Full text: Read Pierre Poilievre’s complete speech to the Conservative convention

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Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre delivered the following speech at the party’s national convention in Quebec City on Friday:

Merci à la petite fille de  Pointe-aux-Trembles!

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Je me souviens de la première fois que j’ai vu Ana il y a plus de dix ans. Pendant quelques secondes je ne pouvais même pas respirer.

Qui est-elle? Je me suis demandé.

Les gens posent la même question ce soir.

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Pourquoi cette belle Québécoise est-elle avec cette tête-carré qui a perdu ses lunettes?

The day I knew she was the one was when we were driving back to Ottawa from Montreal in the dead of winter, and the under-engine cover had come loose and was dragging on the ground. So, we pulled into this gas station, and it had a repair shop called Herb’s Repair Shop attached to it.

I went in. It was dark and no one was there. I yelled “Herb, Herb”. And not finding him, I went next door to the gas station and they told me Herb’s had been closed down for years. So, I went back to the car to find Ana underneath it, tying the under-engine cover on with her hair elastic. It stayed in place all the way back to the mechanic shop in Ottawa, who told me she had tied it so well, we could just leave it like that.

That is when I realized I was dating MacGyver.

That is common sense in action. Solving problems like that.

La magie d’Ana. C’est la magie du Québec et du Canada.

Ce n’est qu’ici que son histoire est possible.

Because it is only here in this country that a little girl who came as a Venezuelan refugee and the adopted son of school teachers can stand on a stage leading the oldest and biggest political party in the country.

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I want to thank my parents. It’s because they adopted me and worked hard in front of a classroom that I now stand in front of this room.

Ce qui est extraordinaire dans cette histoire c’est que c’est ordinaire. L’endroit d’où vous venez ne détermine pas où vous allez. The promise of Canada was that a kid can start anywhere and get anywhere. Hard work used to get you a powerful paycheque that bought you good food and a decent home and retirement in a safe neighbourhood and a free country. And every generation was a little better off than their parents. That was the promise of Canada.

And that is the most important promise Justin Trudeau broke.

You see, politicians often break their own promises. But this is different. This promise didn’t belong to him. It belonged to all of us.

It was a promise Canada kept for me, and it’s a promise I will restore for Canada after the next election.

We don’t know when that election will be, but when it comes, Canadians will have only two options:

A common-sense Conservative government that frees hardworking people to earn powerful paycheques that buy affordable food, gas and homes — in safe communities.

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Or:

A reckless coalition – of Trudeau and the NDP – that punishes your work, takes your money, taxes your food, doubles your housing bill. And unleashes crime and chaos in your neighbourhood.

Laissez-moi répéter.

Un gouvernement conservateur guidé par le gros bon sens qui défend ces Canadiens qui travaillent fort afin qu’ils gagnent plus et paient moins pour la nourriture, l’essence et le logement.

Ou

Justin Trudeau et le Bloc qui punissent votre travail, prennent votre argent, taxent votre nourriture, et doublent le prix de votre logement.

Et soyons clairs, beaucoup de ces politiques sont rendues possibles grâce à l’appui du Bloc. Si les Québécois veulent se débarrasser de Justin Trudeau pour de bon, seul le Parti conservateur peut le remplacer pour vrai.

C’est donc le choix entre un pays où les gens qui travaillent fort réalisent leurs rêves ou un pays où le gouvernement divise entre bons et mauvais Canadiens. Un gouvernement qui se mele de tout et n’est bon dans rien. Where people get ahead on merit and smarts—not by entitlement or inheritance.

Speaking of inheritance.

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Justin Trudeau inherited a great fortune. And I don’t mean his tax-sheltered family Trust Fund. I mean the country he inherited.

Did any prime minister ever inherit a richer legacy?

Did any prime minister ever squander it so thoroughly?

Think back to how we lived when Justin Trudeau was elected. No – really think.

Inflation and interest rates were rock bottom. Taxes were falling faster than at any time in our history.

