The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - The Liberal Government – Where’s Freeland？

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm your

00:00:11.200 host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton Quartha-Likes Brock, with new content

00:00:14.880 for you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. We ask that you like, comment, subscribe,

00:00:19.240 and share this program. Of course, if you can't watch or listen to it in its entirety,

00:00:24.380 right this second, download it, listen to it on platforms like Catsbox, iTunes, Google Play,

00:00:28.220 Spotify, you name it, it is out there. Great show lined up for you today. We are bringing in

00:00:33.860 the man who set the record of filibuster time in committee. We have Rick Perkins. Thanks for

00:00:38.920 joining us, Member of Parliament, South Shore St. Margaret's. Great to be here, Jamie. It's always

00:00:43.340 a pleasure. My voice is a little hoarse. Yes, don't blame me. So you were kind of filibustering the

00:00:48.400 Finance Committee for good reason. You wanted the Finance Minister to come to Parliament,

00:00:53.480 come to committee and talk about her multi-hundred billion dollar budget that she refused to talk to 0.97

00:00:59.480 anybody about. Yeah, I mean, the filibuster was really about ministerial accountability, a fairly

00:01:04.740 fundamental thing about Westminster parliamentary democracy. He would think so, yeah. In fact,

00:01:09.880 the open and accountable government document that the Prime Minister put out when he first got elected

00:01:14.620 in 2015 and which is tied to every mandate letter requires the ministers to go to parliamentary

00:01:21.180 committees when asked. Unfortunately, the Minister of Finance, Christopher Freeland, had not been at

00:01:27.800 Finance Committee in the last six months and had actually blown off the three separate invitations

00:01:33.180 from the committee to appear. One with the Governor of the Bank of Canada together or separately on

00:01:38.320 inflation. The second one on estimates, which is almost the required appearance for a minister.

00:01:44.540 And the third on, believe it or not, the pre-budget consultation. And those invitations were sent

00:01:51.280 unanimously from the committee, from all parties, and the Minister of Finance never showed up. And that's

00:01:57.720 why we were filibustering, because there was no belief that she would show again. And if she did,

00:02:04.460 she was only willing to show up for an hour on a budget that projects in five, over the next five 1.00

00:02:11.700 years, that they will spend a record $3.1 trillion. We don't think it's too much to ask that the

00:02:17.840 minister give Parliament two hours of her precious time. She is busy doing all these important things 1.00

00:02:23.460 like jet-setting around. Someone did an attendance check on her. Was that you who looked at the attendance

00:02:28.840 record back to January and figured out that she's only been to the House of Commons three times?

00:02:33.040 She had been five times in the question period, although she had been in Ottawa 13 days. She

00:02:37.780 only chose to show up the question period on five of them. Five days? Out of 48. Five out of 48. Wow.

00:02:45.460 Okay. Almost as bad as Justin Trudeau. Yeah. Well, we're reminded, and I reminded Liberal members of a

00:02:51.240 very famous debate, the debate of the 2011 election, where Jack Layton, as NDP leader, questioned

00:02:58.000 Liberal, then Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, and said, you've got the worst attendance record in

00:03:02.660 Parliament, and Canadians pay you a paycheck to show up to work like they have to. Maybe you should 1.00

00:03:09.700 show up to work. And that's what we're asking for the minister, to show up to work. Maybe she was too 1.00

00:03:14.920 embarrassed to defend her budget? I would be if I tabled that budget. Well, yeah. I mean, only six months ago,

00:03:21.440 before she issued an economic update last fall. And that economic update, believe it or not, and you'll

00:03:30.880 recall this, actually projected in 26-27 a balanced budget and a slight surplus. And six months later,

00:03:40.960 six months later, she projects a budget that has nothing in the way of a balanced budget, and in fact,

00:03:47.400 adds $130 billion to the national debt. In six months, promised Parliament, and not unusual for

00:03:54.860 the Liberals, promised Parliament to balance a budget six months ago, six months later, say, oops,

00:04:01.760 sorry, didn't really mean that. Well, they also said inflation was transitory, and we had worries

00:04:06.520 about deflation, too, and we all know how that came up. So we finally found Freeland. We did. We

00:04:11.920 finally found Freeland. At one point, though, we were wondering if it was that we had to free Freeland.

