EZRA LEVANT ｜ Is the Bank of Canada fudging the numbers to keep Trudeau in power？ A special interview with Manny Montenegrino
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Summary
On this Canada Day long weekend, Ezra Levenant sits down with the CEO of Think Sharp, Manny Montenegro, to talk about why the Bank of Canada is fudging its own interest rates to keep Justin Trudeau in power.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. Today on this Canada Day-Long Weekend, a special half-hour conversation with
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our friend Manny Montenegrena. We're going to talk about a lot of things, including
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is the Bank of Canada governor fudging interest rates to keep Justin Trudeau in power? Manny's
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got some things to say about that. Hey, by the way, before we get to the podcast, let me invite
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Tonight is the Bank of Canada fudging the numbers to keep Justin Trudeau in power. It's July 3rd,
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Tiff Macklem almost sounds like a made-up name. Tiff Macklem. No, that is the name
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of the head of the Bank of Canada. And what is the Bank of Canada? Well, their number one job,
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I suppose, is to set interest rates low enough. It encourages people to borrow, to expand their
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businesses, to buy homes. That motivates people to stop renting and start owning. But if the economy
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gets too fast, too hot, then the Bank of Canada can increase interest rates, cooling off the economy.
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That's another way of saying making things too expensive, making home ownership too expensive,
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making business expansion too expensive, making people less employed. It's a brutal business.
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Here's what Tiff Macklem said shortly after the pandemic struck. Take a look.
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Interest rates are very low, and they're going to be there for a long time.
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We recognize that Canadians, Canadian businesses are facing an unusual amount of uncertainty.
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And so we have been unusually clear about the future path for interest rates. If you've got a
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mortgage, or if you're considering to make a major purchase, or you're a business and you're
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considering making an investment, you can be confident that interest rates will be low for a long time.
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Well, that's what Tiff had to say. And Tiff wouldn't lie, would he? Tiff wouldn't tell
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millions of Canadians to go ahead and load up on mortgages and business loans only to change his
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strategy. Would he? Well, joining us now to talk about that is one of our favorite guys,
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Manny Montenegrino, the CEO of ThinkSharp. Manny, if I was someone looking to rent or buy,
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listening to Tiff Macklem would make me say, boy, this is the time to buy. Money's going to be cheap,
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not just the time to buy, but to have what's called a variable rate mortgage, because you get a better
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deal on it. What do you make of what Tiff Macklem said there? And guess what? There's a second video
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we're going to show in a second to tell you how the story ends. But why don't you unpack a little
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Well, he couldn't be any clearer. He basically told Canadians. And by the way, the Bank of Canada
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never tells us what it's doing in the future. Rarely tells us. And this time, this was about
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six months after COVID struck. And this time, the Bank of Canada went forward and said, be rest assured,
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low interest rates for a very long time. And that means people went out and bought homes,
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people went out and took variable mortgages. And Ezra, in my law practice of 35 years, I practice
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in real estate law pretty heavily as well. And a long time in real estate law means a minimum of five
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years. We, at the time that Tiff Macklem said that, the governor said that, we have now had almost
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0% or 1% mortgages, 2% bank rates from 2008 to 2020 when the pandemic hit. So that's 12 years of
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really low rates. And when the Bank of Governor comes up and does a long time, one could reasonably
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expect it's at least five years, if not another 10 years of low interest rate. So people went out
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and listened to this independent Bank of Canada governor and acted accordingly. Then what happened?
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Yeah. Well, let's take a look at video number two. Here's Tiff again.
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Going forward, nobody should expect that interest rates are going to go back down to the very low
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levels that we've seen over the last decade or so. So we're in a transition period to a world
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where interest rates are going to be higher than what many people have gotten used to.
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Well, there you have it. So everyone who got a variable rate mortgage, everyone who invested,
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borrowed to build their business or build their home. Well, sorry, Tiff has new instructions now.
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What's been the impact of this high interest rate? And combine that with inflation. First of all,
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what has it done? And second of all, how did it happen, Manny? Well, I think it's important to know
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how it happened. I looked into very carefully, and I have graphs that I can present. But basically,
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the Bank of Canada's job is to keep inflation around 2%. That's its primary job. And the biggest tool
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that it can do that is with interest rates. So it starts with inflation. Now, when the Bank of Canada
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made that pronouncement after COVID struck, that interest rates are going to be there for a very
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long time, he knew that the drivers of inflation were in place. And let me list them for you.
