Pierre Poilievre says his freedom fight includes truckers
Episode Stats
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Summary
In the latest episode of Full Comet, host Anthony Fury sits down with Conservative MP for the riding of Carlton, Pierre Poirier, who has declared his candidacy to become the next Prime Minister of Canada. In this episode, they discuss the reasons behind his decision to run for Prime Minister, why he's running, and what he wants to change about Canadian politics.
Transcript
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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners,
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Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.
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Thank you for joining us for the latest episode of Full Comet.
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It has been a tumultuous time in Canadian news, politics, and COVID-19 developments,
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And one of the political fallouts from all of this is that a Conservative leadership race has begun
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after the Conservative caucus voted former leader Erin O'Toole out.
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The first person to declare their candidacy is Conservative MP
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In your video there where you announced your candidacy, you actually said, I'm running for
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Tell me, why do you want to be Conservative leader now?
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I want to be Conservative leader so that I can be Prime Minister, and I want to be Prime Minister
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so that I can give people back control of their lives by making Canada the freest place on Earth.
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And have we lost control of our lives recently?
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It's the vast majority of Canadians under 30 can't afford a house because socialist local
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politicians block construction to limit supply, and socialist federal politicians are printing
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money like crazy to inflate demand, so prices have ballooned for something the average Canadian
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So in the country with among the biggest landmass on Earth, people don't have the freedom to
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Immigrants are blocked by bureaucratic gatekeepers from working in the very professions for which
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they were trained, are qualified, and are needed.
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First Nations face governmental obstacles to developing their own resources.
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Folks on disability who want to get a job and earn their way out of poverty lose 80 cents
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on the dollar to clawbacks and taxes, keeping them permanently trapped below the poverty line.
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Small businesses drowned in restrictions and red tape.
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And I haven't even gotten to all of the government overreach from COVID, where the businesses have
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been perpetually shut down, people's bodily autonomy has been violated.
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And, of course, the government has taken advantage of all of that to try and censor the Internet.
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So in countless ways, government is taking control of people's lives away from them and putting it in the
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I want to unleash free enterprise so small businesses can start up and spend more time
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I want to reduce taxes so people keep more of their paychecks.
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I intend to incentivize provinces to speed up recognition of the immigrant credentials
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so newcomers work in the professions for which they are trained,
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give First Nations control over their own land so they can welcome resource development
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and harvest their own land to escape from poverty.
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I'm going to make government smaller to make citizens bigger and make Canada the freest country on earth.
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I want to pick up on a number of those structural moments, more sort of long-term issues coming up in a few minutes.
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But first, I want to talk about the COVID situation we're at right now in Canada,
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talking about overbearing, overreaching COVID rules.
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A lot of people taking to the streets, some of them in protests, others with their trucks,
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Let people exercise free choice moving forward.
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Do we now, at this point, at the beginning of February, do we need to end COVID rules?
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Look, there's some room from small, common sense guidelines to keep people safe.
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But, you know, for example, I don't have a problem having a small piece of cloth on my face
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when I'm in a small, enclosed area with a very large number of people.
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But beyond that, I think we should just leave it to people's common sense to behave responsibly.
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You know, I don't think we should force people to be vaccinated.
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I don't think we should limit how businesses operate.
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I think we can allow people to go back into coffee shops and restaurants,
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trust them to wash their hands and avoid any excessively risky behavior
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rather than a bossy Leviathan state that goes around telling everybody what they can and can't do.
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What do you make of the truckers' convoy that first made its way to Ottawa, well, two weeks ago now?
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People who had earnest grievances about what's going on.
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I know they've been complaining about the situation for some time.
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The truckers' convoy began as a very particular grievance against the vaccine mandate for truckers,
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and it's expanded to be more a symbol, I think, of people of all walks of life
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who have various different frustrations with different elements of the COVID rules.
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It's certainly taken the city of Ottawa by, I don't know if surprise is the right term,
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but people use a lot of terms like under siege and occupation.
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I mean, how should we think about this situation right now?
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All these people speaking up very firmly, unapologetically, saying,
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look, we're not going away, we're not going to stop protesting until these overbearing rules go away.
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I'm proud of the truckers, and I stand with them.
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And they have reached a breaking point after two years of massive government overreach
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of a prime minister who insults and degrades anyone who disagrees with his heavy-handed approach.
