As we get closer to Christmas, we like to take a step back and take stock of the situation in the country. What does it mean to be a Canadian Conservative in 2021? What are the core values and beliefs that hold Conservatives together? Today we ll speak to the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer, to discuss.
00:01:56.020And, you know, you could probably write a book on analyzing all the different iterations of the Conservative movement over Canada's history and leading up to where we are today.
00:02:05.380I've always believed that there are a few principles that all Conservatives can agree on in general terms.
00:02:12.020And the biggest one of that is just kind of acknowledging that there are natural limits to government, that the government isn't supposed to grow so big as to fill every space in our society.
00:02:24.080And that's something that, you know, a Conservative from Western Canada, Conservative from Eastern Canada can agree on, that somebody, a fiscal Conservative, a Democratic Reform Conservative can agree on, that at a certain point, government needs to know its bounds.
00:02:39.560And I think that's the biggest difference between left-wing people and Conservative-minded people in Canada today, is that the left is always clamoring for more and more government, more government restrictions, more government control, more government regulations.
00:02:51.220And Conservatives understand that at some point, you have to say, no, it's better for society to solve this challenge in another way, other than government.
00:02:59.740I think that's the biggest thing that holds us together.
00:03:02.460And then respect for the tax dollar as well.
00:03:04.660We are hyper aware that every dollar that the government has to spend first has to come out of a taxpayer's pocket.
00:03:11.160And when government takes from one to give to another, that there are costs associated with that.
00:03:16.300And so we respect the taxpayer dollar profoundly and really try to measure our success in getting good results for the least amount of money spent.
00:03:27.080They brag about how much money they're spending and don't really care if the money's doing any good.
00:03:31.860So I would say that those are the two biggest principles that all Conservatives can agree on.
00:03:36.260Okay, so the Conservative Party in Canada is a big tent Conservative Party, and it includes Libertarians, fiscal Conservatives, people who are more social Conservative, religious Conservatives, New Canadians, those types of people, as well as sort of more socially progressive red Tories that might come from Eastern Canada or the big cities.
00:03:58.220And so it's tough to sort of keep all of these types of Conservatives together in one party.
00:04:04.240You look down at the U.S. and the Republican Party.
00:04:06.380They're also a big tent Conservative Party.
00:04:08.020They disagree on more things than they agree on, probably.
00:04:11.480But what keeps them together is the respect for the Constitution.
00:04:15.000That's something that they can hold up and say, this is what we respect.
00:04:19.040The limits on government are written down in this document, and we're going to try to uphold this document.
00:04:24.780Canada, we don't really have an equivalent of that.
00:04:26.960So how do Conservatives prevent the sort of slow, sort of slippery slope to bigger government that you sort of see?
00:04:34.980You know, every year there's new government suggestions that the Liberals come up with, new ideas to push us into bigger and bigger government, more and more spending.
00:04:43.300And the Conservatives are just kind of constantly reacting and pushing back.
00:04:46.720So do you think that we would be better served as a Conservative movement or Conservatives in Canada if we had something very specific that helped us, you know, keep government limited, stay away from big government initiatives, and always sort of defaulting to government?
00:05:02.880What do you think we could possibly use in Canada to help sort of anchor us to a more principled conservatism?
00:05:09.820Well, I think the key is to find the common ground between the different kinds of Conservatives that you've mentioned.
00:05:17.540And, you know, the key for our Conservative caucus and our Conservative movement is to recognize that we do agree on much more than we disagree on, or at the very least, the things that we agree on are higher ranked priorities for most members of the party.
00:05:33.320So there is actually a lot of room to build those coalitions between the different types of Conservatives.
00:05:40.080You talk about kind of current issues and how Conservatives can kind of always respond to them without necessarily always being reactive.
00:05:49.020And that is a challenge when you're up against two federal parties who are constantly advocating for more spending and more government control and the mainstream media doing the very same, you know, always kind of creating that market amongst Canadians for more and more government.
00:06:05.120That's why I've always supported independent media such as yourselves and others who are kind of trying to tell another side of the story.
00:06:13.560If we use the example of kind of some rock-solid principles that Conservatives can build that narrative around, we're actually in a great position to do that and link it back to the Charter.
00:06:27.400And here we have, in the current context, we have Justin Trudeau promoting the idea of tabling legislation, announcing his intention to regulate the Internet.