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The biggest driver of inflation is government spending. Now, at the beginning of COVID,
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we spent the government of Canada spent about $500 billion in CERB and other payments to keep people
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at home. $500 billion, Ezra. The budget of Canada is only about $300 and some billion. So we basically
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spent the whole budget, if not twice as much, in a few months. That is inflationary. The governor knew
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that happened when he made that statement that interest rates would be for a long time very low.
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The second driver of inflation is supply chain disruptions. COVID, when everyone shut down
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around the world, and we know this, and he knew at the time he made that statement that the supply
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chain was disrupted. The third driver of inflation is pent-up demand. Ezra, when you have people staying
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at home for a year, and because of COVID, you know everyone knew. You didn't have to have
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an economist's degree that demand will start ramping up because we shut everything down.
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And the fourth is low interest rates. It's very important to know, Ezra, that the interest rates,
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the bank rate was around 2%. And they dropped, this is remarkable, they dropped it to almost zero
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at the beginning of COVID. Now, think of that logical step. You actually shut down the economy on purpose,
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yet you lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. It doesn't make sense. They shouldn't
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have done the lowering in the first place, because we weren't facing, we faced a lowered economy because
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we chose to shut down everything. Everything was temporary. And my point, Ezra, is if your goal is to
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keep inflation at 2%, you knew that inflation was going to breach the 2% very quickly because of those
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four factors. Interest rates would slightly go back up. That's inflationary. The pent-up demand people
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start buying whatever they didn't buy for a whole year. And the government spending of $500 billion
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flowing through everywhere. That's going to... So he knew. So I don't understand how the Bank of Canada's
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job is to keep it at 2%. And he knew that inflation was going to breach 2% within months after the first
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year of COVID. Yet he made that statement that he's going to keep interest rates low for a very long
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time. Well, you sent over a graph, and we'll put it up on the screen here. It's a pretty simple graph,
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but I think there's a powerful message to it. When the last election was afoot in late 2021,
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interest rates were still manageable. TIF did his job to help get Justin Trudeau re-elected. But as
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soon as Trudeau was re-elected, TIF let go. And that's when interest rates and inflation truly went
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nuts, didn't they? Well, that's a very important point. In fact, Ezra, once again, the Bank of Canada's
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job is to keep inflation at 2%. We've seen four factors that were going to just pop inflation
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past 2%. And it actually happened. Ezra, it happened around February 2021. That was the first
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breach. The Bank of Canada could have easily at least brought interest rates back up to before
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where they were COVID because we breached the 2%. He didn't. And he left them at the almost 0%.
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Right up to the following year, which is after the election. So Ezra, for 10 months,
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inflation kept going up to almost 6% before, a year after it breached the 2% before he started
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implementing the very sharp increases in interest rates. So it is just, there is no explanation.
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And particularly, Ezra, if you take the premise that the vaccines were all going to bring us back
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to normality, the two-shot miracle drug was going to just make everything tickety-boo. And that's what
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all the public officials were telling you. That means you knew by July, or at least by June of 2021,
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that everything would be back to normal and interest rates should have gone up. He did not increase
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interest rates knowing all these factors and knowing that the inflation rate was about 4.5%.
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It was 4.5% at the time of the election, and interest rates were still at virtually zero.
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You know, I think the number one cause of inflation is when governments just print money. I mean,
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when you get to print as much money as you want, it's sort of like counterfeit money. The bad money,
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the fake money drives out the good money. I mean, if there's, I'm just going to make up a number. If
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there's a trillion dollars that people are buying and selling, and then the government prints another
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trillion dollars, now there's still $2 trillion for the same amount of goods and services. So
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everybody's money just got cut in half, but the government stole that half. I'm simplifying,
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of course. But when you pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, of course, everyone's
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going to be poorer. And of course, there's going to be inflation. But here's the crazy part on top of
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that. They're deliberately making energy and food more expensive. They're raising the carbon taxes.
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They raise the carbon tax every April Fool's Day, even during the pandemic. So everything that needs
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energy from your home to transportation to farm vehicles, all more expensive. The war on carbon
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is their excuse. But now they're doing the same to food, Manny. We see it in the Netherlands. We see it
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coming to Canada. The war on nitrogen to make food more expensive. I don't know why they're doing it,
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but I think that's going to be a problem too. Inflation, higher costs for anything needing energy
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and food. And I think it's a kind of rationing. And I think it's madness. I don't understand it.
