The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben sits down with Pierre Poilievre to ask him why he wants to be the next Prime Minister

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Guest: Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, running to be Prime Minister of Canada If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome back to The Ben Mulroney Show. We have been talking about this interview all morning. Very pleased to welcome into the studio, live in studio for the very first time, conservative leader, Pierre Poliev. You're also here with your lovely wife, Anna. Great to see both of you. Yes, great to be here.

And you know, you've been, you've been on the road with the family, right? You've been on the road. Yes. It's, I remember those days. I remember those days of traveling with my family. I remember them entirely fondly. What's it been like?

How old were you? Oh gosh, first one, 84, I was eight. I was eight years old. Yeah. I loved all of it. You know, the staffers became like family. Yeah. I got to see, um, I got to see my dad in the best possible light because it was what he wanted to be

doing. And, you know, I'm hearing some knocks on social media, uh, that, uh, that that's, uh, that people, people assuming that it's not necessarily a positive, I can speak from lived experience. It's an entirely positive experience. Are the kids responding to it? They love it. My, my little guy entirely positive experience. Are the kids responding to it?

They love it. My little guy, Cruz, he loves the excitement, the sound, the noise, and all the adventure. And he helps us with little projects. We did a visit to a pizza shop the other day and he helped put the mushrooms on the pizza. I ended up almost dropping the pizza on the ground. I think I saw that.

And our little girl, um, Valentina is, she loves motion. She likes to be moving physically, moving all the time. So a campaign tour is actually quite good for her. Sometimes she gets a little bit overwhelmed by the lights and the sounds and she has to

make her way to a quieter place. Uh, but it's been, I think overall, wouldn't you say a good experience for them? Yeah, he's been trying to steal my microphone, so I might have some competition here. Speaking of family, one of our own, Greg Brady, is running for the Conservatives in Ajax. Are you as impressed with him as a candidate as we are as a colleague? Yes, and you know, he has an incredible track record and a big following, a big listenership. And if he's been pushing the same kind of common sense ideas in his job, so

thousands of people already knows where he stands. So when he goes to the door and says, you know, I want to cut your income tax by 15%, they say, well, that sounds like something you've been saying for a long time. Or when he says, I'm, you know, we're going to lock up the criminals and make our community safe again, and they probably say, well, I've heard you say that

on the radio, so you're probably meaning it when you say it now on my doorstep. So I think he's gonna be a great part of our Canada First team. Now, you made a speech in Toronto today, and before we get to that, I know you were introduced by my sister, who's a minister in the Ontario government.

That's right. She's also, she endorsed you, she reminded people that Brian Mulroney I know you were introduced by my sister, who's a minister in the Ontario government. That's right. She's also, she endorsed you, she reminded people that Brian Mulroney was one of your first donors. He was. I didn't know that. $500.

I haven't asked her specifically about how she ended up in that position, because I actually wanted to ask you, she works for the Ford government, a lot has been made about, call them, not the best relations between the federal party, the Ontario analog. Is this a signal of things changing on that front?

I think it's a signal of a great friendship. Um, Caroline and I have known each other for a number of years. We, we talk from time to time about economic matters, obviously she has had numerous big economic portfolios, transport, treasury board, and the list goes on. And, uh, I think we share the same values, you

know, good value for taxpayers, money, um, getting P letting people keep more of their paycheck, getting the red tape out of the way to build some more homes. So our youth can actually put a roof overhead. And she was saying that her kids listened to a lot of my social media posts. Um, you know, and they're part of the generation

that's really rallied around conservatives. That's kind of unusual. Yeah. Typically we were the old, uh, the old, old guys party, but now a lot of youth are here because basically they can't afford a home. Yeah. And I'm the only one that's been talking about

how to eliminate the red tape, get rid of the sales tax on new homes, sell off federal land to build those homes, train up the trades to build them so that we can bring back that promise that anyone who works hard gets a beautiful house. And so I think that that resonated with your niece with Caroline's kids and so I was very touched by her endorsement. She spoke beautifully as she always does. She's a very, very impressive woman. Well, we're going to talk about housing

and we're also going to talk about that generational divide and how you might be able to bridge it. But I do want to get into the meat of the speech today. There was a couple of things that you talked about, an immediate response to Donald Trump, as well as an after-election Response yes, so drill down on those two things for me Well the immediate response that I think has to come as early as tomorrow morning is counter tariffs targeting

American goods we don't need can make ourselves or buy elsewhere So we maximize the be the impact on them while minimizing it on us. But we also have to keep people working. There'll be particular sectors that might take a hit. We wanna make sure that those businesses have the cash they need to keep paying wages. Because once they lose their employees, it's very hard to rekindle that bond.

