Read the full transcript of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to place 25% tariffs on Canadian products entering the United States. The tariffs are scheduled to come into effect on February 4.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Opening Statement
PIERRE POILIEVRE: Thank you, everyone, for coming. We must put Canada first. And that is why common sense conservatives condemn President Trump’s massive, unjust, and unjustified tariffs, which will damage both American and Canadian economies. Canada is the United States’ closest friend, greatest ally, and most important neighbor. We share the longest undefended border.
We fought alongside the Americans in two world wars, Korea, and Afghanistan, where we lost 158 of our brilliant young men and women to avenge the attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington. There is no justification whatsoever for these tariffs or this treatment. Canada will never be the 51st state. We are an independent, proud, and strong nation.
I’d like to speak first to our American friends. You are our friends. You are our neighbors. We share the longest undefended border in the history of the world. You buy our products and we buy yours. You have a trade surplus with us when energy is excluded.
And when it is included, the deal is even better for you because you buy our oil and our gas at massive price discounts. Not because we’re nice Canadians, but because here at home, we’ve made really dumb decisions to prevent us from exporting our energy to any other countries. But either way, Americans are better off with this friendship. We share a continent. We share the same risks and the same potential enemies from around the world.
Those kinds of enemies can metastasize into real dangers and actual attacks as you saw suddenly and unexpectedly on 9/11. It’s good to have friends when those sorts of things happen. And let me ask my American friends this question. Even if you believe in tariffs, how is it possible to put a 25% tariff on Canada and only a 10% tariff on China? In what strategic mindset does that make sense?
If it’s to do with Fentanyl, the Fentanyl is coming from China. It’s killing our people too. We both have to do more to stop it, but we can do more when we do it together. Now here at home, my message to the Liberal government, put aside partisan interests and recall parliament. It is insane that in this great crisis, parliament is shut down to deal with a crisis and a power struggle within the Liberal Party.
Canada First Plan
Let’s put aside partisan political interests and recall parliament to put pass into place a common sense Canada First plan. And here’s that plan:
We must retaliate dollar for dollar, carefully aiming those tariffs at maximizing the impact on American companies while minimizing the impact on Canadian consumers and businesses. That means targeting US products that, a) we can do without, b) we can buy elsewhere, or, c) best of all, that we can make here at home. That best example of that would be steel and aluminum.
The tariffs must not be a tax grab. None of the money from the tariffs should stay in government coffers or be spent on unrelated government priorities. All of it should go back to the workers and businesses that are affected, and most of it should go back in the form of a massive tax cut.
And that is why I’m calling for the passage of an immediate emergency “bring it home” tax cut. The tax cut would be designed to save jobs, create jobs, crush inflation, and boost our economy. We need to cut taxes on work, investment, energy, home building, and making stuff at home. Let’s start by axing the Liberal carbon tax and the Liberal capital gains tax hike. They should be the first on the chopping block.
We must immediately scrap the Liberal anti-energy law C-69 and green light job-creating projects now. That includes LNG plants, pipelines, mines, factories, port expansions, so that we can get our products to overseas markets without going through and profiting the United States. It was insane for us to block our industries before this crisis. It is a fatal mistake now. No longer can we tolerate special interests, politicians, and worst of all, corporate lobbyists who profit by shutting down industries, blocking resources in Canada while profiting off them in Brazil, the Middle East, China, and elsewhere.
We need to knock down interprovincial trade barriers to have truly true free trade across our country. We are in this state because we trade we sell twice as much to the Americans as we sell to ourselves. These interprovincial barriers are destructive. They kill jobs. They drive up consumer prices, and they cost the average family $6,000 a year. Let’s knock them down, and let’s be a truly free trading economy ourselves.
We must rebuild our military and take back control of our borders to regain the confidence of our partners, assert our sovereignty, protect our people, and put Canada first. Let us be clear. Our border needs to be taken back into our control, not to please the president, but to protect our own people.
The fact that we have 20,000 to 500,000 people here illegally, according to the government, was a problem before these tariffs. The fact that we lost 47,000 people to fentanyl overdoses should never have been allowed to happen. We must secure our border to stop the guns that are killing our people. 85% of gun crime is done with illegal guns smuggled over the border. We must secure our border, again, to protect our own people and save the lives of our own children.
And we must rebuild our military to protect our sovereignty, assert our strength, and keep our nation strong and free. Finally, we must lock arms with American economic interests that favor Canada. The workers and businesses that depend on trade with Canada should be marshaled to pressure the administration to back down.
We must go to key states that will be up for grabs in the congressional elections two years from now and let their congressmen and senators know that they will be running on a bad economic record if refinery workers have lost jobs because Canadian oil can no longer make it to them, or if young families can’t buy homes because lumber is even more expensive for homebuilders. Or families that are already suffering from inflation are paying more for gas because our energy has become more expensive due to American tariffs.
We must lock arms with all of those economic interests in the states to build an American coalition against the tariffs and in favor of free trade between our two great countries. As always, we will stand strong with growing confidence. We are the second biggest land mass in the world, 41,000,000 brilliant people, the third biggest supply of oil, fifth biggest supply of natural gas, biggest supply of uranium and potash. We have not one, two, or three coasts. We have if you include include the Great Lakes, we actually have four coasts that can take us to Tidewater.
We have the biggest supply of freshwater anywhere on earth, the fifth biggest supply of farmland. We should be the richest nation on earth. These tariffs are wake up call. That it is time for us to meet our potential. It is time for us to be a country that can trade with itself.