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What's your thinking about their plan to make energy and food more expensive?
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Well, I mean, clearly it's a plan. If you took out the carbon taxes on gas, if you took out
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the bump of interest rate, we have no inflation. Our economy is not doing well. It's all government
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created. The sad thing is, Ezra, I actually did an exercise. And you know how income tax
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works. It begins at a low level. If a person's making minimum wage, and let's say minimum wage
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is at $15 and works 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that person's making $30,000. That person
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still pays $4,000 to $6,000 in income tax, depending on where they're at, plus all the other taxes,
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the carbon taxes on gasoline and everything else. Now, that person's purchasing power is about 15%
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less than it was two years ago. The poor are being destroyed because it is the food and the gas that
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are going up. That's what's driving this inflation. And what's really ironic is that the governments are
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taking taxation on it. And it makes no sense that you have someone that gets a bump in their minimum
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wage, and that bump leads to more taxation, although it has no purchasing power.
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Right, because they sort of get inflated into a higher tax bracket. Is that what you mean?
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Right. Yes, exactly. I mean, if you look at a person, I mean, if you go to $18, $19 an hour,
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well, you're purchasing power at $18 an hour is probably equivalent because of the base goods
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that you're buying at $12 an hour, three or four years ago. Yet now you're at $18 an hour,
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you're being taxed at $18 an hour. You're behind. And the government is making money. Now,
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the government makes money, of course, on the four or five carbon taxes that Trudeau's put on,
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and the carbon tax on the delivery of your food, and everything that poor people need, which is hydro,
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food, and transportation, is being viciously attacked with these new taxes. It is an attack
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on the poor. It is a vicious attack on the poor. I mean, you know, people that are making lots of
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money are not paying attention to this, but the working poor have now become poor.
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You know, there's a statistic that I heard about a week ago, which is that Canada passed the 40
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million people mark, which sort of caught me by surprise because the last official number I heard
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was 38 million. I thought, boy, we sort of skipped over 39 million. And if you look at the stats,
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Canada, through all kinds of immigration, visitor status, student visas all together,
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it's about a million people a year, a million, not 250,000 or 300,000, but a million. That's how
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we just suddenly jumped up to 40 million people. And, you know, I know that some of that immigration
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is entrepreneurial or high-skill immigration, but not all of it. My initial reflex is, oh,
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now I know why housing is so expensive. Now I know why traffic is so bad. Now I know
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why schools are crowded, hospital waiting rooms, there's a lineup. Now I know a lot of those things.
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But it also hides a weak economy, because if you bring a million people into the country every year,
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just to give them housing and food, you're going to get some GDP going up. But if you've increased the
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population by 3%, but GDP goes up, I don't know, 4%, well, three of that was just these newcomers,
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and you actually have a very weak economy. I think that's sort of the point you were making earlier,
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wasn't it? Exactly. That's the third point or fourth point that the Bank of Canada, I mean,
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I don't know, I call it gross negligence, Ezra, but the Bank of Canada is now hesitating,
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dropping the interest rates, even though the inflation rate is down to 3.4%, that was a few days ago,
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3.4%. You would expect, because it's now gone down for 12 consecutive months,
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that there'd be an ease in the interest rates. Remember, Ezra, it went up 12 consecutive months,
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inflation up to 60% before he acted, and it's now dropped 12 consecutive months, and he's not
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lowering these interest rates. The answer, if you just listen to the fake news media and the Bank of
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Canada, they're saying, well, we have a strong economy, and we got to temper it down.
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Ezra, the strong economy that they're now saying is 3% GDP. And as you stated, just the number of
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people coming into Canada is about 3% growth. If we did not have any immigration or any new people
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coming into Canada, our economy is dead flat. We're in a recession. It's in trouble. And when
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it's in trouble, you reduce interest rates. So he doesn't even, the Bank of Canada doesn't even net out
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the extraordinary, there's no country in the world that's adding more people. I had a debate with an
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American friend, and he said, well, yeah, you're adding one million, we're adding three. I said,
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we're one-tenth the size. I mean, they don't get it. America thinks it's under siege by
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open borders and immigration. We have three times what America brings in, 10 times what my old country
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Italy is bringing in, probably 15 times more than Germany. There's no country in the world that's
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admitting more people, which is fine. I mean, that's the direction that Canada wants to go.