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Canadians have finally had it, and they're speaking up.
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If Canadians are being inconvenienced or are in any way suffering from these protests,
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it is because Justin Trudeau made these protests happen,
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and his intransigence is keeping the protests going.
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One of the things that's remarkable is that the vaccine mandate for truckers only came about in January 2022.
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It's not something that was brought in right when vaccines were made available,
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back when I think there was more unified opinion that,
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OK, COVID's a really serious issue here, we've got to bring all these rules in.
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It was almost brought in right when other jurisdictions were getting rid of the rules,
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No. I mean, there's no science backing this up.
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Even when Teresa Tam, the chief medical officer of the Trudeau government, was asked,
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give us the evidence that mandating vaccines on individuals who spend 22 hours a day all by themselves in a truck
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And in fact, she didn't even really endorse the mandate at all.
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So it sounded, it looked to me like Trudeau imposed this trucker mandate as a vindictive wedge strategy
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to divide Canadians and demonize an apparently unpopular minority of unvaccinated people
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But now it's blown up in his face from a political point of view.
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He is backed into a corner where he's defending an utterly irrational and unscientific decision
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only because he doesn't want to be seen backing down to the protests that he provoked in the first place.
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So he has gotten himself into an impossible political situation.
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And unfortunately, the rest of the country is held hostage by his unwillingness to do the right thing,
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What would you do differently if you were in this position right now, if you were in Trudeau's position?
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And I know there are a number of observers saying, well, that sets a precedent because that says that
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anybody who comes to the nation's capital, anyone who comes to Ottawa, they just need to set up a blockade,
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bring their vehicles or whatever they're doing, and they're going to get what they want.
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So they're concerned that this creates some sort of a moral hazard to encourage this subsequent behavior.
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What do you say in response to the people saying that?
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Well, are those people really saying we should keep in place an unscientific and nonsensical mandate
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If we really want to get, why don't we do the right thing and at the same time put an end to the protests?
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Now, I've heard a lot of people say the Conservative Party, it's the party of law and order that usually
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doesn't have too much tolerance for this sort of stuff because I guess there are a number of rules
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that are being broken right now by this convoy situation in Ottawa.
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Well, I've always said I believe that you can fight for your own freedom, but your freedom stops where mine begins.
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And so I encourage the truckers to follow the law, behave responsibly, don't inhibit the freedom movement of other people.
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But at the same time, the vast majority of truckers and their supporters have been peaceful, law-abiding, joyful, decent, patriotic people,
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despite the dishonest propaganda of the liberal press gallery on Parliament Hill.
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So you think the press gallery plays a big role in it?
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I know he did his tweet where he accused the protesters of being Islamophobic and transphobic and six or seven other accusations in there.
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But you would add the press gallery and the broader media landscape into the mix?
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Yeah, because I've, listen, yesterday, they say, so the entire city is shut down.
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It took me an extra minute and a half to get to work from the suburbs of Ottawa.
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You know, there are, the vast majority of the protesters are just peaceful, law-abiding.
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They're walking around with Canadian flags draped over their sole shoulders.
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And none of that is reflected in the torqued media coverage that the press gallery has put forward.
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And I think they obviously have an agenda, which is to demonize, once again, the same way they demonized people who didn't get vaccinated.
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Now they're demonizing anybody who protests the mandates.
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And, you know, the good news is that I think the press gallery is just losing earlobes and eyeballs.
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People are looking for other forms of information because they're recognizing that what they're seeing from the mainstream media is mostly garbage.
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Which I was, yesterday, I stopped on my way home to get some food at the local shawarma shop.
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He said, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
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And I thought they were kind, generous, lawful, and peaceful people.
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And it was nothing like what I saw in the media.
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And I think increasingly Canadians are seeing the difference between what the media tells them and what's actually true.
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And that is allowing, I think that will allow other media voices to garner more audience.
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Now we have seen this, I guess, quantified a little bit in various surveys and studies out there.
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There's something called the Edelman Trust Barometer that they do every year.
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There's another organization that recently put out a survey looking at trust in our institutions and finding that it has really dropped quite a lot from 2020 to 2022 now.
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Now, just, you know, double-digit drops in terms of trust for politicians in general, for government, for public health officials.
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It seems like we have a problem right now with, I don't know if the term legitimacy of our institutions is the right way to frame it.
