The Blueprint: Update on New Conservative Leadership
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
198.7638
Summary
In this episode of The Blueprints, Conservative MP Jake Stewart Stewart joins us to talk about his new role on the leadership team and what he's looking forward to in the next session of Parliament. We also talk about energy and the need for more natural gas production in Canada.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your
00:00:07.380
host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton Quartha Lakes, Brock, with
00:00:11.080
new content for you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. We do appreciate you
00:00:16.040
joining us today. And because you are here, we ask that you like, comment, subscribe,
00:00:20.080
share this program. Together we can push back against that ever-moving liberal agenda. Of
00:00:24.520
course, as always, if you can't listen or watch the program in its entirety right this
00:00:29.440
second, download it, listen to it on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify,
00:00:33.700
you name it, it is out there. Now, a very interesting week, as I talked about last week with Rick Perkins
00:00:40.040
from the great province of Nova Scotia. We talked about energy, how the East Coast can benefit,
00:00:45.700
as well as the West Coast. Actually, all of Canada can benefit from a strong energy sector,
00:00:50.720
especially when parts of the world, especially Europe, are dying for energy that is ethically
00:00:56.160
produced as it is in Canada. So we did say on that program that we're going to talk about
00:01:01.400
the leadership and what is in store for the next session of Parliament. As you can see,
00:01:05.320
we're back in studio. We're back in Ottawa. Parliament is resuming this week. And we're
00:01:10.480
going to bring on a new member of the leadership team, Jake Stewart, the member of Parliament for
00:01:14.680
Miramichi Grand Lake. He's also the chair of the caucus committee coordinator. Yes, sorry.
00:01:21.700
Good to have you on. Nice to be here, Jamie. Thank you so much. Two East Coasters, two weeks
00:01:26.360
in a row. I love it. That's a big deal. Listen, I'm real happy to be on here. My role on the
00:01:30.780
leadership team is a caucus committee coordinator. Pretty excited about it. So what does that mean?
00:01:35.320
What happens? Basically, the leader, you know, our leader, Mr. Polly, he wants all of our committees
00:01:41.960
to be repetitive and in sync and on the party message. Years past, committees would have a lot of
00:01:48.740
members that were organized. But potentially, we'd be throwing a lot of things at the wall at
00:01:52.780
once. We want to be really zeroing in on our central themes of keeping the affordability down
00:01:58.340
for Canadians, fighting inflation, things like that. No new taxes. We want to really stay on that
00:02:03.940
message. Well, it seems like the message is coming on board. I think more and more Canadians are paying
00:02:08.920
attention, realizing that, you know, the cost of groceries don't have to be this high. The cost of
00:02:13.020
energy doesn't have to be this high. Why are housing prices out of control? The latest polling out this
00:02:17.820
week. And of course, the only poll that matters is on election day. But the latest polls show that
00:02:22.200
the conservatives are heading in the right direction. We have a new leader. As you mentioned,
00:02:26.540
we have a new leadership team, which is going to help set the direction. I think things are in motion
00:02:30.960
and Canadians are looking for that alternative. And we're here to present that. Canadians are feeling
00:02:35.960
the pinch. I know in New Brunswick, I get emails and calls every day, Jamie. People can't afford their
00:02:41.380
heat bills. They can't afford to put gas in their vehicles. And then we got to look at the fact that we
00:02:45.900
could have had an Energy East pipeline in New Brunswick and a natural gas industry in recent
00:02:50.680
years. I used to be the energy critic provincially. And I remember when those two projects failed. And
00:02:56.200
they were basically sidelined with a lot of help from the Trudeau Liberal government. We're seeing
00:03:00.900
the effects of that now, in particular with Russia, which they're buying a lot of their, they're supplying
00:03:06.620
a lot of gas to Germany and France. We could have been doing that now if we develop those industries.
00:03:11.280
So in New Brunswick, we feel like we're behind the eight ball, but we know that the liberal agenda
00:03:15.800
is what did that to us. I'm really excited that our leader is in favor of more pipelines and getting
00:03:22.260
gas to Canadians and basically taking our own energy resources and developing them for the
00:03:27.900
betterment of our own country. I think that's going to be important going forward.
