Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will axe the carbon tax and will cap government spending with a new dollar-for-dollar law if he is elected prime minister in the next federal election.
“Politicians need laws to limit their spending. They need to be disciplined by law or they will spend irresponsibly,” said Poilievre. “It’s time that politicians started pinching their pennies too.”
In his speech, he pledged to eliminate the carbon tax, especially mentioning home heating bills, as well as cut tariffs on fertilizer so that more food can be produced by local farmers.
“That’s good for our environment, it’s good for our farmers, it’s good for our consumers,” said Poilievre, criticizing the current system that sees food shipped in from as far away as Mexico. “By driving production out of our country, we drive it to more polluting foreign jurisdictions,” he said.
He also vowed to build more houses, with a plan to bring in a condition for “big cities with overpriced real estate” that would link the number of dollars provided for infrastructure to the number of houses that get built.
This “will incentivize them to lower the cost and increase the speed of building permits,” Poilievre said.
A Conservative government would “sell off 15 percent of the 37,000 federal buildings,” many of which are vacant with people working from home. Poilievre said these should be sold off and turned into housing.
“It warms my heart to think of the beautiful family pulling up in their U-Haul to move into their wonderful new home and the former headquarters of the CBC,” he said to enthusiastic applause and cheers from the audience.
Poilievre said that nations must be energy-independent to control their destiny, and that given that Canada has the third-biggest supply of oil on Earth, there was no excuse to be importing overseas oil from places like Saudi Arabia. The prime minister-hopeful said Bill C-69 is an “anti-energy law that stops oil and gas production and many other mining activities,” and pledged to repeal it if elected.
“We’re going to build pipelines, we’re going to approve more oil and gas projects. And I’m going to back up Newfoundland’s plan to more than double its production so that we can produce 400,000 more barrels of oil every single day in Eastern Canada, to fully replace the 130,000 that are coming in from overseas,” said Poilievre.
Among his other election promises, he said his party would support more trades and apprenticeships instead of favouring university education, approve more natural gas projects, and instead of legalizing drugs, he wants to see government “massively expand drug treatment.”
Poilievere said his government “would sue the pharmaceutical companies” for their role in the drug overdose crisis and make them “pay the full price of the recovery and treatment.”
He ended his speech vowing that his government, if elected, would stop targeting hunters and legal gun owners.
It’s not hunters in Labrador who are “shooting up downtown Toronto,” he said. “In fact, we know who’s doing all the shootings. ... It’s guns that are coming over the border from smugglers. Eighty-two percent of firearms used in crime in Toronto, come in illegally across the border.”
Poilievere said a Conservative federal government would defend the right of legal firearms owners to hunt and carry out Canadian traditions, while going after violent offenders and criminals.
“What we’re going to do is repeal these insane bail rules. Put people behind bars. If they have a track record of repeat violent offences, they should stay in jail until such time as their trial occurs.”
“It’s common sense,” he said, adding that a Conservative government would “stand up for the common people.”
“We have this elite group that thinks they know better than everyone else. They want to make your decisions for you in faraway places. Sometimes it’s not just Ottawa, it’s over in Davos,” said Poilievre.
“And that’s why I’m so proud that I made the commitment during my leadership race and we’ve kept it ever since. Not a single solitary Conservative MP is part of the World Economic Forum, and they will never be.”