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But at least the Bank of Canada has to take that factor into account and say, look, real growth in
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Canada, if you net out the new people, is not 3%. Our economy is stagnant. We need to get interest
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rates down, not up. You know, you said if that's the direction you want to go as a country. I don't
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think we've ever had a debate on immigration, at least not in the last decade. I think of past
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conservative leaders, Andrew Scheer, Aaron O'Toole, terrified to even talk about it. Basically, whatever number
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Justin Trudeau said, they said, yeah, we agree. Trudeau, whatever he would say, literally any
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number, both Andrew Scheer, Aaron O'Toole, and I think Pierre Pauly, I would just say, yeah, whatever
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he said, they're too afraid to be seen as racist or whatever they would be called for wanting a
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manageable number of immigration that could be absorbed into the economy and the community.
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And the number is so astonishingly large, a million people a year in a country of just 40
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million people. I have never seen a poll where the people who say more immigration is larger than
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the people who say less immigration. I mean, it's like single digits who want more. Most people say,
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yeah, we're okay. A lot of people say it should be less. Angus Reid does this poll all the time.
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I just don't think we have a national debate on immigration because everyone's terrified of being
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Well, that's true, but we don't even have an analyzation of the type of immigration. And let
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me explain it to you. When I immigrated to Canada, five strapping boys came with mom and dad, and we
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all added to the workforce. And not only that, but we created tons of jobs. That's the type of immigrant
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that came to Canada, when we came to Canada. There's a way of measuring it, Ezra. Now, and I've
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done this as well. I've measured how we're doing as an economy. I already said that our economy is at
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zero percent if you net out in GDP growth. But in employment, I do not look at the unemployment rate.
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That's a terrible number. It gives you no information. I look at the labor participation
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rate, and people can Google what that is. Now, Ezra, I've done the math, and I've actually posted it.
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But here's what the labor participation rate is. It's very simple. It is how many possible working
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people are there in your country, and how many of those are working. And you express it as a
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percentage. Now, we know that's an important number to look at, because we're adding so many
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people to this country. And this tells us what type of people are we adding. If our labor participation
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rate is going up, and we have a million new people in Canada every year, that's a great story. We're
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going to have a booming economy. We're going to have probably three percent plus three percent. We're going
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to have six, seven percent growth, because we should have six or seven percent growth, because we added
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three percent of the population, and we've got these entrepreneurs. But Ezra, I looked at that. Back
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before, in 2014, the labor participation rate was about 67 percent. It's now 65.5, 1.5 percent less. That
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means if you look at to the working people, let's say there are 30 million people in Canada that are of
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working ability, not the people that are looking for jobs, not just that's the problem with the
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unemployment rate. If I stop looking for a job, I'm not considered a part of the workforce. No, I am,
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whether you're starting to look for a job. So 1.5 percent is 450,000 people. Ezra, that means that since we
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started this mass immigration, there's been less 450,000 people that are not working in the same
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percentage that they were before that, before Trudeau expanded it. So the type of immigrants
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that he's getting are not the entrepreneurs. Of course, there are going to be some, but it's so
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disproportionate that we are now 450,000 people less working on a percentage basis than we were three
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years ago. And that's not good. So when you sum it all up, Ezra, they're number one, we don't have a
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three percent GDP. There are people buying milk and people buying cars and people buying food that are
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immigrants. They are three percent new. So therefore, we have no real GDP growth. And if you look at the
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future of the economy, we have no employment growth. In fact, it's dropped. And that's a problem.