The New York Times had just calculated that Canada’s middle class had become richer than America’s. Thank you,  Stephen Harper.

The budget was balanced. Thank you again, Stephen Harper.

Crime had fallen 25 per cent — so low that small town folks often left their doors unlocked.

Our borders were secure.

Housing cost half of what it costs today.

Take home pay had jumped 10 per cent after tax and inflation.

All this despite a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis in the U.S. and wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and, yes, Ukraine.

Funny how when Stephen Harper was around those wars did not cause inflation in Canada.

Yes, when Justin Trudeau  took over, Canada was rich, affordable and safe.

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And he promised Canadians that if we gave him more power and money he would change everything — and boy did he ever. That’s the only promise he kept!

So what’s changed?

Eight years later inflation — after already hitting 40-year highs — is back on the rise again and the economy is now shrinking, GDP-per person is actually smaller today than it was

Six years ago and Canada’s growth is projected to be dead last in the OECD, not just for the next six years, but for the next three decades.

Housing costs have more than doubled after Trudeau promised to lower them.

It now takes 25 years to save up for a downpayment in Toronto. Before Trudeau it took that long to pay off an entire mortgage.

Some families have to stretch out the terms of their mortgages to 90 years, which means you now have to be 120 to finally be mortgage free.

Under Trudeau, Canadian homes cost over 50 per cent more than in the U.S. and you can buy a castle in Sweden for the price of a two-bedroom home in Kitchener.

Toronto is ranked the world’s worst housing bubble and Vancouver is the third most unaffordable housing market on earth, worse than New York City, London England, and Singapore — a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada.

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Trudeau’s carbon tax has forced 1.5 million people to food banks and caused a fifth of people to skip meals.

Les aînés doivent couper dans leurs repas pour payer la taxe Blanchet-Trudeau. Une nouvelle taxe de Trudeau sur l’énergie — que le Bloc veut radicalement augmenter.

Ça coûte cher voter Bloc. Oui ça coûte très cher voter Bloc.

Trudeau has now doubled the national debt — adding more debt than all of Canada’s previous 22 prime ministers combined — And just to end the suspense, the budget hasn’t balanced itself.

Shootings, gang killings and overdose deaths have all doubled.

Trudeau’s spent and Canada is broke.

Or broken?

Trudeau and I agree things are broken.

We just disagree on what and who broke it.

He blames the country itself.

He said Canada has no core identity and that it is not the best country in the world. What kind of prime minister says his country is not the best after he’s been leading it for eight years?

J’ai été très soulagé d’arriver ici à Québec et de constater que cette magnifique ville que Justin Trudeau a effacée de notre passeport existe toujours!

Il a honte de notre patrimoine commun et de notre histoire. C’est pour ça que

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Justin Trudeau l’a effacé du passeport — il a aussi effacé le Royal Vingt-deuxième régiment, Vimy, et les autres moments glorieux de notre histoire. Il dit qu’on n’a pas d’identité en tant que pays.

Justin Trudeau wants to cancel our proud history, erasing it from our passports.

Our great military triumphs — gone.

The Famous Five who won women’s rights — gone.

Even Terry Fox had to go.

Why? Because there can be no heroes but him. So, he replaced these images in the passport with an image of himself as a boy swimming at Harrington Lake and pictures of snowflakes — in honour of his Liberal cabinet, I guess.

This business of deleting our past must end. And this is a matter on which English

Canada must learn from Quebec. Quebecers — and I’m saying this in English deliberately — do not apologize for their culture, language or history. They celebrate it. All Canadians should do the same.

Les Québécois se battent pour préserver leur langue et leur culture. Mon père — qui a des origines Canadienne-françaises — me promettait que le père Noël allait être plus généreux si j’étais capable de rédiger ma liste de souhaits en français. J’ai quand même perdu mon français pendant mon adolescence à Calgary mais je travaille fort tous les jours pour l’améliorer. C’est pourquoi Ana et moi sommes déterminés à parler français à nos enfants et à les envoyer à l’école en français. C’est aussi pourquoi j’ai voté à la Chambre des communes pour reconnaître la nation québécoise.

