Pierre Poilievre to tailgate, attend Labour Day Classic in Regina

Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, will be attending the Labour Day Classic game and festivities in Regina wearing Rider green on Sunday.

Speaking on The Evan Bray Show on Friday, Poilievre addressed issues of affordability, Canada’s trade war with the U.S. and his plans to visit Mosaic Stadium and support the Saskatchewan Roughriders this weekend.

Read more:

• Conservative MPs back Poilievre after he says he’ll lead party into next election
• Poilievre says Alberta needs new priorities from Ottawa, not a new country
• In the news: Trade war ignites, Poilievre wants Parliament recalled, businesses brace

Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

PIERRE POILIEVRE: I can’t wait to be there for the big game.

EVAN BRAY: I’m impressed. I know people are going to be excited to have you here. Here’s the number one question: Will you wear a Rider jersey? 

POILIEVRE: Of course. I value my personal safety more than to put on a jersey for a foreign nation when I come to the Rider Nation, so of course I will be dressed in green and I will be at the tailgate party. So I hope to see you and many other people there to have a drink and a high five.

Well, we’re always glad when we’ve got our national leaders visiting the province. There’s so much going on right now. Obviously, the U.S. trade war is a big part of it. I know you have previously said when we first started this back and forth with the states 18 months ago that counter tariffs are one of Canada’s key tools to a trade fight with the U.S. Now you’re saying it’s a little more complicated. Do you agree with this recent retaliatory tariff strategy?

POILIEVRE: We don’t know what it’s going to cost Canadians, and this is my biggest concern, is that  the last time Carney put in counter tariffs, he had to reverse himself. He had a complete flip-flop right in the middle of the last election – without telling anybody, by the way – he removed the tariffs, secretly, while campaigning with elbows up, and he told us after the election (it) was because he’d found out that his own tariffs were doing more damage to the economy than they were benefiting it. So, we’ve asked him to release the analysis. How much will Canadians have to pay in higher food costs, higher housing costs, higher costs for basic appliances around their homes. We’re already in a cost of living crisis brought on by Liberal taxes, Liberal money printing, Liberal deficits. The last thing we need is for that to compound with a tariff – badly targeted and overly broad costs that are applied to the Canadian people. The second thing we went over was, where’s the money going? We don’t need more money to go into the black hole of federal government spending. We need the money to go back into the hands of the consumers and businesses that are already suffering as a result of the trade dispute, so we want answers before we can make a firm judgment on whether the government’s got it right. But our mission remains the same as it was before the trade dispute with the U.S., which is to make Canada affordable here at home for hardworking people to have food, homes and other essentials.

We are hearing from south of the border, some of Trump’s administration are accusing the Liberals and Mark Carney of stepping away from this deal for political reasons. I know the Prime Minister sat down with you and and did a bit of a briefing when the talks broke off. Would you go that far? Would you say that it was political reasons that the Canadian government pulled away from the table?

POILIEVRE: I’m not going to make an allegation without evidence. What I’m asking the Prime Minister to do is show us the deal he walked away from. Surely there was a working text when you have two sides in a trade dispute discussing a resolution and a deal, as items are agreed, they go on a sheet, a term sheet, and they are there for all eyes to see to keep track of who’s agreed to what. Release that deal. Tell Canadians what’s in it, so that we know what he walked away from. Right now, we’re getting a lot of changing stories and he said, she said. If the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, and if the truth resembles his words, then just publish the deal and let Canadians decide for themselves.

I think there are a lot of Canadians that are also saying, show us what was so bad. Help us understand why this was the right thing to do. You’ve also asked for Parliament to be reconvened early. It doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen. Is there anything else that you think the government is missing that needs to be done, needs to be prioritized?

POILIEVRE: An economic action plan. Our economy has not grown in 10 years. We’ve had the worst GDP growth in the G7 for that decade, and for the last year, Prime Minister Carney is the only prime minister since Lester B. Pearson whose first year in office left the economy smaller at the end than when he than when he started, and now we’re being faced with an escalating trade war. We need an economic action plan now, and we’ve already published what would be in that plan. We’re proposing, for example, to scrap all carbon taxes – not just the visible consumer tax which we forced the government to back down on – but the less visible fuel standard tax, seven cents a litre at the pump, GST on gas, the industrial carbon tax on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, cement, concrete and all other industrial goods. Let’s end capital gains tax on any reinvestments that happen in Canada. Let’s take sales tax off Canadian-made cars to save you money and save auto workers their jobs. Let’s immediately greenlight the 500 economic construction projects awaiting federal approval, but are held up right now by bureaucracy. Repeal Bill C-69, the No New Pipelines Law, legalize shipping oil off the west coast of B.C., and finally, let’s build up. Let’s announce today that we are partnering with industry to have a strategic energy and oil reserve that will give us tremendous leverage in negotiating free trade with the United States, who desperately need our energy and minerals. Let’s tell them today: Within five years, we’re going to have a massive stockpile of everything they would ever need to fight a war or power their economy in a crisis. And if they want to have first right of reverse refusal on it, they need to give us tariff-free trades. In other words, an economic action plan that saves you money and brings home paycheques in production.