It's cheaper for a government to keep people in their jobs than it is to have them lose their jobs, collect EI for a long time while they're searching for a new one. So I've said, we need to create a saving Canadian jobs fund. It'll be a loan program targeted specifically to those businesses that are hit. Um, but then after the election, we got to

figure out how to solve this. Is this, this insanity cannot go on. So what I'm proposing is this, the Kuzma deal, the trade deal we have now, it has to be renegotiated by the end of 2026, by summer of 2026. Why would we wait? Why would we have this kind of revolving chaos for another year and a half? Let's nail down a deal. So the first the first foray into foreign affairs by a I would call go right down there.

I called the president say look suspend tariffs both ways and let's set a tight deadline to renegotiate the deal on both economics and security. The deal would do three things as far as I'm concerned. One it has to maintain our sovereignty. We're going to control our country, our dollar, our laws, our health care, our water, all of that. Secondly, we need tariff-free access to the American market, which we should grant in return. And third, we should do our part on national defense. I mean, the Americans on this point, they're not wrong to say that Canada needs to rebuild its armed forces. And I'm gonna say to the Americans,

the more you trade with us, the more money we will have for our military, we'll do our part, you will not have to carry our weight on defense, and that's how we nail down a deal that can put this insanity to rest and bring calm, growth, and strength to our country. Safety on our streets has been something you've been talking about, not just during this campaign, and bring calm, growth, and strength to our country. Safety on our streets has been something you've been talking about, not just during this campaign,

but for years, really, and the Toronto Police Association penned a letter, not just to you, but to Mark Carney, about four issues that they want to know your positions on. Two of those issues are bail reform and ending the handgun ban to redirect resources to frontline police workers. What, what do you say to the questions that they have levied at both of you?

Well, the police know what they're talking about. The Toronto police have first said that the liberal catch and release bail law C 75, which requires judges release offenders at the earliest opportunity under the least onerous conditions. And I'm quoting, have caused chaos everywhere. The same repeat offenders are released within hours of their latest arrest, often before the paperwork is done, and then they re-offend.

They're literally arrested three times in a day. So I will repeal liberal catch and release. I will end liberal house arrest laws, and I will pass a law that says any repeat offender will be ineligible for bail, parole, probation, or house arrest. It will be jail, not bail, jail, not bail. But we also have to build more jails, right? No, I actually, you know, the funny thing is

when Harper brought in a major crime track down with tougher laws, everyone said, Oh, you're going to need massive California style prisons. Turned out incarceration rates went down. Now why is that one? The people we locked up for good were people that were in and out weekly anyway, because

they were released to go and reoffend. Then they go back in and then they're released. And then they go back in through the revolving door, you have to reserve them a room. It's like the hotel, California, they they check out but they never really leave. So you're actually not adding a new prisoner, you're just keeping them there. The second thing is you deter crime.

The small time offenders say, I'm not gonna risk going to the slammer for 10 years, I'm not gonna do the crime in the first place. So we actually brought crime down by 25% and reduced overall incarcerations by focusing on the, we don't have a lot of criminals in Canada. The problem is they're very productive in Vancouver. They had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6,000 times.

So you just take those 40 guys off the street, you have 6,000 fewer crimes. But I'll tell you after the lost liberal decade of rising crime and chaos of hug a thug,thug, catch-and-release, we can't give the liberals a fourth term. What we need is a new conservative government that will put law-abiding Canadians first for a change. Now, if Canadians were to give them a fourth term,

Mark Carney has laid out a housing plan. I haven't heard you talk about his housing plan, but clearly it's something you've thought about. Well, it's a lot like the last liberal housing plan, you know, um, over the last liberal decade, housing costs have doubled. They've gone up faster in Canada than any other country in the G seven

Toronto and Vancouver are now the most expensive markets in all of North America after the lost liberal decade. It takes 29 years to save up for a down payment in Toronto after 10 years of liberal government and now Carney is doubling down on Trudeau's plan which is to build these monstrosities of these incredible bureaucracies in Ottawa. Since he wants a 35 billion dollar government housing corporation that's going to build Tiny prefab homes with no driveways because of course they don't want anybody driving cars

And we know the money will go to building bureaucracy. We don't need more bureaucracy You know after the lost liberal decade of doubling housing costs. We can't give liberals a fourth term We need a change and the change I offer is this, let's axe the GST, the sales tax, on new homes. Let's incentivize municipalities to speed up permits, free up land, and cut development charges. Let's sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build.