00:06:36.740That he's going to restrict free speech and freedom of expression, especially as it relates to what Canadians can post and what they can see online.
00:06:45.560That's something that runs counter to, you know, our entire history as a country and certainly the Charter and the Bill of Rights that John Diefenbraker brought in.
00:06:55.160Free speech is an essential bedrock that all Conservatives can agree on.
00:06:59.160And so here we have a great issue where we can show Canadians and tell the reasons why we don't want the government to have that power.
00:07:07.000The thing that's so kind of seductive about the left-wing ideology and their communications is that it's often very, you know, they can lead with their motives, you know.
00:07:18.800So we do have some things online that I, as a parent, am concerned about.
00:07:24.400I'm concerned about people promoting hatred.
00:07:28.020And so the left comes along and solves that with more government.
00:07:31.180They do this all the time on fiscal issues, on all kinds of different policy matters.
00:07:36.680And a lot of people want that problem solved.
00:07:39.880And so when the left-wing parties are saying, well, government's the right thing to do it, there's a simplicity about that, that, you know, many people can be swayed by that.
00:07:49.940So what Conservatives need to do is we need to say, hold on a second, we're concerned about the same thing.
00:07:54.580We don't want people to be bullied online.
00:07:56.460We don't, you know, we want to have some kind of ability for people to interact online without being exposed to hatred and things like that.
00:08:03.040But you don't want to live in the world in which the government gets to decide that.
00:08:06.740And the downsides, the negative consequences of empowering government to do more things always creates more misery than solving the problem.
00:08:18.580And we see this time and time again in every state that gets bigger and bigger and more and more intrusive into people's lives.
00:08:24.780They always hide their bad policies with good intentions.
00:08:32.320The Berlin Wall was designed to keep enemies of the state out originally.
00:08:36.740And so we always see the left dressing up their horrible policies with good intentions.
00:08:42.060And what Conservatives have to do is we have to constantly remind people about the downsides of the expansion of government control, the misery that state intervention into the economy, curtailments on our individual liberties lead to.
00:08:54.720And we need to do that everywhere we see it so that we can, you know, make the case for smaller government actually leading to an improvement in the quality of life from fiscal issues to societal issues, you name it.
00:09:10.240Our principles will always have better results than what the left is offering.
00:09:14.460It's been tested and found to be true everywhere it's been tried.
00:09:17.880Absolutely. And I will just note that when you were giving your farewell speech as leader of the Conservative Party, one of the things you said was you told Conservatives specifically to challenge the legacy media and their left-wing narratives.
00:09:30.340And you gave a little shout out to True North.
00:09:35.040And I think it's so important that we offer alternatives, right?
00:09:39.840So it's not just that Conservatives can stand there and say, no, it's a bad idea for the government to regulate speech.
00:09:45.160But you have to offer an alternative, be it, you know, in civil society, a lot of the solutions that the Liberals propose for problems in society, they'd probably be better off solved by the community or by individual families or by churches and charities as opposed to the sort of heavy-handedness of the state.
00:10:02.860And same with the media. It's like we can sit there and criticize the media all day, but we should also turn in and support Conservative efforts to try to make a more balanced landscape in the media.
00:10:14.080So we really appreciate you saying that.
00:10:17.040And really, you're one of the few Conservative voices at the time that was saying that.
00:10:25.360I mean, I get frustrated when I see kind of the monolithic media narrative get constructed around various issues and recognize how hard it is for Conservatives to kind of swim upstream against that.
00:10:40.560And, you know, I haven't agreed with every single thing I see on True North or, you know, the post-millennial or some other independent things.
00:10:48.080But I just, I really appreciate what those, what yours and others are trying to do with just creating more dialogue, more opportunities for the other side of the debate to be talked about and dissected.
00:11:00.640And quite frankly, to cover things that the mainstream media just won't cover because, you know, of the bias there.
00:11:06.900So there's a lot of things that you guys have covered that the mainstream media won't.
00:11:12.420And it's imperative for voters to have all sides of an issue and to find out kind of what some alternative philosophies are about that.
00:11:20.620So, yeah, happy to, happy to give you the shout out and I hope, I hope, I hope it, I hope it continues to grow.
00:11:30.080We've had a, we've had a great year and, you know, I think that the work that we're, that we're doing, I don't, I don't always agree with everything that's on True North either, because the idea is that we have different perspectives, different voices.
