The Candice Malcolm Show - December 02, 2021


Justinflation is wreaking havoc, so why is everyone ignoring it？


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

163.97646

Word count

3,603

Sentence count

219

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Inflation in Canada is driving up the cost of almost everything. We ll talk to one MP who is doing everything he can to ring the alarm bell and talk about what he calls Just Inflation. MP Pierre Polyev has been the Conservative MP for the Ottawa-based riding of Carleton since 2004. He currently serves as the party s finance critic and has kept the Trudeau government accountable for the unprecedented number of new spending initiatives during the pandemic.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.040 Canada is facing an unprecedented economic situation.
00:00:03.560 There is a severe labor shortage.
00:00:06.020 The global supply chain crisis is limiting the number of goods available and sold in Canada.
00:00:10.740 And finally, most of all, inflation is driving up the cost of almost everything.
00:00:15.860 We'll talk to one member of parliament today who is doing everything he can to ring the alarm bell
00:00:19.800 and talk about what he calls just inflation.
00:00:22.840 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:24.700 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in today.
00:00:31.340 We've got a great show for you today, but first I'm going to stop you right now and say
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00:01:07.860 Okay, we're going to get right to the interview today.
00:01:09.420 I'm really pleased to be joined by one of the most effective communicators in parliament.
00:01:13.800 I'm talking about MP Pierre Polyev.
00:01:16.060 Polyev is the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Ottawa-based riding of Carleton.
00:01:20.740 He's been the MP since 2004.
00:01:23.640 Pierre currently serves as the Conservative Party's finance critic and has kept the Trudeau
00:01:27.760 government accountable for the unprecedented number of new spending initiatives during the
00:01:33.060 pandemic.
00:01:33.900 Since the government began printing more and more money, Pierre has been one of the only
00:01:37.680 MPs in Canada who has consistently sounded the alarm bell, but not just sounded the alarm
00:01:41.960 bell.
00:01:42.380 He's done an incredible job articulating what the problem is, helping Canadians understand,
00:01:46.960 because we're talking about abstract financial concepts here.
00:01:49.920 It is hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, and Pierre does a great job of making it more
00:01:55.340 easily understandable and more approachable for the everyday Canadian who might not have
00:02:00.380 a background in finance.
00:02:02.220 He cuts through the spin.
00:02:03.280 He calls out the media.
00:02:04.240 He does exactly what you want a Conservative MP to do.
00:02:07.300 And his work on inflation has been absolutely outstanding.
00:02:09.840 So, Pierre, thank you so much for joining the Candace Malcolm Show.
00:02:12.180 It's always great to have you on the show, and we really appreciate all that you do.
00:02:15.440 Thanks for joining the program.
00:02:16.380 It's great to be with you, Candace.
00:02:19.160 So, let's talk about inflation, or as you call it, just inflation.
00:02:22.740 So, the government believes that this isn't a made-in-Canada problem.
00:02:26.600 Chrystia Freeland said this.
00:02:28.160 They think that it's part of a global problem, and the best way to address these concerns is
00:02:32.360 through things like childcare subsidies, housing subsidies.
00:02:35.540 So, I want to ask you, Pierre, what is wrong with this approach, and will the government
00:02:39.460 ever stop spending our money?
00:02:43.040 Well, let me start with the diagnosis, and then we'll talk about the cure.
00:02:49.560 The Liberals want you to believe that this is just some problem that came from elsewhere
00:02:54.240 around the world, and that they're doing their best to solve it.
00:02:57.200 But let's analyze that and break it down.
00:03:01.120 They say that, for example, COVID caused supply chain disruptions, which has raised prices.
00:03:08.960 Well, if that were true, then you would expect products that don't have supply chains to have
00:03:14.780 no inflation.
00:03:16.240 The most obvious example is raw land.
00:03:19.420 Raw land has no supply chain.
00:03:21.120 It's under our feet.
00:03:22.060 It's been here for thousands, maybe millions of years.
00:03:24.500 So, if inflation were just the result of blockages at shipping ports long thousands of miles away,
00:03:33.160 you wouldn't expect any inflation for something like land.
00:03:36.200 Well, it turns out land prices have inflated by 20% in just one year.