The polls are showing that 75 per cent of Canadian people, regardless of political party, are saying this is a time where we need to be Canadian first and political second. You have a role as the leader of the opposition, obviously, to hold government accountable. How is this balance for you, in terms of supporting the government and getting a fair deal for Canadians, but also holding them accountable?

POILIEVRE: We’ve got to put Canada first. That’s why, when I went to the United States, I did not criticize the Prime Minister on foreign soil, but rather used the occasion to fight for tariff-free access for our businesses and farmers. At the same time, Conservatives have been putting forward positive ideas that we hope the government steals, like the aforementioned ones I just stated. And so, if the Prime Minister were to scrap the industrial carbon tax to help Saskatchewan produce more steel and fertilizer, I would congratulate him. If he were to take capital gains tax off of reinvestments and bring home that trillion dollars that’s left our economy to create jobs and paychecks here, I would pat him on the back. If he’d take GST off Canadian-made automobiles so we would incentivize our consumers to buy Canadian cars and trucks, that also saves you a lot of money. If he did those things, I would pat him on the back because my goal here is not to score points; it’s to do well by our country, and that’s what we should all be thinking of right now.

Three by-elections on Monday ended up being three decisive wins for the Liberals. How much do you think this U.S. trade issue is playing into political victories in Canada?

POILIEVRE: Massively. It has enormous impact. But I can’t control that. I can’t. Nobody can control what President (Donald) Trump does. So we shouldn’t try to pretend that anyone can sort of run his decision making. Instead, we should focus on what we do control here at home. We control whether we permit the 500 projects the federal government is holding up, whether we may pass a law to light new projects within a year rather than 10 years, as it takes right now. Whether we cut the deficit by eliminating all the God-awful waste in the federal administration and spending, those are things we control here at home. And my goal is to convince Canadians to focus on what we can control, and then we can actually achieve the affordable, safe, strong country that we all aspire to have.

We have, I think, seven more by-elections happening between now and the end of the year. Some of them are in what are considered very conservative, safe seats – one of those being right here in Saskatchewan. If you’re being introspective as a leader, is there anything that you see, Pierre, that you think you need to do differently? That the party needs to do differently to have a different outcome in these by-elections in favour of the Conservatives?

POILIEVRE: I think the focus has to be on cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. Every day, I meet someone who’s just being walloped by the cost. I just got a haircut and I met a young lady who works as a young hairstylist, and she says her parents are trying to get her to leave home, but she said she can’t find a place that she (can) afford to rent in the city of Ottawa. She says, basically $2,000, no matter where she goes. $2,000 a month is a lot for someone living on a hairstylist income. The same would be true of a waitress or a barista or anyone else who’s working hard and contributing, but they can’t make it. So we have to be the party of an affordable Canada to save you money, and that will be the big focus we campaign on. And our plan is very clear: We have to cut the money printing inflationary deficits by slashing consultants, foreign aid, handouts to fake phony refugees, corporate welfare for the Liberal club. Cut that back so we can bring down inflation, taxes and the cost of living. We have to take all taxes off gas until at least Canada Day, to save on filling up at the pump and groceries, and we have to be just obsessively focused on making our dollars go further for our hardworking Canadians.

When Parliament resumes, which is going to happen here in a couple of weeks, what are the first issues that you think need to be addressed? I mean, U.S. trade is going to dominate talk and headlines, but I know there‘s lots going on that seems to get swept under the rug. How do you find a way to bring that to the forefront and make sure that those topics are prioritized, as well?

POILIEVRE: We just have to remember that as much as the Donald Trump circus takes all the attention, people’s lives are not going well in Canada today. While Mark Carney says that affordability is the best that it’s been in a decade, Canadians pay the highest grocery bills ever, up the most in the G7. Rising mortgage payments force families to sacrifice even more, while Canada has the highest insolvencies since the great global recession, and the reason that Carney thinks things are so great is because he’s not focused on the common people here at home. Instead, he’s focused on the club of Liberal insiders and corporate power brokers that get rich making everyone else poor. And so our focus is to reverse these policies that have driven our working class and our youth into poverty, and let people keep more of their paycheck, get a reward for their hard work, pay their bills, have meat and potatoes on the dinner table every single night. That is what we need to be fighting for. That’s what we can control here at home. So while it’s important to stand up to President Trump, we can’t allow the circus around his tweets and his statements to overtake the problems that are caused here at home.

Enjoy that Labour Day Classic. People will be watching for you now, knowing you’re wearing a rider jersey. It’ll be easy to pick out in the crowd. Enjoy your time in the province this weekend.

POILIEVRE: It’s going to be wonderful. I can’t wait to see all of our friends. We grew up in Alberta, of course. My mother’s from Saskatoon, and so I imagine there will be a lot of people from Saskatoon who will make the trip to watch the game, and so I know she’ll be very proud that I’ll be in her home province.