EXCLUSIVE： CPC leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre.
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.66583
Summary
On this episode of Conservative Leadership Candidates, we speak with Jason Kenney, who is running to become the next Prime Minister of Canada. In this episode, we discuss why he's running for the party leadership, why he thinks he's the best choice, and how he plans to govern if he wins the election.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Mr. Polyev. It's been a pretty lively campaign
00:00:07.440
for you so far, I imagine, and we appreciate you speaking to our viewers out here in the West.
00:00:13.440
Good to be with you. Thanks for having me on the show.
00:00:16.380
So I'll get ready to it. You know, one of the themes I see in general right now from a lot of
00:00:21.720
people when it comes to government or the party as well and things like that is trust. People don't
00:00:28.120
feel very trusting of government and politicians. I mean, that's sort of always kind of been
00:00:32.120
happening. But in these tumultuous times, we've had a lot of that. And I did ask some of our viewers
00:00:37.040
to say questions. And one from Dale Grabb was about accountability. Like with the last leadership,
00:00:42.440
we don't need to go into so much that. But the candidate sort of proposed a lot of things one
00:00:47.200
way and then didn't follow through later on, which I think kind of led to the change in leadership.
00:00:52.480
But what sort of measures could we put in to ensure accountability in matters of transparency or
00:00:59.520
Are you talking about within the government itself or within the Conservative Party apparatus?
00:01:05.400
There are two levels. Yeah, I packed a lot into that, I'm afraid. Well, in the leadership and so
00:01:10.240
on, your accountability would be to the members. And you're running kind of for two positions right
00:01:14.000
now. So there's mechanisms within the party. And we saw those exercised recently. But I would like
00:01:20.420
to talk about the potential Pierre Polly of Prime Minister. What kind of measures could we bring in
00:01:25.700
and then to feel that you would be following through on your word on the way up and following
00:01:30.320
after that, I guess? Well, I was the parliamentary secretary in the Harper government that ushered
00:01:35.560
the Accountability Act through Canada's parliament. That was the toughest anti-corruption law in Canadian
00:01:41.200
history. Still is. In fact, the scandals that have ensnared Trudeau are all the result of breaking
00:01:46.320
that law. It expanded access to information, separated the prosecution arm from the political
00:01:52.640
arm of government. It banned politicians from taking gifts from people with whom they have
00:02:01.680
government business, something the prime minister was all found guilty of doing. And later on in this
00:02:07.140
campaign, I will be announcing new measures to get tough on corruption and expand accountability
00:02:13.680
to empower citizens to hold bureaucrats and politicians accountable when they may waste money or defraud
00:02:21.340
the public treasury. So I believe the government is servant and the citizen master. And that is what I
00:02:32.500
will enact when I'm prime minister. Okay. So when it comes to that transparency, I've noticed like
00:02:39.800
Blacklock's reporter has been very effective actually in some of those committee hearings and
00:02:43.940
things like that, but sometimes they still hit a wall of redacted stuff or the old, you know,
00:02:48.540
toss a giant bill for an information inquiry. So would there be an intention to make it a little easier
00:02:54.560
to get in and check on our, what is our government? Yes, absolutely. I want to give more power for access
00:03:01.680
to information and more proactive disclosure of government decisions and expenditures so that people
00:03:08.240
know where their money is going and can trace every penny. There's no reason why with the modern
00:03:14.860
technology, we can't have easily traceable government spending so that we can follow not just the dollar,
00:03:22.140
but right down to the penny, what is spent and where it went. And that's the kind of transparency that
00:03:29.040
I will enact as prime minister. Great. And then maybe I'll move a bit back towards the partisan end of
00:03:34.640
things. A problem we have as conservatives in general, and as we've seen a lot of conservative
00:03:39.140
leaders lately, it seems, haven't resigned from their positions, you know, choosing to retire.
00:03:44.760
They've been pulled down by upset party members, and we're certainly in the midst of quite a bit of
00:03:48.900
turmoil in Alberta with our provincial leadership right now. So this leadership race has already
00:03:54.560
gotten off, you know, to a heated start, and that's fine to be lively, I guess, but we do also worry that
00:03:59.460
it might turn into something that could be fracturous. How can you maintain this race while
00:04:03.520
differentiating yourself from other candidates, but not letting it get too divisive?