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Et je serai toujours un allié du Québec, du peuple acadien et de tous les francophones à travers le pays. Un plus petit gouvernement central fera la place à un plus grand Québec et des plus grands Québécois.

What’s worse than what

Justin Trudeau thinks of Canada, is what he thinks of Canadians. He calls them “small” and “angry.” Recently in Charlottetown he said everyone should stop picking on him, because quote, “it is a really tough time … to be a politician.”

No, Mr. Trudeau.

It is a really tough time to be the 74-year-old retired trucker I met doorknocking in Bowmanville, who had just gotten his eviction notice despite always paying his rent. Finding another place will cost him an extra $700 a month. He doesn’t have an extra $700 a month. So, his options are to ask his full-grown daughter — his little girl — if he can move into her basement or else, he will become homeless for the first time in his life. After 50 years of driving a truck. What is he supposed to do? Go back to work? He’s seventy-four. His back can’t take 70 hours a week in a truck. But you know something? I didn’t see anger in his eyes.

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That was fear.

Mr. Trudeau, if you think your life is tough for you, you should talk to the carpenter I met at Tim Horton’s in the Soo who lives in a parking lot, because he can’t afford the rent. He wasn’t angry either. But I admit I was angry for him: because an economy where the people who build our homes can’t afford to live in them is fundamentally unjust and wrong.

La famille qui a vu ses paiements d’hypothèque augmenter de $1,000 par mois. Elle n’est pas fâchée non plus; elle a simplement peur de ne pas pouvoir payer pour garder  le toît au-dessus de sa tête.

If the Prime Minister thinks he has it tough, then he should talk to our youth — almost all of whom seem to have two jobs these days, not to save up for a home — they’ve long ago given up on that — but to avoid getting evicted after their rent doubled. They would like to have kids and they’re running out of time, but they have nowhere to put them in their tiny $1500-a-month studio suite. Eight years ago, at their high school graduations their eyes beamed with possibility. Now their eyes have big heavy bags under them as they drop off another delivery of UberEats at midnight — which is their third job. The youth aren’t angry. They are too exhausted to be angry.

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He should meet the mom who broke down and told the cashier at the grocery store that all she can afford is the half-price chicken, that is past expiry, which gives her family food poisoning. And the cashier said, “I can relate. I live in a tent.” That’s not anger in their voices, Prime Minister. It is anxiety — they can’t sleep at night because they do not know what they’re going to feed their kids in the morning.

If Mr. Trudeau thinks politicians have it tough, he should meet the veterans that asked for help with post-traumatic stress, and they were told to consider medical assistance in dying. Remember, this is the prime minister who famously told veterans they were asking for more than he could give. These soldiers and veterans are not angry either. They are heart-broken that the freedoms they fought for abroad are not respected or repaid at home.

Instead of apologizing to these people for the hell he has caused in their lives, Mr. Trudeau calls them names. He wants Canadians to blame each other, and not him. He divides to distract using race, religion, region and sexuality. He thinks that if you are afraid of your neighbour, you will forget you can’t afford groceries.

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You see Mr. Trudeau and I agree that things are broken. We just disagree on what’s broken and who broke it. He thinks the people are the problem. When Canadians know he is the problem.

But we won’t let him divide us anymore. We won’t let him put our country and its people down in order to push himself up.

Canadians are not small or angry. They are big and generous people. They deserve better than this. They should no longer have to give up the things we always took for granted — like affordable homes and food — to pay for the incompetence and ego of one man. After eight years, Justin Trudeau is not worth the cost and not worth the country we know and love.

The good news is that life was not like this before Trudeau and it won’t be like this after he’s gone.

Which proves we can turn the hurt he has caused into the hope that Canadians need.

And it starts by bringing home lower gas, heat and grocery bills by axing the tax. Axe the tax!

On va abolir la taxe Blanchet-Trudeau.