00:03:41.260 In other words, four times faster than the average inflation rate, as measured by Stats Canada's CPI index.
00:03:50.520 So, we know that there is something homegrown when land prices increase that fast.
00:03:58.700 And we also know that housing price inflation is an extraordinarily Canadian phenomenon.
00:04:06.680 We have the second biggest housing bubble in the world, according to Bloomberg.
00:04:11.100 Only New Zealand, which has the restriction of being a tiny island with a finite amount of land,
00:04:19.040 has higher housing prices than Canada relative to income.
00:04:24.880 Vancouver is now the second most unaffordable housing market in the world.
00:04:31.200 And Toronto is fifth.
00:04:32.520 So, those two cities are now ahead of San Francisco, Chicago, Manhattan, London, England,
00:04:38.720 all kinds of places with less land, more people, and more money.
00:04:41.660 So, that can only be a homegrown inflation phenomenon, homegrown being an intended pun.
00:04:50.700 And so, but the government is right about one thing.
00:04:54.460 There is inflation in other countries, in those countries that have the same inflationist policies
00:05:01.260 that our government has.
00:05:02.840 So, where they're printing money and running monster deficits, they're getting high levels of inflation.
00:05:09.520 It is true that you can, you have this phenomenon everywhere in the world that's tried, not just in Canada.
00:05:15.200 So, if you chart the G20 countries and you put money supply on the X axis and inflation on the Y axis,
00:05:26.620 you find a nearly perfect correlation.
00:05:30.440 Those countries that have had large money supply growth over the last year and a half have the highest inflation,
00:05:37.040 and those with low money supply growth have the lowest inflation.
00:05:41.380 So, it is the decision of countries to print money.
00:05:44.840 Now, liberals will say, we had no choice.
00:05:47.040 We had to print money and run huge deficits.
00:05:49.000 Well, we had to spend some money during the pandemic,
00:05:51.520 but we didn't have to have the biggest deficit in the G20.
00:05:54.600 And we also didn't have to print money to pay for those deficits.
00:05:58.360 We know this because countries who did not print money are succeeding now.
00:06:02.480 For example, Switzerland has 1.2% inflation.
00:06:07.660 Japan has 0.2% inflation.
00:06:11.340 Why?
00:06:11.680 Because they did not print excessive money to fund their governments.
00:06:15.620 So, that's how we diagnose the problem.
00:06:18.860 They're printing money to pay their bills, which inflates the price of everything.
00:06:23.320 Too many dollars chasing too few goods.
00:06:25.400 So, the second part of your question is, should they spend more money still to tackle inflation?
00:06:30.680 Well, that would be like trying to cure lung cancer by smoking more cigarettes,
00:06:34.860 or to cure obesity by wolfing down more cheeseburgers.
00:06:39.660 You'd be taking the cause as the cure.
00:06:43.380 Instead, we need to do the exact opposite.
00:06:46.900 Balance our budget.
00:06:48.100 Stop printing money.
00:06:49.460 Instead of creating more cash, create more of the stuff cash buys.
00:06:52.640 Build more homes.
00:06:53.720 Grow more food.
00:06:54.980 Deliver more clean Canadian energy to consumers.
00:06:58.340 Well, it seems laughable that the solution that the Liberals have come up with
00:07:02.140 is continuing on the path of spending more, borrowing more, and printing more.
00:07:07.340 Pierre, let's talk a little bit about the theory behind it,
00:07:10.440 because I don't think that people really recognize that this is a concerted effort.
00:07:15.260 It's a planned decision.
00:07:17.320 Something called the modern monetary theory,
00:07:19.860 which has been embraced by left-wing liberal governments like Justin Trudeau,
00:07:24.760 like Joe Biden down in the States,
00:07:26.580 and other governments around the world that you talked about
00:07:28.760 have this corresponding increase in inflation.
00:07:31.620 So, can you walk us through a little bit what the thinking is?
00:07:34.600 And, as a secondary question to that, I mean, they know what they're doing,
00:07:38.980 and they can recognize it.
00:07:39.940 They can read the statistics just as well as you can and I can.
00:07:42.980 So, why is it that they are sort of turning against the obvious answer
00:07:47.080 as to, you know, why inflation is happening?
00:07:49.380 Obviously, it's because of printing money.
