Taxes, homes, budget, crime, and energy – Pierre Poilievre holds a roundtable with ethnic media

Yuri Bilinsky, New Pathway – Ukrainian News.

The leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre, prefers ethnic media to mainstream outlets. He said this during the ethnic media roundtable in Mississauga, ON, on May 31, which he held together with MP Larry Brock (Brantford—Brant). The roundtable, which lasted well over an hour, proved that.

Poilievre’s introduction and questions from over a dozen ethnic media outlets circulated around the announced themes of the hard drug legalization, Poilievre’s recent summer fuel tax announcement, the proposed Conservative plans to fix the current housing crisis, and the issue of foreign interference into Canadian politics.

The opposition leader’s remarks and answers were consistent with the positions he often proclaims in Parliament. He spoke about homeless encampments in Toronto, shootings and carjackings on the streets in different cities, extortion letters addressed to businesses, all the things that, he stressed, many members of ethnic communities got away from when they emigrated to Canada but are now experiencing in Canada. He quoted the CBC-provided statistics that the number of Canadians leaving their country to live in the U.S. was up 70 percent in 2022, many of those quoting political reasons of dissatisfaction with the Liberal government for the move.

Poilievre reiterated his plan to “Axe the tax, Build the homes, Fix the budget, and Stop the crime”. He promised:

• Not just to strike the carbon tax but also to lower income taxes;
• To fix the budget to be able to cut taxes, with the “dollar for dollar” law that would require an equal amount of savings for every dollar of new spending, and with cutting on the government waste, bureaucracy, and mismanagement;
• To require that municipalities permit 15 percent more homebuilding per year and permit high-density high-rises around every federally funded transit station as a condition of getting federal money, as well as to sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land;
• To bring “jail, not bail” for repeat violent offenders, to put high-powered scanners in the ports to look for stolen cars, to secure the border to stop illegal firearms from getting into Canada;
• To cut back on aid to “dictators, terrorists, and multinational bureaucracies” and put that money into rebuilding Canada’s military.

Poilievre promised to restore Canada to “the big, beautiful, free enterprise country.” His proposed policies fall into the conservative set of rules that he has followed throughout his career in government and politics. When asked two different questions about his economic priorities and the proposed ways to solve the problem of student debt, make education more affordable and students’ lives easier, he repeated, calmly, that he would axe the tax, build the homes, and fix the budget as the way to address all those issues. He explained how these policies would solve very different problems that Canada is facing now.

In response to NP-UN’s question about Poilievre’s preference for ethnic media over mainstream media, the leader of the opposition reiterated his plan to defund the CBC “to save a billion dollars.” He promised to provide advertising to the multicultural media to get across the information on public health issues, natural disasters, government policy changes, etc. “We will make sure that the multicultural media get more than their share of the government advertising money,” said Poilievre.

Contrary to the widespread opinion about his contrarian character, on several occasions, Poilievre mentioned current government policies that he agreed with. For example, he called the foreign agents’ registry legislation “a step in the right direction” (albeit an insufficient one), which the Conservative caucus supports and will push for the prompt adoption of.

At the same time, Poilievre remained quite harsh in his criticism of the Liberal government. “Frankly, if I don’t become Prime Minister within the next two years, there will be a large sucking sound of businesses, money, and people leaving this country to go anywhere else to escape Trudeau,” he said at the end of the round table, calling Justin Trudeau “the worst prime minister we’ve ever had.”

The final question at the roundtable was about Poilievre’s plan to support Ukraine. In his response, the leader of the opposition emphasized the need to sell Canada’s resources to Europe. “Right now, Europe is funding Putin by buying his gas and oil. They could be buying them from Canada. The Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, and the Japanese all said that they didn’t want to buy Russian gas; they wanted to buy Canadian gas. Trudeau is such an environmental radical, he doesn’t want us to sell our gas overseas. I support it, I will bring in fast permits for natural gas liquefaction facilities so we can sell billions of dollars worth of clean Canadian LNG to break the European dependence on Putin and turn dollars for dictators into paychecks for Canadians,” said Poilievre.

At the end of the roundtable, I thanked Pierre Poilievre for his principled position on the need to push Russia out of the global energy markets and thus significantly undermine that country’s murderous war machine. “Let’s put the screws on Putin,” I told him. “Because he is now endangering…,” I continued. “Yes, all of us,” Pierre Poilievre finished the sentence with a firm handshake.

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