00:04:17.340 Right. Finding Freeland was our goal, but it was suggested at one point that maybe she wasn't

00:04:23.080 being allowed to attend by the Prime Minister's office to defend this terrible budget, this failed

00:04:28.380 budget. And so after we started to talk about freeing Freeland in the filibuster, we got an email

00:04:37.580 to the committee clerk. So she was safe. Saying that she would attend. Okay. For an hour. No, no. She

00:04:44.240 wouldn't say how much time. Okay. Well, she kept you hanging. She kept us hanging. And so she finally

00:04:48.740 did show up this past Tuesday. It was kind of her. It was kind of her. For one hour, and at the end of

00:04:54.600 the one hour, she said, I can spare you another 15 minutes. She's so generous. She's very generous.

00:04:59.780 She spends us, what, what are we in this? $42 billion in the hole this year? 1.00

00:05:05.260 $44 this year. And the first question was put to her by our colleague Adam Chambers. Very simple

00:05:13.200 question. The question was, how much interest will we pay this year on the debt? Pretty simple

00:05:22.320 question. But you've got to put that in context. That's right. Yes. She said you had to put it in

00:05:26.200 context. The simple answer is $47 billion. We will spend in Canada. I shouldn't say we. But she didn't

00:05:32.280 want to tell anybody. But she didn't want to say it. $47 billion, that's a big number to pay in

00:05:36.700 interest. It goes to bankers. So what's that equivalent to? That's equivalent to all the money

00:05:42.240 the federal government sends to the provinces for health care. We spend as much on paying interest

00:05:46.740 to bankers on the debt than we pay on health care to the provinces. And remember that our debt

00:05:55.300 is now $1.2 trillion. And if you take Trudeau Sr., who added $468 billion to our debt, and

00:06:07.700 Junior, who's added more than $700 billion to our debt, $1.1 trillion of our debt has been

00:06:15.380 added to Canada's payments requirement by father and son. Like father, like son. I guess sins of the

00:06:24.820 father are the sins of the son. Well, yeah. Trudeau Sr. started the ball rolling. But isn't that

00:06:29.180 kind of the leftist philosophy? We'll decry everyone else's wealth, but we want all of it.

00:06:33.900 So we decide what we spend it on because, of course, you know.

00:06:37.520 Government knows best. Government knows best. Clearly, it's not better for the people who are 0.98

00:06:41.640 working for it, who are trying to eke out a living and maybe take a, heck, even a vacation to

00:06:46.020 spend their money with, right? The simple pleasures in life, government should control it and tell you

00:06:50.220 what to do. Well, you know, budgets do balance themselves, right? That's what was said in 2016.

00:06:56.580 It was that easy. It was that easy. They would balance itself. What that meant was that the

00:07:00.560 government revenues would grow faster than their expenditures. And through that process,

00:07:08.480 Justin Trudeau said, through that process, the budget will balance itself. And the reality is,

00:07:14.020 when they got in power, they found spending much more attractive than worrying about, you know,

00:07:19.480 your credit card payments. So they've been spending much, much faster than revenue comes in. Now,

00:07:26.080 just to put that in perspective, when the Trudeau government was elected in 2015,

00:07:32.440 the federal government was spending $263 billion and the Harper government left that year a $1.9

00:07:39.800 billion surplus, a $1.9 billion surplus, then they promised they would run some small deficits

00:07:46.280 and balance the budget in 2019. And in 2019, instead of those being balanced, they ran a $20

00:07:54.120 billion deficit. So what's all that mean? Well, the spending this year in the budget is almost $500

00:08:01.780 billion. So they've had a 63% increase in the amount that they spend since they were elected,

00:08:09.680 in 2015. And a budget projects the spending for the next five years as well. And it projects it

00:08:16.420 based on the spending to date. It doesn't take into account what they may add into new spending

00:08:21.900 next year or the year after if they're still in government. So if they don't spend a dollar

00:08:27.800 more in new programs, and if you believe all their economic projections on interest rates and

00:08:33.960 inflation... Because it's been so credible so far.

