Pierre Poilievre’s Interview @ Triggernometry Podcast (Transcript)

And that’s why I’ve stayed true to it. Well, that’s not the only reason I’ve stayed true to it. It makes it easier for me to stay true to it. Sorry.

The Trajectory of the Western World

FRANCIS FOSTER: Fair enough. But it’s been very disheartening and actually quite upsetting to watch what Canada has become and the trajectory it’s gone on, because as somebody who’s from the UK, I’ve seen the exact same trajectory we’re on. And I look at Europe and the same thing is happening in Europe, and you’re kind of thinking to yourself, why is this? Why are we on this trajectory when, to even the most basic of laymen, it seems like we’re heading on a path of self destruction?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: If you look at it, what it really comes down to is this: it’s freedom or force. There’s a movement to concentrate power, control, and money in the hands of bureaucrats, technocrats and other insiders, using the state as their mechanism. And that has led to the mass impoverishment of the people across the Western world and an enormous gap between rich and poor.

By the way, this is not happening because of free enterprise. It’s happening because of the massive interventions of the state to take from the hardworking many and concentrate it in the hands of the few. On the other hand, there’s another alternative, which is to give people back more economic, personal and political freedom through a smaller state and more powerful individuals, families and communities. And that’s the side I’m on.

Net Zero and the Concentration of Power

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you’re focusing on the narrow economic part of it. But I think what Francis is alluding to is there’s a cultural and ideological dimension to this as well. Because say the policy of net zero, which is just economic suicide —

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s the same thing, exactly the same thing. Because it’s being used as a pretext to concentrate money and power in the hands of the state. It is just the latest of the many pretexts that are used to justify taking away everybody’s money and giving it to a treasured, privileged few green grifters.

The corporatism of saying, “Well, we’re going to tax all of the energy and we’re going to block the resources, and then we’re going to take the money and give it to the government, who’s going to dole it out to all of these corporate insiders who claim that they are doing something for the environment” — when in fact, if you look very carefully, it’s all BS. In fact, they have no problem directing much of that money to China, which is opening two coal-fired plants a week. So it has nothing to do with the environment.

It is entirely a pretext to take from the working classes and give to a small group of insiders through the mechanism of the state. So whether you’re talking about the net zero fraud, massive government redistribution schemes, an overall growth in the bureaucracy, or even on the speech side — it is all about concentrating power and money in the hands of fewer and fewer people while taking away the opportunities of the people who actually do the work.

Mass Immigration and Its Economic Impact

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because I was going to say, when I was researching for this interview, I was looking at the immigration rates in Canada. It’s staggering. Just as it is in the UK, just as it is in Germany and other countries.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The same phenomenon. Because here again, what happened is a corporate elite was able to drive down wages and drive up rent. They brought in low wage temporary foreign workers and they brought in enormous numbers of so-called students. Many of them weren’t actually studying, but they ultimately provided a source of low wage labor and created a major demand for a fixed supply of housing. So the rent went up and the wages went down. And those multinationals that benefited from it concentrated even more wealth, while the working classes ultimately got shut out of jobs and homes.

So again, it’s the same phenomenon, whether you’re looking at mass immigration, censorship policies, these net zero schemes, blocking home building, very high taxes, and as the French would call it, dirigiste economics, where the government decides who gets what. All of it has concentrated wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. And that is why our working class people are understandably and legitimately upset with the state of things.

And we have to provide them with a hopeful way forward that involves the opportunity to own homes, have affordable energy, affordable food, start families, raise kids and live their lives. That’s the hopeful vision that I’m trying to bring Canadians.

Trump, Canada-US Relations, and the Election

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you were poised to be in the position to implement that vision. A former prime minister of Canada described the relationship of being next to the US like sleeping next to an elephant. “Doesn’t matter how peaceful it is, every twitch and grunt affects you.”

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I put it to you, the elephant is wide awake now and it’s stomping around. You might like that, you might dislike that. But is Trump’s behavior towards Canada the reason you didn’t become Prime Minister?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the challenge for me was that it was very hard to focus on the very powerful domestic case we had. I mean, if you looked at the situation in Canada, the housing costs had doubled, so had the food bank lineups. We’ve got 2.2 million food bank visits every single month. Violent crime up 50%, the immigration system in shambles. And we wanted to focus the election on that. It became very difficult with the sound and fury of the Canada-US debate.

