Juno News - Pierre Poilievre on corruption, inflation and skyrocketing debt

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:00:05.280 this was an election that certainly everyone knew was coming at some point minority governments are

00:00:13.660 not particularly stable i think the question was more of one about when rather than if but

00:00:19.200 if you had to characterize the election themes where we are now i know a lot of people thought

00:00:25.440 it was going to be a pandemic election but now we have this afghanistan crisis when you're knocking

00:00:29.620 on the doors what is the election actually about to people well people are trying to figure that out

00:00:33.660 because trudeau caused this election to occur and his campaign has been a seinfeld campaign

00:00:39.600 a campaign about nothing people are sort of waiting you called this election do you have something to

00:00:46.220 tell us do you have a big agenda that you have to ask our support for and the answer is no he has

00:00:53.780 absolutely nothing new to say he simply called the election in retrospect because he thought

00:00:59.400 he could get away with securing a majority while in the immediate aftermath of spending a half

00:01:07.700 trillion dollars while people were still afraid of covid so i i joked earlier today his slogan should

00:01:13.940 have been quick no one's looking because i think that's how he thought this would go he'd just call

00:01:20.200 a snap election partly in the middle of the summer partly while farmers are out at getting ready for

00:01:26.160 harvest and uh and that people just wouldn't have any time to think or scrutinize and would

00:01:31.040 accidentally secure his majority mandate and it's not turning out that way at all there's been a

00:01:35.620 massive backlash against him for calling this election and then not only that he's uh he this is

00:01:43.360 the worst run election campaign the liberals have ever done he's gone from uh the wonder boy to the

00:01:48.920 blunder boy um every day it seems there's a gaffe you know whether it was um liberal saying that the

00:01:55.700 afq that the uh taliban uh are their brothers or or him true to us admitting he doesn't know anything

00:02:02.600 about monetary policy now when we have among the highest inflation in decades uh and people can't

00:02:09.580 afford to buy a home uh or this recent gaffe where they are now saying that he admitting um for the

00:02:15.500 first time that they we knew all along which is that they're going to tax uh gains on primary

00:02:20.340 residences um these are massive gaffes any one of which should cost him the election we've seen this

00:02:27.740 government skate through a lot of pretty difficult things without really being challenged on it you

00:02:35.120 look at snc lavalin and they followed that by a victory in 2019 sure coming down to a minority

00:02:41.000 the we scandal as well had legs for a while as we say but then the government prorogged parliament

00:02:46.080 and it seemed like a lot of the scrutiny on on that went away and i remember a lot as a lot of

00:02:50.640 canadians do that press conference where you were showing all of these documents that the government had

00:02:54.140 redacted and still i haven't heard we brought up a single day on this campaign what do you think

00:03:00.040 needs to be done to get canadians and by extension i guess the media to care about these things

00:03:05.200 well the media will the mainstream media will never care about any of them because they almost

00:03:11.300 almost unanimously support trudeau and want to see him re-elected of course he bought them off with

00:03:17.820 the half billion dollar media fund uh let's not forget though the conservatives won more votes than

00:03:23.360 the liberals in the last election he got the lowest share of the votes of any prime minister who to be

00:03:28.620 re-elected in canadian history so it's not as though he's a particularly popular prime minister

00:03:33.960 you'd think he was if you just watched the cbc national but if you look at the data he's actually

00:03:40.220 quite an unpopular prime minister who's been very lucky about the distribution of vote that has allowed

00:03:45.360 him to preserve power with a very small but less than a third of uh voters backing him so let's talk

00:03:53.600 a little bit about what the conservative answer to that corruption right allegation is because i know

00:03:58.840 the platform this year has some stuff to crack down and give a lot of these conflict of interest and

00:04:03.660 ethics violations uh that are found to have happened to a bit more teeth in the response to them

00:04:08.840 but but how can you really combat that in practice because i mean in general there's i think a malaise and

00:04:14.540 a distrust of politicians but but what could a conservative government do better that would

00:04:18.860 make it so these things don't happen with impunity well uh for one there has to be more

00:04:24.500 consequences for guilty findings uh particularly compounded and serious guilty findings for politicians

00:04:31.660 violating the conflict of interest and ethics act um secondly i think we uh have to toughen up the

00:04:39.720 whistleblower protection so that it's easier for people to speak out when they see corruption

00:04:44.960 uh and but third i think the people of canada have to exercise accountability at the ballot box

00:04:50.780 ultimately that's the way our system works um we have uh a system of democratic accountability

00:04:57.000 uh more than um bureaucratic uh rules um you know it is one thing to have a public

00:05:04.620 authority like the ethics commissioner examine behavior and then compare it to a law an issue of

00:05:11.640 finding but it's not quite another for the voters to say they've had enough and throw the guy out

00:05:16.920 and i think that's the ultimate accountability that we can show on election day let's talk about

00:05:22.340 the financial situation here we've all seen that pbo report that says we're on track to run up deficits

00:05:27.460 for the next 50 years right at that point it doesn't even become relevant because it's just so many

00:05:32.540 billions and trillions of dollars of debt and debt service payment and all of that realistically how is

00:05:38.840 a fiscally conservative approach even possible when you're coming in if a conservative government's

00:05:44.280 elected with that much baggage i know your platform is to balance within 10 years but but practically

00:05:49.520 how does that actually happen when things are as dire as they are now right well good question i mean

