Juno News - March 07, 2023


Pierre Poilievre on Chinese interference, affordable housing and inflation

Topics
China interference and Liberal Party accountability
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Andrew Lawton Show Christine Anderson Maxime Bernier Pierre Poilievre
What does Trudeau know about Beijing’s interference？ (ft. Pierre Poilievre) Alberta says no to Justin Trudeau's gun grab

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

177.23

Word count

2,084

Sentence count

135

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Andrew Lawton Show, I sit down with the candidate for the Green Party of Canada, Pierre Poutine, to talk about his vision for the future of the country and what he would do if elected Prime Minister.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:08.120 Good to see you in London this time.
00:00:10.060 Great to be here.
00:00:11.280 Your campaign has often talked about the idea of everything being broken.
00:00:16.600 And I know this has become a point of contention with the Liberals who are in denial about this point.
00:00:21.040 But fundamentally, we're seeing a breakdown of many sectors, many institutions, of trust in institutions.
00:00:28.040 How much can government, a Pierre Polyev government, fix that?
00:00:32.720 Well, government is the thing that's breaking it in the first place.
00:00:36.720 You know, the old saying, government is not the solution.
00:00:38.840 Government is the problem.
00:00:40.180 It is eight years of Trudeau that has given us 40-year highs in inflation.
00:00:43.980 Why do we have that?
00:00:45.180 Well, because they printed a half trillion dollars.
00:00:47.560 More money chasing fewer goods always equals higher prices.
00:00:50.280 This is a mathematical relationship that goes back thousands of years.
00:00:53.780 It was utterly predictable.
00:00:55.400 I predicted it because it was obvious.
00:00:58.040 And that's why seniors can't afford food, moms can't feed their kids, and nine out of ten young people who don't own a home believe they never will.
00:01:07.460 All that easy cash bid up the cost of housing and everything else.
00:01:10.760 So we need to reverse those inflationary policies, cap spending, fire the high-priced consultants, defund the CBC, cut the waste so that we can get rid of the inflationary deficits that are driving up inflation in the first place.
00:01:23.080 We should also get rid of the carbon tax to bring down fuel, heat, and grocery prices.
00:01:30.880 And then instead of creating all this cash, we've got to start creating more of what cash buys.
00:01:34.080 We need to build more homes and get the government gatekeepers out of the way.
00:01:37.860 I'm going to get a lot tougher, frankly, with incompetent left-wing big city mayors who block housing construction and therefore shut working-class immigrants and youth out of housing.
00:01:48.540 Very good for the privileged elites living in leafy neighborhoods, the woke wonderland where they sit around reading the New Yorker magazine in their overpriced house, but not great for the working-class kid who can't afford a home.
00:02:01.560 So I'm going to tie federal infrastructure money to the number of houses that big cities allow to be completed, and I'm going to require that there be high-density housing around every federally-funded transit station.
00:02:11.120 I'm going to sell off 15% of federal buildings, turn that into housing, so that people can actually get into a house.
00:02:16.840 I actually believe the single biggest cause of social breakdown right now is the fact that young people can't afford homes, because it totally screws up their entire psychology.
00:02:26.880 They lose a sense of self-agency if they can't own a place of their own.
00:02:31.060 They can't start a family.
00:02:32.420 They can't have kids.
00:02:33.380 They can't even date.
00:02:34.160 They can't build up credit history, collateral, or savings for the future.
00:02:39.160 So we need to knock down the barriers to housing construction, build millions of new homes, and then cut income taxes so people's paychecks can afford more mortgage payment and more house.
00:02:49.320 And that's what a poly of government's going to do. 0.86
00:02:51.780 Do you think there's a cultural problem of people wanting to live in the very cities that they can't afford to live in?
00:02:57.420 Do you think something is perhaps missing where people should be going to different parts of the country?
00:03:01.940 We should be putting government offices in more remote parts of the country, places where it is more affordable to live?
00:03:07.800 Well, look, I'm not against any of that.
00:03:09.640 I think rural living is great.
00:03:11.100 It's fantastic.