So my focus now is: what do I do from here? How do I go forward? Obviously our trade relationship with the US is up for review. We have a free trade agreement that effectively dates back to the Mulroney era in the late 80s, early 90s, that has largely remained intact. But that relationship is being renewed in the summer. And so what we have to do as Canadians is be stronger at home so that we have unbreakable leverage in any negotiations that come on that relationship.

And we’ve got a lot of leverage. I mean, a lot of people underestimate Canada. We’ve got the fourth biggest oil supply, we’ve got 10 of the 12 NATO defense critical minerals, we’ve got the second biggest landmass, the biggest oceanic coastline. We should be leveraging all of that power to get what we want, which is basically tariff-free trade with our American friends. And that’s the approach I’m going to be taking going forward.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you pivoted very well from my question, but it sounds like Trump’s behavior was not helpful to your election. Is that fair?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I acknowledge that by saying I wanted to be talking about how we could make people’s lives better on immigration, cost of living, housing, crime, all of that. But it was very hard to do that when obviously the debate was Trump —

KONSTANTIN KISIN: — was talking about how you should become a state, which is never going to —

PIERRE POILIEVRE: — which is never going to happen.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And everybody knows it’s never going to happen.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And do you think he meant it, or was it one of his trolling comments that he throws out there?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the Liberal government in Canada said that it was a joke at the time. But what I would say is we can’t control President Trump. I think that’s very clear. And actually our prime minister has acknowledged that. So that’s one thing we actually agree on. But very stoically, we have to focus on the things we can control.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. And let me ask you about that.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah.

Canada’s Place in the New Geopolitical Order

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because I think we did get the answer I was looking for, clarity at least on it. Mark Carney, who’s the Prime Minister of Canada now, after Davos and the U.S. administration presented a whole different geopolitical vision effectively at that meeting, he came out and he talked about the fact that countries like Canada and the UK and Australia, they basically need to get very upset with the US and have their own little clique that they work together while challenging the US or working with China. Do you think this is a good

PIERRE POILIEVRE: way of approaching things, working with China? Yeah, look, I think we need to trade and talk with China. The Chinese people constitute a brilliant and extraordinary civilization. There’s no denying it. And if we’re being honest about it, they’ve been outworking, out-hustling those of us in the West for the last three decades. It’s incredible, really. China went from a country with 80% of the population living on less than a dollar a day to the second biggest economy in one lifetime. So you can’t ignore them.

But the idea that we can have a permanent rupture with our closest neighbor and biggest customer in favor of a strategic partnership for a new world order with China is not on. It’s just not going to happen. We sell 20 times as much to the Americans as we do to the Chinese. American capitalism is the single biggest economic force in the history of the world and they live right next door. So we need to have a solid friendship, free trade agreement, and of course, security partnership with the United States. And there’s no way that China or anyone else will replace that relationship.

Canada’s Economic Potential and the Brain Drain Problem

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because one of the difficulties that you have in Canada is, to put it bluntly, you’ve got a brain drain where your brightest and best are consistently leaving for America, where you are essentially stifling growth and entrepreneurialism. And you look at what’s happening with America and you see Canada dwindling almost, don’t you?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, look, it doesn’t have to be that way. In 2015, the ultra-liberal New York Times wrote that Canada had the best and the strongest middle class in the world. And people were actually leaving the US to go to Canada. That was 10 years ago.

Wilfrid Laurier, who was our first Liberal and our first francophone prime minister, actually said that Canada always had to have lower taxes than the United States because they would have this enormous economic gravitation. The only way to overcome that would be to have lower taxes, faster permits and more economic freedom. And by the way, for most of the early part of this century, we ranked as a more economically free country than the US based on the rankings of numerous think tanks.

So we can do that again. We need to repeal all the laws that block our resources so that we can have the fastest permits anywhere in the OECD. We should have a policy of generating energy, home building and food production at a faster rate of growth than the growth in our money supply. And then you will find that we will become the most affordable country in the world. We should be the dirt cheap place to live because we’ve got the most dirt to build homes on, to grow food on, and to dig resources from. For 41 million people to share in that enormous endowment, we should be the richest and the most affordable. And we will be when we unlock that potential.

