The bookshelves in Pierre Poilievre’s Stornaway office hold two volumes, the first I’ve seen, from Conrad Black’s upcoming three-million-word (!) history of the world, sent to Poilievre by the author. There’s also a complete set of Winston Churchill’s works, donated by a Conservative Party supporter to be held in trust — at Stornoway, 24 Sussex, or whatever replaces that beleaguered residence — by each Conservative Party leader in turn.
This Conservative leader doesn’t have much reading time. Shortly after our interview Thursday he was leaving for a trip in the United States; he’ll skip Washington, and a thoroughly-reported piece by Mickey Djuric in Politico suggests it’s just as well.
I have been requesting an interview with Poilievre for four years. The requests had become increasingly pro forma. But when even Mansbridge got him, I started to believe Poilievre had nowhere left to go but me. His office arranged this interview over the last two weeks.
I decided to let Poilievre talk, mostly. He’ll be Conservative leader in a year or not, prime minister in three years or not. The polls really aren’t great. But if Poilievre ever gets to pack those Churchill books for a move to bigger digs, it’ll still be useful for the rest of us to know what he thinks about trade, energy, university funding, federalism, and the elephant next door.
Paul Wells: I want to begin by talking about something that you plainly wanted to talk about last week, when Peter Mansbridge interviewed you. He was asking you about floor crossers, which has to be a preoccupation. But you said that this is an Ottawa obsession that gets us away from the real issues. You said, ‘Ottawa is absolutely fixated on the inside-baseball machinations in the halls of power,’ but meanwhile, there are people who are $200 a month away from going bankrupt. There are 2 million people lined up at food banks. There are cases of malnutrition, and that Brampton and Surrey are being torn apart by extortion. I do get the impression this is kind of what drives your political action: that you want to focus on what’s not working in the country, rather than what’s not working as well as you might like in Ottawa.
Poilievre: Yes. And, look fair question about floor crossers. Obviously, there has to be some discussion on that, I just find that there’s a disproportionate obsession among the parliamentary press gallery and the commentariat on what I call “small-itics” — this or that political analysis, who’s meeting with whom, which politician is getting along with which other politician, when you have 41 million people whose lives are distant from all of that. You know we still have an entire generation of young people who can’t afford a home. We’ve got record crime on our streets. And you mentioned Brampton and Surrey, we’ve seen a 500% increase in extortion.
When I go to those two places, there are literally lineups of people recounting the phone calls they’re getting from extortionists demanding a million dollars, or there will be a bullet fly through their children’s window in the morning. Our economy is the only one shrinking in the G7. We have the worst food price inflation in that same group of nations. No wonder 2.2 million people are lined up at food banks, and to top it all off, our government has the biggest deficit, outside of COVID, in its history. So these are things that affect people’s daily lives. That’s what we’re supposed to be focused on. I would like to see our discourse on Parliament Hill focus more on what matters in the daily lives of our people. And I think we’d then get better results for them.
PW: In what communities are these? Let’s stay on that extortion thing for a bit. What communities are we talking about?
Poilievre: Well, it is the South Asian community that’s there, there as a result of there’s an organization called the Bishnoi gang. It’s now a listed terrorist organization that’s a gang that runs from it’s run remotely by Lawrence Bishnoi, who is a very powerful, albeit imprisoned gangster, but he has an enormous network. And he, along with other organizations, have seen vulnerabilities in our criminal justice and border system that has allowed them to carry out mass extortion operations throughout the communities I just mentioned.
And now what has happened is, because the threat is so real, there are these little guys who are grifting off it. So, you know, they might not be part of the gang, they might even be able to execute on their threats, but they basically call everybody in the neighborhood and demand 20 grand, 50 grand. And of course, the recipients of the call know that there’s, there is actually a serious threat of extortion, so they don’t know if they have to pay in order to stay alive.