00:03:12.060 And I think people who want it should have that chance.
00:03:15.100 But ironically, the federal government is attacking rural living as well.
00:03:19.080 Their carbon tax is particularly hard on rural folks because they have to heat more space and travel longer distances.
00:03:24.680 And electric cars and bicycles are not an option if you're living in Labrador or around peace country Alberta, for example.
00:03:34.400 So they're attacking the cost of living of the rural person, and now they're making cities unaffordable. 0.58
00:03:39.740 So I don't know where people are supposed to be expected to live.
00:03:42.360 The bottom line is we need to get rid of all these taxes and all the red tape that's driving up the cost of living because it should be easy and cheap to live in housing in Canada.
00:03:51.860 You know, eight years ago, the average house price was $450,000.
00:03:55.620 Now it's almost double that.
00:03:56.640 The average mortgage payment was $1,400.
00:03:58.820 Now it's $3,200.
00:04:00.240 The average rent was $950.
00:04:02.280 Now it's over $2,000.
00:04:03.460 They've doubled the cost of housing by printing cash and blocking construction, knock down the gatekeepers, build more houses, print less money.
00:04:11.280 You have existing homeowners that are being completely squeezed out of being able to afford their own mortgage payments.
00:04:17.500 People that will have to renew their mortgages in the next couple of years that have no idea what that interest rate is going to look like.
00:04:23.580 And obviously getting into the housing market is the greatest challenge.
00:04:26.700 But there are a lot of existing homeowners right now that in three, four years could be an incredibly precarious situation.
00:04:32.700 What's your prediction and what's your way out of that?
00:04:35.800 Well, you're absolutely right.
00:04:36.920 And we're already seeing it.
00:04:38.320 Just yesterday, CIBC said one in five of its mortgage holders are actually seeing their mortgage grow.
00:04:46.940 So normally you say, I'm paying down my mortgage.
00:04:49.800 Yeah, you get that statement and it shows you a little bit more every year.
00:04:52.520 But now people are paying their mortgages, but the overall principle is rising because interest rates on their variable rate mortgage have gone up.
00:05:02.700 And therefore their mortgages, so when they go to renew, their payments are going to explode.
00:05:06.740 I think the real cliff is coming in 2025 and 2026.
00:05:10.760 Why?
00:05:11.800 Because it was in 2020 and 2021 that people bought the massively overpriced houses with the huge mortgages.
00:05:19.100 And if they locked in for five years, well, they'll be up for renewal in 2025, 2026.
00:05:23.660 So I'm very, I mean, I will be prime minister at the time.
00:05:26.440 I'm going to have to deal with this major cliff that Trudeau and the Bank of Canada have sent our homeowners towards.
00:05:34.860 And I think the only way to deal with it is to try and get spending under control now so that we bring down inflation and interest rates before those people have to renew.
00:05:43.920 Despite the vote across party lines largely in favor of an inquiry into China's interference in Canada's elections,
00:05:51.420 Justin Trudeau has come out and basically written off the idea of having an inquiry.
00:05:55.960 Now, I don't want to put too much stock in an inquiry as being the best venue for accountability,
00:06:01.200 but simply put, what do you think is the best way to get to the bottom of this?
00:06:05.860 Well, multiple ways.
00:06:06.680 We do need a public inquiry that can requisition documents, force testimony under oath.
00:06:14.760 But we also need Parliament to continue its examination because what I don't want to see is for the Liberals to create an inquiry that shuts down the debate,
00:06:24.280 doesn't start for four months, is largely done in secret, and doesn't report until after the next federal election,
00:06:30.420 which could face interference again.
00:06:32.000 So we need simultaneously to do our investigation in the Parliamentary Committee.
00:06:38.300 We need to know what Justin Trudeau and his top staff knew.
00:06:41.680 There's reports that CSIS was briefing them about the way in which Beijing was supporting Justin Trudeau
00:06:48.140 and giving money to his foundation over the course of a decade.
00:06:51.620 We need confirmation that he knew that, and we also need to know what he was aware of
00:06:56.240 and what the Liberal Party was aware of in the two elections where Beijing interfered.
00:07:00.040 The media reports we've seen about CSIS's findings show that in the 2019 election,
00:07:04.640 there were 11 candidates that were the beneficiaries of Beijing's attempts at influence,