The Housing Crisis

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because when you talk to young people from Canada, they talk about the property situation being even worse than it is in the UK.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s hard to imagine.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We have the fewest homes per capita of any country in the G7, which is incredible because we have 10 times more land per person than the second closest country, being the US. And so why is that? The answer is that, depending on where you are in the country, somewhere between a third and 60% of the cost of a new home is government taxes, fees, charges, delays, lobbyists, consultants, and lawyers that you have to hire to go into building a home. Twice as much money goes to guys in suits to build a Canadian home than goes to guys who swing hammers and lay concrete.

And the consequence is that the carpenters who build our homes can’t afford to buy them. So we need to get government cost out of housing. And I’ve proposed zero taxation on homebuilding and massive, powerful incentives and penalties for bad behavior by municipalities that block home building. You unblock home building and you could have very, very affordable homes. Everyone could afford to own in Canada if we did that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because when I look at Canada again, it reminds me of the UK and I think to myself, this is economically unsustainable, particularly when it comes to your young people. You’ve got wonderful universities, world class institutions, but you get your brightest and best who go there. They get trained in engineering, et cetera. They look around, they see there are no opportunities, they can’t buy a house, so they leave for America and they literally double, if not triple their salaries. And frequently they pay far lower taxes as a result.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And that’s exactly what I want to reverse. We have to cut income taxes so that the brilliant kids that come out of Waterloo and Kitchener in engineering can stay in Canada and earn an incredible living and own an affordable house. And we know we can do it. We have so many advantages over the Americans — geographically, the land mass we have, the population that we have. We should be the richest and most affordable country in the world. And we can be.

Understanding America’s Geopolitical Posture

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And moving to geopolitics a little bit, do you have a clear understanding of what the Americans are doing, what their posture is towards the world? And obviously that will affect Canada as well.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Do you want to talk about the tariff policy or the recent actions in Iran and Venezuela? What would you like to address?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Here’s what I’m trying to get into. And we can talk about all of those things, and I think we should. A lot of people thought that Trump 2.0 would be a little bit like Trump 1.0. And suddenly, he’s talking about Canada becoming a state of the United States, he’s talking about invading Greenland, and he’s taken real action. Some of it I am a big fan of — getting rid of Maduro, great. Iran is more difficult, we can talk about the pluses and minuses. But what I think is happening is there is a clearly different perspective that they have. They’ve shifted their entire attitude towards geopolitics, the world, and they’re taking a totally different approach. Do you understand the rationale and the logic behind that? Do you see what they’re trying to do?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Here’s what I think is happening. For about 50 years, the United States made a calculation that they could trade freely with China and build a friendship with that rising power. And they blinked. And all of a sudden they had a very powerful rival. They looked around and saw that their entire industrial base had been hollowed out, whole towns had been emptied, and they had become increasingly dependent on a country that was at best a serious rival and at worst a serious threat. And they decided that they were going to assert dominance in order to counter that rivalrous threat.

Some of that thinking was justified, some of it has since been mistargeted. Canada, for example, despite all of the criticisms you might have made about public policy decisions, Canada is not the problem. And so I think that targeting Canada is a mistake and a distraction. Canada is actually part of the solution because we have the resources, the minerals and the geography to help make the entire continent safer. And that would be the better way to go.

But there’s no doubt that the United States does not want satellites of Beijing in Latin America. In particular, as we saw with the decision to oust Maduro and with the aggressive economic approach against Cuba, and as I think we’re seeing with Iran, they’ve made the decision that they’re not going to have these countries that are ultimately in the China sphere of power encroaching on America’s security or sovereignty. And I think that is one of the reasons for the approach that the US is taking.

So we have to decide, as Canadians, how we fit into that. And my view is that we have the ability to make the North American continent a lot safer and more secure and more prosperous for all the countries, if we take advantage of the leverage that we have — resources, geography, etc. If we massively rebuild our military to protect the Arctic, then we will have a lot more leverage to get what we want, which again is unbridled, tariff-free access to the most lucrative market in the world, that being the US.

