assert sovereignty over those treasured territories? Well, you have to have a military presence there.

What’s changed for Canada is that we want to maintain and ensure that we can make our own decisions without relying on the Americans, because the Americans have expressed that they are maybe not going to be as collaborative and friendly, and we want to be able to decide for ourselves. We want to be masters in our own home. In Quebec, they say maître chez nous. And so if we want to control our own destiny and territory, we have to be able to protect ourselves.

It has been very good for Canada to be next door to the biggest military power the world has ever seen and have friendly relations that go back to the early 1800s, before we were even a country. We had largely friendly relations with this enormous power. But what has become clear is that we cannot simply rely on the Americans to protect us. We have to be able to protect ourselves. And that requires a massive military buildup for a country of our size, the second biggest country anywhere in the world. We have the longest oceanic coastline, even longer than Russia. So that takes money, and it takes a buildup like we’ve never seen. And that’s what we, as Canadians, agree has to happen.

Trump’s Threats and the Canadian Election

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now, this is in part because of Trump. In part, yes, because Trump threw the election and then thereafter said that he was going to make Canada an American state, which is never going to happen. But with the leader of the most powerful military on earth saying, even jokingly, that they are about to take your country — you can laugh, but at the same time, if I was leading Canada, I’d go, wait, is this possible? Are we ready to defend ourselves?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We, as Canadians, react very badly to that. And we’re not going to ever be the 51st state or any part of the United States of America. The American people are our friends. They’ve been our top trading partner, our closest ally. As President Kennedy said, “History has made us friends, economics has made us partners, geography has made us neighbors, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature have thus joined together, let no man put asunder.” But he understood that Canada was a separate country that had its own unique interests. And I think the American people understand that as well. I think the American people are very fond of Canada as a neighbor and friend, but they understand we will always be a sovereign country.

The Canadian Election: What Happened?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You would have been negotiating with Trump right now if the election, the recent election in Canada, had gone your way. This is a pretty stark graph that I’ve just slid you. It shows that you were leading in the polls seemingly up until the very, very last moment in the elections. Is that accurate, that poll?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, I think that’s probably a weighted average, but yeah, I think more or less.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What happened?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, if you look at what happened, our support didn’t drop that much. The other parties collapsed in behind the Liberal Party, and it was largely due to the Canada-U.S. issue that you raised, really. But at the same time, we got the biggest vote count we had ever received and the highest share of vote that we’ve received since 1988. So we did perform very well. Our opponents performed even better. And now we have to build on the solid base that we’ve accumulated in order to win the next election.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just as the election comes into the home stretch, your polling basically stays the same — slight little bit of a drop, but roughly stays the same. What caused the drop in that sort of home stretch there, do you think?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: One of the challenges I had was I wanted to focus on the things that were going on in people’s lives — the doubling of housing costs, the rising crime rate, the inflation crisis, and my solutions to all of those problems. But a lot of that was swept off of the conversation because everyone was focused suddenly on the tariffs and the President.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The president saying that he was going to take Canada as a state, but also him saying that he was going to apply tariffs.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. And those tariffs are still in place.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did that impact you and help Mark Carney?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s a good question. I think it allowed the conversation to move away from the domestic record of the government and onto two external factors. And that always helps the incumbent and hurts the challenger.

The Emotional Toll of the Campaign

STEVEN BARTLETT: How was this emotionally?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Oh, it was a roller coaster. Things were changing so fast and moving so quickly in the moment. It’s like you don’t really have time to feel anything. You’re just doing so much so quickly that your emotions are put on delay until after it’s all over.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So after it’s all over — I’ve got this wonderful photo of that.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You and your family. You said the emotions came after because you were going, going, going, going, going.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes. So my leadership started in 2022, as we were coming out of COVID, and there were so many people who placed so much hope in me, who had suffered so much. They would tell me they felt like they lost control of their lives and that they vested hope in me.

Young people would say, “You have to win because I want to start a family, and I can’t start a family in this economy.” Or mothers who would say, “We just can’t afford food anymore.” Or police officers saying, “I’ve arrested the same guy four times this week, and he keeps getting released. You have to win to fix these problems. It’s not about you, Mr. Poilievre. It’s about the stuff that’s happening in our lives, and you have to fix it.”