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Well, I think the elites have misled Canadians.
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And as a result, Canadians are questioning the honesty of what they're hearing from the elites.
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And the elites can get angry and say that they are entitled to be trusted.
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But nobody's entitled to force someone else to trust them.
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And when the media reports dishonestly about events, when they act as basically a large part of the liberal press gallery on Parliament Hill is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the PMO.
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And when everyday people see the difference between the real facts and what's reported, it is understandable that they're going to turn their trust to other voices.
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Give me a specific example, because I got to stand up a bit for my colleagues here.
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I was very briefly in the Parliamentary Press Gallery a number of years ago.
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I haven't lived in Ottawa for quite some time here.
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There's no doubt that there's pack journalism, that there's kind of narratives that people are very nervous to deviate from.
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There's a lot of sort of follower stuff going on instead of leading in terms of covering a story in a different way.
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But what do you mean when you say they're mouthpieces for the PMO?
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So just the other day, John Baird, who's supporting my campaign for prime minister, went on Global News.
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And Mercedes Stevenson said that I was misleading Canadians by saying that Trudeau's government had raised taxes.
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Baird pointed out that, in fact, payroll taxes went up on January 1st.
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And she said, oh, yes, well, that was a scheduled increase.
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I never said that Trudeau's tax increases were unscheduled.
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But she tried to slip in that falsehood to discredit me.
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Another example is CBC suggested that the truckers were instigated by Russian actors.
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I mean, if she has evidence of that, she should say so.
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But for her to just lob that out there on national television with no proof is, one, an example of state media attacking its own citizens.
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And two, makes the CBC look like it's spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.
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What does this mean, then, for the fabric of our democracy, all the things that you have said?
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Because there's going to be, obviously, great disagreement among some people about what you've just said here.
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But what does it mean when you can have – and I see this.
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I see this in my own life in terms of just the people I know, neighbors and friends.
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That depending on where you get your news from, you're increasingly seeing the world in completely different ways right now.
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And I think that is almost exacerbating some of the frictions and tensions out there.
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And it would be nice if the press gallery had some balance and then everybody could tune into it.
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But what they seem to want is a world where we all are obliged to read their reporting, even though it's completely one-sided and liberal.
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You know, there was a time when, you know, many, many years ago when Canadians could open a newspaper, read a news story, and have no idea what the politics of the author were.
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That time, definitely when it comes to the press gallery on Parliament Hill, that time is now gone.
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And now it could come back, and maybe some of the liberal journalists and their publications will come to the view that they need to be more objective in order to regain the lost confidence of Canadians.
00:17:30.420
So you're not just saying this as someone who's a media critic and observer of the media scene.
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And you're saying this as someone who's just announced you're running to be the next prime minister, to be the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:17:40.160
One of the ways that I guess you would go about being successful in that is talking to Canadians through some of these media outlets.
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There's many other ways, of course, now to talk to individuals.
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And I think everyone in the media landscape is well aware that more and more people are getting their information from alternative media, that CBC ratings are declining every year.
00:17:56.680
But still, there are millions of people who do still almost exclusively access their news through those conduits.
00:18:02.540
So how do you navigate that, given what you've just said, that you feel you're likely not to get a fair shake through them?
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Check out my Twitter, my Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.
00:18:50.760
So we talk about Canadians being divided in terms of the media issues, which brings us, I think, to a bigger issue the nation faces now.
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Or at least a lot of people say the nation faces this issue.
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Justin Trudeau's playing it up in some ways, downplaying it in other ways.
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Pierre Pali, would you say that Canada is divided right now?
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Well, Canada has never been so divided as it is now six years into the Trudeau government.
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He has tried to divide Canadians on the basis of race and gender.
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We shouldn't be terribly surprised, given the prime minister's own ugly racist history,
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that he would be such a divisive figure in that way.
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He insults and name calls people who have legitimate questions about his COVID policies.
00:19:51.680
And we see families have been torn asunder by the resulting climate that he has created.
00:20:02.420
But that is unfortunate, but we can turn it around.
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We can restore our freedoms in this country, give people back control of their lives,
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send out the message that every Canadian is welcome in the Canadian family,
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and unleash individual opportunities so everybody feels like they have a stake in the future.
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That's how we turn the corner on this thing and reunite our country, which I will do as prime minister.