Let's train up 350,000 trades workers who will build the homes, and let's cut income tax by 15% so that people can afford their mortgage payments. That is a real plan for a change, and to bring homes you can afford. I was, earlier in the campaign, I was sort of struck by how many endorsements

you were getting from blue collar workers and unions, and then it occurred to me, well, if you support the trades and you also support all the work that is going to put the trades to work, then that's a great formula to get them behind you. And one of those sort of massive projects would undoubtedly be pipelines and energy corridors across this country.

And one of the differentiators that I'm now seeing since yesterday between the two campaigns is, you know, position on bill C 69 with Mark Carney yesterday saying he would not repeal it. He did tell Danielle Smith. And she said that he said something privately that was different. He swears he wants to ramp up resource development is, do you think he's trying to cater to everybody? I mean, and what's your plan to expand the development of those industries, knowing that it's not all up to you?

Well, in the last liberal decade, they have killed $178 billion worth of resource projects, two major pipelines, one that would have gone west to east to get around America. They've killed 15 massive natural gas export plants that would have allowed us to take billions of dollars of our gas overseas rather than giving it to the Americans at a discount. And all of that is because of liberal bill C-69. They call it the no new pipelines law, but it will make sure that no bigger no new mines Nuclear plants LNG export plants will ever be approved again. We will never have a national pipeline to go around the Americans

We will have to get I'll give them all our energy at a discount and mr Carney said very clearly he will keep the ban on pipelines. He was very direct finally And so there's the choice, folks. Do you want to continue to give your energy cheap to Donald Trump, keep our economy weak and reliant on the Americans, or do you want to take back control of our economic future? My Canada First Plan will repeal C-69, bring in a new law that requires that we approve projects within six months, bring in shovel-ready zones. These are zones that have pre-permits before there's even an application for pipelines,

mines, data centers, LNG plants, nuclear power stations, and other infrastructure that break our dependence on the Americans. And this is the choice in the election. After a lost liberal decade where the Americans dominate our resource market, are we going to give them a fourth term or do we want to put Canada first for a change? With a new conservative government that will unleash our resources Bring home our jobs so we can stand up to the Americans from a place of strength I have talked to a number of people where I said hey

Why? with Mark Carney he's had some long-held beliefs, say, on climate change and only to turn around and reduce the carbon tax to zero. I said, what does that say to you about his values? And they say, no, that's not a problem. We view that as pragmatism.

And I have a tough time pushing back on that. If that's how they see it, that's how they see it. How do you see it? Well, what if pragmatism means that he raises the carbon tax back up after the election? I mean, his criticism of the carbon tax up until about a year ago was that it was not high enough. And he has gone on to say that he wants to keep

the industrial carbon tax, which will drive our steel, aluminum, fertilizer, cement, concrete production south of the border where there is no carbon tax. You don't think that that tax is going to be passed on to you in a higher cost for a car. Steel goes in cars. You don't think it will cost more to rent an apartment when all of the concrete in those apartments is taxed at a higher level. And what about the people who work in those jobs? They won't be able to keep them.

You know, this is an area where Mr. Trump and Mr. Carney agree. Trump, they both want to tax Canadian industry. Carney with a carbon tax, Trump with tariffs. I want neither. I will ask the entire carbon tax for everything, for everybody, for everything, for everybody, for real, for good, and for a change.

We gotta talk about this generational chasm that seems to exist right now. If polling is to be believed, then older voters support Mark Carney, and they think that the ballot box issue that trumps everything else is the president. How do you break through them well a couple of things first I would say say look at the look at the lives

that your kids are living you know my parents were able to afford a home on a teacher's salary this generation our generation now here in Toronto it takes 29 years to save up for a down payment after the lost liberal decade doubled the costs. Think about the crime and the chaos that's overtaking our streets after the lost liberal decade. Think about the rising food prices that you're paying after three consecutive liberal terms.

We need a change in this country. And as for Donald Trump, you know, Mark Carney wants to continue with the same liberal policies that gave us the worst growth in the G7 that pushed a half trillion dollars of our investment south of the border, that gave our resources to Trump on a discount. If you want to reverse that, then we need a change with a new conservative government that will put Canada first,

to unleash our resource production. We have to take back our streets by locking up the criminals. We have to cut taxes so that our seniors can keep more of their pensions and retirement income. That's what it means to put Canada first, and that's my pitch to older voters, wiser voters. I can't go on to Twitter, Pierre,

and say anything about this election without an army of people coming at me, attacking you for security clearance issues. Can I get you on the record so I don't have to do it anymore? Like, explain once and for all the situation with your security clearance. Well, first of all, I've already had a clearance. I was a minister in the cabinet, so I've already been cleared.