00:03:31.400
I think it is really important, especially when you hear the Chancellor of Germany saying,
00:03:36.720
yeah, we would like to purchase natural gas from countries other than Russia. And the Prime
00:03:44.040
Minister of this country saying, no, there's no big business case for it. I don't see a future for
00:03:49.120
that. Canadians are so disappointed. And just recently, we've seen the Prime Minister singing
00:03:55.380
over there at a piano. I mean, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, she's had a 70-year reign. She is a,
00:04:01.860
I mean, I'm 44 years old, Jamie. The vision I have in my head of her was there from the moment
00:04:09.420
I was born. I seen her on TV. I seen her on money. She was hanging, her picture was always in our
00:04:16.240
classrooms. As much as I used to be a musician and, you know, love to sing, read the room to the
00:04:22.940
Prime Minister. Wrong location for that. And I just think Canadians need a government that's really
00:04:28.160
going to put the public first. And to hear you talk about the German Chancellor, that's interesting
00:04:33.060
as well, because Putin's actually fueling his war machine by selling that product to our allies.
00:04:41.020
We should be working with our allies. And you can see how they're on the same page as us in that.
00:04:45.980
But we need a government that actually puts the natural resources first in Canada.
00:04:49.940
Well, that would be actually really nice, because the revenue and the taxation that comes from that
00:04:55.500
helps to fund our social programs, helps to build our roads and bridges and pay for hospitals. And
00:05:02.160
I think the government seems to forget that, that the money comes from the economic activity,
00:05:09.260
shutting it down. You still have to get the money from somewhere. It doesn't make sense.
00:05:12.540
The hypocrisy of the liberal climate agenda, the one thing it never details for Canadians is where
00:05:18.440
revenue actually comes from in this country. It's always come from the oil and gas sector. It's always
00:05:24.280
come from places like Alberta, which has the third largest oil reserve in the world. It's always
00:05:30.060
come from there. And I think we've gotten so far, far into this hypocrisy. And as you know,
00:05:36.480
mainstream media is involved in it too. My kids, I have four children, school-age children that are
00:05:41.180
all in school in New Brunswick. And I have to teach them all the time where revenue comes from in this
00:05:46.420
country, because they don't teach that. And they teach them about climate change and the importance of
00:05:50.680
the environment. As a salmon fisherman, I support the environment. I want to protect it. But we have
00:05:56.220
to teach our kids where revenue comes from. We are an energy resources rich country. We've always
00:06:01.340
benefited from that. It's always paid the bills. And we need to get back to promoting the fact that
00:06:06.360
that's been happening for so many decades as it is. And I think we as conservatives, we've never
00:06:10.840
said we're against green energy. The liberal mindset is, let's take away what we have. Let's try to put
00:06:19.020
all these endless grant programs and all this funding into an experimental new green energy. But
00:06:26.820
the technology innovation isn't there yet. You know, there will never be enough wind turbines or solar
00:06:31.560
panels. It should be, as we said before, the energy portfolio must be A plus B, not B minus A,
00:06:39.260
because with abundance equals peace and shortage equals strife. Absolutely. We all want to protect
00:06:45.500
the environment. Conservatives, I mean, we're known as conservationists. We want to protect it. But we
00:06:50.720
still have to, like, if you look at New Brunswick, we had iron ore, tungsten, zinc, natural gas, shale gas.
00:06:59.100
We have potential wind potential off the coast of, like a fundy. We have so much potential in our
00:07:05.880
province, but so many of those resources are not being developed. And what happens is, while our
00:07:11.000
province, you know, fights over doing it or tries to do it, other jurisdictions do it. Places like
00:07:17.260
China, with less regulation, less care for worker safety, less regulations. And then they develop the
00:07:24.260
very industries that we're sitting on, just in my home province. So, like you, I want to see our
00:07:31.000
country develop our natural resources so we can build a strong future for Canadians. But it's
00:07:35.380
almost like the 1% is telling the other 99% how to live, right? The 1% on whole, the individual
00:07:42.700
creates way more greenhouse gas emissions and all the carbon footprint, you name it, way more than
00:07:50.020
any individual. Collectively as a whole, the 99% create more. But it's the 1% that is telling the
00:07:56.700
others how to live, but they don't change their lifestyle. And Canadians have had enough of that
00:08:01.080
mentality. If you look at the leadership campaign, if you look at our leaders' message of giving
00:08:06.680
Canadians back control of their lives, that resonated at a level that sometimes I couldn't even comprehend
00:08:13.200
because every Canadian that heard it took something different from it. But underlying all of that was
00:08:19.880
the fact that the Trudeau Liberal government is always telling them what to do, regardless
00:08:25.260
of which... Lecture after another. Lecture after another. I think that's why our leaders' message
00:08:29.900
resonated thoroughly throughout New Brunswick and of course throughout the country.