00:20:33.620
We'll be back in just a moment with more full comment after this.
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00:21:53.780
Pierre Pauly, have you said every Canadian is welcome?
00:21:56.520
That that is the issue, that is what needs to be said, sort of moving forward, dealing
00:22:02.620
Talking about your run for leader of Conservative Party of Canada.
00:22:08.460
What does that mean in the context of running for the leadership?
00:22:12.320
Because it's a big blue tent, and we often hear conversations about all these disparate
00:22:16.900
Economic conservative, social conservative, libertarian.
00:22:19.640
Definitely a lot of people with frustrations from Western regions, Western caucus members.
00:22:25.180
How do you look at the conservative big blue tent and all those perhaps disparate voices?
00:22:32.640
I look at the single principle that unites them all.
00:22:40.920
Social conservatives want the freedom to raise their families with biblical or other traditional
00:22:48.920
Some people of different faiths would like to raise their families with their traditional
00:22:55.480
values, whether they're Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or otherwise.
00:23:01.780
They want the freedom to teach their kids their own values, to espouse their faith in their
00:23:08.880
own fora, and to be free from government interfering with any of that.
00:23:20.300
I stood up for the freedom of social conservative charities that Prime Minister Trudeau attacked
00:23:25.360
when they wouldn't support his view on abortion, and that he tried to take away their summer
00:23:31.980
I oppose that because I believe people should have the freedom to believe what they want.
00:23:36.480
And fiscal conservatives want economic freedom, the freedom to work hard, share the fruits
00:23:43.400
of your labor with your family and your neighbors, rather than having it confiscated by the government,
00:23:48.300
to start a business which focuses on paying wages and serving customers rather than filling
00:23:55.400
They want the freedom for First Nations to harvest their own resources, the freedom for immigrants
00:24:01.000
to work in the professions for which they are qualified and needed, rather than being blocked
00:24:10.720
Red Tories want to see the freedom for gays and lesbians and women to live their own lives
00:24:18.380
and make their own personal decisions without any government interference.
00:24:23.000
And Quebec nationalists, frankly, want the freedom to make their own decisions in their own
00:24:33.420
jurisdiction without interference from an overbearing federal government in Ottawa.
00:24:39.000
So the single unifying principle that pulls all conservatives together, regardless of which
00:24:46.000
part of the coalition they come from, is freedom.
00:24:49.640
And I just want to clarify, when you said Quebec nationalist, you're not meaning the same
00:24:56.000
You're saying that there's room for Quebec nationalists in your party, and you encourage
00:25:02.460
I mean, separatist is a different word than nationalist.
00:25:06.380
Separatists want to create their own separate country.
00:25:13.920
I believe in one Canada, which includes Quebec.
00:25:16.400
But people who have an affinity to the Quebec nation, which is recognized by Canada's parliament,
00:25:25.980
As Prime Minister Harper put it, in a motion which I voted for, Quebec is a nation within
00:25:34.480
And we believe in a small federal government within a decentralized federation where provinces,
00:25:43.860
including Quebec, have the autonomy to make more decisions within their jurisdiction.
00:25:49.160
Now, you've basically just said, OK, everybody welcome in the big blue tent.
00:25:53.220
Although I've heard a lot of complaints from various people in Conservative Party grassroots
00:25:57.200
and federal conservative, different provincial parties who say, you know what?
00:26:00.560
A person talks a big game during a leadership race, and then when they become the leader,
00:26:05.420
when they're running in the general election, we find things look a little different.
00:26:08.120
And there were complaints about Aaron O'Toole in that regard.
00:26:10.660
He said quite firmly that he was against cancel culture when he was running for leader last
00:26:16.140
Then we saw a little bit of canceling going on.
00:26:18.340
A couple of candidates pulled from their writings.
00:26:20.940
People felt like there was a bit of a bait and switch in terms of that approach.
00:26:25.140
Is everything that you're going to be saying as leader, is that something that people can
00:26:31.240
Or, you know, what do you say to people who go, Pierre, are you going to walk this stuff
00:26:37.100
Well, I'm running on things that I can stay true to before and after the leadership race.
00:26:44.940
So what you're seeing now is what you're going to see after I become leader and after I become
00:26:52.020
A couple more questions about the big tent idea.