The carbon tax is not just a tax on gas and heat. It is a tax on food. When you tax the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who ships the food, you tax the food. Now Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh want to quadruple the tax to 61 cents-a-litre. Forcing seniors to choose between eating and heating.

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C’est une nouvelle taxe fédérale sur le dos des Québécois, et qui s’ajoute à toutes les autres taxes sur l’énergie déjà en place. Imposée par Justin Trudeau. Mais que dit le Bloc? Il l’appuie. Mais, il n’y a qu’un seul point de désaccord : le Bloc pense que le fédéral devrait, et je cite radicalement augmenter la taxe. On savait que ça coûtait cher voter Bloc, mais soyons clairs: le Bloc veut prendre l’argent des Québécois et le donner au fédéral. Cette taxe Trudeau-Blanchet, c’est une taxe sur l’essence des agriculteurs qui cultivent les aliments et les camionneurs qui les transportent donc c’est une taxe sur la nourriture. C’est une taxe sur tous les travailleurs et propriétaires de petites entreprises dans les banlieues et régions qui ont besoin de leur camion pour travailler.

J’ai un message, pour vous messieurs Blanchet et Trudeau: les gens des régions et surtout les fermiers ont besoin de leurs camions et de l’énergie pour leur quotidien.

Vous n’avez pas le droit de piger dans leurs poches encore.

Je vais abolir la taxe Blanchet-Trudeau pour ramener des prix plus bas et je vais mettre fin à la guerre contre l’auto. C’est ça, le gros bon sens.

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But there is a second tax that I will axe: the inflation tax.

Yes. Inflation is a tax. When governments print money to fund deficits, they raise prices. It is the worst tax, because it is sneaky. Politicians don’t have to vote on it. And because it steals seniors’ savings, workers’ paycheques  and takes food from the mouths of the working poor, it is an immoral tax.

It is a silent thief, quietly picking the pockets of the poor.

It is the thief that reaches into the wallet of the elderly grandmother at the grocery store as her $100 only buys

$80 of groceries, and there’s the thief again, as it empties the bank account of the working couple who now need to save for 25 years for a downpayment on a house.

The radical money-printing deficits of the Trudeau government, funded with newly-created cash, caused the money supply — in coins, bills and bank deposits — to grow from $1.8 trillion to $2.4 trillion or 32 per cent while the real economy grew four per cent. In other words, the money grew eight times faster than the stuff money buys, bidding up everything.

Now, Trudeau forces the same people who suffer from his inflation to suffer from higher interest rates to stop it.

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Recently, former Liberal finance minister John Manley, said Trudeau’s deficits press on the inflationary gas pedal, which forces the Bank of Canada to press harder on the brakes with higher interest rates. These higher rates now collide with the very overindebted families that the government encouraged to buy overpriced homes when rates were low.

Time is running out for these families. If rates remain high when they renew their mortgages, they will lose their homes.

My common-sense plan cuts waste and caps spending to bring down inflationary deficits and interest rates, so Canadians can keep their homes.

Here is how we will do it:

When I am prime minister, we will cap spending with a Dollar-for-Dollar Law forcing the government to find a dollar of savings for each new dollar of spending it introduces.

As the great economist Thomas Sowell said: the first law of economics is scarcity —people always want more than there is to have and the first law of politics is to ignore the first law of economics.

Every time a politician has a bright idea to spend money, he will be forced to root out waste in his bureaucracy to pay for it, rather than just passing the bill to you in debt, taxes and money-printing inflation.

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Speaking of waste, we will eliminate it:

· We’ll end the wasteful and pointless $54 million ArriveCan App.

By the way a couple of IT workers as a gag decided to see how hard it would be to design this app from scratch. They did it in a week, and it didn’t cost them $54 million.

I think they should send this new app to Trudeau and call it the ResignCan App.

· We will end the $35 Billion Infrastructure Bank that, despite paying bonuses to executives, has not completed a single solitary project.