00:11:41.600But then when it comes to the news, we just sort of try to report the facts as they are.
00:11:45.620And like you say, so many times it's a story that, that, that should be covered in the legacy media.
00:11:49.400The CBC should be reporting on these things, but they don't.
00:11:51.980I want to ask you a little bit about your role as the shadow minister, the critic of infrastructure and communities.
00:11:57.700Because while you, while Catherine McKenna was the infrastructure minister, you helped shine light on the fact that the government had spent $188 billion in something called an investing in Canada plan.
00:12:08.540It was slammed by the auditor general, thousands of projects were missing or unaccounted for.
00:12:13.260There were massive delays, no tracking.
00:12:15.900So for viewers who might be unfamiliar with the infrastructure portfolio and this government's failed plan, you really don't hear about it much in the media, given such a huge price tag.
00:12:27.600I'm wondering if you could just sort of shine some light on the situation and, and, and talk about, you know, what, what this money was supposed to be for in an ideal world.
00:12:36.700Should it be spent or, or, or is that too much?
00:12:38.980And, and, and if, if you were the infrastructure minister, how would you sort of better handle this file?
00:12:46.580And as you point out, it's $180 billion.
00:12:49.940What we found over the last couple of years is that the government has put, the liberal government has put in all kinds of filters and lenses aimed at achieving certain outcomes, but they had no ability to track those outcomes.
00:13:03.640So, so they, they, they'd say, you know, our priority is to get, you know, X type of projects built and it'll have this kind of, of impact.
00:13:12.180And then what the auditor general found out was that there was no tracking mechanism to see if, if those targets were, were even being hit, hit.
00:13:19.200But in addition, we've heard from municipalities who all over the country, remember every region who have good projects, projects that will have a huge return on investment, you know, expanding road access or expanding water capacity to handle new, new growth within a community.
00:13:35.460And what they're telling us is that the projects are just sitting on tables in, in, in Ottawa and because of the delays, the costs are going up and, and the timelines are getting stretched.
00:13:45.700So very, very critical report from the auditor general.
00:13:48.460We've also heard that they put in all these lenses, they call the filters or lenses to screen out which projects will be approved and which ones won't.
00:13:58.100And some of those lenses are really preventing good projects from going ahead.
00:14:01.900So for example, there's a climate change lens, there's an indigenous lens, there's several other lenses, which if projects don't speak to that, then they fall down the ranking list.
00:14:11.800And as a result, there's a lot of communities where, you know, they just, they need regular old infrastructure, you know, they, they need their, their, their roads rebuilt, they need highway access, they need water systems.
00:14:21.320And there isn't always a linkage to some of those lenses.
00:14:24.820And so what we've heard from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is that we need some more flexibility, which goes back to another conservative principle, which is the decentralization of government and recognizing that Ottawa doesn't know best.
00:14:36.520And that creating a one size fits all program where you're applying the same regulatory and same parameters from coast to coast for large cities and small, that it doesn't work.
00:14:46.860We're big believers in letting the provinces and letting municipalities determine for themselves what their priorities are.
00:14:53.240And we can support that without totally dictating what, how they should be spending the money that they receive from Ottawa.
00:15:00.660In addition, what we found out, Candice, was about the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, which is a giant boondoggle, a $35 billion bank that Justin Trudeau created, which was supposed to leverage private sector investment.
00:15:15.080And the idea was that if the government took on some of the risk of these large projects, that more private sector investors would put their own money into some of these large scale projects.
00:15:24.740Well, Justin Trudeau must be the only person who could run a bank these days that loses money, but the operating costs keep going up.
00:15:31.720There's been no private sector leveraging at all, and the bank hasn't completed a single project in over four years of existence.
00:15:38.760It's basically become a corporate welfare bank.
00:15:40.920We found projects where large companies were promoting a project.
00:15:46.500For example, Fortis Energy was promoting a project to help one of their subsidiaries fill the needs of the electricity market.
00:15:54.740Great project, but it's a multi-billion dollar company that has lots of success in the energy sector, both in the United States and Canada.
00:16:02.800And for some reason, Justin Trudeau decided that Canadian taxpayers should help underwrite this project and put your tax dollar into a project to help a giant multi-billion dollar company make even more money.
00:16:15.880And conservatives have no problem with companies making money, providing goods and services, and making profit on that for its workers and its shareholders.