00:07:09.700 and two of those were Conservatives.
00:07:11.180 Nine of them were Liberal.
00:07:12.660 Do you think those candidates should be publicly named?
00:07:15.960 Yes, I do.
00:07:16.720 Now, I'll be fair to them, even though they're mostly Liberals and not in my party.
00:07:22.680 If they did not know, and there was somebody inserted in their campaign without their knowledge,
00:07:28.440 that's one thing.
00:07:29.080 If they knew and willingly collaborated with a hostile foreign government, that's another.
00:07:34.120 And I'd say right here, right now, I think that CSIS should let us know, all parties know,
00:07:40.320 if anyone in our party, any party, is willingly collaborating with Beijing,
00:07:46.660 if there is anyone like that ever discovered in my party, I'll throw them out.
00:07:50.580 Do you know or suspect who those two Conservatives were in 2019?
00:07:53.560 No, I do not.
00:07:54.300 No.
00:07:54.440 And if you were to find out as candidates again, what would the approach you'd take be?
00:07:59.760 Well, I have to find out if they knew, because the reports that we've seen in the media so far
00:08:04.400 are not clear on whether the 11 candidates were aware of the involvement.
00:08:09.200 It could have been undercover involvement.
00:08:12.720 But if they did know, then obviously they'd have to be removed from the party.
00:08:17.160 What's your take on where the Liberals, if I can just be frank, weakness on this issue is coming from?
00:08:22.620 And do you think it is that they're just trying to avoid any level of scrutiny that could blow back on them?
00:08:27.440 Or do you think there is genuinely a soft spot for China from this government?
00:08:30.600 Well, I think the soft spot is in their wallets.
00:08:36.560 Corporate Liberals have been making grand fortunes doing business with Beijing and the government there for many years.
00:08:44.680 It's no secret that Liberal Inc. loves to do business with the Communist regime.
00:08:50.120 And so they have deep ties, and they fostered those ties into what appears to be a political advantage.
00:08:58.840 Now the question is whether or not the Liberal Party knew, and if so, what it did about Beijing's interference in two consecutive elections.
00:09:09.420 And we don't know the answer.
00:09:11.040 I'm not going to lay down an allegation until we know for sure.
00:09:13.580 But so far, Justin Trudeau does not seem to be one of telling the truth, and that's not a good sign.
00:09:20.300 You denounced German MEP Christine Anderson as, quote, hateful and racist when she was touring Canada and had met with a couple of Conservative MPs.
00:09:29.460 What are the views that you ascribe to her that are hateful and racist, to use your terms?
00:09:33.700 I mean, she attacked Muslims.
00:09:36.380 She said that Islam is a misogynist religion, and that she didn't actually, she said it wasn't a religion at all.
00:09:46.200 Well, there are over a million Muslims in Canada.
00:09:48.160 I don't believe that that's true.
00:09:50.520 And if someone had said that about Christianity, well, we'd all be up in arms.
00:09:54.740 And so I disagree with the comments that she's made, and I said so.
00:10:02.160 What would your message be to the people who are supporters of yours that went out and saw her speak and felt like you were making a swipe at them, perhaps?
00:10:08.980 Well, I wasn't making a swipe at them.
00:10:10.860 I'm simply speaking directly and clearly, the same way I condemn Justin Trudeau for his racist blackface
00:10:17.820 and for his nasty comments that he's directed at minorities, including the unvaccinated.
00:10:23.520 I, the same way I denounce Maxime Bernier for attending the World Economic Forum.
00:10:31.340 I think Maxime really has to come clean on why he attended the World Economic Forum, why he was involved in that,
00:10:37.320 why he proposed free trade with communist China, why he said that he admires the freedoms that exist in communist China.
00:10:44.500 And I would denounce him for making those comments as well.
00:10:47.000 And just lastly, since we're in London, anything you're looking forward to seeing here?
00:10:49.880 The people, the hardworking people here in London, the folks who do the work, who build this country.
00:10:56.020 You know, I want to, I want them to bring home more of what they earn, more of each dollar they earn.
00:11:00.600 And I want this to be a country that works for the people who work.
00:11:03.980 And that's what we're going to bring home when I'm Prime Minister.
00:11:05.940 You're probably up. Thank you.
00:11:06.840 Thank you.
00:11:07.600 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:11:10.100 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:11:15.560 True North at www.tnc.news.com