· We will stop giving money to foreign dictators and global bureaucracies, like the Beijing-controlled Asian Infrastructure Bank which uses our money to fund pipelines and highways over there that Trudeau won’t let us build over here. We will bring that money home to Canada. Bring it home!

· We will end bonuses for government executives and central bankers who fail at their jobs.

· Et nous n’allons plus financer les dépassements de coûts du secteur privé et des autres paliers de gouvernement. C’est ca le gros bon sens.

· And I will restore and enforce the low-inflation mandate that Brian Mulroney rightly legislated on the Bank of Canada. It will mean the bank has one job and one job only: low inflation. Not printing money for politicians to squander.

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Balancing the budget to keep inflation and interest rates low was the unanimous policy goal of every major party at every level of government right up until the radical departure from reality under Mr. Budgets Balance Themselves.

Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin, Harper and even NDP provincial governments accepted that balanced budgets were the safest way to secure future funding of schools, hospitals and roads.

That common sense consensus drove down debt, inflation and unemployment while growth rocketed up and we enjoyed a quarter century of powerful paycheques. Many common-sense grassroots Liberals and New Democrats still understand the virtue of fiscal discipline even if their leaders do not.

Ici même, au Québec, l’ancien premier ministre Lucien Bouchard a équilibré les budgets pour préserver les programmes sociaux.

L’heure est à rebâtir ce consensus fondé sur le gros bon sens pour vaincre l’inflation et protéger notre avenir.

Instead of creating more cash, we should create more of what cash buys: homes, food, factories, and energy.

Let’s start with homes. We need to stop printing money and start building homes.

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L’accès au logement, après huit ans de Justin Trudeau, dégénère… en fait, on pourrait dire que c’est une dégénération… comme la chanson de Mes Aïeux, qui va comme suit:

Et pis toi, mon p’tit gars, tu l’sais pu, c’que tu vas faire

Dans ton p’tit trois et demi bin trop cher, frette en hiver

Il te vient des envis de devenir propriétaire

Et tu rêves la nuit d’avoir ton petit lopin d’terre.

Une belle mélodie…

Mais pourquoi pas un p’tit lopin d’terre? C’est la moindre des choses au Canada. On possède plus de terres que n’importe où ailleurs dans le monde.

Il y a des terrains partout, ça devrait être abordable au Canada.

Canada should be the cheapest place to get a home in the world—we have more land per person than all but four countries on the planet.

Yet we have the fewest homes per capita in the G7.

We built fewer homes last year than we did in 1972, when our population was half the size of today’s. And homebuilding is way down again this year.

What do you think is the most expensive thing that goes into a new house in, say, Vancouver?

Labour?

Land?

Lumber?

Nope!

Government.

A C.D. Howe study added up all the cost of labour, materials, land and profit needed to build  a home and compared it to the sale price of a house. In Vancouver, the gap was nearly $1.3 million. In Toronto, the difference was $350,000. That means that over 60 per cent of the price of a home in Vancouver is government. Delays, fees, regulations, taxes, consultants, and all the other costs of government.

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Canada has the second slowest building permits in the OECD. The U.K. and U.S. offer building permits three times faster without sacrificing safety.

Une autre étude montre que l’hôtel de ville à Montréal a empêché la construction de 24,000 nouvelles maisons et appartements. The City of Winnipeg just lost a lawsuit because it tried to block 2,000 homes near transit systems. The Trudeau government actually funds these gatekeeping bureaucracies that block new homes by giving the local governments more and more of your money. And the bureaucrats at Trudeau’s federal housing agency are actually slowing down financing for builders trying to build affordable apartments.

When I am prime minister, my government will stop giving tax dollars to gatekeepers.

My common-sense plan: link the number of federal dollars for local governments to the number of new homes that get built in their cities.

1. We will require big cities permit 15 per cent more homebuilding or lose federal infrastructure money. Pas de nouveaux logements. Pas d’argent fédéral.

2. Those that beat 15 per cent will get building bonuses. Dollars should be based on homes completed—that is roofs over heads, not promises made. Je paie pour des résultats, pas pour des promesses.