I had a lady come to one of my rallies — because when you vote to choose a leader of a party, you have to pay $15 to join the party. She came up and told me about her life story. And then she went up to the membership desk and said, “Can I borrow $8?” And they said, “What do you need it for?” She said, “Well, I only have $7.” They said, “Oh, there’s a bank machine downstairs. You can go get some more cash.” And she said, “I don’t have a bank card.” And they said, “Well, is there perhaps — could you go to your car and get some money?” She said, “Well, I don’t have any money in my car.” “What about your home?” — because we’re not allowed to buy them under the rules for other people. And she said, “I don’t have a home. I live in my car. And the $7 is all the money I own, and I’m spending it on a membership so that I can vote for Mr. Poilievre because he is my only hope. This is the only chance I have.”

So I wanted to deliver for these people. And when we didn’t win, I felt terrible that I hadn’t delivered for them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that look like — the disappointment of not delivering for people the night of the election, the day after? If I’m watching you as a fly on the wall, what do I see?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I didn’t spend a lot of time on that. I just got back at it. Because at the end of the day, you have to focus on what you can control. And my approach in life is to zero in on what is in your control. That is the greatest thing you can do for your mental health and for your output as a person. I believe in a stoic approach. So I didn’t spend a lot of time rolling around on the ground in melancholy.

Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, and the Philosophy of Control

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that if Trump hadn’t have said the thing about taking Canada and he hadn’t have done the tariffs, you would be leading Canada right now?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We’ll never know. I mean, these are the kinds of things you speculate about, but at the end of the day, what good does it do to speculate? And I also don’t like to make excuses — to say, “Look, if this person hadn’t done X, then I would be in charge.” I have to own my result. And that’s what I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As someone that doesn’t know a ton about this stuff, I find it interesting to see how consequential these — what do they call them — not butterfly effect, but how the unexpected dominoes can fall and change the course of history. So if Trump hadn’t have said those things, if we were to speculate, do you think it would have changed the outcome of the election?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t know. Because we don’t know what would have happened in the absence of that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you have to bet your house.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t want to bet my house. I don’t want to blame someone else for the outcome of the election because at the end of the day, the people voted and they made their decision, and I have to be at peace with it. So I can’t spend my time thinking on what ifs, because if that what if hadn’t happened, then there might have been another what if. So I have to focus on what I can control.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dealing with those moments — you mentioned stoicism. I found this book, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which I think was quite formative for how you see things in some respects, and generally, stoicism.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes, it’s a great book. The amazing thing about it is it’s so readable. This is just a random page, but it’s a very interesting excerpt. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.” But if you go on and read it, what it basically says is, expect these things, but don’t be controlled by them. These are factors outside of your control. Put all of your emphasis on the things that are within your control, and it will bring a tremendous amount of peace. Because when you are focused on what you can control, you’re the boss of your life. And that’s what stoicism has done for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I heard you say, “You’re not acted upon.” That’s right.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: When you focus on what you can control, you are the actor rather than the acted upon. If you spend a lot of your time thinking about the things you cannot control, then you become a helpless victim. Whereas if you focus on what you can, then you become like the driver of the car — you decide where it goes.

And as my favorite poem says — Invictus — that Nelson Mandela used to read himself when he was in prison for all those years in South Africa. He would recite to himself the poem Invictus to remind him that he could focus on what he was in control of, which was his own soul. “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul,” is how it ends. And that gives you a lot of peace.

Core Principles and the $10,000 Essay

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things you often find in stoicism and other teachings of that time is this idea of being flexibly minded — being able to learn, being growth minded, and being able to evolve. I was wondering, as you went on that campaign trail and generally over the last 10 years of your career, it’s clear to me that your core principles have been quite consistent. I have this document you wrote when you were, I think, 20 years old, which was part of a contest where you won $10,000.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For explaining what you would do if you were Prime Minister, if you were leading Canada.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: You even dug up the check.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I found the check. It wasn’t cashed. No, it’s a fake check.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We’ll go have lunch.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you won $10,000 for submitting this? Yes. When you were 20 years old, explaining what you would do if you ever became the Prime Minister.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

Pierre Poilievre’s Book Excerpt & Views on Freedom, DEI, and Family

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I would like you to actually just read the opening three paragraphs because it is quite interesting to see how you’ve evolved, if at all. Could you just read those first three paragraphs and any other of the context which I might have excluded?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Sure. “Although we Canadians seldom recognize it, the most important guardian of our living standards is freedom. Freedom to earn a living and share the fruits of our labor with loved ones. The freedom to build personal prosperity through risk taking and strong work ethic. The freedom of thought and speech, the freedom to make personal choices, and the collective freedom of citizens to govern their own affairs democratically. Government’s job is to constantly find ways to remove itself from obstructing such freedoms.