00:07:51.100 Why is it that Liberals, I mean, they're smart people on the Liberal side of the aisle there.
00:07:55.260 They must understand, be able to read charts, and see the writing on the wall.
00:07:58.920 So, why is it that they are sort of denying the fact that printing money correlates with money being worth less?
00:08:07.140 Well, because they're profiting off it.
00:08:09.740 Printing money is highly profitable for big government and big business.
00:08:15.400 So, you know, a lot of media say,
00:08:17.720 well, even the banking economists endorse this money printing.
00:08:20.720 Well, of course, of course they endorse the money printing.
00:08:24.180 They get the money.
00:08:25.680 Where do you think the money goes first?
00:08:27.760 They are the first ones to touch it.
00:08:30.340 So, this is how it works.
00:08:31.960 There is, there's this thing called modern monetary theory, as you point out.
00:08:35.860 Others people call it the magic money tree, MMT, or more money today.
00:08:41.060 And it is this socialist idea that governments can just keep printing cash to pay for sumptuous welfare state spending.
00:08:50.940 The liberals here in Canada and the Federal Reserve in the United States have a twist on it.
00:08:58.420 They call it quantitative easing.
00:09:00.780 So, where modern monetary theory has the central bank print the money and literally just hand it over to the government to spend,
00:09:07.900 the liberal government and the U.S. government in Washington and other central banks around the world have something that's even more devious.
00:09:17.020 And that is to allow the financial institutions to play middleman and profit off of all of these transactions.
00:09:24.800 And they call this quantitative easing.
00:09:27.720 What a great, what a great euphemism.
00:09:29.180 It sounds so calming and so soothing.
00:09:32.600 Exactly.
00:09:33.180 Whenever they come up with a, with, you know, a 15 syllable technical term that no one can understand, you know they're hiding something.
00:09:43.760 But here, but here's how it actually works.
00:09:46.360 The government sells bonds when it runs deficits.
00:09:49.960 A bond is like an IOU.
00:09:51.560 So, the government says, here's a bond that I promised to, it's a promise from me to you to pay you a certain amount of money in, say, five years and to pay you interest in the in-between time.
00:10:03.160 That's how governments have raised money for deficits for years.
00:10:06.540 But what's happening with quantitative easing is that the Bank of Canada then goes and buys the same bond right back.
00:10:14.600 So, the government goes to a financial institution, sells a bond to raise some debt.
00:10:21.200 And then within days, our central bank, which is part of the government, buys the bond back at a higher price.
00:10:27.920 In other words, the financial institution profits off the difference between the price for which the government sold it, the bond, and the higher price for which the central bank bought it right back.
00:10:41.420 And the effect is to allow banks and credit unions and insurance companies, private equity firms to profit off of the difference between what our government sells and what our government pays for those bonds.
00:10:56.460 The other thing it does is it floods financial institutions with easy money.
00:11:01.260 If you want any proof of how the impact of this, look at the Bank of Canada's report just last week on the investors, real estate investors, getting 100% increase in the number of mortgages they've had in a year and a half.
00:11:17.320 That increase began in April of 2020.
00:11:21.700 Well, what happened one month earlier?
00:11:25.120 Quantitative easing began.
00:11:26.460 So, all of this cash started funneling into the financial system and it got lent out to investors who then used it to bid up the price of real estate.
00:11:35.260 And since that time, we've had a 32% increase in real estate prices.
00:11:40.140 And that has priced poor working class people out of homes while making the existing mansion owners or investors extraordinarily rich. 0.82
00:11:49.260 It's also ballooned the stock market.
00:11:50.820 For the first time, our stock market is worth about 130% of GDP.
00:11:56.200 So, what happens is when all this cash goes into the system, it inflates the assets that the rich own and the products that the poor and working class must buy.
00:12:06.840 So, quantitative easing in the states has bipartisan support, Candace.
00:12:12.820 Democrats love it because it inflates big government.
00:12:16.880 Republicans love it because it inflates big business.
00:12:20.280 Washington and Wall Street are happy and the working class gets screwed because it destroys the purchasing power of working class wages.
00:12:30.120 So, it's a monstrous wealth transfer from the have-nots to the have-yachts.
00:12:36.620 And so, Candace, you asked, are they smart?
00:12:39.200 Yes, they're bloody smart.