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3. To get federal funds for new transit stations, cities will be required to permit new high-rise apartments on all land around them, so seniors and students can live next to the bus or train.

4. And I will sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of surplus federal land so we can build, build, build.

Moins de bureaucratie, plus de maisons.

We will make sure people have powerful paycheques to pay the rent and mortgages.

We will liberate the mighty strength and smarts of our workers to make more of what we need.

We will honour hard work again in this country. And that is about more than money.

Work brings dollars and dignity, paycheques and purpose, burdens and blessings, a good living and a good life.

Today, there is a war on work with taxes that punish earners and gatekeepers that block jobs.

Every time a worker turns around, he is punished for doing the right thing. You make it, Trudeau takes it. Oh, you took an extra shift, they clawback your child benefit. You get a bonus, he bumps you into the next tax bracket and takes away your reward. Oh, you’re on disability but try to work anyway, you lose your medication. You’re an immigrant doctor, forget it, you’re stuck earning minimum wage.

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A single mother earning $50,000 in Toronto who goes out and earns another $100 can lose $96 of it in federal, provincial and municipal clawbacks et une mère monoparentale au Québec pourrait perdre quatre-vingt pourcent du prochain dollar qu’elle gagne. The experts call it Marginal Effective Tax Rate or METR. The amount you lose on the next dollar you earn. With a parking meter you pay to park. With a work METR, you pay to work.

Ça me rappelle l’histoire du garçon qui demande à son père, Papa, c’est quoi une déclaration d’impôt? Papa répond, c’est l’inverse de ton bulletin scolaire. Quand tu as bien travaillé, t’es puni.

It is a matter of money, but it’s also a matter of hope.

When people find that no matter how hard they try, they get nowhere, they say what’s the point? They can’t move forward, they can’t even see forward. Humans need progress towards an achievable goal to feel valued and valuable. Le travail, c’est plus que gagner sa vie; le travail engendre une vie gagnante.

Mon plan fondé sur le gros bon sens réduira les impôts pour que le travail redevienne payant. My common-sense plan cuts income taxes so people bring home more of each dollar earned and hardwork actually pays off.

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But to bring home a paycheque. You need to have a job.

We will cut taxes and red tape to bring home our business, our money, and our jobs.

We will work with the provinces to create a merit-based blue seal qualification so that immigrant doctors and nurses can take a test, prove they’re qualified and get to work.

And we’ll bring home our energy and resources jobs.

Canada has the know-how to unlock the massive energy in our waters, our rocks and even our atoms.

Yet the Trudeau government has blocked — in different ways — almost every source of energy. Yes, we all know they shamefully killed pipelines in favour of dictator oil. But it’s not just oil. When the Germans and Japanese asked us for natural gas to break their dependence on Putin, Trudeau said there was no business case, blocking the completion of 18 liquefaction facilities.

We have 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — we can liquify it using 25 per cent less energy than the U.S. because of our cold weather, while using emissions-free hydro to do it. His environment minister has protested nuclear and his fisheries department has blocked Nova Scotian zero-emissions tidal power from the ocean.

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What has this done for the environment? Nothing. With all these taxes, Canada has missed every emissions target and now ranks 58 out of 63 countries in combating the real problem of climate change.

The International Energy Agency says the world will be using 50 million barrels of oil every day for the next 20 years. Trudeau and the NDP want that oil to come from polluting tyrants in Iran and Venezuela. I believe the country that invented the Canadarm and discovered insulin can produce those barrels cleaner than any other country on earth.

My common-sense plan is to repeal anti-resource law Bill C-69 and replace it with a law that protects our environment, consults First Nations and green lights good projects in 12 months, not 12 years. We will support Newfoundland’s plan to double its energy production, ending funding of overseas dictators altogether.

We will massively increase Canadian production of emissions-free energy, by green lighting green projects. Like zero-emitting Small Modular Nuclear Reactors for New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. And carbon capture and storage to make our oilsands the world’s lowest-emitting. We will approve more hydro dams and tidal wave power to turn water and gravity into lighting.