00:08:36.680 Yeah, and their inflation numbers are very credible, right? They say that inflation will

00:08:40.740 be down to 3.5% this year. For that to happen, inflation will have to be at 2% a year, 2% a

00:08:48.400 month starting in July.

00:08:50.100 Yeah, that's not happening.

00:08:51.020 That's not happening.

00:08:51.520 That's not happening at all.

00:08:52.320 We're over 4% now. That's not happening. And so, and then it would stay at 2%. Now,

00:08:57.700 how does inflation stay at 2% when they're imposing a carbon tax, a carbon tax that next April

00:09:04.300 is projected to go up 23%. So when you're increasing the carbon tax by 23%, which is a

00:09:10.360 tax on everything, that by its nature causes inflation in addition to everything else that's

00:09:16.340 going on.

00:09:16.960 And we're still deficit spending.

00:09:18.600 Still deficit spending, so it didn't balance itself. So the spending has gone up 63% since

00:09:25.460 they've been elected. Now, by the end of this five-year term, spending will have gone up 94%.

00:09:32.040 94%. Gone from $263 billion a year under Harper's last budget to over $500 billion. Now, if you

00:09:42.920 think that they're just doing good things for people, half the money that was spent during COVID

00:09:49.040 was on non-COVID related stuff.

00:09:51.260 It was couched in the language of COVID so they could spend it, right?

00:09:53.800 And, you know, I'm sure the viewers know that everything is twice as good today as it was

00:09:58.540 before since we have twice as much spending. Our healthcare is twice as good. Our roads are

00:10:02.900 twice as good. We're twice as fast at analyzing passports. And we're really efficient at processing

00:10:10.680 immigration applications, which I think are up around 2.4 million now.

00:10:14.700 Yeah, I think I said over 2 million now. So while we've spent twice as much money, things

00:10:21.160 haven't gotten twice as good for us. In fact, they've gotten worse. We know the doubling

00:10:27.120 seems to be a habit of this government. So we know that one of the biggest things that

00:10:31.320 Canadians are experiencing is since they've come in, not only has the debt and spending

00:10:35.500 doubled, but housing prices have doubled. The cost of a home and the cost of renting has

00:10:41.300 doubled under these Liberals. So if you want to see the connection, it's pretty obvious.

00:10:47.760 As government also gets bigger. They've also hired a lot more bureaucrats.

00:10:52.120 80,000 more bureaucrats since 2015. It is the fastest growing employment sector, in my belief.

00:10:59.540 Which is incredible because government itself, as you fill the kind of the middle management

00:11:04.280 and the tower, not that the towers in Ottawa have anybody in them anyway, but their job really

00:11:09.460 is to slow things down. They create the rules, the regulations, the red tape that slows down

00:11:14.120 business, which needs to move fast to adapt to the current needs of their customer base.

00:11:19.600 I'll give you an example. Because 80,000 is a lot of people. What are they doing? Where

00:11:25.040 are those people being hired? I represent a rural fishing riding in Nova Scotia. I have 7,000

00:11:31.880 commercial fishermen in my riding. I said, so the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is critical

00:11:37.460 to how we are able to earn a living in my community. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in just the

00:11:44.860 last three years, has grown by 5,000 people. So you say, well, Rick, that's only 5,000 and 80,000.

00:11:51.240 The Department was only 10,000 people. Now it's 15,000 people in the last three years. And over 1,000 of

00:11:58.580 those jobs went to HR and the Finance Department in Ottawa. So you never guess. Like, I worked most of my

00:12:06.260 career in the private sector. We had HR, every company has HR departments. But this is now a

00:12:12.040 department of 15,000 people. Guess how many people work in HR at the Department of Fisheries

00:12:16.680 and Oceans? I'd love for you to tell us.