00:26:55.480
I've heard some people already say that while they feel you were already coming out of the
00:26:59.420
gate very strong, I've heard the phrase coronation being bandied about.
00:27:02.760
There is still the idea that perhaps you're a conservative conservative and some people
00:27:06.980
would like to see a progressive conservative enter the fray.
00:27:10.100
Someone such as Peter McKay or I saw my post-media columnist colleague Tasha Carradine said
00:27:15.160
that she was kicking the tires considering a bid.
00:27:18.520
What do you make of that dichotomy, the split between a progressive conservative and
00:27:27.940
I believe in maximizing the freedom of the Canadian people, putting them back in control
00:27:36.340
of their own lives, making them the authors of their own stories.
00:27:43.620
And I believe every wing of the party can rally around that unifying principle.
00:27:49.780
There's one label, though, that we got to accept because it's a legitimate label.
00:28:00.120
The PPC, Maxime Bernier's party, 850,000 votes.
00:28:04.300
Like I said, 5% of the vote, double what the Green Party got.
00:28:07.680
As you know, Maxime Bernier almost became conservative leader up against Andrew Scheer.
00:28:19.220
I'm not going to talk about left and right because I don't think it's actually a good
00:28:28.180
The electorate is multidimensional and it isn't on a linear spectrum, despite what we
00:28:38.880
There are a lot of People's Party supporters who stood up and spoke up because of legitimate
00:28:47.220
frustrations that they've experienced, particularly since the government's overreach during the
00:28:53.640
And I approach these people with total humility to listen to their concerns.
00:29:05.520
They are decent, honorable people who want control of their own lives.
00:29:10.600
What they will get from Pierre Polyev as a prime minister who will make them, once again, masters
00:29:17.600
of their own fate and authors of their own story.
00:29:22.080
There's going to be a lot of people listening in who like a lot of the things you've said,
00:29:26.580
a lot of people listening in who don't necessarily agree with everything you've said.
00:29:31.920
And I don't just mean, obviously, in the leadership race, people swing between different candidates,
00:29:35.620
but in the general election as well, should you, when the leadership, go on to be prime
00:29:39.820
What is your message to all those individuals out there?
00:29:43.480
Well, look, I just think that we have to, I don't think that a lot of the, the political
00:29:52.900
class appreciate the way that the working class people have been flattened in this country
00:30:02.400
You know, like I went to a trailer park that's about five minutes from my house when I was
00:30:08.660
I met a young couple, they work at a quarry and they make a hundred grand between them
00:30:14.720
and they have calculated that they will never be able to leave the trailer and own their
00:30:20.480
own home because it now costs seven, $800,000 to buy a property.
00:30:29.180
That is astonishing in a country like Canada, which has the 10th biggest landmass per capita
00:30:35.500
in the world, second biggest raw landmass on earth.
00:30:39.620
We have more land than where there's no one than we do where there's anyone.
00:30:43.620
And yet we have 33, 34 year old people with decent jobs who've done exactly what they, we
00:30:50.480
told them they should do, who now are, are faced the prospect of being permanent tenants to
00:30:57.900
corporate and multi-millionaire landlords with no hope of ever escaping and building their
00:31:07.960
This is going to be the single biggest contributor to inequality and class divisions in this country.
00:31:16.720
And the way we do it is we undo that problem is to unleash the private sector to build more
00:31:24.160
housing, get the government side of the way and let builders build and stop creating all
00:31:32.640
In other words, we need to start building houses and stop printing money.
00:31:37.800
And that's one of going to be one of the key freedoms that I will champion throughout the
00:31:43.840
Lots of tensions out there, lots of headaches, frustrations, bad headlines about, to your
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But are you ultimately optimistic that things can be turned around?
00:31:57.140
This country was founded on our ancient liberties that go back hundreds of years.
00:32:03.720
We've had governments, we've had terrible governments in years gone by, most notably the
00:32:09.580
And yet we turned it around and we replaced those governments and undid their policies, unleashed
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free enterprise so Canadians could, workers could earn more, businesses could hire more
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We created a country where three or four hundred thousand people a year want to come as a beacon
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All of this is possible again with a new government and a prime minister determined to put Canadians
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back in charge of their own lives and to make the country the freest on earth.
00:32:50.320
Pierre Polyev, it's been an interesting conversation.
00:33:01.600
This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, with theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:33:08.060
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00:33:15.900
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