00:08:33.320
It really did because no matter where you are, like as we talked about before, groceries are out of
00:08:39.260
control. Housing, you know, the Bank of Canada is trying to do whatever it can to slow down this
00:08:44.760
inflation. Something our leader, Pierre Polyev, warned two years ago that this is going to happen.
00:08:50.100
And of course, all the so-called experts said, no, we're going to have deflation. It's going to be,
00:08:54.000
you know, transitory, et cetera, et cetera. Every excuse they could. But when you inflate the money
00:08:58.440
supply, what did you expect to happen? Government doesn't even have a monetary policy. You know,
00:09:03.360
like we've traditionally had inflation of somewhere between zero and 2%, depending on the decade or the
00:09:09.040
year. But to see inflation where it is right now, you get there by printing money,
00:09:14.280
putting it back into the system and then bidding the cost up of everything that we need to live
00:09:18.720
on, whether it's bacon, the cost of fuel, gas for the vehicle, groceries, the list goes on.
00:09:24.560
Canadians are paying way more than they should for everything they need to live. And Trudeau's
00:09:30.040
continuing to tell them what to do and how to live. And that's why this resonated so well with
00:09:35.780
our leader's message. Absolutely. Because not only do we expand it, but you also have price inflation
00:09:40.400
because we have more dollars chasing fewer goods, raising the price for it, right? So you have both
00:09:45.840
things happening at the exact same time. And it doesn't necessarily mean your house is worth that
00:09:51.280
much more. It's just, there's that much more money in the atmosphere and more people, because they have
00:09:55.920
more money, are buying the things that are available.
00:09:58.840
That's right. I've seen houses in New Brunswick, just in my riding of Miramichi Grand
00:10:03.280
Lake, in areas where real estate was hard to part with and you didn't always get a good dollar for
00:10:09.720
your property. I've seen houses that would have been worth maybe a quarter of a million 10 years
00:10:14.500
ago, or now they're selling for like $600,000. Hard to believe in a place like Miramichi Grand
00:10:20.240
Lake. We have a beautiful place, but we've never had a booming housing market. Because the Liberals
00:10:25.760
printed so much cash and flooded all the markets with cash, the costs went up of everything. And
00:10:30.720
people's houses, it was a good time for people to sell a house, but a terrible time for people to
00:10:35.820
buy a house, or for a young family to try to get into a new house. And that was one of the central
00:10:40.620
messages that our leaders shared during the leadership campaign. And one of the things this
00:10:44.480
government continues to do is continue to spend, right? It's one program after another. They're,
00:10:49.780
of course, taking in more money than ever before, but they're still spending it at a record pace.
00:10:54.440
And until the government starts to realize that they can't spend their way out of this crisis,
00:11:01.400
they actually have to have some fiscal policy here and actually think about what their decisions do
00:11:08.440
and the implications that causes for everyday Canadians. The Trudeau government has no fiscal
00:11:13.240
policy. They have no monetary policy. They literally believe they can print their way out of the
00:11:19.420
situation they've put themselves in. Most Canadians think inflation may have moved a bit.
00:11:24.400
during this period, but not the level it went to. They were every, I was in the finance committee,
00:11:29.440
and every time we were going in to review a new bill, 70 billion in new spending. You know,
00:11:36.160
every time we went in, it was more and more dollars that they were just printing. And there was no,
00:11:41.120
there was nothing attached to it, like no parameters. It was just, we're going to spend some more money.
00:11:46.000
Here you go. Canadians. Great. We're giving back. But in all, they were just putting the price up of
00:11:51.040
Well, here's my fear. And yesterday I fueled up is $1.40 a litre in Ontario, still way too high. But
00:11:58.320
my fear is there are, you know, the conditioning that comes around it, right? The left wants high
00:12:04.480
gas prices to get people out of their cars or in government transportation, right? So does this
00:12:10.560
become normal? Does $1.40 just become, oh, that's normal now? In my opinion, that's still way too high.