Iran, Regime Change, and the Lessons of History

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you worry that what is happening in Iran now — I mean, I’m someone who’s happy to see intervention when I think it’s good, but I also grew up in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan. We both did. And those were not things, I think, objectively speaking, that led to positive outcomes that everybody would want. Are you worried that perhaps President Trump feels like he’s on a roll and you can just keep going, and sometimes he’s going to go too far and there will be a lot of drawbacks to the policies he’s pursuing?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, it’s easier to predict the past than the future, but I don’t see how it could be a bad thing for the world to remove Khomeini and the theocratic dictatorship that dominated Iran.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Isn’t that what we said about Gaddafi and Saddam and all these other people? They’re bad people, but what comes after is my question.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, there are a couple of differences. One, Iran has not been just sitting back and watching the world go by. Iran was responsible for the attacks of October 7th. It was funding and directing Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Yemeni terrorists. Before the Assad regime fell, it was responsible for that. It was actively threatening not just Israel, but the Arab powers in the region, and was developing a nuclear program for the express purpose of targeting Western allies — not just Israel, by the way, which would be bad enough, but the United States of America. It was the single biggest state sponsor of terror in the world. And by the way, they killed over 100 Canadians when they fired a missile at Flight PS752. And it was a civilian aircraft. So this is a hostile enemy regime.

So it’s not just that somebody showed up at the UN and made allegations that they had weapons of mass destruction. Everything I’ve just said is undisputed, by the way, unlike the weapons of mass destruction allegation in Iraq.

And then who would govern? Well, I think what they need to do is find a way to get to elections, because I think the people of Iran could choose a government, and I think it will be a very Western-friendly government. The population there is actually very Western-friendly. The government was completely out of touch with the population, and so they need to get to elections. That’s the outcome.

Iran, Venezuela, and the IRGC Threat

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Are we certain about this? I’d love it for it to be true. I honestly don’t know. Are we certain that the population is pro-West?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: We have an enormous Iranian expat population in Canada, and they are very pro-Western and against theocracy. So I’m confident that we’d have a better future if it were directed by the Iranian people than, by the way, by the Ayatollah and the religious theocracy that was running the place before.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And is your sense that this more geopolitically interventionist policy will continue? Is Cuba going to be next? Are we going to see more things like this, do you think?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t know. I don’t know the answer.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Your wife is nodding over this.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: My wife is hoping so. She’s from Venezuela and her family was obviously thrilled to see Maduro go. And this is actually what’s so funny — to watch these woke progressives pulling their hair out claiming that they’re siding with Iranians and Venezuelans by opposing the removal of their dictators. And the people, both the Iranian people and the Venezuelan people, were thrilled to see these dictators ousted. And my wife’s family can attest to that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Oh, look, absolutely everyone who watches —

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And it’s making my wife happy —

FRANCIS FOSTER: — it can’t be bad.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The joke here is Francis says his family’s from Venezuela every single show. It’s the number one liked comment on our show every time.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Are you Venezuelan?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. Yeah. I know I don’t look it. Yes.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Oh God. We should have brought my wife on the show then.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. Half Venezuelan. The other half is Irish, so that’s why.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I’ve got a lot of Irish blood.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: There’s only two types of people. Those who are Irish and those who wish they were.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That does sound like something an Irishman would say.

Now, I think we can acknowledge that what happened in Venezuela is very, very different to what is happening in Iran. And what people never really address is that when you get an authoritarian government coming to power, as we saw with Venezuela and then before that Iran, what they do is they put in and establish autocratic methods of control. So in Venezuela you get the colectivos. In Iran you get the Islamic Republican Guard, numbering — I was reading about 150,000 people. It’s not just as easy as removing the Ayatollah. What do you do with the Republican Guard? They’re not going to lay down their arms. This is a very, very serious problem.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Yeah, the IRGC is the single biggest terrorist organization in the world. And then it has a whole series of spawns that it controls remotely. So you’re absolutely right. The IRGC, I believe, will have to be dismantled and they will have to find a new way to set up a security apparatus that reflects a hopefully democratically elected government. But you’re quite right. The IRGC will be a very big problem and they need to be destroyed.

We only, frankly, should have banned them a long time ago in Canada. They are active in Canada. They have something like 700 agents on the ground.

FRANCIS FOSTER: What do you mean they’re active in Canada?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: According to intelligence, they have 700 agents on the ground in Canada. Former IRGC members have moved to Canada and taken the plunder with them so that they can harass the Persian and Jewish populations in our country. Some of the insane anti-Semitic riots and attacks that we saw against synagogues in Canada, I believe, were actually instigated by the IRGC by inflaming the population and getting people to carry out these terrible rampages in our streets. So this is a terrible organization that is not just a threat to the Iranian people, but is active around the world. And hopefully with the ousting of the regime, we can break that organization as well.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Look, I want that and we all want a free Iran, a democratic Iran. The problem comes when you remove the leader — you still have the IRGC. And you think to yourself, well, how are they going to get rid of it? Because Trump said in his speech that this is a chance for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. And you think to yourself, what — you want the Iranian people to go out against 150,000 trained military? I mean, that’s what has the potential to be a bloodbath.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, it’s already a bloodbath. It was a bloodbath before the President and Israel removed the regime. They were slaughtering the population in the street, and they have been doing that now for years. And the population has been rising up and getting crushed, rising up and getting crushed over and over again. So I think what he means now is, well, now the regime that was crushing the population has been removed. The population has to come together and secure a democratic government.