“Human beings are graced with the gifts of creativity, wisdom and ingenuity. The best way for a society to go about improving its living standards is to allow citizens to apply these qualities to the challenges of everyday life.

“Asking a Prime Minister to single handedly improve the living standards of 30 million of the world’s brightest is about as realistic as asking him to take to an Olympic sprinting track to help a lineup of world class athletes reach the finish line. The more the government becomes involved in the race, the greater the number of hurdles competitors will encounter. Therefore, as Prime Minister, what I would do to improve living standards is not nearly as important as what I would not do as Prime Minister. I would relinquish to citizens as much of my social, political and economic control as possible, leaving people to cultivate their own personal prosperity and to govern their own affairs as directly as possible.”

How His Views Have Evolved Over the Last Decade

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the last decade since you’ve been out on the road more speaking to people, campaigning, where have your views evolved?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I would say my temperament has matured. Ten years ago, I did not have a wife and kids. As a father, you end up having to grow in a tremendous amount of patience because kids don’t do what they’re told or they have needs that must supersede your own. You’re constantly making compromises with a spouse in order to juggle all of the difficulties of family life. And that necessarily spills over into your political approach. I think temperamentally I’ve changed. I’m much more careful and thoughtful than I was, say, in my late 20s and early 30s.

On Being Called “Trump Lite” and the Wokeism Debate

STEVEN BARTLETT: People in opposition parties have often referred to you as Trump Lite.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And what do they base that on?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess because you’re both conservatives. I guess that would be much of the argument. And you both have spoken out against this term, Wokeism and DEI.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, on DEI, I don’t think that is something particular to President Trump. There are a lot of people around the world who, for their own reasons and based on their own experiences, have criticized that particular ideology.

What I think has changed is that liberals used to believe in liberty and conservatives believed in conserving it. They used to say liberals were the gas pedal, conservatives were the brake, but we were both heading in generally the same direction. But what I think happened with Wokeism is that it is a deeply illiberal ideology. Traditional liberalism was a colorblind ideology. It was based on total equality regardless of gender, sexuality, race or anything else. Wokeism is exactly the opposite of that. It accentuates all of those differences and disagreements. It groups people based on what should be irrelevant characteristics like race and gender. And then, having divided people into groups, it seeks to expand state control over their lives.

What I believe in is treating people as individuals and letting them live their own lives, judging them exclusively on their own merits. And I think that was the consensus view of both Liberals and conservatives up until this toxic ideology came along and divided people.

Systemic Discrimination and the Question of a Fair Shot

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things — I’m a black man, I moved from Botswana when I was a baby and came to the UK — and thank God there were social systems in place because I don’t think that I would have had the outcomes I’d had. One of the things that I did know though, when I was 18, dropped out of university and started to get into the world of business, is I was aware — because when you look at funding data for entrepreneurs that are black, or especially women, it’s clear that there’s a systemic disadvantage of some sort.