00:12:19.260 832. But, you know, they've got a lot of paychecks and stuff to manage with that fast growth of 5,000

00:12:26.160 people. So the finance section of DFO, combined with their corporate strategy, is now over 1,000

00:12:34.480 people in that department. 1,000 people pushing the finance papers of the 832 people in HR because,

00:12:42.060 of course, they need all those people in HR because they're hiring so many people. Somebody's

00:12:47.000 got to do the paperwork to get them on board. It's unbelievable. It's this growth. And I can

00:12:53.120 tell you, it hasn't gotten 5,000 more people better. In fact, it's worse. We've got poaching

00:12:59.740 and criminal activity happening in the fishery all over. During the strike, the police force

00:13:05.840 for DFO, they have their own police force, is an essential service, but they refuse to

00:13:09.760 go out in the water. Sorry, we're on strike. We're not going out in the water to enforce

00:13:13.980 the law. And guess what happened?

00:13:16.560 Guess what happened? Massive poaching. We've got thousands and thousands of poachers now

00:13:20.380 illegally fishing seafood. And you may think, well, so what? But the reality is the more people you

00:13:29.180 have fishing it unabated, the more you destroy the fishery. You destroy our oceans. You destroy

00:13:35.760 the biodiversity. Something apparently the liberals claim to care about, but don't seem to do anything.

00:13:40.560 Which takes a long time to replenish if it's destroyed.

00:13:43.540 Now, I know I spoke for about an hour and a half on the fishery during this to educate my fellow

00:13:48.660 committee members about where the money was being spent on this issue. But I think it's really

00:13:56.580 important to understand on the issue. I mean, for a lot of people say, well, you know, isn't that a

00:14:01.300 lot of silliness, what we were doing? Right? Talking for 18 hours to get the minister to appear for

00:14:07.520 one hour? It seems a little out of proportion.

00:14:10.240 Well, she didn't want to appear at all. 0.86

00:14:11.180 No. And we did get her, but she didn't answer the questions, as you said, when asked her that simple

00:14:16.960 question on interest payments, she tried to explain to a parliamentarian how the budget

00:14:22.720 works. She wouldn't answer, let me explain to you how a budget works. Very arrogant.

00:14:27.760 I'm not sure she knows. But she's not, it doesn't seem like they're being briefed. And if they are, 0.66

00:14:34.480 they just don't care what the questions are. They've just decided, and we've seen this in

00:14:37.600 question period, it doesn't matter what the question is. You ask them what the color of the sky is,

00:14:41.440 they'll tell you what they had for dinner last night. Like, it's like they're not even trying

00:14:45.200 anymore. We were questioning this week in the House for a few hours, the Minister of Housing.

00:14:51.920 You know, we have a housing crisis in Canada. The government is spending $82 billion in their

00:14:59.040 national housing strategy. And so I asked the Minister of Housing a very simple question.

00:15:05.440 There is an estimate of how many houses need to be built in Canada for Canada to reach housing

00:15:14.080 affordability, right? We've got a homelessness crisis going on. We've got a rent crisis.

00:15:19.520 I asked the Minister a simple question. How many houses need to be built for us to get to housing

00:15:25.280 affordability and not be in a housing crisis? I think Scotiabank said $1.8 million.

00:15:29.040 He accused me of playing politics and asking that question. Because him being able to answer,

00:15:34.800 as a housing minister, how many houses Canada needs to build, is apparently a political question. I

00:15:40.720 thought it was just a factual question. He didn't know. So I told him, obviously, he didn't know. And the

00:15:47.200 president of CMHC was sitting there in the House, as you're allowed to do, and committee the whole

00:15:50.960 rate. And they were adding sticky notes, so some answers. Yeah, little sticky notes. But I said,

00:15:55.280 well, maybe you should get the president of CMHC to tell you because the president of CMHC put out

00:16:01.280 an annual report this year and said, we need 3.5 million new houses in Canada for us to reach

00:16:08.160 housing affordability. And so I said, so how many new houses were built, according to Statistics Canada,

00:16:15.760 in the last year? Again, he couldn't answer the question. It's a pretty simple one. Anyone who follows

00:16:21.040 the housing, knows that it's been plus or minus around this number for years, 221,000. So 221,000 new

00:16:30.640 houses built in the last year, and we need 3.5 million. But he didn't know those two basic things.