The West’s Culture of Self-Denigration

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Coming back to the conversation we were having earlier — and you were very persuasive, I thought, in articulating the idea that almost all the problems that we often focus on are the product of the concentration of power and assets and wealth in the hands of a small number of people who structure society for that purpose. But there’s another dimension culturally, which is the kind of self-denigration that has become very popular in the West and is frankly being taught in our schools and colleges and universities en masse now, where young people — young Canadians, young British people — are effectively taught a version of their history that inevitably leads to them hating their own country. Do you see that happening and what can you do about it?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I think that’s also part of the same phenomenon I described earlier, which is that those who want to have more power — what do you do? You erase history, because then you have a blank slate to write on. You can create something out of nothing. You can say everything. All of the foundations that created our civilization — we’ve wiped them away. And now I pull out my magic marker and I paint a brand new civilization.

If you look at all the literature about dystopia, whether Huxley or Orwell, it involves eliminating the past. But the only way to preserve freedom is to anchor it in history. Our history, for example, goes back to a field about an hour from here in Runnymede — the Magna Carta, the great English liberties that we inherited as Canadians. That is an 800-year-old tradition, an imperfect one, one that started off with a very small group securing their freedom by imposing liberty under the law, but then expanded over eight centuries to the imperfect state it is today. But without that 800-year tradition, you don’t have freedom. So on the other side are those who want to erase all of that so that they can impose their agenda.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Two generations at least — our generation — I remember it started to creep through already. Then you look at the generation below us. I mean, if they went to university — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that meme of the people before and after certain drugs. Like before weed, after weed, before heroin. And then the last one is before college, after college. And before college, it’s a normal person. And after, it’s nose piercings and all of that kind of stuff. That’s been the effect. That is the country, if you ever become Prime Minister, you will inherit — in which young people, some young people, have been brainwashed into this ideology. I know Jordan’s obviously done a lot to try and push back against it. Great Canadian.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Jordan Peterson truly is a great Canadian.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, he is a great man. But the fact that he had to is evidence of where your society is. Is that a fair assessment?

Canada’s Youth: A Conservative Shift

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think that our young people today are more conservative, more hard-working, and have more common sense than maybe any generation since the Second World War.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Lucky you.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Our young people — the young people in Canada, the ones I meet — they want to start families, own homes and take responsibility.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But the ones you meet, you’re a Conservative.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: No, the ones I meet when I go to a coffee shop and I talk to the barista, or I go to a restaurant and talk to the waitress. I’m not talking about at Conservative rallies. I’m talking about on shop floors and in retail outlets across the country where I meet young people. They’re the ones being held back.

We won, by the way. We won the youth vote. In fact, our election body — Elections Canada — runs elections in the high schools. They are mock elections, but all of them participate. Now some people say, “Oh, this is trivial stuff.” We’re talking about every high school student. We won the high school vote. They voted Conservative.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Wow.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: And this is the first time that the high schoolers voted differently than their parents in the general election. And it’s on election day. So young people today in Canada, I believe, are grounded in a desire to work hard, to unleash their ambitions. And so I’m actually very optimistic about our upcoming generation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, if I thought that was the case here, I’d also be optimistic, but it’s not.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It’s not? Okay. I don’t know a lot of British —

KONSTANTIN KISIN: — youth, but you guys are very lucky if that’s the case.

Indigenous Guilt and Canada’s Historical Reckoning

FRANCIS FOSTER: One of the things that we’ve seen with the UK and Australia and Canada is the guilt of their history. But the guilt is different. For instance, in the UK it’s guilt for empire. In Australia and Canada it’s slightly different because there’s the indigenous people and there’s a guilt around that in Canada. Can we talk about that a little bit? Because I’ve found something quite fascinating actually.