I’ve been to numerous events in these communities where I always do a photo line, where people can come up and they can talk to me about anything. And I’ve been to some of these events where, you know, a quarter of the people in the lineup tell me they have personally, or a personal friend of theirs has received these threatening calls. And it’s serious stuff. You know, ‘Deposit this money in this account, or someone’s going to harm your kid or shoot you at your workplace.’ And there have been murders, prominent businessmen gunned down. So these are very serious problems, and we have solutions. We want to bring in a 10-year mandatory minimum for extortion. We want all the those who are visiting here who are linked to the Bishnoi gang to be deported from the country. We want better screening of people who come into the country, so that we don’t bring foreign extortionists to visit that danger on our people. And we want the RCMP to do a much better job of interrupting transnational organized crime.
PW: On the broader question of people who are suffering and not getting ahead. You did another podcast interview with the Triggernometry guys in Britain. You said: “The biggest phenomenon in the western world over the last decade or two has been the total betrayal of the working class — the people who make stuff, fix stuff, move stuff and build stuff, the younger people who are entering the job market, trying to start a life — who’ve seen their opportunities absolutely destroyed by massive government interventions that have concentrated wealth among a group of well-connected insiders.” You said this is especially the case in Canada. It kind of makes Canada sound like a great big Ponzi scheme.
Poilievre: I wouldn’t put it that way, but I would say that the policies that governments, writ large, have been implementing have had the effect of taking from the the working-class people and giving to a very small group of elite insiders through interventions that are kind of reverse Robin Hood. I’ll walk through them. You’ve got a massive expansion of corporate welfare and consulting contracts. We’re spending $26 billion as a federal government on consultants. This works out to about $1,500 per family in Canada in federal taxes just to pay high-priced consultants. And the government hired more consultants to figure out how we can spend less on consultants, by the way, or these massive corporate-welfare checks that go to favoured industries. Or you’ve got the so-called environmental policies, which raise energy costs, block our resource development, and then shut blue-collar working-class people out of jobs they should be earning six-figure salaries doing.
And then, of course, the greatest example is the money printing. It’s the most complicated one for anyone to understand. I don’t think there are 10 Members of Parliament who even understand how government is creating inflation by printing money. But the reality is, we’ve been creating cash about seven times faster than we build homes. So the result is that housing costs continually inflate.
I was in a coffee shop in PEI and I asked how much the espresso machine costs. And the lady said it was $11,000 for this little espresso machine. It wasn’t that fancy. There was a lady on the other side of the counter, a little old lady who said, “I bought my first house in Montreal for $9,000.” Less than the espresso machine. I said, “How much did you and her husband make that year?” And this was back in, you know, ’69, ’70, but she said, “We made about $16,000, $17,000 between us.” So it was the equivalent of a half year salary. Now depending on the market, it’s five to 10 times earnings to buy a house. Paul, it should be cheaper to buy a house today, because we have so much more technology to build them. And yet, where we used to be able to own a house with a single income, put meat and potatoes on the table every night, today, a couple working — they should be making twice as much because there’s two people working — they can’t afford a house.
Something is fundamentally broken, and I believe that the core problem is that we’re creating all of this cash to fund government deficits and spending, and this has inflated the cost of things that working people buy. The assets of the billionaire class, their assets go up in in monetary value.
PW: This is the line of thought that led you, when you were running for the Conservative leadership, to call for the dismissal of Tiff Macklem as Bank of Canada governor. I haven’t heard you talk about that as much lately.
Poilievre: Well, his term is all all but over now. I think it’s either this year or next year, so there’s no point in pursuing that any further.
I hope that the Prime Minister, when he does appoint the new governor, it will be someone whose focus is on sound, hard money, low inflation, stable prices, because that’s what we have to get back to. And in fairness, we did that for a long time after Brian Mulroney led the world in bringing in the inflation targeting in ’92 I think it was. And for basically 20 years, we had very low inflation and stable prices.