And I wonder, someone like yourself who’s against this sort of DEI ideology, how do you contend with systemic institutional discrimination towards certain groups, which does pose an objectively real disadvantage on them being able to climb the ladder? Because you said something earlier about your goal being in Canada to make sure everybody has a fair shot.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does one counteract the systemic issues around race or gender or whatever it might be that stop that being possible? Because I find myself in an interesting position where on one end I’m like, I want to be treated like everybody else.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ve always felt that way. And I’ve always, to some degree, cringed a little bit when I felt like someone was giving me special treatment because my skin color was different, because it in some way made me feel like I was at a disadvantage, which I know can become quite self-fulfilling. However, on the other side of the spectrum, I do also believe that there is systemic discrimination that is going to hold certain groups back if there isn’t something done to level that playing field.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, I think the answer is equality. There has to be strict equality and equal treatment regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, religion. And that is the ideal to which we were all striving. And I think if we get back to that, then we can give everybody a chance to achieve based on their own merit. What we need is a meritocracy that is colorblind and judges people based on what they can do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People aren’t colorblind though, are they?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think my dad said to me when I was younger, he said, “Everybody’s prejudiced.” I remember sitting in the back of the car — my dad’s white — and I’m thinking, my dad just said that he thinks everyone might be racist and everyone’s prejudiced. I’m like, is my dad racist? But as I’ve gotten older, I realized that he, to some degree, is telling the truth. That prejudice is part of how we survived as humans and were able to understand danger from not so. So prejudice is something that I think is very prevalent in society whether we believe we’re not and everyone else is. So if prejudice is very prevalent in society, does there need to be measures that counteract that to give everybody a fair chance?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Our institutions have to be conscious about making sure that we are judging people based on their merit. And they should work aggressively to make sure that everyone, regardless of where they come from or their background, has a chance to succeed, get the job, get the promotion, move up the ladder.

I don’t think that is achieved by breaking people down into more and more different groups and divisions, by trying to build the barriers between people based on race and gender. I think it’s by actually removing them. So the problem I have with Wokeism is it seems almost designed to divide people. And that is exactly the opposite of the objective that we all sought when we pushed for racial equality and personal freedom and responsibility.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does one contend with the systemic issues though, the prejudices? I remember reading about studies where if they got a bunch of people and got them to apply for jobs and just based on the names — whether they were a typically white name versus say a typically black name — the response rate is markedly different.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I go back to my first principles. I think that government is responsible for a lot of the barriers that are put in place. So let me give you some examples.

When government brings into place these anti-housing policies that I described, they impact far more on minorities and disadvantaged people than they do on established people. Obviously, because if you’re new to a country or you come from a poorer background, you won’t have a house, and then you’re the one who’s going to pay the biggest price for the fact that government is making housing unaffordable.

If you think about the occupational licensing rules that I just described that block immigrants from working in their professions even when they’re thoroughly qualified, those are government-imposed obstacles that prevent people from getting ahead. Also, a lot of these soft-on-crime policies have been sold to us on the grounds that they’re going to help minorities by ensuring that we don’t have as high a conviction rate. Well, what they’ve actually done is that in many minority communities, the law-abiding people are now suffering as a result of criminals of all backgrounds.

So ironically, it’s actually government policies that are causing people of disadvantaged backgrounds to suffer even more. Wokeism accentuates all of those problems rather than solving them. I’m interested in solving problems to give everybody the opportunity to live a safe, affordable, opportunity-filled life. And Wokeism is not doing that. Actually creating a free market, free enterprise economy with free people who have free speech — that’s the single best way to give people of all racial backgrounds a better chance in life.

Housing Discrimination and the Limits of DEI

STEVEN BARTLETT: Again, I’m holding the position of DEI to try — I like the clash of ideas because it helps me to think through these things. I’ve never had the chance to ask somebody these kind of questions before. And on that point of housing, one of the things that I found to be quite surprising was that black mortgage applicants are up to 200% more likely to be denied a home loan than white applicants with a similar financial profile.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: This is in Canada?

STEVEN BARTLETT: These stats are for the West. So what is going on there? Because it says that they have similar financial profiles, yet their applications are being denied up to 200% more than white home buyers.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I had not seen that data point before, but I would say that these sound like really stupid bankers because they’re making a bad decision to deny people a mortgage and ultimately deny themselves the business if that’s how they’re making their judgments.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then DEI comes in to make sure that their judgments aren’t stupid.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I’m not sure that DEI cures stupidity though. In some cases we’ve seen it cause more.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s how it shows up, right? It’s like a logical next step, which is there’s prejudice going on in the system which is making it unequal for some groups, and DEI becomes this corrective measure so those stupid bankers don’t make stupid decisions.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: But DEI has been in place now for several decades. And how is it working? You’re reading the statistics to show that it’s not. So maybe it’s not actually doing what it’s designed to do. Maybe it’s doing other things.

Meeting Valentina: Pierre’s Daughter

STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing that I was really keen to talk about — and I just realized — is this.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Oh, that’s a little Valentina there. She loves to be on daddy’s shoulders.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How old is Valentina?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Valentina is seven years old.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Seven years old and she’s non-verbal.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: She’s non-verbal? Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does non-verbal mean?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: She is autistic. She’s on the spectrum. So the biggest difference between Valentina and other children is the ability to communicate verbally. We’re working very hard on that. She’s making some encouraging progress, but she does have some challenges in that area.