00:04:08.800
Well, everything my campaign has said about the other candidates is just factual and on the public
00:04:13.300
record. Patrick Brown supports a carbon tax. He supports, actually endorsed Justin Trudeau's
00:04:18.260
version of the carbon tax, and said he would impose it in Ontario. It is a public fact that
00:04:24.500
Brown, like Trudeau, has been twice convicted of breaking the ethics law, in his case, the Ontario ethics
00:04:31.080
law, and he's already attacking Stephen Harper, something Trudeau does as well. So I just disagree
00:04:36.660
with him and that approach. Jean Charest was a liberal premier who raised taxes, brought in a carbon
00:04:41.380
tax, attacked Stephen Harper, and endorsed a long gun registry. So I disagree with those policies, and I
00:04:49.440
think it's better to have those disagreements out in the open rather than have these two who are in a
00:04:54.900
coalition together sneak into the leadership by hiding what they really believe and then thrusting
00:04:59.880
a big surprise on party members after the fact. Your second part of your question was, how do we
00:05:05.860
unite? Simple. We unite around one core principle, freedom. All conservatives can endorse that principle.
00:05:12.520
Social conservatives want religious freedom and freedom to preach without censorship. Progressive
00:05:18.240
conservatives want the freedom for women, gays, minorities, and others to live their lives in
00:05:26.240
equality and without government interference. Fiscal conservatives want economic freedom to control
00:05:32.440
their own money, start businesses without government blocking them. Libertarians want freedom online,
00:05:39.300
freedom to own cryptographic assets and to express themselves. Rural and firearms conservatives want the
00:05:46.920
freedom to own their property lawfully and without undue confiscation. So these freedoms bind all
00:05:55.080
different conservatives back together. And so I will unite conservatives around freedom. And that's how I will
00:06:04.180
bring together the country to become prime minister. Okay, so we've seen a time when our in exceptional
00:06:11.080
circumstances, our civil liberties have been challenged more than we've seen in our lifetimes, whether it
00:06:15.960
was through pandemic legislations, you know, ostensibly to control the pandemic, fair enough. And then with
00:06:21.940
the short invocation of the Emergencies Act, how can we be assured, though, that I mean, I understand the
00:06:28.320
reason for an Emergencies Act is sometimes you just get something that's beyond the pale, but we want to make
00:06:32.380
sure it's absolutely the very possible last resort for a government to go to. And people's confidence, I think,
00:06:40.100
It has indeed. Trudeau is on a pandemic power trip. He caused this emergency by targeting truckers with a
00:06:48.520
ridiculous new mandate that they had worked safely without for two prior years, even though they are
00:06:56.820
the very people least likely to spread any kind of virus because they're all alone in a truck all day and
00:07:02.100
all night sleeping and driving. And he did it at a time when the rest of the world is lifting mandates and
00:07:07.080
restrictions. So he deliberately provoked that crisis. And then he used the crisis he provoked
00:07:12.720
to invoke more to give himself yet more powers. I've been calling out Trudeau's pandemic power trip
00:07:19.180
for two years since March of 2020. I was probably the leading voice against his attempt to give
00:07:25.940
himself the power to raise any tax to any level for any reason without parliamentary approval back when
00:07:32.760
the pandemic first started. I fought against his abusive tax money in the We Scandal. And I fought
00:07:38.820
against his attempt to regulate internet speech and helped Rachel Thomas from Lethbridge stop that
00:07:47.880
bill in its tracks before the last election. So I've been fighting for freedom against Trudeau's
00:07:53.440
pandemic power trip since the COVID crisis began. And I continue to do that as now the leading voice
00:08:01.520
to end all mandates and restrictions so Canadians can take back control of their lives.
00:08:08.660
So getting to that freedom and an important part of transparency, I mean, independent media
00:08:12.580
like ours has been on the rise and it's been turning into an alternative. You've already committed to
00:08:17.340
defunding the CBC, which is appreciated. But we worry, we're worried a lot. We've got a bill C-11,
00:08:22.080
I believe, that's coming forward now that there seems to be quite a move on to strangle the growth
00:08:26.660
and development of alternative media sources out there. Would you act to protect those?