But what happened was Japan experimented with something that came to be known as quantitative easing. And whenever they use these, you know, convoluted Latinate words like that, you have to be suspicious about what they’re really talking about. And Japan did it. So the Americans said, “Let’s try that. They got away with it.” And then the Americans did it. So we got in on the action in COVID, and in the years that followed. And what quantitative easing effectively was, was the central banks buying enormous quantities of government bonds, which flooded the marketplace with easy money. That money goes to very well-connected and well-off people first, because they ultimately have more connections to credit, and they get to spend it before it loses its value. By the time it makes its way to the hands of the working people, it’s lost its value, and their wages are undermined. And that is the problem I seek to solve right now.
Mark Carney’s deficit is $78 billion. I worry that the temptation will be to print money again to pay for it, because it’s easier than than the alternative, but the results will be the same. And so I would caution against that. We have to get back to fiscal responsibility, reducing deficits, balanced budgets and sound money.
PW: When I first heard you talking along these lines at a labour-union event in Gatineau a couple years ago, capital accumulates value. Labor doesn’t. I thought, my God, he’s gone Marxist. I mean, control of the means of production is an old bit of discourse in Western thought. And what you’re essentially saying is the people who are lucky enough to have a house, or who got into the game early enough to have a house, now have have an interest in the current system, whereas people who don’t yet have a house are locked out.
Poilievre: Well, I don’t think it’s quite the case. There’s two things I’ll object to. One is the Marxist thing. Won’t be surprising, but I’ll just address the issue.
Homeowners today are actually not the winners, because even if you have a house that has doubled in price, and let’s say you’re eventually planning to go into a senior’s residence, the increased cost of real estate means that the seniors residence is ultimately going to charge you more for your monthly payment. Amortized over the, say, 15 years you’re going to be there, you’re going to pay more for that. So you’re not actually winning in the long run. The only ones who win are the extremely wealthy people who are able to borrow money at rock-bottom rates, buy assets that then inflate in price, while the real value of their debts shrink as a result. Those are the very, very small number of people who actually benefit from it. It’s not that the mainstream homeowner that actually wins in the end, because they have tolive somewhere.
The big losers are, of course, the young people who can never own a place, or the people who can no longer afford food that they earlier took for granted. But let me be clear about this. What I’m talking about is, you want to talk about political philosophy, it’s basic Adam Smith. Adam Smith said that all the value that exists in the economy comes from labour. Every resource that we use, including the microphone in front of me, it was worthless when it was in the ground until someone’s labour brought it forward. And he believed, not in the supremacy of capital, but in the free, voluntary exchange of of capital with labor, work for wages, product for payment, investment for interest. Workers always win in that kind of free market environment, because they they have to be compensated enough to be willing to take the job, and that’s what I want.
I want workers to get what they’re owed, and they’re not getting it right now. They’re working harder and longer, and they’re not able to afford homes and food. And the first foundational thing we have to get right is sound money and low inflation, so that the workers’ wages, the retirees’ pension retains its value and buys them a really good life. And I think all of the political resentments that you’re seeing right now are partly the result of the fact that people say, “I’m working harder than ever before and I’m not getting anywhere.” We can fix that. I think we’ll have a much happier, harmonious and stable country.
PW: You said something else to the Triggernometry guys that I had a harder time following. You were talking about what you call “the net-zero fraud,” which is environmental policy as we’ve seen it over the last decade or so. You said, “It has nothing to do with the environment. It is entirely a pretext to take from the working classes and give to a small group of insiders through the mechanism of the state. “You said, “It’s all about concentrating power and money in the hands of fewer and fewer people.” It’s got nothing to do with the environment?
Poilievre: Let me give you example after example of where it clearly has nothing to do with the environment. You know, in Ontario, the Liberal government of Wynne and McGuinty doubled electricity prices to subsidize wind and solar power. And what do we get? Still, the vast majority of the electricity does not come from wind and solar, but the people are paying vastly more to fund these crazy subsidies. The solar power has to use Chinese component parts in order to make the solar wafers and panels. The inputs into the windmills come largely from China. So we’re basically subsidizing a foreign economy that is the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses anywhere in the world, and we’re profiting a very small number of people by raising the energy prices on the working class.