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Hmm. How do you tackle this? I mean, is Pierre Polyev able to tackle this? I think that the media
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is less enthralled with Justin Trudeau now than they have been. I think he's just getting a little
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tiresome in some ways. I think that China influence scandals. I'm not sure if they're resonating with
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ordinary people on the ground, but the media sort of doesn't trust Trudeau as much anymore. I think they
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see him as a bit of an operator. But I still think that for reasons of class and clubbiness,
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I still think the media is on Justin Trudeau's side. I think they don't like Pierre Polyev. They
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regard him as a barbarian and an outsider. And I think that the media are going to help carry Trudeau
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against across the finish line again. And I don't think Trudeau is going to stop until he beats his
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father's record of being PM for 16 years. I think he's going to run it. Sorry, go over to you. Go
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ahead. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There's nothing to stop Trudeau because there is
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no news that's really attacking. I mean, there are Canadians that are suffering, but they're not
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part of the landscape, the news landscape. And it seems to me that every institution
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works to keep Trudeau going. And when I say that, I don't say that lightly. We know that the media does
00:25:05.960
it. We know that the RCMP, oh my God, you couldn't get more of us. There's Section 139,
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one of the Criminal Code, obstruction of justice, every subsection has been met and Trudeau should
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have been charged and the file wasn't even opened up. The whole Nova Scotia thing to make Trudeau look
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good. So we have the RCP and now we have the Bank of Canada. In my opinion, the Bank of Canada should
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have increased its interest rates knowing all those factors at the beginning of 2021 when it knew that
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inflation broke 2% and slowly get Canadians back on track. He waited a whole year, a whole election
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cycle. I tell you, if interest rates got up 2-3% before the election, you would have seen
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people think twice about their government. They didn't. We went on. And I do believe that you'll
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see interest rates go down, not this year, which it should, but it will go down before the other
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election cycle, which is in 2025. I want to ask you a question about Toronto. In the last few days,
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there was an election in Toronto and the socialist candidate won, and won fairly strongly. Olivia Chow,
00:26:23.680
the widow of Jack Layton. Is that just Toronto for you? I mean, that's just big cities in Canada,
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their vote left. Is there anything we should extrapolate from that? Is there any lesson
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federally or is that just a quirky city hall, 102 candidates, things fractured many ways? Is there
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anything that we should, does this tell us any lessons about Trudeau or the national political scene,
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or is this just something more local? Well, I hope it's local. I hope it's Olivia Chow. I mean,
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she was married to an incredible individual, Jack Layton. I had the honor of meeting him and talking to
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him. A really impressive guy. He understood the socialist side, not the rabid socialist side,
00:27:11.180
not the crazy destroy families and destroy everything social side, but he understood,
00:27:16.260
you know, what I would, you know, the socialist stuff that I heard in the seventies, that was Jack
00:27:21.660
Layton. And he was loved by all. Olivia Chow, I think, was helped substantially behind that. And I also,
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so I'm, I'm hoping, I mean, if Canadians feel that, and she campaigned on increased taxes,
00:27:37.480
uh, I hope that it was all about personality and nothing about policy.
00:27:44.300
Yeah. You might be right on that. Um, you mentioned that Jack Layton was a different breed
00:27:48.640
of socialist. I wasn't that familiar with him, but I come from the prairies originally,
00:27:54.220
and there was a prairie socialist that was a little bit different. In fact, I remember Roy Romano,
00:27:58.380
the last socialist premier of Saskatchewan, he actually balanced the budget and brought in private
00:28:05.940
sector healthcare, which, you know, you might say, how on earth did an NDP or do that? Well,
00:28:10.180
they're a little bit different, or at least they were a generation ago in the prairies. Now I think
00:28:15.080
the left is about being woke, which can be described as cultural Marxism, critical race theory, critical
00:28:23.020
gender theory. And I think if you ask a young socialist today, a young progressive, half of the
00:28:30.960
kids in universities, what do you stand for? They wouldn't even talk about economics other than,
00:28:36.900
of course, they're for big government. They would say, you know, the climate crisis. They wouldn't
00:28:43.240
really know what that means, but they would say it. They think we're all going to burn up. And they
00:28:47.520
would talk about gender and microaggressions and how we're all racist and sexist. And they would
00:28:53.620
really focus on, on those identity politics. I think that's the heart of the NDP today.
00:29:00.560
That's a new NDP. Like Ezra, you forget 2019 election, every political leader said they were
00:29:10.560
going to balance the budget. That included the NDP. Jack Layton, a perfect example. He's like a prairie
00:29:17.720
socialist with a little bit of downtown in them, which is, which is fine. We've now gone to,
00:29:24.160
you know, a socialism, a communism, an abstraction of reality. And that's where the new party is at.
00:29:31.960
So, so yeah, I mean, it's not the same socialism that you and I understood it to be, or we,
00:29:38.160
that we understood Canada. There was a great prairie socialism that was responsible, strong family
00:29:44.620
oriented, strong church oriented, and, but, but more of, you know, fairness for the individual person.