00:12:40.680 They know exactly what they're doing.
00:12:42.880 And that is they're enriching their friends.
00:12:45.560 The managerial class of CEOs, lobbyists, bureaucrats, corporate lawyers, investment bankers, they all make off like bandits.
00:12:56.280 They're not breaking any laws.
00:12:57.900 They're just profiting from a system the government puts in place.
00:13:01.760 They're perfectly honest people.
00:13:03.540 But the system is profiting them at the expense of the working class who pay the bills in this country.
00:13:10.680 Well, you make it sound incredibly cynical.
00:13:12.880 You know, usually in politics, if the question is, you know, is something happening because someone is evil or is something happening because someone is incompetent, I usually tend to lean more towards incompetency.
00:13:25.820 But the way that you're painting it seems quite cynical.
00:13:29.000 I know that the liberal government is sort of intentionally conflating two issues here.
00:13:33.000 They're sort of pretending that their printing of money and inflation is caused by the global supply chain issues, which is a real issue, Pierre.
00:13:39.700 It is happening around the world.
00:13:41.420 I'm buying some new furniture for my house and I'm living it because everything I ordered that was supposed to be here in November is now they're telling me, you know, you might have it in January.
00:13:49.300 So the supply chain crisis is real.
00:13:53.020 The COVID pandemic is having an impact on that.
00:13:55.280 I'm wondering if we could switch and you could address this issue as well.
00:13:59.260 What would a conservative government do to address the supply chain issue?
00:14:02.660 Do you think that Canada needs to do more to take back and build up our own domestic manufacturing industry, have a made in Canada solution the way that we that we see sort of emphasize in the US?
00:14:14.160 Or do you think or conservatives still sort of stand behind the free trade model of having everything sort of imported from China and having costs go down that way?
00:14:24.500 Well, I want to just address one last point on monetary policy with regards to supply chains.
00:14:32.100 A lot of people say, well, there's nothing that the Canadian government or the bank in Canada can do about foreign supply chain costs.
00:14:39.560 Well, actually, there is one very obvious thing, and that is if our dollar is more valuable, then we can outbid other countries for international goods.
00:14:47.500 So while we don't, in Canada, set the global oil price, if our dollar were higher, then our purchasing power for oil would also be higher.
00:14:58.300 So when governments print money, they deliberately actually devalue their currency, which reduces the purchasing power of their money in the international bidding war for scarce goods.
00:15:11.380 Again, I go back to Switzerland.
00:15:13.240 Switzerland has supply chains too.
00:15:15.780 They have no inflation.
00:15:16.860 Why?
00:15:18.000 The Swiss franc is extraordinarily powerful.
00:15:21.760 When you have a potent currency like that, you can just outbid other countries for scarce and obstructed goods.
00:15:31.020 So that's the first point I would make.
00:15:32.820 Secondly, on supply chains.
00:15:34.960 Well, I go back to my slogan, which was a very deliberate one in the last election.
00:15:41.220 We need an economy that makes more, costs less, with paychecks, not debt.
00:15:45.340 If we had unleashed the productive forces of free enterprise in our country, we could make more things here in Canada.
00:15:52.940 But here it is very expensive to set up a factory.
00:15:56.020 We're ranked 36 of 37 OECD nations for the delay time to get a building permit.
00:16:01.720 So why would you build a factory or warehouse here when you could go build it where they approve it much quicker?
00:16:09.000 We have an extremely punitive tax regime with payroll and carbon taxes expected to rise January 1st, which means businesses who are thinking about setting up a factory here or say Ohio will say, well, I'm not going to move to Canada because I have to pay all these payroll taxes and these energy taxes to produce the goods and services that the people need.
00:16:32.460 We, you know, we, you know, if we unleashed our energy sector by building pipelines, we could supply more of our domestic energy through from Canadian resources rather than importing them from expensive foreign producers.
00:16:46.720 If we reduced the taxes and taxes and taxes, we'd have a greater supply of workers who'd have more powerful after-tax paychecks.
00:16:58.220 You know, we have a million unfilled jobs, Candace.
00:17:01.000 Why is that?
00:17:02.240 Well, we're paying people not to work and then punishing them when they do work.
00:17:07.300 So why are we surprised when people don't work?