She’s very acrobatic and rambunctious. She loves to climb, swing, bounce, jump. And she is extremely affectionate. One of the superpowers she has is that whatever she does, she does 100%. She’s also 100% authentic. And that’s not the case once kids get old enough to manipulate to get what they want — they can put on acts and artifices. She doesn’t do that. She’s the real deal all the time. You know exactly how she feels because she indicates it. And she’s very blessed to have a little brother Cruz who adores her and treats her better than anyone else in the world.

Thinking About Valentina’s Future

STEVEN BARTLETT: I often hear parents talk about their concerns with someone like Valentina growing up in the world as non-verbal. You’re not going to be here forever to protect her. And I was saying to you before, my brother has three kids under the age of seven years old now. And I’ve noticed just how much he thinks about how they’re going to be when he’s not here. How does that relate to Valentina being non-verbal and how you think about the future?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, a lot of things. One, we obviously have to build up a nest egg for her so that if she can’t earn income, she will have the resources for a great life after we’re gone. And second, we’re really hoping that we forge a very permanent and deep bond between her and her brother Cruz, because he will be there.

One of the things he says again and again is, “My job is to protect Valentina from bad guys.” So this is a good attitude, especially that they are actually in the same class. Even though she’s older, she is in his class at school. And so he’s daddy’s eyes to protect our little princess. But I think when he’s older, I believe, based on his nature, that he’s going to be there for her. And we are building a plan towards that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: “My job is to protect Valentina from bad guys.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: That’s right. It’s a great instinct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How has it changed your politics?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s reinforced my sense of compassion for people who can’t provide for themselves. I’ve talked a lot about how government should be limited. I do think there’s a very, very real role for government to help people who genuinely cannot provide for themselves. People who suffer from disabilities being probably the best example.

And it has reinforced to me that we have to also have policies that recognize the inherent worth of every individual. Too often governments have seen people with disabilities as just someone they have to care for, but not someone who can contribute. And I believe that everybody has something to contribute and that we should try to unlock that in every human being.

We don’t know exactly what Valentina will do, but I believe she will do some kind of a job at some point in the future. And I’m very passionate about policies that enable people with disabilities to have work opportunities, even if it’s just very limited, to design programs so that when they have, for example, cash or medication support, it doesn’t get robbed from them just because they get a job.

So it has focused my mind a lot on people. It gives you a sense of compassion, because when you see somebody who might be different, I see my daughter in that person. I see my daughter often. My wife is very good at this. She’ll see someone who might be acting differently in a crowd, and other people are looking at that person, and she’ll grab my hand and say, “I think he’s autistic.” And then she will often go and talk to that boy and make him feel loved. So compassion is about feeling what the other person feels. And you have a greater ability to do that when there’s a loved one close to you who has the experience.

STEVEN BARTLETT: An interesting range of emotions, to be the father, the parent of an autistic child.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know this because I get messages en masse from our audience members who have an autistic child.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What can you say to the range of emotions you feel?

Raising Valentina: A Message to Parents of Autistic Children

PIERRE POILIEVRE: My wife was able to discern that there was something different about Valentina very early on, when she was still a baby, because she didn’t make a lot of eye contact. And there was a period during which she was not very communicative at all, even in ways that babies normally are. There wasn’t a lot of reciprocal communication to start with. So when we went for the diagnosis, we were not that shocked.

When the — I think she was a nurse or she was a specialist — gave us the diagnosis, she paused, like, waiting for us to burst into tears. We were just kind of like, “Yeah, we expected that, and let’s get on with it.” And then we just started doing the things that we had to do.

And my message to parents of autistic children is just focus on what you can control. Get onto the things that you have to do. Get a speech therapist. Get the play structures in the house that they love. With Valentina, it’s a bouncy castle and a little trampoline and a lot of building blocks — and enjoy them.

She’s so much fun. She’s a fun little girl. She loves to jump. She’s scared of nothing. If anything, the problem is she’s a bit too much of a daredevil, but she’s a thrilling little girl to be around. You see all the pictures with her on my shoulder — she always loves to climb on my back. And she loves to run. She loves me to run with her on my shoulders.