00:05:55.360 first of all i don't think it's just practical i think it's going to be unavoidable

00:05:59.320 um the current deficit uh is driving inflation um whenever you create crash you inflate the the price of

00:06:08.320 things and the government has created 400 billion dollars of m2 money supply which is to say coins

00:06:15.900 bills and bank deposits in just over a year which is the biggest increase in money supply ever

00:06:23.080 in percentage terms it's the biggest since 1974 and we remember what happened in the late 70s we had

00:06:30.000 hyperinflation in the double digits uh followed by massive interest rate hikes uh to nearly 20 percent

00:06:36.560 that that is uh uh we don't know exactly what the future will bring but we know that the history

00:06:41.640 of money printing has been a runaway inflation so whoever forms government is going to have to rein

00:06:48.520 that in unless we want to continue to see out of control price increases that uh destroy the middle

00:06:54.440 class um drive the poor deeper into poverty and inflate uh the wealth of the super rich um i think we

00:07:02.720 probably when we look back on this and the data comes up we'll see that this money printing binge the

00:07:07.460 government is on will uh lead to probably the biggest uh expansion of the wealth gap in canadian

00:07:14.900 history as um wealthy asset owners people who hold gold um real estate uh stocks bonds and other

00:07:24.380 appreciating assets saw their net worth skyrocket while the wages of the working class are chewed up by 1.00

00:07:31.920 inflation so the answer to that of course is to to stop printing money and start creating the stuff

00:07:36.960 money buys build more houses grow more nutritious food build pipelines to bring canadian energy to

00:07:43.000 canadian consumers uh that way we actually uh produce the things that dollars buy and and thereby

00:07:49.640 increase the value of our dollar relative the goods we need to purchase so so we're going to have to

00:07:55.320 get spending back to normal pre-covid levels as quickly as possible bring in a pay-as-you-go law

00:08:01.060 to ensure that every new dollar of unbudgeted spending is met with a dollar of savings

00:08:05.700 and unleash the free enterprise system so businesses and farmers can make more here in canada

00:08:11.660 we heard justin drudeau say that he doesn't think about monetary policy and

00:08:16.900 the answer i i believe him who doesn't believe him like i don't believe a lot of things he says that

00:08:22.520 one i believe what i found more interesting than that was what he said in response or kind of

00:08:28.500 to justify these i don't think about monetary policy i think of families when i'm thinking well

00:08:32.200 hang on how how does monetary policy not affect families but there is a question in that though

00:08:37.220 which is that do you think canadians understand and care about these inflationary issues you're

00:08:42.920 bringing up because again it does get in the weeds and a lot of canadians are thinking let

00:08:46.500 cut cut the nonsense what's it going to mean for me but but do you find that that is a discussion

00:08:50.840 that is taking place in canadian households oh it's taking place in shopping aisles it's taking

00:08:55.860 place in uh home showings uh for uh with real estate agents it's taking place at the gas station

00:09:03.760 when people are filling up their cars and that's why this deficit issue has gone from the abstract to

00:09:08.980 the highly vivid and practical people are actually witnessing what deficits do to their cost of living

00:09:14.840 uh whereas you know a few years ago it was an abstraction the consequences were not yet visible

00:09:19.780 now people see what it's doing to their lives it's chewing up their uh their dollars uh in the present

00:09:27.920 uh so there's no doubt people make the link between overspending and inflation uh they they live it they

00:09:34.640 see it they feel it uh and uh the fact i think one of the reasons why trudeau is in free fall in the

00:09:39.720 polls and why conservatives are gaining is because people know that if trudeau is re-elected there will

00:09:44.680 be a continued explosion in inflation and a cost of living crisis you mentioned earlier that this

00:09:51.780 election you think is about trudeau seeking a majority he's had relatively unchecked power with

00:09:57.600 the ndp and the bloc backing him for the last couple of years but but realistically what do you

00:10:02.340 think the consequences of a trudeau liberal majority would be a massive debt crisis right now canada has

00:10:09.340 about 8.7 trillion dollars of debt personal corporate and government debt combined that means

00:10:16.740 we have four dollars of debt for one dollar for every one dollar of gdp so a one percentage point

00:10:24.260 increase in the effective interest rate on all debt in canadian economy will cost 87 billion dollars

00:10:30.700 every year one percentage point or it will cost four percent of gdp just put that into perspective

00:10:36.100 imagine one percentage point increase in the effective interest rate that we all pay on all

00:10:41.820 our debts would cost four percent of gdp gdp um at a federal level a one percent just in debt in terms

00:10:49.460 of the federal debt a one percent increase in interest rates means 12 billion dollars in extra costs

00:10:55.140 that's uh you know much more than the car a one point increase in the gst so like you start to think

00:11:02.680 about the the enormous costs that are we're going to face when interest rates eventually rise uh that

00:11:08.320 that problem will only worsen if we re-elect a prime minister who's determined to further in debt the

00:11:13.040 nation um we uh we will face a serious debt crisis and that will bring a catastrophic human tragedy

00:11:20.220 uh so what we need to do is uh make a shift now away from a credit card economy to a paycheck economy

00:11:26.480 to unleash the productive forces of our economy uh to make more cost less paychecks not debt

00:11:33.220 thank you very much thank you great to be with you andrew thanks for listening to the andrew

00:11:37.920 lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

00:11:43.960 you

Juno News - September 02, 2021

Pierre Poilievre on corruption, inflation and skyrocketing debt

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