Juno News - March 23, 2022


Are massive tax hikes coming？ (Ft. Pierre Poilievre)


Episode Stats

Length

16 minutes

Words per Minute

170.1731

Word Count

2,769

Sentence Count

138

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Did Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh form their coalition pact to avoid fiscal collapse?
00:00:05.160 Does it mean that huge tax increases are coming? MP Pierre Polyev is here to discuss. I'm
00:00:10.600 Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast.
00:00:25.780 My guest today is Conservative MP Pierre Polyev. Pierre has served as an MP in the Ottawa
00:00:31.120 base riding of Carleton since 2004 and is one of the candidates running to be the next leader of
00:00:35.200 the Conservative Party of Canada. So each of the candidates has joined my True North colleague
00:00:39.400 Andrew Lawton on his show in the last few weeks including Pierre and I really encourage you to go
00:00:43.820 and check out all of those interviews here on our channel. Now today I want to discuss something a
00:00:48.540 little different. I want to talk about the latest coalition pact, whatever you want to call it,
00:00:53.160 between the Liberals and the NDP and what it will mean in Parliament. So Pierre thank you so much
00:00:58.000 for joining us today. Great to be with you Candice. So let's talk about the biggest news in Canadian
00:01:03.580 politics right now. Let me hear your opinion on this formal governing agreement between the Liberals
00:01:08.800 and the NDP until 2025. Nobody voted for it. People who voted NDP thought they were advancing an
00:01:15.960 independent opposition party. People who voted Liberal didn't realize that they were going to get NDP
00:01:21.960 far left extreme radical policies. So there will be a lot of betrayed voters for both of those parties.
00:01:30.420 And what does it mean for the country? I think it means that the government will double down on
00:01:37.220 massive deficits, money printing, and as a consequence, very high inflation. As you know, the cost of government
00:01:45.700 is driving up the cost of living. More dollars chasing fewer goods always leads to higher prices. That's why we have
00:01:52.000 30-year highs in inflation and all-time highs in housing inflation. House prices have doubled in just six or seven
00:01:58.320 years. That's what I call just inflation. There'll be more of that. But we're going to fight back as
00:02:06.080 leader. I'm going to mobilize the Canadian people to pressure more reasonable Liberal MPs and more
00:02:13.360 working class oriented NDP MPs to turn against their this backroom deal and ultimately pull apart
00:02:21.200 the coalition, bring down the government in a confidence vote, and win the following election.
00:02:28.000 Well, that sounds like quite the plan. And I think there'd be many conservatives that would be excited
00:02:32.720 about that. I want to ask you specifically, Pierre. So 18 months ago, I had you on the show. It's September
00:02:38.400 2020. And we talked about the finances of the country at that time. Now, you must have a crystal ball
00:02:43.600 somewhere because you predicted that Justin Trudeau would trigger an election and that he desperately needed
00:02:48.240 a majority government. And you said that was for two reasons. One, because his spending was
00:02:53.120 mathematically impossible to maintain and that in order to maintain it, he would need to have some
00:02:57.280 kind of a massive tax increase. And second of all, because the ethics commissioner was going to expose
00:03:02.640 some ugly truths about his government. And so I'm wondering, you know, he did trigger that election.
00:03:07.760 He thought he was going to win. He didn't. But it seems like with the deal that he came up with on
00:03:12.560 Tuesday morning, he sort of managed to create a majority government out of nothing. So I want to
00:03:17.840 revisit those predictions that you made. Do you do you think that that part of the reason this
00:03:22.480 coalition is in place now is because of the possibility of tax increases? And what would
00:03:29.360 that look like? And then also, what is the update with the ethics commissioner? I know they were
00:03:33.440 investigating the we scandal. Where are we with that? Okay, let's start with the economy. We now have
00:03:41.920 about $3.50 of debt for every dollar of GDP in Canada, that number fluctuates between $3.50 and $4.
00:03:49.760 That's near record highs. That means for every one percentage point increase in interest rates across
00:03:56.960 the economy that we have to pay 3.5% of our economy in interest rates, in interest payments. So just to
00:04:08.320 give you a very practical example of what that means. So the average typical home, according to the
00:04:14.240 Canadian Real Estate Association, costs $868,000. There are about a fifth of households have only 1%
00:04:22.000 down for purchases in the last two years, and about half are variable. So if you've got a variable rate
00:04:31.040 mortgage with 1% down, and you have about an $850,000 mortgage, if rates go up by just 1%, your
00:04:38.080 annual mortgage payments are $8,500 higher, $8,500 more in annual recurring mortgage payments. Many
00:04:50.720 families would clearly go bankrupt, given that there are about a half of Canadians only have $200 left in
00:04:56.240 the bank account at the end of each month. So I think you could have a serious household finance
00:05:03.040 crisis. On top of that, that same percentage point increase in interest rates adds $12 billion in
00:05:10.000 annual costs to the federal government. So that means that the last thing Trudeau wants is for this
00:05:17.920 financial reality to come to the surface, you know, and then have the opposition vote him down and hold
00:05:25.360 him accountable for having caused it. So this could give him, you know, two or three years while