00:16:24.160But we don't believe that the Canadian taxpayers should be underwriting these projects when large, profitable companies are already doing that type of thing.
00:16:31.200It's wild, and again, you don't really hear too much about that.
00:16:36.080Andrew, it's wild how much money this Trudeau government just wastes without even regard.
00:16:41.140I mean, creating a bank that does nothing for $35 billion is outrageous.
00:16:45.660So in Canada, this is a final question.
00:16:50.040I constantly hear from people trying to afford to buy their first home.
00:16:53.760They end up having to move, like, you know, an hour and a half away from Toronto just to be able to afford a single-family home.
00:16:59.960You know, when it comes to the cost of filling up gas, the cost of getting groceries, everything is more expensive.
00:17:07.180I think the housing thing really is such a big issue for Canadians.
00:17:12.380And we don't really see, you know, in theory, that's maybe what an infrastructure and communities minister would do.
00:17:18.700And yet, that doesn't really seem to be the focus of this government.
00:17:21.760Like you said, they're more focused on ideology and making sure that there's climate change and Indigenous lenses on things, whatever that means.
00:17:28.500What do you think that the Liberal government could do right now to make things more affordable for Canadians?
00:17:34.000Well, the first thing they need to do is they need to stop printing money.
00:17:37.260The increase in the housing costs is directly linked to inflation.
00:17:41.840And inflation rates are running over double the normal rate of inflation.
00:17:46.600That is all directly linked to the government of Canada running out of money to borrow.
00:17:49.960And so they turned to the Bank of Canada and they cranked up the printing presses.
00:17:53.940And at the beginning of the pandemic, the Bank of Canada was creating $5 billion worth of new currency every week.
00:18:00.280They've tapered that off somewhat, but they're still creating a lot of money every week out of thin air,
00:18:05.140buying government bonds and flooding the financial system with brand new money.
00:18:10.740Anytime you have more dollars chasing the same amount of goods, you're going to see prices go up.
00:18:15.180Especially when it comes to assets, the institutions, the financial sector, they receive the money first.
00:18:22.320And they understand that to protect against inflation, you have to buy assets.
00:18:26.500So there's been a lot of investment, not in terms of building new homes, but buying up homes throughout Canada as a hedge against inflation.
00:18:36.700But the money flowing through the system also causes inflation, which has an effect on home price as well.
00:18:43.940But then there's a larger problem with or an equal problem as it relates to the supply of new homes coming onto the market.
00:18:50.300And one of the things that we've talked about as the Conservative Party, both in this election and in the 2019 election,
00:18:55.420we talked about making it easier for new units to come onto the market, that all the policy tools on the demand side won't work if there isn't an increase on the supply side as well.
00:19:08.640And so some of the things we've talked about was linking some of the infrastructure dollars to municipalities to create more housing stock.
00:19:15.020So that could be investments in public transit to enable more developments.
00:19:21.160It could look at incentivizing municipalities to reduce their regulatory framework and their approvals process timeline.
00:19:29.760There's a C.D. Howell report that indicated that there's over $200,000 in the cost of the average home in Canada is directly linked to regulatory issues at the planning level, the municipal and provincial level.
00:19:41.840So there's a lot that we can do to free up new to facilitate new units coming onto the market by working with municipalities, incentivizing them to reduce the regulatory framework and their timelines and build that critical infrastructure in areas and ways that can build up that housing stock.
00:19:58.740If we don't look at the supply side and we only look at the demand side, we're just going to have more dollars chasing the same number of units.
00:20:04.120We're going to continue to see that cycle of prices going up.
00:20:07.680Yeah, I mean, you see that I'm from Vancouver originally.
00:20:10.280I spent some time in the summer there.
00:20:12.200And, you know, you have these whole communities where there's just single family homes, even though, you know, there are apartment complexes sort of nearby.
00:20:19.200And it's like, you know, so many more people could live here.
00:20:22.540Obviously, you'd have to fix the roads and the bridges and through there is because the traffic is already really bad in Vancouver.
00:20:28.060But it's pretty shocking how many single family homes there are right in the center of Vancouver that could easily be converted.
00:20:35.000Well, it's really interesting stuff, Andrew, food for thought.
00:20:37.740And I appreciate your insightful comments, especially on what it means to be a conservative.
00:20:41.280So thank you so much for joining the show.
00:20:43.480Merry Christmas to you and your family.