Building the stockpile

Meet the new, calmer Pierre Poilievre

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My Paul Wells Road Show — Vancouver is coming on March 20. I’ll be there, slightly disoriented by the clean coastal air, and my guests will include BC Premier David Eby, James Moore, author Suzanne Simard and some fantastic young singers from Vancouver Opera. Here’s the full rundown. Tickets are for sale here. But we’ve sold 3/4 of the house already, so don’t wait to get yours.

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Let’s begin with a few applause lines and smart turns of phrase from Pierre Poilievre’s Economic Club speech in Toronto on Thursday. (I’m now working from a transcript rather than the text reporters were sent before the speech.)

• Probably the biggest applause was for the simplest sentiment: “And let's be clear about another thing: the President's talk of 51st statehood, whether it is a joke or not, is unacceptable. It goes without saying there is zero chance of Canada ever being a part of the United States.”

• In a largely but not entirely Tory room, a line about Mark Carney’s overtures to China also won applause. “We should not declare a permanent rupture with our biggest customer and closest neighbour in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with Beijing… China is not a substitute for the United States of America.”

• A neat framing of Canada’s trade woes, which to Poilievre are mostly self-inflicted: “Canada already has free trade with over 50 other countries…. The problem is not that these countries block our products from coming in. It’s that our own government blocks our products from getting out.”

This turned into an extended riff: “Some of the worst tariffs imposed on Canada today are those imposed by the government here. Slow permits, changing rules, high taxes, outright bans on shipping oil off our Northwest BC coast. We have the second-slowest building permits in the OECD. It now takes 19 years to get a mine approved. None of that has changed in the last year.”

One of the hour’s most effective moments was served up by Lisa Raitt, a former cabinet colleague of Poilievre’s who joined him onstage after his prepared speech for a semi-improvised fireside chat. She asked him about news reports of a boatload of Australian LNG that’s put into port at Saint John, NB. Poilievre shook his head. “It makes me depressed,” he said. “You think about this. We have 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and yet weare importing gas from Australia.”

That last bit seems key.