00:05:30.640 Canadians are suffering under the hell of higher rates and inflation to avoid democratic accountability.
00:05:37.600 And as you said, if he runs out of money with the help of the NDP, he might be able to get through a
00:05:42.880 very unpopular tax increase that he would not have been able to pass in a normal minority parliament.
00:05:50.000 So we don't know for sure exactly what they're going to do. It is possible that he would save tax
00:05:54.720 increases for an eventual, in his eyes, future majority. But it is possible that Jagmeet is
00:06:02.880 going to back him up and get that passed. And, you know, Candace, one of the worst things about
00:06:09.600 these coalition governments is that the more unpopular they are often the longer they last
00:06:14.880 because the coalition participants don't want to face the music with the voters. So they bind together
00:06:20.320 and hold themselves in office. And that's why we need to have a strategy to pull it apart one MP at
00:06:26.160 a time on the ethics front. I mean, I think that the bigger issue is where is the RCMP and not so much
00:06:33.360 the ethics commissioner, but, but where is the RCMP on the we scandal? And on the SNC-Lavalin scandal,
00:06:42.080 Mounties said they were looking into both. And we haven't heard anything back. So we hope that
00:06:48.240 that hasn't just gone into the law enforcement black hole again, and that there is some legal
00:06:53.360 accountability for what happened in both of those cases. We know in both scandals,
00:06:58.080 laws were broken because the ethics commissioner found Morneau guilty and found Trudeau guilty for
00:07:06.080 the SNC scandal. Now it's time for the RCMP to come clean on whether or not criminal code
00:07:12.320 violations occurred as well. Well, it seems like Justin Trudeau always has a way to avoid
00:07:17.680 accountability. And I think that's one of the loudest complaints that I hear from True North
00:07:21.520 viewers. I want to ask you about the priorities that the NDP and the Liberals have presented because
00:07:27.360 maybe they sound good on paper, the idea of universal pharmacare, universal dental care. When
00:07:31.760 I hear about that, it strikes me as so painstakingly out of touch, given the financial situation in this
00:07:37.600 country, given the performance of our health care system over the past two years, it seems to me that
00:07:42.640 we need serious change on this front, not just adding in more goodies, more entitlements to a
00:07:48.960 broken system, essentially. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.
00:07:52.640 Well, the pharmacare idea sounds terrific until you scratch the surface. A lot of people will be far
00:07:58.880 worse off in drug coverage if this plan goes ahead. Remember, 91% of Canadians have some kind of
00:08:04.320 coverage, most of it through private sector employer based plans. The very poor usually have
00:08:10.240 coverage through their provincial social services. And many people purchase their own private
00:08:17.600 insurance for supplementary drug plans already. Finally, then there are also the small minority of
00:08:23.600 very wealthy people who just pay out of pocket. So the number of people who don't have some coverage
00:08:29.920 and can't afford to pay for their medicine is well below 10%. And the answer would be to give
00:08:37.920 them some targeted assistance with their needs rather than creating a national governmental program
00:08:43.760 that would ultimately incentivize employers to dump their private plans. And this is where it's going to
00:08:48.640 become extremely unpopular, especially with unionized blue collar workers. If their employers say,
00:08:55.920 well, we're paying for a government plan through taxes, so we're not going to provide you with the workplace
00:09:03.120 plan, then these workers could end up stuck with an inferior government plan that has a smaller formulary
00:09:10.800 and higher deductibles and much less responsive. And you could find the NDP and Liberals face a massive
00:09:18.480 backlash from their own voters, not just because it costs $20 billion to institute this new
00:09:25.840 national bureaucracy, but because people actually get worse drug coverage. And so I'm in favor of
00:09:33.120 keeping our market-based system with possibly some incentives to cover the very small minority of
00:09:39.040 people who don't have coverage now. That is far superior. You remember when Kathleen Wynne brought in
00:09:45.600 this program provincially for people under the age of 26? You know how she paid for it? She actually cut
00:09:51.920 the drugs that were covered for children's cancers at the children's hospitals. So we had doctors at the
00:09:59.760 Ottawa Hospital here for children having to call drug companies and ask for donations of drugs to save the
00:10:07.600 lives of kids who were literally on their deathbed. Because Gwynne actually cut off these kids from cancer drugs so that she
00:10:15.200 could pay for a governmental program to help 22 year olds get acne medications over at their local drug
00:10:23.360 stores. So again, they sound wonderful when they're when they're announced. But in practice, they can not
00:10:29.840 only be extremely expensive, but very detrimental to the health and the coverage of Canadians.
00:10:36.480 Oh, that's truly awful. I'm so sorry to hear that. I had a question about the the trucker convoy,
00:10:42.560 because it seems to me that what we experienced this year in this country was essentially a huge
00:10:47.760 working class uprising and backlash against the governing elites. And it seems that the NDP was
00:10:53.680 once the party that represented those sorts of people. Well, no longer. I mean, first we saw
00:10:58.560 Justin Trudeau refuse to meet with them, call them every name in the book. Jagmeet Singh essentially