00:12:16.160
They're trying to change our behaviours. Now, I'll give you another example, and it's in the same line
00:12:21.040
of thinking. Electric cars. Where I live in Miramichi Grand Lake, there's hardly, there's very few
00:12:26.320
places you can plug in an electric car. So they incentivized getting an electric car. But then when
00:12:32.240
you actually order one, it can take a year, sometimes a year and a half for the car to come in. So you're
00:12:37.760
waiting 18 months for the car. When it comes in, there's nowhere to plug it in hardly, because you're in
00:12:42.480
a very rural area. No planning whatsoever. They're trying to precondition Canadians to get us all
00:12:48.720
driving electric cars. But we have to wait for them to show up. And then we have no place to plug
00:12:53.200
them in, in certain jurisdictions. So it's really, it's the cart before the horse completely. And
00:12:59.040
Canadians know it, because Trudeau's always telling us what to do. And if he can't convince us what to
00:13:04.160
do, he'll force us by just printing more money and flooding the markets. Controlling your behaviour
00:13:09.600
the tax code too. That's right. Yeah. I always said that they're doing it to you, not for you,
00:13:14.880
right? Everything is on purpose. It's planned. That's right. And this is following their plan.
00:13:20.000
But at the same time, you know, in some cases when you're getting lithium that's needed for these
00:13:24.880
batteries, what do you, what do you need to do to get lithium in many cases? You need to use hydraulic
00:13:29.280
fracking. But at one point, I'm old enough to remember, the left was against hydraulic fracking.
00:13:33.920
But it's okay now with lithium. But then you can't still recycle the batteries when you're done with
00:13:38.480
it to the need that is growing because of the more electric cars that are becoming on the market.
00:13:46.160
And there's a lot of lithium that, you know, obviously the country of China has a lot of
00:13:50.640
lithium deposits and they make a lot of the, I've seen it in the car industry this year,
00:13:55.040
a lot of the chips that come with vehicles. I was looking at getting a new vehicle at one point,
00:13:59.360
and the vehicle was going to come in 10 months late. And when it came in,
00:14:03.360
some of the technology wouldn't work because of the lithium aspects in the chip. So like our cars are
00:14:09.600
being made, the lithium aspect, a lot of that is being made in China. So it shows, I find during
00:14:15.840
the, during COVID, Canadians got a real good look at how globalism doesn't always work in their favor.
00:14:23.120
And, and I, I think it, I think I, another example I'll give you from Miramichi Grand Lake is what do
00:14:29.120
we have in Canada? I always hear the leader talking about a cold air. So in New Brunswick,
00:14:33.280
we've got lots of cold air. We've got four separate seasons. We've got a winter. People drive snowmobiles.
00:14:39.200
My daughter wanted a snowmobile jacket. She likes to snowmobile. I went down to the, to get her the
00:14:44.000
snowmobile jacket. They said, we've been waiting six months for these jackets. So I know the guy who runs
00:14:49.520
the business. And I said, well, how come it's taken so long to get a snowmobile jacket? I just
00:14:53.440
couldn't wrap my head. I mean, I'm commit, I'm Canadian. We had a great winter season. And that's
00:14:58.880
something I thought that wouldn't be hard to get. But during COVID, we've seen how different products
00:15:03.920
were hard to achieve. So I said, where is, where is it made anyway? China. And then it hit me.
00:15:11.040
We're waiting six plus months for a winter snowmobile jacket in Canada. Now I wasn't faulting the guy who ran
00:15:18.720
the company. But the fault is we've put so much emphasis and support on globalism that as soon as
00:15:25.920
COVID hit, we actually seen how it wasn't going to serve us. And that's just, those are small examples.
00:15:32.160
Well, it also showed that we need to bring those jobs back and manufacturing back and why it's so
00:15:36.640
important to have these jobs here. So we need to make sure the environment is right to allow these
00:15:41.360
businesses to come back and actually make a profit and create jobs, opportunity, wealth in our communities.
00:15:46.320
That's right. And that was, and that was what I was getting at. I mean, it's,
00:15:50.160
it's hard to believe in a sense, but it kind of shocked me that day, just something as simple
00:15:55.360
as a snowmobile coat. But anyway, this is, this is great, man, being on the show. It's,
00:15:59.360
I've heard of your show a lot, and I'm glad I could be on here today with you.