So enjoy the special things that they bring, because they are magical. They’re wonderful. They call it autism because they’re auto — they’re in their own world. You can’t force them to be in your world. You have to go into their world and reach them there. And understand that for her, tapping on something might give her a tremendous sensation that we can’t appreciate. On the other side, minor irritants that you and I would brush off might drive her completely crazy. And so if she’s having a meltdown, it’s not because she’s a bad kid. It’s because she’s going through a horrific sensation that we can’t quite understand. But you just have to embrace it all. And it’s a lot of extra legwork that goes into a child that has these conditions. But it’s worth it, and it’s rewarding in the end.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She — obviously I’ve not met her — but from all the photos, she makes you smile.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Just looking at the photos, she makes everyone smile. She’s very popular at school. The kids are very nice to her, by the way. We get secondhand reports, and it’s like they love her. They’re sweet to her. She has a little boy that has a crush on her, so I’m keeping an eye on that. But she’s so affectionate. We went to a fall fair one time, and there were these little old ladies sitting there, and Valentina just decided she liked this little old lady and went and sat on her lap — a complete stranger. But that’s how she is. She decides she likes you, and you’re in.

Closing Thoughts: Canada’s Future and Final Reflections

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are your closing statements? We’ve got listeners that are all over the world — the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK. If you had to send one final message to them, what would that message be in this moment in time that we find ourselves in?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I’m actually optimistic about the future, and I think Canada’s got a very bright future. I think the world should look to Canada. We have the most resources of anyone in the world. We have probably the most diverse and educated population. We have the most fresh water, the second biggest land mass. And I think the future belongs to Canada. We’re going to be an incredible place, the envy of the world, if we do the right things. I don’t want to be egotistical about it, but I think it would help if I were Prime Minister as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I love Canada. It’s one of my favourite places in the world for so many reasons. I told you, when I went to Toronto for the first time, I felt like I was at home.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I think Brits and Canadians have a lot in common.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Including a king.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah. You would be very well received in Canada. So consider coming.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I go all the time, whenever I’m invited to go, and I’ve been once or twice on vacation as well. So I hope to be back there soon and actually going to do a tour there at some point with the Diary of a CEO to meet all the people that listen. So very excited about that as well.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Oh, you’ll bring up big crowds. It’ll be fun.

What Pierre Poilievre Fears Most

STEVEN BARTLETT: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is: what are you most afraid of, and how do you deal with that fear?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t have a lot of fears. For myself, I would say, going back to family, it would be that something would happen to my kids. You hear terrible, terrible things in the news. Unfortunately, I had to go to a funeral for mass shooting victims in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Every parent worries about something happening to their kids. I think that would be my biggest fear.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about for Canada at large?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The biggest fear I have for Canada is that we just keep blocking our own potential and declining, and opportunity vanishes, and slowly our people lose the promise that the country gave me and so many generations. My fear is that we become the frog in boiling water and it just gets slowly warmer and warmer and warmer, and the frog really never notices.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that the trajectory of travel?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think it is, unfortunately. But I think we can change that trajectory if we make some big reversals in direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And lastly, what about for the world generally, the Western world?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I would say my biggest fear is that the Western world does not stay true to its foundational principles. I want the Western world to stay true to the basic principles that grew out of the Magna Carta — of freedom, of government that is servant to people that are masters, and that the free democracies not only succeed at home, but work together abroad to preserve that civilization.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you, sir.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thanks for taking the time to come have this conversation with me and answering all of my questions. I don’t like interviewing politicians because they are very slippery.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They slip and slide away from answering things in a way that makes the very essence of why we started this show feel like we’re not delivering for the audience who want to know the truth, whether it’s ugly or indifferent or whatever it might be. And I’ve really enjoyed the conversation because I feel like you answered my questions to the best of your ability.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s not usually the case with politicians.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think they think that’s the right approach. But actually, I think in a world that’s now more of a glass box than ever before — and not a black box where you can paint the image of something on the outside — being transparent and being willing to come into these environments matters. And your team didn’t tell me anything was off limits. They didn’t say there was anything I couldn’t ask you.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They didn’t ask to be able to edit this. And I would like more politicians to follow in that vein.

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