Mark Carney himself bragged about how he had profited by lobbying for fuel regulation in the aviation sector that required airlines pay for more expensive fuels that he had invested in. In Germany, I met with a Social Democratic politician who was telling me that one of the reasons there’s so much resentment among working-class communities of the German countryside is because they massively increased energy prices to shut down conventional forms of energy. They de-industrialized, and now they’re having to hold open coal-fire plants because there are no alternatives to power their grid. So how did that help the environment? It didn’t help, but there was a bunch of insiders and grifters who probably got all kinds of grants and subsidies and handouts to pay for a transition that never happened and wouldn’t have made much benefit to the environment had it happened. So my approach is to focus on liberating abundant, affordable energy, including oil and gas, because that is the single biggest and best thing you can do to defeat poverty and empower your economy. Cheap energy that’s reliable and affordable.
PW: Since 2025 that has been Mark Carney and Tim Hodgson’s policy too.
Poilievre: I’m glad you put a date on that.
You only have to read his book. He wrote this book called Value(s), and he said his values were that he wanted to keep half of our oil in the ground. He testified against the pipeline to the Pacific. He said Trudeau’s carbon taxes were not big and broad enough, and that these were his values. And remember, this is only like three years ago. And now he expects us to believe that he has thrown away his entire book of Value(s) and that he has new values. But so far we haven’t actually seen any results to support that it’s a real change of heart.
PW: Danielle Smith seems sold on it. I mean, she talks up the concrete benefits to her economy of this MOU, today. Whe says it’s already drawing investor interest in Alberta.
Poilievre: Danielle Smith is doing what she should be doing, which is fighting for her province. What Mark Carney is doing is signing agreements to do a little bit less damage than he was originally threatening. So let’s be clear, Carney did not give Alberta anything in the MOU. He withdrew some of the damaging policies that he had been threatening. If I show up at your house and I steal your lawn mower, your blender, your microwave, your television, and then I sign an agreement to give you back the lawn mower and the blender, I haven’t given you anything. I just let you have back what some of what you already had.
That’s what Mark Carney has done in this so-called MOU. He’s agreed to back down on the production cap and on a few other very damaging liberal regulations. But if I were Prime Minister, I would have done all of that by default the first week on the job without forcing Danielle Smith to sign on to an agreement. And by the way, there are still some extremely damaging federal liberal policies. The industrial carbon tax is cited by CNRL, one of our biggest oil companies, for canceling an $8 billion investment just last week in the middle of this price spike around the world. The Americans don’t even have an equivalent carbon tax on their industry, so we’re losing vis-à-vis our competitors. And as for the pipeline, let’s see if it actually happens. So far, the federal government hasn’t done any indigenous consultation. They haven’t recruited a proponent. And they’ve done nothing to clear the way for the project to actually occur. A year into office, this is not moving at the lightning speeds that Mr. Carney promised.
PW: You’re heading off to the United States on a multi-city tour. First of all, there’s all this stress about whether it’s okay with the Government of Canada that a Conservative is traveling in the United States. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister about this trip?
Poilievre: Yes, I spoke to him on the margins of Question Period [Wednesday]. We had a pull-aside meeting, and I told him where I was planning to go, Detroit, Texas, New York, that I’m focused on autos, energy, finance, and that that I would keep him apprised. He raised no concerns whatsoever about it. And in fact, I think he suggested some ideas on some people I might meet. My plan is to debrief him on my return.
I’m not going to get involved in negotiations, though. We’ve got a prime minister. He has a chief negotiator and a minister responsible. We’re not going to divide Canada. I wish him all the success in those negotiations. My goal, more than anything, is to build more continued American support for Canada. We have a lot already. We have a great reputation as a country in the US. All the polling data shows that. But let’s leverage it even more with American business, American audiences, the American people, so that we can increase the likelihood of our success in the negotiations, in the broader relationship.