00:08:31.560
Yes, I led the charge against C-10, which was the forerunner to what is now C-11.
00:08:37.600
Well, I should give more credit to Rachel Thomas because she was the one who pushed,
00:08:43.240
she was the critic. I worked with her to stop that horrible bill. And it's really unfortunate that the
00:08:50.180
government-backed media and the corporate media want this bill to go ahead because it will further
00:08:57.260
entrench their oligopoly on speech. They are acting as gatekeepers. They want to keep out the
00:09:04.540
competition so that they can control what's reported and basically guarantee that it's
00:09:10.900
government talking points that Canadians hear without an alternative voice is getting a hearing.
00:09:17.300
That's why the media in the press gallery is so hard on me because I'm fighting against their
00:09:24.000
gatekeeping and in favor of freedom of expression and freedom of competition in the media. So yes,
00:09:30.820
I will repeal C-11 and I will repeal other bills if they pass that Trudeau is proposing to curtail
00:09:38.920
Well, it's comforting to know. I mean, it's so important that we have these means to communicate.
00:09:42.980
I mean, I understand there's a lot of misinformation out there, but we can leave it to citizens to
00:09:47.480
Well, frankly, there's a lot of misinformation in the corporate and government media as well.
00:09:53.320
There's a tremendous amount of disinformation that the press gallery publishes. And so let's,
00:10:00.580
we want to get rid of disinformation. Let's start with ending that.
00:10:04.900
Great. So, I mean, we're coming from the West, of course, we're the Western Standard that we've got a
00:10:08.600
lot of Central Canadian listeners, but regional challenges and equity have long been an issue for
00:10:13.280
us out here, of course. And I'm of the old bent of the Reform Party way back when, and Senate reform
00:10:19.660
was a very large issue for us. I mean, the Senate right now is supposed to address regional inequity,
00:10:25.160
but realistically, it's terribly imbalanced. Would you consider looking into reforming the Senate?
00:10:31.780
I mean, seriously reforming it, not just, you know, perhaps tweaking it here and there?
00:10:35.780
Well, the truth is, I don't think it will happen. I'm just being blunt with you. Like,
00:10:41.600
I don't want to be one of those politicians that comes on air and tells you a bunch of stuff just
00:10:45.320
to get your vote and then goes back on it. The Supreme Court ruled that abolishing the Senate
00:10:51.000
requires 10 of 10 provinces. Even reforming it would require seven provinces representing 50%
00:10:57.700
of the population. We'd have to open the Constitution, which would begin a whole new can
00:11:01.940
of worms about every other grievance that people have with the constitutional structure of the
00:11:07.200
nation. And I don't think we would get to a consensus. I don't like the fact that our Senate
00:11:11.980
is unelected. I fought for an elected Senate. In fact, when I was a teenager, I worked on the
00:11:16.800
Senate election campaign of Ted Morton when the Alberta government was promoting Senate elections.
00:11:24.140
And I helped him as a volunteer at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, collecting signatures for him to run.
00:11:30.340
So that's how far back my arguments for Senate democratization goes. What I would support is
00:11:38.140
appointing the winners of elections that provincial governments hold in their provinces. So I would
00:11:44.560
appoint the candidates that Albertans elect in their locally held vote. If any other province
00:11:51.840
held similar elections, I would appoint the winner in those cases as well. So that's something doable,
00:11:57.120
doesn't require a constitutional change. And I want to promise only things I can actually do.
00:12:02.460
Good. That was the next question. I was going to ask if you would commit to appointing the ones we
00:12:06.040
elect, because we do have some senators elect right now. Yes. I'm sure they can see... They should be
00:12:10.300
appointed. They should be appointed. Sorry, the elected ones should get an appointment to the Senate.