Indigenous Communities and Resource Development

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I think that in Canada what we need to do is focus on what we can actually achieve together. The Indigenous peoples of Canada can be literally the richest people in the world because the lands on which they live are among the most resource rich. And one thing you will never hear about in the media is the pro energy, pro oil and gas indigenous communities that are very common across Western Canada in particular, but also in the mining communities of Northern Ontario.

The previous Liberal government killed a number of natural resource projects as part of the net zero obsession that had overwhelming and near unanimous support of the indigenous communities nearby. And there was one oil and gas mine, the Teck Frontier mine, $20 billion. Every single indigenous community around it supported it. And the government in Ottawa came in and killed it.

The approach that we have tried to take as conservatives in Canada is to unleash incredible amounts of opportunity for first nations, allow energy companies to even pay some of their corporate tax obligation to local Indigenous communities to help with fighting poverty, training young people, getting them into six figure jobs in the trades. So that’s the approach that I take and I think it’s a positive one. And I think the traditional Indigenous values I believe are quite conservative. Faith in a creator, family tradition. And I think we can build on those foundations because it—

FRANCIS FOSTER: —seems to me the Liberal Party take a very paternalistic approach towards the Indigenous people, whilst on the other hand not giving them the freedom to actually be able to progress and improve their own communities.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the approach has been to block resource projects and then double the size of the bureaucracy for Indigenous affairs. So that is not the right approach. And we don’t need more bureaucrats in the nation’s capital. We have too many of those. What we need is more opportunity in the Indigenous communities themselves.

The Rise of AI and Its Impact on Society

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Pierre, one thing that Francis and I have been thinking about a lot, because I think anyone is thinking about a lot at the moment, is I think the world is about to change very dramatically. It’s a trivial thing to say in one way, but we went to San Francisco and you walk around, like a third of the cars on the road are not driven by humans anymore. You talk to some of the people in AI, this thing is happening really fast. Do you have any thoughts on the impact that that will have on countries like Britain, like Canada? And what do you see coming down the pipe?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Look, it’s an incredible opportunity. I think it could massively increase the availability of goods and services at much lower prices if it’s allowed to, and if monetary inflation doesn’t cancel out all the benefits again. But one thing I ask myself is, if AI is going to replace a number of different tasks that we do, what kind of meaning will people have in their lives?

I’m a big believer in Viktor Frankl, incredible psychologist, and his thesis was that people need meaning even more than they need food and water. They need meaning in their lives to give them happiness. And he tells the story of a group therapy session where there were two ladies. One was a very wealthy woman who had married a very rich man. And she was sitting next to a woman who lived in poverty and had two children, one who died early and the other who was severely disabled.

And he said to both of them, “When you’re on your deathbed at 80, what will you look back upon your life and say?” And the wealthy woman said, “Well, I’ll say that I had an easy life with lots of joys and easy, frivolous pleasures, but it all really meant nothing.” Whereas the mother who had struggled and fought for her kids said, “Well, I look back on my life, and though my first child had a short life, it was a beautiful one, and my second child had a disability, I made him into a great person, and I would look back at my life and say it was an incredible success.”

So the point being that life is not just a pleasure machine. It’s about having meaning. And if machines and robots replace the meaning that we get from doing our work and contributing, then how will we find meaning and purpose? That’s something I think about. 50 years from now, if some of the predictions about what these AI mechanisms are going to be able to do come true, what kind of meaning will we get? The meaning that comes from work and contributing?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think you’re exactly right. Although I think 50 years is extremely optimistic, I think it’s happening very quickly.

Another thing though, and look, I think you’re totally right, the upside is unlimited in health care and in all sorts of things. There is a thing though — they’ve started to do some experiments where they give the AI some information and they say, “Well, the CEO is having an affair.” And then the CEO gives an order to shut down the AI for an unrelated reason. The AI will blackmail the CEO to not be shut down.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In other words, it has a survival instinct.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Wow.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And if something has a survival instinct, that means by definition, its primary interest is not human beings. Its primary interest is survival. There is an existential risk to humanity. It might be very small, but is that something you’ve thought about at all? I hope more politicians do think about this.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Listen, I’ve never been blackmailed by AI, so I haven’t thought about that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, get ready. It’s coming.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thanks for the warning. Yeah. Look, these are the kinds of things we have to think about and what happens if and when they take a life of their own. But I don’t have the ability to extrapolate that far into the future. But you’ve given me something to think about.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Fair enough. No, it’s just a new thing. But I think it’s going to happen so much faster than people think. And I think, I hope politicians start to think about it a little bit—

FRANCIS FOSTER: —more, because one of the challenges I think politicians face, and we saw that with Zuckerberg when he was being interrogated by US politicians, is that you were listening to the US politicians interrogate Zuckerberg and you go, “You don’t understand tech.” And the concern for a lot of people is the knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a very small amount of the population. And really, we need politicians who are across this just as much as the tech industry, if not more.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I agree, I agree. Because otherwise it’s a black box for all but those who control it. And so we have to diffuse the knowledge and we have to know more about what it’s going to do.