PW: What took you so long?
Poilievre: Well, I wanted to clear the way for the government to do its job right. We had a foreign president who was threatening tariffs and our sovereignty, so I wanted to allow the Liberal government to have a clear field to do the job of representing the country. We have one prime minister at a time. But you know, as the time has gone on, I thought, “Is there a way I can be helpful?” And the thing I can do is just champion and fight for Canada towards the American people, American business, American legislators — as distinct from the executive branch, which is the purview of the federal government. And I think I’ve got the right balance in this approach.
PW: You have begun to curtain-raise elements of what would be a Conservative negotiating strategy if you were Prime Minister, which is to use leverage to improve Canada’s chances in CUSMA renewal negotiations: Canada’s airspace, the abundance of critical minerals, the huge energy supply and the capacity to rebuild the military. And what you’ve said in a speech in Toronto a couple of weeks ago is that access to a Strategic Mineral and Energy Reserve, that you would build up, would depend on tariff-free trade, and that the amount Canada would spend on US weapons would depend on tariff-free access to the United States. So: “We’ll let you have our critical minerals, and we will buy our military kit from you if there are no tariffs.” I’m nervous about how that negotiation would go. I mean, I’m not aware of a country in the world that the United States is maintaining a tariff-free arrangement with.
Poilievre: We have to start our negotiating position from the absolute ideal outcome and then negotiate from there. The alternative is to make a bunch of preemptive concessions and then ultimately make more later on. My approach would be to walk into the room and say, “On my left, I have all of this leverage. This is what we can offer. We have 10 of the 12 NATO-defined defence minerals. We have the fourth-biggest supply of oil. We have a massive defense spend coming up that your industry would love to compete for. We’re your second biggest customer.” And I want to use all that leverage to get what I want, which is tariff-free access to the United States. And obviously the negotiation begins from there. I think building up a Strategic Mineral and Oil Reserve would give us leverage with the Americans. They would see the opportunity, because frankly, modern warfare depends on fueling your military, but also building the component parts out of these very rare minerals that we have in abundance. So why not build leverage and convert that leverage into results at the negotiating table?
PW: Seems like a pretty easy bluff to call if they keep the tariffs on. Does that mean that Canada’s stuck with Swedish fighters and Belgian rifles?
Poilievre: I don’t think necessarily. Here’s the situation that we’re in right now. On the fighters, the military has recommended the F-35 repeatedly, and there have been competitions between the F-35 and the Gripen that the Air Force has made clear it prefers the F-35 and a single fleet. That said, it’s a very large purchase, and I think we should just include that in our leverage as we seek to have access to the American market. And I think we can. I think we can end up with the best of both worlds, meaning we can get the best purchase of a plane and and also use it to to get ourselves more access to the American market.
PW: During the campaign, you talked about your vision for Canada-US negotiations, and you said that we could deepen trade so profoundly that there’d be a kind of trade liberalization bonus that you could use to increase military spending. I mean, given the amount of military spending that needs to happen in this country, it seems, again, optimistic that after 30 years of free trade, we could have so much freer trade that we could spend it on guns and planes.
Poilievre: Look, I don’t think the entire military budget increase is going to come exclusively from an enhanced trade deal. But the point I was making is, let’s show our American friends how our security and economic interests are aligned. So the more you trade with us, the bigger the economy we have. The bigger economy we have, the more we spend on defense. And it necessarily benefits the Americans when we are doing a better job of securing our Arctic. For example, right now, we have a dedicated and permanent full time contingent of 300 soldiers for the entire Canadian Arctic, which is the size of the European Union. That’s one soldier for every 15,000 square kilometers. Well, if we could massively increase that number, have three bases in the north fully surveil our waters with drones, Poseidons, and have it all backed up with the best fighter jets in the world, then our American friends would know that the likelihood of them facing danger from their northern flank would be significantly reduced. And so we say to the to the Americans, look, we can help keep you keep us both safer from the northern side if we have a stronger economy. So let’s link what we want, market access, to what they want, greater continental security. And we’d increase the likelihood of a positive outcome for both.