00:16:02.880
I appreciate you coming on. And we should also point out New Brunswick and Ontario,
00:16:06.640
two of the provinces with nuclear power. So we do have that green energy portfolio
00:16:11.680
that works in our favor. We've got Point Le Pro in, in New Brunswick. And we also have,
00:16:16.240
we're working on some small nuclear reactors as well. There's some projects in the future.
00:16:20.880
There's some hydrogen ideas. We've got some great project ideas in the province of New Brunswick. And
00:16:25.440
I do want to let you know too, that New Brunswick was, was very strongly in support of our leader
00:16:30.080
during the leadership convention. We were, we were probably over 70% would be the average. And
00:16:35.680
my home riding of Miramichi Grand Lake was 82.1%. So a lot of Pierre Polyev supporters.
00:16:42.240
Well, you, you chaired Pierre's campaign out in New Brunswick. So you certainly did deliver.
00:16:46.560
That's right. Yeah, we worked hard and I mean, but we all did. I mean, you looked at that night,
00:16:51.120
we looked at the results, every province was, was a fan of our leader, you know, no matter how you
00:16:56.000
looked at it, he won almost every riding, but just wanted to give a little plug in there for
00:16:59.760
Miramichi Grand Lake. Absolutely. Well, Pierre did win 330 out of 338 ridings. I think that's a
00:17:05.360
pretty solid message. It shows the party is united and, and behind Pierre and ready to take on the
00:17:10.080
Liberals. And a fresh face. I found, found one of the interesting things on the campaign, Jamie,
00:17:14.960
is that you could look at any room that, that Pierre Polyev visited and, and let's say there's 400
00:17:21.440
people in the room or 500. It was interesting to see in the lineups for a photograph when it was over,
00:17:27.360
everybody get in that lineup. No one left. They all wanted to be, they all wanted to meet the leader
00:17:32.400
and shake his hand and get the photograph. But what was interesting is you had people that were
00:17:36.960
18 years old. You had young couples with young kids in their 20s and early 30s. You had, you had
00:17:42.400
people from not old enough to vote yet to like 90 years old. And I, it never ceased to amaze me. Every,
00:17:49.680
every generation was represented in support of, of, of Mr. Polyev. He didn't have generational gaps.
00:17:57.120
I never noticed any. Every decade of Citizen, he had, he had them. He had them lined up.
00:18:02.560
And it was a lot of new faces that we haven't really seen before.
00:18:06.480
In my own writing, I met a lot of people. I never, I mean, I have 65,000 constituents. I don't
00:18:11.120
know them all personally yet, but I met a lot of people I'd never met before just because they're
00:18:15.520
inspired by, by Pierre. It's that message. It's that message.
00:18:18.480
They love his message. Absolutely. We have to get out of here. Question period's coming out. We, we ran a bit late.
00:18:22.960
I always seem to do this. I always say I'm going to stay on time and then I go away after. But as,
00:18:27.760
as you probably know, the guests always get the, the final word, a couple of thoughts about
00:18:32.080
anything we talked about or really anything you see coming up in parliament this, this, this fall.
00:18:37.040
Just wanted to say a big thank you to Mayor Michie Grand Lake. We're opening up another session. I'm
00:18:41.680
just really proud to be here on working on their behalf. Very proud to be on the leadership team for Pierre
00:18:46.720
Polyev and really want to have a strong session, want to work hard, want to get that message out to
00:18:52.240
Canadians that, that a poly of conservative government is going to work hard to gain their
00:18:56.640
trust and to get, get control of this government and put the liberals out of power. I love it.
00:19:00.640
Jake Stewart, member of parliament, Mayor Michie Grand Lake is also the caucus committee coordinator,
00:19:05.360
part of the leadership team. We do appreciate his time and we do appreciate yours as parliament
00:19:09.680
starts sitting again this fall and we have new content. We did not stop this whole summer. New content
00:19:14.960
every single Tuesday. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, share this program. Tell your friends
00:19:21.040
about it because they can download it. Listen to it on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play,
00:19:24.800
Spotify, you name it. Until next week, remember low taxes, less governments, more freedom. That's the blueprint.