Learn English with Andrew Scheer, the new Prime Minister of Canada. In a speech in Quebec City, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with supporters to celebrate his victory in the upcoming leadership election, and spoke about his vision for the future of the country.
00:00:00.000You are listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:09.040Is the Prime Minister actually saying that taxpayers should be on the hook when he breaks the law?
00:00:20.420What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:30.000All these deficits leading to nothing but burying Canadians in taxes.
00:06:07.000Now we have a deficit that we're told won't be closed until 2045.
00:06:13.000Unforgivably, a government that is squandering those reserves during a boom time.
00:06:23.000My friends, Canadians, if anything, are a fair-minded people.
00:06:29.000We understand, you understand, that no good parent would run up huge debts and pass them on to their children.
00:06:38.000That doesn't become any less true when people think as voters and when people act as a nation.
00:06:45.000There is something unethical and immoral about sustaining living standards today and expecting somebody else to pick up the bill.
00:07:00.000And let me say something as a Conservative among fellow Conservatives.
00:07:06.000Your party should never be embarrassed about making the case for Canadian patriotism and the vision of what this country stands for and what it could be.
00:07:17.000And when I talk about Canadian patriotism, when I talk about that vision, I don't mean the vision of Trudopia.
00:07:28.000I don't mean a great country that defines itself as being a kind of touchy-feely, UN compliant, nappy-changing, interventionist social democracy.
00:07:38.000I mean, yeah, there may be a certain market for that in some aspects of this country.
00:07:43.000But I tell you, your allies abroad, my friends, your allies have not forgotten the Canada of Vimy Ridge and the Canada of Juneau Beach.
00:07:51.000Unless I've completely misread your temper, I don't think Canadians have completely forgotten it either.
00:08:22.000And yet, as we sit here in Halifax, we're living through an extraordinary time where it is considered acceptable for people to trash the name and deny the legacy of the founder of Confederation, Sir John A. Macdonald.
00:08:39.000Now, just think of what people are doing when they attack Sir John A. Macdonald's legacy.
00:08:45.000What are they really saying? I mean, what is it that we remember him for, right?
00:08:48.000What they're really saying is, the world would have been a better place if Canada hadn't come into being at all.
00:08:54.000And I've got one question for the people who say that.
00:08:57.000What country has contributed more to the happiness of man, forgive me, the happiness of people kind than this one?
00:09:07.000When nations and systems that have elevated the individual above the collective have struggled for supremacy against autocracies that have done the opposite,
00:09:18.000every time Canada has been on the right side.
00:09:22.000If you don't think that this country was worth building, you find me a better one.
00:09:25.000Let me say this as a friend of Canada, as a friend of Canadian democracy.
00:09:44.000My late father fought, I suspect alongside some of yours, in Italy in 1944.
00:09:53.000My late uncle is buried in rural Ontario.
00:09:56.000He was a casualty of an exercise during military training, a surprisingly common way for people to meet their end.
00:10:03.000His heartbroken parents never got to visit the grave.
00:10:07.000But they were consoled by receiving regular letters from a local woman who, spotting the headstone and inferring that the body lying there was a long way from home,
00:10:17.000for years took it on herself to lay flowers at the grave.
00:10:22.000Our countries have been through a great deal together.
00:10:26.000Look around you in this city, see the monuments to the young men who were prepared to cross half the world in order to take up arms for freedom.
00:10:37.000Half a million Canadians passed through Halifax alone in the Second World War, out of a population of what, 11 million at the time.
00:10:46.000Half a million, almost all of them volunteers, rushing to the aid of a country on which in most cases they'd never set eyes.
00:11:20.000My own country, I'm glad to say, is at last recovering its sovereignty, its independence, its right to hire and fire the people who pass its laws.
00:11:41.000And one of the consequences that I hope will flow from our recovering our self-government is that we will be able to strengthen our bonds with our oldest and closest allies.
00:11:57.000In part, this is a question of closer economic and trading links.
00:12:06.000Canada looks like it's going to have a trade deal with the EU.
00:12:09.000It's great, much better to have one than not to have one.
00:12:11.000It took seven years and we still haven't got CETA through.
00:12:32.000We are creating a proper market for the consumer, not for big business.
00:12:36.000And if we have such a deal between the UK and Canada, it becomes very difficult not to extend the same deal to the United States,
00:12:51.000which would solve the NAFTA problem that your current Prime Minister is making such a hash of.
00:12:57.000We could have a different way of doing trade, one that brought together initially common law and English-speaking countries,
00:13:06.000but that extended in time to anyone who was able to meet those standards,
00:13:10.000that was based on mutual recognition instead of standardization,
00:13:14.000on extending choice and opportunity, on being a capitalism for the little guy,
00:13:19.000not a capitalism for the big corporates.
00:13:21.000And we can lead the world together in establishing such a system.
00:13:27.000But this is about more than trade and economics.
00:13:36.000I want to re-establish that alliance of free democracies that has done so much to secure the happiness and liberty of our species.
00:13:46.000And I want to see Canada resume its leading place in that alliance.
00:13:51.000And the great, elemental, historic task of your party is to preserve that vision of a proud, strong, free, independent Canada.
00:14:02.000If there is one job for the Conservative Party of Canada, and for all of you as private individuals, even when you're not sitting here as delegates, it's this.
00:14:11.000Your job is to remind young people here, wherever their parents or grandparents were born, that they are not just a random set of individuals born to a different random set of individuals.
00:14:25.000That being Canadian means something, that it makes them heirs to a sublime tradition.
00:14:44.000Let me end with a plea from a British Conservative to Canadian allies.
00:14:53.000I'm not the men who made this country.
00:14:56.000Keep intact the freedoms that you've all been lucky enough to inherit.
00:15:02.000And pass them on securely to your children.
00:15:05.000children. Never be afraid to speak to and for the soul of this great country, of which,
00:15:14.740by good fortune and God's grace, you are privileged to be part. Thank you, my friends. God bless you.
00:15:21.800God bless Canada. And God bless the alliance of our great Commonwealth democracy.
00:15:28.580Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:15:32.180To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:15:38.500search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.