PW: I think I’m seeing here the elements of a real difference between you and Prime Minister Carney on relations with the United States, which is that you’re more aligned with businesses, and a lot of other people who say, “Look, we’re stuck with the United States, so we might as well make the best of it.” You have said that we can’t move away from being next door the United States; that the American population likes us. And you have said, “Let’s not make short-term decisions to rupture that partnership because of what we hope will be a short-term dispute.” Do you see, regardless of its utility as a negotiating stance, the elbows-up rhetoric that we’re hearing from various corners, do you see that as unrealistic over the long term? That at some point people are not going to be able to stay out of the United States, they’re not going to be able to stop buying American products, and that we might as well jump to that position of greater realism, despite how bad it feels.
Poilievre: I’ll say two things. First of all, it is a false proposition to have a permanent rupture with our biggest customer and closest neighbor in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with China. It is also unrealistic to think that there is any other country that can replace the United States as our main customer. We sell, depending on the year, between two-thirds and three-quarters of all our exports to the United States of America. That is the biggest economy the world has ever seen, and it’s right next door. None of those things are going to change, so my view is that we need to get the best possible deal we can, while at the same time we are stronger at home. Stronger at home means we need to unlock our resources so that we can reach other markets at the same time.
And this is the real difference between Mr. Carney and I. He believes that lots of meetings and handshakes and unenforceable MOUs will get us more trade diversification. Reality is, most of the countries he’s meeting with already have free trade in open markets with Canada. The problem is not that they won’t let our products in. It’s that we won’t let them out.
You know, natural gas is the most hilarious example of reverse protectionism. The Germans are saying, “Please sell us your natural gas,” and we’re saying no, or at least the Liberal government was saying that. And so they’re getting 95% of their natural gas now from the United States because we, our government, blocked 16 LNG plants from happening over the last 10 years. One of these tankers, Paul, has a quarter billion dollars of gas in it. One of them. Carney is bragging about a new free trade deal with Indonesia. Fine. It’s a $400-million deal. That’s two tankers of natural gas. And no one’s blocking our gas but us. So if you want to diversify markets, the problem is not abroad. The problem is here at home with our own government policy.
So what I would do is repeal C-69 and C-48, the anti-development and export laws. Approve pipelines, LNG plants in six months, not 15 years. Get rid of the industrial carbon tax and unlock our incredible resources to vastly diversify markets overseas. That is how you build more diversity and strength at home.
PW: This mechanism of offering bounty to the Americans and withholding it if the free trade talks were to collapse, is a mechanism that you have used in various fields, kind of what economists would call a bonus-malus [Actually, it comes from insurance — pw]. Offer good things if things go your way and withhold them if they don’t. So you have said that you would reward cities that build homes and punish those that don’t you said that you would withhold research funding from universities and operating grants from museums if their policies are too woke, or if they if they too openly permit antisemitism. And you have said you would reward provinces for reducing trade barriers. It seems to be a vision of the federal government as a kind of a wicket: add up everything in the adding machine. And if you liberalize trade, but you don’t build enough houses, then it comes out, you know, sort of even this year, but we’ll see next year. Don’t governments traditionally get stuff done by meeting and discussing and coming up with common projects, rather than with this sort of “If you’re good, you can have dessert” attitude?