00:12:14.920
Yes. It's the best we can do without reforming the entire system. I know constitutional change
00:12:19.260
is very difficult. I'll get to some familiar territory. Inflation, of course, is going wild. It's running
00:12:24.720
rampant. There's a number of factors. I mean, government spending is a huge part of it and
00:12:28.600
borrowing the energy costs as well. So in addressing inflation, though, I mean, how can we get that under
00:12:34.100
control reasonably? Well, three things. Let's start with what I call just inflation. When Trudeau started
00:12:42.180
printing money to finance the half trillion... ...has had in the last two years, I predicted we have
00:12:51.780
inflation. Why? Because throughout thousands of years of history, dictators, emperors, prime ministers,
00:12:56.660
presidents, print money to pay their bills, create coins out of cheap copper, as they used to do,
00:13:02.400
to pay for their opulent spending, they end up causing inflation. Why? Because more dollars chase
00:13:08.160
fewer goods, which leads to higher prices. It's not rocket science. So I said this would happen.
00:13:15.160
Now, so the first... That's what I call just inflation. So how would I stop that? Well,
00:13:20.100
I'll phase out the deficit, cancel the $100 billion slush fund of spending. Trudeau is promising
00:13:24.600
defund the CBC, cancel the infrastructure bank, which is a colossal boondoggle, and also root out
00:13:31.440
other waste and mismanagement to get rid of our deficits. So there is no need for money printing.
00:13:36.320
Secondly, I would ax the carbon tax. John Chere, Patrick Brown passionately support the carbon tax.
00:13:43.720
They want higher gas prices as a stated policy objective. And of course, the Bank of Canada
00:13:49.200
the governor admitted this week that the carbon tax is adding to inflation. I would ax that tax to
00:13:54.600
bring inflation down. The third thing is instead of creating cash, my free enterprise economy will
00:14:00.720
create more of what cash buys. I'll remove the regulatory gatekeepers to produce more Canadian
00:14:08.220
energy, to reduce taxes and regulation on our farmers so they can produce more affordable food.
00:14:16.860
And I'll incentivize municipalities and sell off as well as selling off 15% of federal buildings
00:14:24.320
to turn into more housing, to get the regulatory gatekeepers who block housing construction out of
00:14:30.380
the way and increase the supply by millions of housing units so that there's more housing to have. So in
00:14:38.340
other words, stop printing cash and start creating more of what cash buys. That's my common sense
00:14:49.340
Okay. Would deregulating some of the agricultural controls that do lead to inflation involve supply
00:14:55.180
management? I mean, that's been proven to raise the cost of a lot of consumer staples with dairy
00:14:59.660
goods and poultry products and such. And it was a large part of the past conservative leadership
00:15:06.340
I'm not proposing a change in that area. And the reason is that the farmers who own the quota
00:15:12.960
have had to pay millions of dollars for it. And furthermore, if we bought them out, then
00:15:19.300
it would cost more to do that than it would to keep the system that is in place right now.
00:15:25.420
Overall, I do support more choice and freedom in the agricultural sector. That's why I was
00:15:30.540
a part of the Harper government that got rid of the wheat board and unleashed the productivity
00:15:35.920
of our grains in our Western prairie provinces. And I'll also be reducing to other taxes and
00:15:46.260
simplifying regulations so that our farmers and ranchers can spend more time producing nutritious
00:15:52.600
food and less time filling out paperwork and being hounded by government bureaucrats.
00:15:57.260
Great. So in your campaign, do you plan on coming out West Alberta pretty soon?
00:16:02.000
I do. I should point out I was already in Saskatchewan, the province of my parents' birth. My folks
00:16:09.000
are from Saskatoon and Leoville in Saskatchewan. So I visited there. And of course, I'm from Calgary,
00:16:15.320
as you know, I'm born and raised there. My folks still live there. So I'm going to be back to visit
00:16:20.180
them and connect with my many Western family and friends in the great province of Alberta.
00:16:28.500
And I'll make sure you know about it when I have a date nailed down.
00:16:32.180
Great. Thanks. Well, I hope we'll get the opportunity to talk when you do come out here.
00:16:36.420
Is there anything else you'd add before I let you go?
00:16:39.780
Well, whenever someone comes to my office for a job, I always ask them, why do you want the job? So I have
00:16:45.940
to answer that question myself. I want to be prime minister to put you and every Canadian back in
00:16:52.420
control of their own lives by making Canada the freest nation on earth. That's my purpose. That's
00:16:59.700
what I've always believed. And that's why I'm in this. Well, thank you very much for joining me today,
00:17:04.740
Mr. Polyev. And we'll be watching your campaign with interest. Thank you for having me.