00:29:52.200
Now, I know you've been a critic of Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada before. We've had
00:29:57.620
you on and you've been very blunt about that. A few weeks ago, there was a by-election in Portage
00:30:02.520
Lisger, which oddly enough, or maybe it's not odd at all, had the highest vote count for the People's
00:30:10.100
Party in the whole country. So it made sense that Bernier ran there in a by-election. The conservative
00:30:16.440
incumbent wasn't running again. There was a lot of things that could have made it the perfect storm
00:30:22.580
for a PPC breakthrough. Alas, it didn't happen. In fact, Bernier's vote declined a little bit
00:30:30.540
from the last election. I admire Maxime Bernier. I know that you and I have a bit of a difference of
00:30:36.860
opinion on him, but I would concede that that's two general elections and two by-elections in a row.
00:30:44.800
That's four opportunities to break through that he couldn't do. I like the guy, but I see him more as
00:30:51.060
a pundit and an activist than a political alternative now. I really think it's uniting the right, so to
00:30:59.740
speak. It's like a signal that, all right, conservatives like Pierre Polyev more than they
00:31:06.020
liked Aaron O'Toole or Andrew Scheer. In the most PPC-friendly riding in the country, that was sort
00:31:12.180
of proved again. I think that that's good news for Pierre Polyev. It says that he's sort of reuniting
00:31:17.600
the right at least a fair bit. That's my analysis of it. What do you think?
00:31:21.500
You're absolutely right, Ezra. I want to say this. There's nobody better skilled to talk about this
00:31:30.940
topic than me. I think I was mentioned in one of the PPC conventions in ridicule because I was
00:31:38.600
not a supporter. Ezra, not only did Maxime do worse, he, remember, the very clear aspect is that
00:31:48.440
riding that he went in Manitoba was a riding with a PPC member that did very well, nowhere near winning,
00:31:57.140
but did very well. Maxime took that riding because he knew it was the strongest riding with PPC.
00:32:03.080
He brought the power of his leadership, the power of his money, the power of his personality,
00:32:09.380
and dropped the vote by 25%. That's a big sign. And then I looked, as I do always,
00:32:17.480
I looked at the other ridings. They all went down. PPC went down. Now, Ezra, the first time that we
00:32:24.440
met, we were a lot younger. And I was, you might remember, I was a lawyer for the Reform Party in
00:32:31.880
Preston Manning. I think it was 1991. So I'm not one of these guys that doesn't do change. I'm one of
00:32:39.000
these guys that does change. I was part of the Reform Party. I put my legal career at risk. I put
00:32:45.320
everything at risk because I wanted to see this Western movement. And it was a great movement.
00:32:51.440
Now, let me just do an analogy, a comparison. Preston Manning's, the Reform Party, first election
00:32:58.900
was 1988, one seat. Then 93, I think 46 seats. And then 97, leader of the opposition. And Preston knew
00:33:10.960
by that time, we could never form government as a Conservative Party when the Conservative vote was
00:33:16.660
spit. It took us that long, but with great success. Now, you look at Maxime Bernier, he's going
00:33:23.520
backwards, absolutely backwards, had a seat, lost a seat that he and his father had in Boast since 1984.
00:33:32.720
I mean, that seat was a Bernier seat for almost my adult lifetime. He lost that seat. He goes to
00:33:42.720
Manitoba and takes the best seat that there is and knocks it down by 25%. It's going nowhere. It's been
00:33:50.220
two by-election, I'm sorry, two federal elections and two by-elections, and everything's regressed.
00:33:57.200
And I think you're right. I think the Conservative family obviously has a large spectrum. And there's
00:34:04.120
no question that O'Toole said one thing when he ran for the party and campaigned in a different way
00:34:11.060
that was more to the centre. And that certainly helped the PPC. But I don't get that feeling
00:34:19.600
from Pierre Polivare. Pierre Polivare, in my opinion, is the truest Conservative. And I've had,
00:34:27.360
you know, I've served under, as you know, Preston Manning, Stockwell Day, and Stephen Harper.
00:34:35.700
I would put Pierre pretty close to the top of that list, if he gets the chance. The only thing I fear
00:34:43.940
is the weight of the institutions, the weight of the media, just literally crushing him if he takes
00:34:51.380
him on. But I do think that he could. Well, it'll be very interesting. And I think we might have that
00:34:57.540
chance sooner rather than later. Last question for you, Manny, and it's great to catch up.