Poilievre: Well, the current attitude is, if you’re bad, you get dessert, and the worse you are, the more dessert you get. And that’s the result we’re getting. You’re asking, don’t governments get things done by having these meetings? Well, that’s not been happening over the last 10 years. Let’s take housing. For example. We have the most expensive housing in the G7. We have the fewest homes per capita of any G7 country, even though we have 10 times as much land to build on per person than the second closest country. Why is that everyone who builds homes will give you exactly the same answer — that the taxes and red tape block them from building? 60% of the cost of a new home in Vancouver today, according to a CD Howe study, is government, taxes, red tape, fees, charges, lawyers, lobbyists, etc. That means twice as much money goes to bureaucrats in offices for a new home than goes to the workers, the suppliers and the land on which that home is built. Okay, so what have we been doing for 10 years? Holding meetings and sending cheques. And it doesn’t matter how badly local governments block projects, stand in the way, screw things up. They get more money from the taxpayer.
It’s not my money. If, God willing, I’m Prime Minister, I will be custodian of the money of taxpayers. They want the money to be spent on results. So what I would say to municipalities is the amount of federal infrastructure money you get will depend proportionally on the number of homes you allow to be built. And I would require them to cut their development taxes to a level that is necessary to build the pipes, the parks, the roads, etc, but nothing more. In Toronto, for example, they’ve increased their development charges tenfold. Is it 10 times more expensive to build a pipe or a park today than it was a decade ago? Of course not. It’s all going to fatten bureaucracy. I would insist on on municipalities like that cutting those taxes, getting out of the way, so that we can unlock a building boom and we have more carpenters earning six figure salaries and more people owning young people owning homes. That’s the result I want to achieve.
PW: You said the amount of federal funding that a city would get, the program that you chose to increase or withhold that funding, is the Canada Community Building Fund — which the federal government doesn’t pay to cities. It pays under tripartite agreements to provinces. How could you target municipal performance with a fund that you pay to provinces?
Poilievre: You just put it in the funding agreement that the province will distribute the federal money on the basis of homes built, and that’s the condition of sending the federal money. It is federal money. After all, I’m not talking about doing anything with municipal or provincial money. I’m talking with money that’s collected by the federal government and spent by the federal government, for which the federal Prime Minister has the responsibility.
PW: On university funding, on some occasions, you’ve talked about if universities are too woke, or if there is antisemitism felt by Jewish students somewhere on a university campus, then you’ll withhold research money. Researchers aren’t committing acts of antisemitism. How come they’re the ones whose budgets get withheld if something happens on a large university campus that you don’t like?
Poilievre: So to be clear, what I’m talking about is universities, administrators, etc, promoting an environment that is not safe for the Jewish people. Our country has become a very, very dangerous place to be Jewish. Let’s just be blunt. In the last week, we’ve had two or three synagogues shot up, which has become a regular occurrence in this country. Unfortunately, that antisemitism is coming from the top down. It is in government departments that give out grants to overt, repulsive anti semitism. It is in university professors who have antisemitic backgrounds, who have supported antisemitic causes. It is in violence and intimidation that is targeting our Jewish population. I’m not interested in governing the political ideology of professors. That’s none of my business. But nor am I going to allow Canadian tax dollars to subsidize antisemitism or to create an environment that is violent and dangerous for our Jewish population. I don’t think we should be funding antisemitism. It’s as simple as that.
PW: I’ve gotten this far into the interview without comparing you to Donald Trump, because I don’t think it’s a useful comparison, but the only government in the world that has implemented similar policies has been the Trump administration, and what we’ve seen is hundreds of millions of dollars of grants withheld from large numbers of universities.
Poilievre: That’s a different thing entirely. I’m talking about where there are acts of antisemitism, or where the Jewish population is put at risk. The government should not be funding it. And that’s not just at a university level. It’s, for example, the Heritage Department, where the government gave a grant to Laith Marouf, who was supposed to promote an anti-racist agenda, and he himself is a vicious antisemitic racist who is on the record, in public comments the government easily could have found, making repulsive, horrific comments about Jews that I can’t even possibly repeat on your show because they are so disgusting. So it’s in those kinds of rare and extremely obvious cases that I think the government should make sure that its tax dollars do not go to funding this kind of hatred.