Secondly, what the Liberals have been trying to get me to do is sign an oath of secrecy so that I can't speak publicly about foreign interference without their permission to get locked in to an oath of confidentiality so that when an issue of foreign interference comes up, I have to risk criminal prosecution if I say something the government considers that it has briefed me on, even if I might have said it anyway. And the other day, for example, I had to speak out because a liberal candidate had spoken, had said that he wanted to turn over a conservative candidate on a bounty to the Chinese embassy, which would then send him back to China and potentially imprison

or kill him. And I talked about how Mr. Carney, for example, took a quarter billion dollar loan from the Chinese government for his company just six months ago. Would that kind of comment have been captured by the confidentiality rules that go around getting these security clearance briefings? It might be, but the reality is I will get the briefings I need when I'm prime minister to protect our country against foreign interference, but I will not be silenced or gagged in the meantime. Will you talk about East-West divide, we talk English-French, we talk about rich and poor and old and young,

but I wanna talk about urban and rural because there are 18 writings in this country with the word center in the title. Oh, I didn't know that. And currently- That's a good piece of trivia. Well, currently, here's another one, currently the conservatives only control one.

Really? Yeah, so how do conservative conservative, how do conservative policies, how do you, I don't tweak them, or how do you deliver them so that they resonate with downtown urban dwellers? I think it's the cost of living. It's costs and crime. Liberals have driven up both in the last 10 years.

Let's start with costs. Urban dwellers are often hit extra hard by inflation because they tend to be renters. And higher rent, rent has gone up by about 100% in the last decade. So that's why we need to, a new conservative government that will unleash home building, reduce taxes so that we can get more apartments that people can afford to rent.

We need to stop the inflationary spending so that our city downtown residents can afford groceries again and we want them to be able to walk to the grocery store without looking over their shoulder or worrying that they're going to be robbed and so that we need to stop the crime and we will be cracking, we'll do the biggest crackdown on crime in Canadian history when I'm prime minister, by locking up the most serious offenders. We're gonna put fentanyl kingpins in prison for life so they stop killing our people.

We're gonna secure our borders with high powered scanners and watch towers so that we can intercept the guns that are responsible for 90 or 85 percent of the gun violence that often afflicts inner city communities. That's how we're going to bring safety back to our country. So you know after after 10 years of rising costs and crime the question is do we want the Liberals to have a fourth term or do you think it's time to put hardworking downtown Canadians, the people who are trying to slug it out in these expensive and often

dangerous inner cities and they, we want to put them first. And I think we do. I only have a couple of minutes left. I want to get to at least two more questions. One of the criticisms that we hear here is, is not about policy. A lot of Canadians are behind the vision and the policy.

They tend to complain about tone, the tone of the campaign or the tone of speeches. How do you set about changing someone's mind when it seems like they already agree with a big chunk of it? It's a fair question. I'm very passionate about what I believe in. I do get frustrated with what is happening to our people. You know, when I meet young people who

can't afford a home or I meet an elderly couple that say they're choosing between their grocery budget and their heating bill, it upsets me because it, I know it's so unnecessary. And so sometimes that can come out, uh, as hostility, but what it is, is really frustration for the fact that our politicians have caused these problems. And what I'm going to do for the closing three and a half weeks of this campaign is focus on a

hopeful solution. And so my message to that elderly couple who's choosing between eating and heating is that hope is on the way to the single mom who's going to bed hungry and wondering how she's going to feed her kids in the morning. Hope is on the way for her too, to the grieving family who have lost a child to an opioid overdose.

That death was not in vain. We're going to save other lives. That's the hopeful, optimistic message that I think we need to share, that people know why I'm in this. Why, lastly, Pierre, why do you want to become prime minister? What does it mean to you? I want to bring back what I call the Canadian promise.

We have something in this country. It's a deal. It's a deal that the country made with me and it made with all of us. Made with your dad when he was born, a poor Irish kid in Bay Como to an electrician father. Is that anybody who works hard gets a great life and do anything they want. You have a beautiful house on a safe street, good food, under a proud flag. That promise has been broken over the last 10 years

and the promise was made to me. I was the adopted son of two school teachers. It was made to my wife who came here as a refugee and has succeeded. My, my family owns this country, everything. And, um, I think the way I can give back is to restore that promise. I've been in conversation with Pierre Poliev, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Pierre, thank you so much. Anna, thank you for coming in as well. And, uh, we wish you a good luck on the campaign. Great to be with you. Many blessings. Want to transform your space and your Sundays? Well, Home Network is giving you the chance to love your home with $15,000.

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