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We will grant permits for natural gas export plants to safely ship it off to replace dirty coal in Asia and to break European dependence on Putin.

And we will harvest the minerals of electrification from our mines, not import them from coal-burning China.

Je sais qu’au Québec, l’hydroélectricité rime avec fierté. Et avec raison, le génie québécois en matière de construction de barrages est reconnu mondialement. Mais le Québec aura besoin de 100 térawattheures supplémentaires d’ici 2050 pour répondre  à la demande croissante. Ça représente environ 50 per cent de la production actuelle  d’Hydro-Québec.

Pour lutter contre le vrai problème des changements climatiques il nous faut plus d’hydroélectricité et rapidement.

Mon plan fondé sur le gros bon sens utilise la technologie et non pas les taxes:

·En incitant les entreprises à réduire leurs émissions.

·En donnant le feu vert aux projets verts — comme les barrages et les éoliennes — finis les dédoublements d’études et les obstacles fédéraux de toutes sortes.

·En produisant des minéraux verts ici – et non pas importés de la Chine.

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Voici le choix : Blanchet et Trudeau veulent radicalement augmenter les prix de l’énergie traditionnelle. Moi, je vais réduire le prix de l’énergie verte. Eux, ils choisissent les taxes. Moi, je choisis la technologie.

Eux, ils choisissent d’envoyer notre argent aux dictatures étrangères. Moi, je choisis les travailleurs canadiens.

Here is the choice between Trudeau’s costly coalition and my common-sense plan:

They choose taxes. I choose technology. They push up prices of traditional energy we still need. I’ll push down prices of carbon-free alternatives. They put stop signs in front of our workers. I will green light green projects.

And most important: They send dollars to dictators and I will bring home paycheques for our people in this country.

Bring It Home!!!

And speaking of home, home will be safe again.

As a result of Trudeau’s catch-and-release policies, crime, chaos, drugs and disorder are common.

His catch-and-release bail law C-75 allows someone to commit a vicious, violent assault on an elderly woman in the morning and be out by noon to do it again. After this law passed, Vancouver Police had to arrest the same 40 offenders 6,000 times—in a year. That is 150 arrests per offender per year.

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The good news is we don’t have a lot of criminals, the bad news is that they are very productive. So productive, that if we locked them up, we would bring our crime rate down overnight. We know this, because we did it before.

When the last Conservative government brought in tough on crime laws, the opposition and the media screamed that we would have to build new prisons to house all the criminals we’d lock up. But you know what? It didn’t happen.

The truth is, not only did crime go down, incarceration also went down. Because we ended up locking up the same small number of repeat criminals for longer and deterring other would-be criminals from committing crimes in the first place.

How’s that for common sense? And it works!

Le Bloc a voté en faveur de ce projet de loi pour la libération rapide des récidivistes violents — tout en appuyant l’interdiction des armes de chasse. J’ai un message pour Yves François Blanchet : ce n’est pas le chasseur du Saguenay qui cause la criminalité au centre-ville de Montréal, ce sont les criminels récidivistes que vous voulez libérer.

Justin Trudeau, it is not the hunter in Labrador who is shooting up downtown Toronto, it is the violent repeat offenders that you keep releasing.

My common-sense plan:

· Jail not bail for repeat offenders.

· Reverses bans on hunters and licensed sport shooters and uses the money to jail gangsters and bolster borders against illegal drugs and guns from the U.S.

· And gives treatment, not decriminalized or tax-funded drugs, to addicts.

· And — using the dollar-for-dollar principle — we will pay for it by suing and collecting hundreds of millions or even billions from the corrupt pharmaceutical companies that profited by lying about the dangers of their opioids in the first place.

We will bring home our loved ones drug free and bring home safety to our people.

Bring home freedom.

The safety of our country in a dangerous world depends not on attending yet another gabfest at the UN or in — God-forbid — Davos. Nor do we secure Canada by sending ever more aid to foreign dictators. It is by standing on guard for our country and rebuilding our military here at home.