00:16:38.960 Either that, or he just refused to answer because he'd be too embarrassed, obviously, to admit what a

00:16:45.600 failure their housing policy is as part of this budget. So when a budget is spending 3.1 trillion

00:16:51.840 dollars over the next five years, 82 billion on housing, and you can't even cite the number of

00:16:58.240 houses you need to build. Yeah, but this government, they have two speeds, big government and bigger 0.72

00:17:04.960 government. There is no, let's make way for the private sector to do what they do best. That's not

00:17:10.400 part of how their brain works, it doesn't seem. No, and if you read the mandate letter, so every

00:17:15.600 minister gets a mandate letter from the prime minister, and they release it. And there's one

00:17:20.000 line that really, I find quite humorous in the, in every mandate letter, including the housing

00:17:25.680 minister and the finance ministers. It's that you need to focus on the big ideas, right? To me, the big...

00:17:32.400 Right, because government has the big ideas, right? Right. To me, 3.5 million houses,

00:17:36.400 so we don't have a housing crisis, that's a big idea. The solution, not so much a big idea.

00:17:41.520 But apparently, the little ideas don't matter. So the little ideas like processing a passport,

00:17:46.640 you're not supposed to concentrate on those little ideas. You're not supposed to concentrate on the

00:17:50.320 little ideas like processing an immigration application, or processing the health checks

00:17:56.480 for commercial pilots so that they can continue to fly. Those are the little things, right? The ante up

00:18:02.480 at the poker game for the government to actually do its job. Don't worry about focusing on the little

00:18:07.600 things, just focus on the big things. But it's a government of inputs, not a government of outputs.

00:18:13.120 Yeah, but if they focused on the little things, it might make life a little bit better for the

00:18:17.280 people paying the taxes that give the government the ability to run. Right, and people's lives might be

00:18:23.120 easier, better. Maybe a little happier. Might have a better paycheck if they focused on the little 0.72

00:18:27.600 things. Those are the kinds of things. You know, can I pay my rent? Can I pay my bills? Can I afford

00:18:32.320 some food for my family? Can I save a little money for my kids' education? Those are the things that

00:18:37.760 people worry about. But apparently, those are the little ideas. They just worry about the big ideas.

00:18:43.360 I'm not quite sure what the big ideas are. We're still waiting. I think one of them is a tax.

00:18:47.600 Probably. Well, a carbon tax too is coming. Again, and again, and again.

00:18:52.240 So we're going to be hit a whole bunch more times.

00:18:55.600 41 cents a litre is their plan. So they really want people out of their car.

00:19:00.400 Well, they seem to really want people out of their cars. Well, I think if you live

00:19:04.880 in downtown Montreal or downtown Toronto, and you have the opportunity to take public transit,

00:19:12.320 that might drive you out of your car onto public transit. But there is no public transit in my four

00:19:18.080 county riding. There is none. We have to drive everywhere. You have to drive for groceries.

00:19:22.960 You have to drive to take your kids to school. You have to drive to take them to their activities.

00:19:26.400 You have to go drive to see your parents. You have to drive to see your grandkids. There is no

00:19:32.080 transit. There is no subway. There is no choice. So I have to pay the fuel charges.

00:19:37.280 Yeah. And like in terms of the overall picture, I think government transportation is one piece of it.

00:19:43.120 But I also look, too, at the fact that you spend, say, $400 on a car payment, right? That's

00:19:50.640 not getting you much, right? It's basically getting you four wheels and a steering wheel.

00:19:53.680 That's basically what's getting you. But at the end of that five year, seven year,

00:19:58.640 you still have something you own at the end of it, right? You buy a bus pass or a transit pass,

00:20:03.600 in that seven years, five years, you really don't own anything, right? And so it's like they're

00:20:08.560 trying to make that separation, make it so expensive for the average person to have a 0.87

00:20:14.320 vehicle where they can go where they want, when they want, whom they want, rather than going,

00:20:18.960 well, the train doesn't run at this time. I can't go, right? They're taking that away. I find it's

00:20:24.640 kind of very interesting that the government will not make the same sacrifices as the people will make

00:20:33.040 because they will still have their limousines. They will still have their planes. They get to go where

00:20:36.320 they want to go, when they want to go, because they're super important. Right. And most liberals

00:20:41.040 represent an urban riding in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. That's basically where their seats are.