00:17:10.560 You know, you get less of what you punish.
00:17:13.640 You get more of what you reward.
00:17:15.300 We should reward work with lower income and payroll taxes instead of rewarding non-work with greater welfare programs.
00:17:24.680 Well, and it's even worse than that, Pierre.
00:17:26.740 I read the other day about how the CERB, which was intended for people who had lost work, that there was about six times as many people collecting it as there were job losses due to COVID.
00:17:36.320 So, you know, what happens when you pay people not to work?
00:17:40.660 People are going to take advantage of that.
00:17:42.080 And sadly, it looks like that's what we see on.
00:17:43.900 And then on the other side, you know, my mother-in-law owns a small business in Toronto and she can't keep employees because, like, why would anyone go out and work if they can make the same amount of money staying at home getting paid by Justin Trudeau?
00:17:56.380 I want to ask you a final question here, Pierre.
00:17:58.600 I know, OK, so last week, you know, Parliament's back.
00:18:02.240 Last week, the media and the Liberals were completely obsessed with this idea of finding out every individual personal health story of Conservative MPs and finding out why they had exemptions and who was vaccinated.
00:18:14.720 It was a total distraction.
00:18:15.840 And you rightly called out one journalist for falling into a Liberal trap.
00:18:19.840 This week, it seems like the House of Commons is completely distracted by a disingenuously named bill called the Conversion Therapy Bill, but it had unanimous support in the House.
00:18:31.160 Why is it that the issues that we're talking about right now, the things that really matter to Canadians, every time I talk to someone, they're talking about the cost of living.
00:18:37.440 They're talking about how expensive it is to get gas, how expensive it is to go grocery shopping.
00:18:40.800 And yet, when you look at Ottawa, you look at politicians, the media, the government, they're talking about issues that just don't matter at all, that are totally relevant to Canadians' day-to-day lives.
00:18:51.060 So, you work in politics, you've been on the Hill for a long time.
00:18:55.240 Why is Ottawa so out of touch?
00:18:59.020 Well, the press gallery is largely bought and paid for by the state.
00:19:03.880 CBC, of course, is the state broadcaster.
00:19:07.360 Then they pay journalists from other outlets to do extremely lucrative commentary on the network.
00:19:17.120 Very few people watch it, but it still pays a handsome sum.
00:19:22.420 And so, all of those journalists then have to tow the CBC line if they want to keep getting the gravy.
00:19:27.720 And then there's a half-billion-dollar subsidy for the rest of the outlets.
00:19:32.780 So, basically, you have an ecosystem of media who live off big government, and they don't, therefore, want to report on any of the painful consequences of big government.
00:19:45.360 Of course, big government overspending is causing this inflation.
00:19:49.600 A half trillion dollars of deficits mean more dollars chasing fewer goods, driving higher prices.
00:19:55.600 And those who live off of the ecosystem of big government don't want the average Joe on the street to know the reason he's paying more is because the state is spending more.
00:20:11.540 So, you know, they want to talk about every distraction they can conjure up so that nobody realizes why and how the system is screwing them.
00:20:22.780 And so, the important thing for us is to call it out.
00:20:28.440 Be very honest and very blunt when you get these distracting, phony questions like I did.
00:20:34.000 You know, journalists saying, what are the medical exemptions that four or five Tory MPs have to avoid vaccination?
00:20:43.700 Are you serious?
00:20:45.000 Like, as though I would call people up and ask them their deeply sensitive private medical information,
00:20:50.560 as though that is my job as a Member of Parliament and finance critic, that is how crazy it's gotten.
00:20:56.700 That's why it's so important to have independent media that doesn't rely on the state and doesn't just tow the government line like your publication.
00:21:06.760 Well, I really appreciate that, Pierre, and it's always a pleasure to have you on.
00:21:11.400 We appreciate your time.
00:21:12.460 I know you're busy, but thank you so much for joining the show, supporting True North, and coming on today.
00:21:17.600 I hope you and your family have a wonderful Christmas holiday, and we hope to see you again in the new year.
00:21:22.120 Excellent.
00:21:22.580 Merry Christmas to you and your family.
00:21:24.580 Thank you so much.
00:21:25.440 All right.
00:21:25.680 Thank you for watching.
00:21:26.400 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:21:28.380 Thank you.