We will take resources from back-office bureaucracy and incompetent procurement and put it back on the frontlines to rebuild our military and honour the brave men and women who protect our freedom.

They don’t fight for freedom abroad so their prime minister can take it away at home. He says he admires communist dictators in Cuba and Beijing. His radical censorship laws —which Margaret Atwood called “creeping totalitarianism” and which make news disappear from social media — violate our constitutional freedom of expression. We will repeal Trudeau’s censorship laws and restore freedom of speech online, on campus and everywhere else.

We will enact a foreign influence registry to expose those paid by foreign dictatorships to interfere and we will shut down foreign-controlled police stations that still operate in our country. We will bring home control of our democracy, give people back control of their lives, and make Canada once again the freest country on earth.

Freedom used to be part of Canada’s common-sense consensus. Liberals believed in liberty. Conservatives believed in conserving it.

Today liberals run down freedom so they can justify taking it away.

So often today we hear that we can’t allow freedom, that we need bureaucrats and “experts” to dictate what we can say and hear, because “ordinary” people can’t make their own decisions.

But I’ve met these so-called ordinary people and I can tell you they are not ordinary. They are extraordinary. And they have the common sense to make decisions for themselves, and to be masters in their own country.

Que monsieur et madame tout le monde ont besoin du gouvernement pour prendre les décisions à leur place.

Si vous voulez voir la bonté, la grandeur et le génie, ne regardez pas ceux qui sont au sommet.

Regardez plutôt les gens qui sont autour.

Vous savez, nous les appelons souvent les gens ordinaires, mais je vais vous dire, ils ne sont pas ordinaires. Ils sont extraordinaires.

La mère monoparentale qui travaille debout toute la journée, rentre à la maison épuisée,   enseigne les mathématiques à ses enfants et équilibre son budget familial avec un salaire minimum.

Elle n’est pas ordinaire.

Elle est extraordinaire.

L’agriculteur capable de manier sciences, sol et tempêtes pour amener la nourriture de son champ jusqu’à votre assiette n’est pas ordinaire. Il est extraordinaire.

L’électricien qui capte la foudre et la fait passer dans un fil de cuivre pour nous éclairer.  Capable de dompter cette énergie assez forte pour illuminer la nuit et faire gronder le ciel.

Il n’est pas ordinaire. Il est extraordinaire.

Ces gens sont censés être maîtres chez eux, même s’ils ne sont pas célèbres.

Lorsqu’ils meurent, leurs noms ne font pas les manchettes. Il n’y a pas d’éloges à la Chambre des communes.

Sans trompettes ni tambours, ils ont porté leur famille, leur communauté et leur nation sur leurs épaules.

La vraie bonté, la vraie grandeur, le vrai génie: ce sont ces gens.

Notre raison d’être est de se faire leurs champions.  Avec leur gros bon sens.

Unis autour d’un idéal commun, le Canada. Notre chez nous.

Yet these extraordinary people feel like strangers in their own country. With how horribly things have changed and with the Prime Minister working so hard to erase our memories, it’s easy to forget how good life was and how good it can be.

So let me paint a picture:

Of students laughing and walking down safe streets to class.

The distant drumming of hammers driving nails into Canadian lumber on yet another new house.

Shopkeepers sweeping clean storefronts at the end of another day.

Waving to seniors heading home from the grocery store with dinner in the car and change in their pocket.

As the daylight fades, kids pleading with parents for 10 more minutes of street hockey before bed.

And then … quiet.

And a young couple sits on their front porch soaking in the warm night air with a Canadian flag hanging gently but proudly off the front of their house.

With a cold drink in one hand and a hard-earned paycheque in the other, they look into each other’s eyes in a way that says that all that hard work paid off, that those sacrifices were worth it, because … finally … we’re home.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is what Bring It Home means.

These are our people.

They are our country.

This is our home.

C’est notre chez nous.

Your home. My home. Our home. Let’s bring it home!

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