00:20:47.360 And so they really don't have an understanding of the country as a whole. They have an understanding,

00:20:53.120 perhaps, to some extent, of the urban needs. But even in the urban needs, you're right. You know,

00:20:57.920 you've got to go when the buses are running. You've got to go when the subway is running. And that

00:21:04.320 doesn't necessarily always meet what you need to do. Especially during the pandemic, what happened,

00:21:08.640 right? They told us one to stay off. It's pretty hard to take your kids to hockey in Toronto

00:21:12.720 on the subway and bus. Yes, exactly. Right. Yeah. You think your life's miserable now. Wait,

00:21:16.240 you have to take the bus to take your kids. You live in Scarborough and your kids play a hockey

00:21:19.600 game in Mississauga. It's pretty hard to get there without a vehicle. Yeah. I would say you have to

00:21:24.160 plan a few hours ahead. Yeah. Yeah. And then you've got to get home. Yes. And then you have to get home. Right.

00:21:29.360 So those are the things, the little things that they don't seem to concentrate on. So, you know,

00:21:36.400 we just wanted to ask the Minister of Finance how she thinks spending record amounts of money will

00:21:42.800 actually reduce inflation. Because when you continue to put all this government, this money,

00:21:48.160 it's taxpayer money, but when you continue to borrow all this money and put it out there,

00:21:52.800 what it does is it puts all this money out into the market. So there's more dollars chasing the same

00:21:58.000 amount of goods. And when you have that, prices go up. It's simple grade 10 economics from high

00:22:04.000 school and which they seem to have some trouble grasping. And I don't believe their carbon tax works

00:22:12.000 because we have no choice. But if you buy the theory, then you understand that in order for it to

00:22:20.480 work, it has to drive dramatically the price of everything up. Because it's the increasing cost

00:22:27.920 that is supposed to change your behavior. So on the one hand, they've designed a tax that they say

00:22:34.720 will only work if everything becomes more expensive. But it's not their fault that everything's becoming

00:22:40.800 more expensive. Exactly. Well, government should be here to maximize your freedoms, not control your

00:22:46.400 behavior. Exactly. Even right down to the type of vehicle, you know, they're mandating the end of the

00:22:50.960 internal combustion engine. The internal combustion engine is much cleaner today than it was 10 years ago.

00:22:56.320 It'll be much cleaner in another 10 years. Toyota is working on a zero emission

00:23:03.920 internal combustion engine. Mercedes had a diesel engine with zero emissions other than water. It

00:23:11.120 was a little bit of water out in the diesel engine. We're there, but apparently the market

00:23:16.240 isn't supposed to decide this. Yes, government does. Government does. And in rural areas, even if you

00:23:21.200 wanted to have some sort of electronic vehicle, there's no charging stations, there's no power

00:23:27.120 to get you there. So a lot of folks in my writing that are interested, they're buying hybrids. But

00:23:32.480 hybrids are not what the government wants to buy. No, it's not. No, they want to out-subsidize China 0.92

00:23:38.400 and other countries, maybe even the US too, to pick winners and losers.

00:23:42.320 Well, they're doing that. And they can't do that. We can't do that. No, they can't do that because

00:23:46.000 government's got a, I can tell you my part of the world, government's got a really bad track record

00:23:51.120 of picking business winners and losers. We had something called Sydney Steel for a while. We had,

00:23:57.680 we've had way back in the 1950s, the provincial government decided they would get into making

00:24:03.520 stereos. That didn't work out very well. The provincial government in Nova Scotia thought in the 80s that the

00:24:11.600 new latest thing would be an electronic toilet seat that would go up and down and since you were there

00:24:17.200 and it would go up and down. So they invested taxpayer money in that, that went bankrupt.