A country that builds homes quickly for its youth. A country that allows entrepreneurs to succeed quickly and profitably so that success is once again rewarded. A country that allows hard work to pay off. A country that harvests its own resources, that secures its borders to protect its people, that builds its military, to protect its sovereignty, unites its people, to protect our common history and common future. We will always put Canada first, today, tomorrow, and forever.
Let’s bring it home. Thank you. We’ll now take questions from the floor.
Questions from Reporters
REPORTER: Hi. Jared Yeager here from the Western Standard. And if you could answer in French and English, please. So just hours ago, Trump said on Truth Social, he believed Canada would, quote, “cease to exist as a viable country,” unquote, without the US, and hinted again that he won’t end the tariffs until we become the 51st state. So I want to know, at what point is Canada’s relationship with the US beyond repair? And is there even a path forward for reasonable negotiation with someone like him at the other end of the table?
PIERRE POILIEVRE: Our friendship with the Americans is not based on any one politician. It is based on our centuries-long history of trade, of friendship, of common defence, of fighting on the battlefield, arms locked together against common enemies. We will continue to build that friendship with the people of the United States. But let me be clear, we are an independent and we are a proud nation. And we will come through this an independent and a proud sovereign nation. We will not back down. We will not cease. We will continue to march forward as proud Canadians. Thank you.
REPORTER: Thank you. Next question?
PIERRE POILIEVRE: In English? Well, the question was whether I would support a Liberal plan in parliament to respond to the tariffs. Well, we don’t we haven’t seen any plan. So it’s very hard for me to say whether I would support something I haven’t seen in a parliament that is shuttered. The question should be for the Liberals, why they have shuttered parliament in the middle of a crisis. They have their own power struggle going on right now, and the country is left largely leaderless and in chaos. In the meantime, we need to recall parliament to pass a Canada First plan. And that would include tariffs that match the American tariffs, target products we don’t need, can get elsewhere or make ourselves, use the money from those tariffs only to help the workers and businesses that have suffered and not to fill government coffers. We need a massive bring it home tax cut on work, investment, home building, energy, and making stuff in Canada. The purpose is to stimulate our economy, crush inflation, and protect and create jobs. We need to immediately repeal C-69, the anti-resource law the Liberals brought in, which is forcing making us more reliant on the Americans and more and less capable of producing what we need here at home. We need to rebuild our military and secure our borders, to protect our sovereignty and our people, and we need a massive campaign among American businesses and workers in order to pressure the administration to reverse these unjustifiable tariffs. If that plan were put before parliament, I would vote for it today.
REPORTER: Sorry. Sorry. Who’s who’s who’s next? Sorry. I’ve been pushed out a lot. I have to ask questions now. You have talked about… Sorry. Just so sometimes they like to hear from local media. Do you believe the government’s promise of $155,000,000,000 in counter tariffs is enough? And what would you do differently to get the president to change course? And to clarify your last question, are you saying that you would step aside and not compete for the heads of the country to allow us to get through this crisis? Or I’m unclear about your answer to the last question.
PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I find it as a strange question to your CBC is asking me to step aside in the next election. It’s a very strange request. No. We’re not going to suspend democracy. The Canadian people run this country, and they will choose the next prime minister. Thank you very much. Next question.
REPORTER: Thomas Hill from Bloomberg. You mentioned the economic jeopardy for American Refinery Workers in your remarks. Is Canada’s negotiating position today still weakened without the prospect of restrictions or export taxes on its biggest export by far, energy and crude oil?
PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I think the reason that Justin Trudeau has refused to answer that question, and the reason why numerous Quebec leaders have, surprisingly, to some might be surprised to learn, have come out against it is because it’s not clear how Western Oil would actually make it make it to Quebec given that the oil we transport from Western Canada to Quebec goes through the United States. It goes down into the States through lines 59 and back up to Quebec. Of course, Eastern Canada has to import a lot of Eastern American oil because we don’t have a transnational pipeline.
Furthermore, we don’t export any of our natural gas to any country other than the United States because the government here has blocked LNG export plants. So the question then becomes, where else would we export our oil and gas? And I think we’re all starting to realize just how absolutely reckless it was for Mr. Carney, Miss Freeland, Mr. Trudeau to block pipelines and other resource projects that would have made us less reliant on the United States. And so all of these suggestions of blocking Canadian energy exports have to be followed up with a question. Where else would you sell our resources? Yeah. Right. But we have nowhere else to sell it. So, that that is the question that, these are the questions that have to be answered. So far, the prime minister has said that he does not want to divide the country by attacking one industry in one region against, the other. And I I actually commend him for those remarks, and I agree with him on that. This will be the final question.
REPORTER: Alex Zoltan, True North. Question is, do you believe that tit for tat tariffs with the United States could lead to a trade war that Canada cannot win?
PIERRE POILIEVRE: Well, I believe we’re already in a trade war, and I believe no one will win. I think both countries will lose. And that’s my message to our American friends. Why? Why would you want both of our countries to lose a trade war when we have the most successful trading, security, and geographical relationship that any two countries have ever had in the history of the world? Why would you want us to lose? Both of us. Because that’s what’s going to happen. This will make America poorer, weaker, and less safe. Will Canada lose? Of course. We’re both going to lose. So let’s stop losing on both sides of the border. Let’s hammer our differences and actually trade more. That would be a winning solution to all of this. And that is the message that I will bring as we put Canada first. Thank you very much.