00:11:02.080 kind of went along with that. And now here we have the NDP essentially just joining the liberals,
00:11:06.640 turning their back completely on those people. What does that mean to hardworking people in this
00:11:13.200 country that that don't feel that they have representation in the NDP left wing socialist
00:11:19.520 party anymore? Well, they're coming to vote for me. That's why I'm attracting massive crowds.
00:11:25.120 You know, I've had rallies with over 1000 people. And it's mostly working class folks. I was traveling
00:11:30.880 through Quebec. I had 250 people in Laval, a place where we typically finished third or fourth,
00:11:36.720 huge crowds in Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, Montreal, all populated with working class people,
00:11:42.960 many of whom tell me they never even voted in their lives. But there, as you say, there is a working
00:11:48.400 class uprising in this country, people who've been cast aside, they've been told to shut up and do what
00:11:56.960 they're told and let the powerful elites in Ottawa run their lives for them. And they're saying no,
00:12:04.000 they've had it. These are the people who do the nation's work. They build our roads,
00:12:08.640 they deliver our goods, they feed our families, they build our structures, our homes, our office
00:12:15.360 buildings, and they get very little credit. And they've been under attack for years now. The entire
00:12:21.680 monetary system is designed right now to destroy their wage, the purchasing power of their wages,
00:12:26.720 while inflating the asset values of the billionaire class. Now the Liberals and NDP want to stand with
00:12:32.640 the billionaire class and the managerial elite against these working people. Well, I've got news
00:12:38.320 for them. These people deserve a strong voice, and I am that voice, and they will be part of a future
00:12:45.360 Conservative government that stands on their sides, puts them back in control of their lives by making
00:12:50.320 Canada the freest nation on earth.
00:12:51.900 So how do you dismantle that system, Pierre? I mean, I've heard you talk about how 40, 50 years ago,
00:12:57.900 a working class person could afford to buy a house, whereas today their children, grandchildren who are
00:13:02.620 Canadian college educated cannot afford to buy that same sort of house. How do you how do you turn that
00:13:07.980 around? How do you get things back to the way that they were back when a single income family could
00:13:13.980 afford to buy a home in the suburbs or in the cities in Canada?
00:13:17.340 Well, we have to bring back hard money. You know, the reason that what has happened here is like I told
00:13:22.940 the story of many of your viewers might not have seen it, but of an Italian family that came to
00:13:29.260 Ottawa in 1974. And on from the wages of the father who worked paving roads and the mother who was making
00:13:38.220 sandwiches at seniors homes, they were able to buy a handsome bungalow in downtown Ottawa for about 40
00:13:45.900 or $50,000, something like that. And they paid it off in seven years, you know, they grow their own
00:13:51.180 food in the backyard and, and never went to restaurants paid it off seven years, right? Their grandkids now,
00:13:57.180 all these years later, would not be able to afford that house, even though their grandkids are going
00:14:05.260 to be university educated, and supposedly living in a country that has had a half century to advance
00:14:11.980 and grow, we should be able to afford better houses 50 years on than we did back then. And yet,
00:14:19.900 there is no way that that house, which is well over a million dollars now, could ever be owned by someone
00:14:25.420 just coming out of university with a degree in liberal arts or even in business or engineering.
00:14:32.060 So what is happening is, in the early 70s, government started printing massive quantities of
00:14:37.660 cash in order to fund their spending that led to inflation, especially asset price inflation. And so
00:14:43.180 the cost of things like houses has outgrown the wages of the working people. So I'm going to reinstate
00:14:50.860 hard money, give the Bank of Canada, again, the singular purpose of keeping inflation low and very
00:14:56.380 low. And I'll be very specific about that. But also, we need to, instead of creating cash, we need to
00:15:01.660 start creating more of what cash buys, we need to incentivize our municipalities to spill the speed up
00:15:06.540 building permits. Right now, it takes seven to 10 years from the time you buy the land to the time you
00:15:10.940 build on it, we have the lowest per capita number of houses of any country in the G7, even though we have the
00:15:16.460 most land. And so I'm going to be taking a very strong stand to require incompetent big city mayors
00:15:27.260 to get out of the way and speed up build building permits, allow for more land for housing, so that
00:15:33.500 we can build millions of affordable homes for our young people. So that the dream that that Italian
00:15:39.740 family, I mentioned, who came here almost a half century ago, can can can can live on for their
00:15:45.740 grandkids. Well, that sounds like a plan, a wonderful plan. And I think that what's very
00:15:51.740 clear, Pierre, is that we just need change from the Trudeau government, that the spending the out of
00:15:57.180 control, big growth of government system, and it seems like that, you know, there's lots and lots of
00:16:03.100 ideas over on the conservative side. So appreciate your time this morning, Pierre, thanks for joining the
00:16:06.940 program. Excellent. Great to be with you. All the very best you and your family. Thank you so much.
00:16:11.980 That's Pierre Polyev, MP for Carleton. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.