Reclaiming Power from the Bureaucracy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, well, you will need to. But coming back to this central theme of our conversation, which I think you’ve articulated very powerfully, how do you wrestle control back from the people who’ve established this gigantic bureaucracy, who have all the corporate structures that benefit them? How do you actually get to the point where that is no longer the case and your country, our country, is no longer about serving the interests of a very small group of people at the top?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, you have to activate everybody else. You have to provide hope to everyone else that life can be so much better than it is right now for them. And that’s why we’ve focused in our party in the last several months, particularly on a hopeful message, because what we don’t want is people to become despondent and detached from the political process. If they don’t show up, then they will be governed only by those who do.

So I’ve asked myself, how do I go and get the mill worker in Thunder Bay to become politically active so that he can own a home and double his pay and continue to enjoy his hunting rifles and his pickup truck and the things that make his life great? Those are the political challenges for those of us who are trying to give power back to the people — to get the people engaged to take it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But isn’t also the challenge going to be that you’ve got to change a culture? Because I think it was around 40% of Canadians are employed in government jobs. And I was talking to a friend of mine, he was saying, “Look, for a lot of Canadians, that’s the dream. Because you get a cushy government job, you’re not going to have to work as hard.” And that means you’ve got life on easy street. Now, maybe that’s an unfair way of putting it, but I’ve heard that from more than one person.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: To be fair, I don’t know if I would say that’s true in Canada today. The problem I see is that people are working extremely hard, they’re running non stop, but there are so many obstacles in their way. If you’re a young person and you want to buy a home, well, they’re not building them. We build fewer homes today than we did in the 1970s. Why is that? Not because we don’t have carpenters who want to swing hammers. It’s because you can’t get a permit to build a home.

Go to Western Canada. The people who are unemployed in Western Canada in the trades — it’s not because they don’t want to work, it’s because the government has blocked them from working in the energy sector. So I don’t see the population as being a problem at all in Canada. I think the problem in most western countries that are in this challenge is governments. It’s not the people.

Political Anger and the Risk of Destructive Movements

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know how much you followed this in other countries, and I wonder if it is an issue in Canada or not. But the point you make about political activation is obviously true. But one of the things that’s happened both in Europe, in Britain and in America is political activation of a very frustrated population — understandably — has spilled over in many instances into anger and resentment and a much more destructive perspective.

You see, on social media, I always talk about how the caliber of the influencers tells you a lot about the time you’re in. So you kind of go from Jordan Peterson, within like 10 years you go down to Andrew Tate to Nick Fuentes. And in the UK you see that the polarization is creating very angry, divisive movements, which are understandable in some ways because they’re reacting to things that are very unpleasant that you’ve been describing. Do you have that problem in Canada? And if you do, do you know what to do about it? What other people should do about it?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: The problem being the polarization?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, it’s not polarization. I guess the problem being that the anger that’s created by the policies you’re describing then becomes a vehicle for people who are not offering the message of hope and positivity that you are, but are offering a destructive message, a message of hatred against other people, etc.

The Antidote to Anger Is Hope

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I think we’re in Canada, we’re very blessed that the focus has remained on hope. And I will bluntly take some credit for it because I have been the major opposition to the status quo in the country. And during that time, our Conservative Party has remained unfractured. We are one party, we haven’t fractured into numerous parties. And our focus has been on giving people, driving their political energies towards a hopeful future rather than just being upset about the status quo.

And very simply, the antidote to anger is hope. Because if you say to people, “Yes, you’re not happy with where you are, but this is where we could be — and wouldn’t this be wonderful? Wouldn’t it be great if you could own a home, raise a family, chart your own course, live a great life, launch a business.” And I’ve tried to keep people focused on that optimistic, forward looking possibility. And I think that is the antidote to the problem you describe.