00:24:20.960 And a lot of people remember Brian Peckford, the premier, unfortunately a conservative premier,

00:24:25.440 premier of Newfoundland, who decided to think that that was a good thing to try and grow cucumbers

00:24:31.680 in greenhouses in Newfoundland year round and in the winter. And the first winter, the wind blew them

00:24:38.480 apart because, you know, when you're on the ocean in the North Atlantic, it gets pretty windy in the

00:24:43.040 winter. So governments really have a poor track record of picking winners and losers. There's a lot

00:24:50.560 of other examples, but they're doing that all the time. They're trying to do that in the auto industry

00:24:55.520 now. They're trying to do that in sporadically. The energy industry too. Yeah. Yeah. And

00:25:01.520 and they are allowing, while they do that, they're allowing a country with very hostile

00:25:11.120 intentions towards Canada and to the west for that matter, China, to buy up our assets. So if you

00:25:18.080 really do believe in the green economy, you have to believe in critical minerals. Canada has one mine,

00:25:24.720 one that produces lithium and the liberal government in 2019 allowed it to be bought by the state owned

00:25:35.760 mining company of China. They own it. And 100% of the lithium, it's called the tanko mind of the

00:25:43.440 lithium from that mind, gets pulled out of the ground in Manitoba and shipped to China, gets processed

00:25:50.160 into cathodes and nanoids for EV batteries and other things in the green economy. And then as,

00:25:56.720 as our naive Boy Scout-ish Canadians that we are, we buy it all back at full retail.

00:26:03.120 Yes. While China's putting up more coal fired power plants than ever. Right. Every single week. Right.

00:26:08.880 Using that cheap energy. The cheap energy. And, and, and I know that the viewers will be surprised to

00:26:14.240 learn that our number one export to China is thermal coal to help fuel those coal stations.

00:26:22.880 Oh, is that not a great green agenda? That is wonderful. I, we're way over time. I could keep

00:26:27.520 going on and on. My goodness. I hate to end it like this. All right. Finish us off on an upbeat note

00:26:31.920 here, Rick Perkins. Well, the upbeat note is that as conservatives, we're listening. We hear what people

00:26:38.400 are saying and we're putting forward common sense policies that we're hearing from our

00:26:43.920 communities and our constituents. So our focus is going to be squarely on those things that matter

00:26:49.680 to people. And hopefully we'll have an election soon. We'll have a new prime minister under our leader,

00:26:55.200 Pierre Polyev, who will bring common sense policies to the common people so we can have more powerful

00:27:02.080 paychecks and get the government out of the way so that the private sector and individuals can do what

00:27:08.240 they can do best, which is produce, produce jobs and growth for our economy, improving our prosperity,

00:27:15.360 which allows us to have all those programs that we like. Absolutely. And so we'll be bringing home

00:27:20.160 all of those great policies in the campaign that I think are going to be very popular, resonate and

00:27:26.960 show just how out of touch and these liberals are and how out of money Canadians are as a result of

00:27:35.440 their policies. Abundance equals peace. Absolutely. Abundance is the enemy of the Marxist. It sure is.

00:27:41.600 And shortage equals strife. And that's what they like to do. Socialism has been tried in a lot of

00:27:47.120 countries and it's failed 100 percent in every country. It looks great on the brochure. Put into

00:27:52.640 practice, not so much. Not so much. Yes, that's right. All right. Rick Perkins, thank you so much for

00:27:56.960 having us or having coming on the show. Thank you very much, Jamie, for having me. Look forward to it.

00:28:02.720 And just keep paying attention, folks. Keep putting pressure on the liberals,

00:28:08.720 because it does matter every time you call or put pressure on them on the mistakes that they make.

00:28:13.440 South Shore St. Margaret says the riding. We appreciate his time. We appreciate your time as well.

00:28:18.480 Please like, comment, subscribe and share this program. We have new content every single Tuesday. We are not

00:28:24.240 taking time off. We are continuing this trend because there is so much to talk about. More

00:28:28.800 you need to know about because it's not being talked about in the mainstream media. Of course,

00:28:32.080 tell your friends they can download it. Listen to it on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play,

00:28:36.160 and Spotify. Until next week, remember, low taxes, less government, more freedom. That's the blueprint.

The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - May 23, 2023

The Liberal Government – Where’s Freeland？

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