00:35:01.640
When do you think we will have that next federal election? Do you think it'll be sometime in 2023?
00:35:07.460
Do you think it'll be in 2024? I mean, theoretically, Trudeau could hang on with Jagmeet Singh's support
00:35:14.620
as long as 2026, if he stretched it. When do you think we're going to go to the polls?
00:35:20.700
Well, that's a great question. And you know that there's this unholy alliance between the NDP
00:35:25.960
and the Liberals. Now, I'm going to go back a bit with respect to what the PPC have done.
00:35:32.220
I analyzed every riding in Canada after the last election and weighted the PPC vote as half
00:35:40.860
conservative and half other. And in 17 ridings, they went to either the NDP or to the Liberals.
00:35:51.060
And my point is very simple. Although the PPC vote was less than 5%, in many ridings, about 17
00:35:58.720
switched to the NDP and the Liberals. Without the PPC in 2021, Jagmeet Singh and Trudeau could not make
00:36:11.780
the unholy alliance deal. They would have needed another party. And we would have been at an election
00:36:17.040
a lot sooner. And we would have not seen this devastation that Canada is seeing. So there is
00:36:23.640
something to that. Now, to answer your question, they're going to wait until the economy is back
00:36:29.740
down. Like I say, this inflation is going to slow down, mainly because we are in, I think we're in a
00:36:38.480
recession, although our growth of immigration has stopped it. But the inflation is going to slow down.
00:36:45.280
It's dropped down to 3.4%. We're pretty close to the 2% target. Interest rates will come down.
00:36:51.220
It'll be rosy in a year or two. And that's when I think Trudeau and Jagmeet will stretch the tape as
00:37:00.780
long as they can. It'll be 2025. There'll be no incentive to do it earlier. So I think we're in
00:37:08.800
it for at least a year and a half or if not more. That's very interesting. I just want to say, I know
00:37:14.140
that if there was a PPC-er in the room right now, they would say, you cannot simply put the PPC vote
00:37:20.760
behind the Conservatives. Many of them would never do.
00:37:26.100
No, no, but I took half of it. You see, what I did, I understand that. So I said,
00:37:30.720
you know, I mean, listen, I'm as close as you can get to a PPC and ideology. The only difference is
00:37:36.620
I don't suffer cognitive dissonance. I do know that the way that our parliament works,
00:37:43.620
we need to be in the House to make change. And so, you know, you got to put a lid of water in
00:37:50.760
your wine. Because, I mean, look what's happened. We literally gave Jagmeet and Trudeau a kind of
00:37:58.000
marriage license to do whatever they want. So...
00:38:00.620
Oh, believe me, I know what you mean, Manny. I mean, I remember during the height of lockdowns
00:38:05.700
in Ontario, where you had a number of MPPs in Ontario, Roman Baber, Randy Hilliard,
00:38:11.700
Belinda Karajalios, you had a number of dissident MPPs who wanted to talk more about freedom,
00:38:19.420
but because they couldn't get it together pragmatically, because they couldn't join forces,
00:38:23.920
each one of them wanted to be the boss, they were not effective. And Maxime Bernier,
00:38:28.840
if he's not in the House of Commons, he's like those other names I just mentioned,
00:38:32.740
just like Derek Sloan. These are good guys, ideologically solid activists. But if you're
00:38:38.600
not in a legislature, you're just a pundit. Manny, go ahead. Last word to you, my friend.
00:38:45.940
No, that's... Absolutely, absolutely. I think we have to be more pragmatic. I don't know how we
00:38:51.980
could get any worse. But when you have, you know, the NDP aligning with Trudeau, and they're both
00:38:58.780
trying to see who can spend the country's money faster and sooner, and not care about our
00:39:06.520
traditional values institutions. If there's a race there, can we at least throw something into
00:39:12.660
the spokes so we slow them down? Yeah. Manny Montenegrino, what a pleasure to catch up with
00:39:18.060
you. Happy Canada Day-long weekend. Look forward to talking to you again soon, my friend.
00:39:22.840
Thank you very much, Ezra. Take care. Right on, you too. Well, there you have it. That's our show
00:39:27.200
for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, to you at home,