The Apple-Eating Video

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, and I thought your apple eating video was a perfect illustration of people trying to drag you into the negative.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Oh my God. That was strange. When my staff were there witnessing this, no one thought that this was a moment of any kind really. We buried it like seven minutes into a 15 minute video that we thought no one was going to watch — me just sort of wandering around talking to people in an orchard — and somehow this thing blew up. So it was when people came to me weeks later and said they had seen a video of me eating an apple. I didn’t even remember what they were talking about. But it’s funny how social media behaves.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That was a great moment in Internet history. Pierre, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. We’re going to ask you some questions from our supporters. Many Canadians have written in with their questions. Before we do though, the last question we ask all our guests is: what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be, as a society, as a culture?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Before Pierre answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack — the link is in the description — where you’ll be able to see this: What is one thing the world can learn from Canada, and what is one political idea you would like to see brought to Canada from elsewhere? What’s your stance on the Alberta independence movement? And how do you feel about Quebec?

Monetary Inflation: The Biggest Cause of Economic Injustice

PIERRE POILIEVRE: One thing we’re not talking about, I think, is the biggest cause of economic injustice, which is monetary inflation. I think it has been the single biggest wealth transfer away from the working class. And it has been a phenomenon in all of the Western world, with the possible exception of Switzerland. We’re creating cash at six times the rate that we’re building homes. And that is inflating the cost of everything. It’s taking from wage earners and savers and concentrating money in the hands of a very small group of insiders.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And is that why it’s happening, you think?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It is exactly why it’s happening, yes. It’s very simple. You mentioned apples, right? You had an economy with 10 apples and $10 — it’s a buck an apple. If you double the number of dollars to 20, but you still only have 10 apples, it’s now $2 an apple.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, what I mean is — is the reason it’s happening for the same reason you’ve said everything else? There’s a benefit to a small number of people?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. So if you’re a politician and you want to spend money you don’t have, what’s the easiest way to do it? Is it to raise everyone’s taxes — to go out and say, “We’re going to raise the sales tax by three points” — or why not just print the money? It has the exact same effect, but no one realizes it because it’s way too complicated for even people who are extremely intelligent to understand.

And so that is the original cause. But then there are all these secondary beneficiaries at the top, and then the great masses of victims at the bottom who pay for it. And I think it is the single biggest wealth transfer in modern history, and almost no one notices it because it is a sleight of hand. It is an optical illusion that is very difficult to detect.

The Looming Fiscal and Inflationary Crisis

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s become a lot easier to detect now when countries like the UK and the US are running debt at high levels on their GDP. Do you think that music is going to stop at some point?

PIERRE POILIEVRE: It has to, because one of two things will happen. Either they’ll start printing and cause inflation crises that provoke enormous upheaval, or they don’t print — then their bond yields will start to rise to points that they can’t actually make their payments. One of those two things is going to happen if they don’t get their spending under control.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So you have an inflationary crisis or you have a fiscal crisis.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Exactly — one of the two. And they’ve chosen inflation over a fiscal crisis now. And that is why the money printing has been so rampant. The deficits are enormous, and the only way to deal with them — the only easy way for politicians to deal with them — is to print money and rob people’s buying power. But eventually people will get fed up and they won’t be able to do that, and the music will stop.

Cutting Government to Restore Economic Sanity

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So how do you, if you become prime minister, how do you actually deal with this? Because if you’ve got an economy and a society that’s basically got used to the fact that you print money that you don’t have to spend on things you can’t afford, you are then the evil dad who comes in and says, “No, we can’t spend money on this. No more candy for you.” You’re going to be there for one term.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, the people aren’t getting this so-called candy — they’re the ones paying for it. As Jefferson said, “The government is taking from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” The people are paying the price. This is why people can’t eat food. They can’t eat beef anymore. That’s why you used to be able to own a house and pay off a mortgage in seven years on a single income. A welder could buy a house, raise four kids, and pay off his mortgage in seven years. And now a lawyer and an accountant can’t buy a house in 20 years, even get the down payment.

So there’s no candy for the people. It’s only been candy for a small group at the top. And how do you stop it? You need to shrink the size and cost of government so that there’s no longer a need to print money. That means cutting bureaucracy, consultants, corporate welfare, handouts to phony refugees, foreign aid. We have to cut all those things. And yes, it will take backbone to do it, but I have that backbone.

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