The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from October 30, 2025. These remarks have been edited for clarity. Check against delivery.
Toronto, ON – Wow. I’m definitely the oldest guy in the room. We were having some debate about the age cutoff for the Conservative Youth Caucus. I said to Melissa Lansman, our deputy leader, who’s very good at setting the rules, “I’m 46, can I sneak into the youth caucus?” She said, “no, it’s definitely not 46, maybe 35.” I said, “well, 35 with inflation is 46.”
She wasn’t buying it, but I want to thank Angelina for that wonderful introduction and for leading our campus conservative club, the biggest political club at the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto. Angelina, like all our young Conservatives, are fighting for homes, jobs and hope, and they refuse to sacrifice their future to the Liberal government.
Angelina et nos jeunes conservateurs se battent pour des emplois, des maisons et de l’espoir. Ils refusent de sacrifier leur avenir au gouvernement coûteux de Mark Carney. Ils insistent sur la promesse du Canada et c’est la raison pour laquelle nous sommes ici aujourd’hui.
I want to thank all of you for being here, all these young people. We know that you all must be young because you’re here listening to a speech about economics from a middle-aged or aging politician rather than spending your evening trying to get approved for a $900,000 mortgage on a 400 square foot apartment.
Maybe you’re here today for the free snacks. I don’t blame you. We’re in a time when a good meal is considered to be a juice box and a granola bar after Liberals doubled the cost of food.
In fact, what they did is they doubled the debt, the debt that you are going to have to inherit as the youth. And it’s no coincidence that when they doubled the debt, they actually doubled the food bank lineups and doubled housing costs. These things go together.
Mark Carney and the Liberals are spending your tomorrow on their today with their irresponsible, costly, big government policies. Liberals tell us all that we shouldn’t be talking about these substantive issues like debt and costs and inflation and jobs. They say that young people are only interested in vibes.
Like the vibe you get when you see that your rent is now $2,000 a month, or when you get to the checkout and you realize you have to put an item back on the shelf because your bank account has run empty before you finished making your purchase. Those are the types of vibes that we’ve gotten used to after 10 years of costly Liberal government.
But Mark Carney promised there would be different vibes – that he was going to be a tight-fisted banker and promised that he was going to move with unimaginable speed to do all of the opposite things that he talked about, and that his party did for the prior 10 years. So now that it’s been seven months, it’s a good time to review the promises that he’s made and which have been kept.
He promised we’d have the fastest-growing economy in the G7. He delivered the fastest shrinking economy in the G7. He promised to double homebuilding. His housing agency says homebuilding is going to drop by 13%.
He promised that he would be judged by the prices at the grocery store. He delivered more expensive food. In fact, food prices are rising twice as fast as the Bank of Canada’s target, and we just learned that 7% more people will be lined up at food banks this year than last year. This is after Liberals already doubled their lineups at those food banks.
He promised he would negotiate a win with President Trump and get a deal by July 21st. Still no win, still no deal, still no elbows, still no jobs. My friends, he promised that he would change everything. In fact, everything is getting worse.
They tell us, though, they’re just about to do all of these great things. That’s the “Just About Party”, right? They remind me of the student you all know, who is just about to stop procrastinating on that essay. Next week, he’s going to stop procrastinating on that essay.
Or it reminds me of when we used to go to the student pub at the University of Calgary, and there was that sign on the wall that said “free beer tomorrow”. So you showed up tomorrow, and it still said “free beer tomorrow”, but tomorrow never came, and beer prices would just keep going up and up and up.
It reminds me of the lady who got married for her fourth time and as she was leaving the wedding hall and driving with her new husband to the hotel, she said, “I’m feeling a little bit nervous”. He said, “why?” She said, “this is my first time being with a man.” And he said, “well, how is that possible? You’ve been married three times already.” And she said, “well, each of my prior husbands had a condition. My first husband had a heart condition, so when we got back to the hotel room, he got so excited that, sadly, he died of a heart attack. My second husband had an eye condition and he didn’t see a tree as he was driving back to the hotel and he hid it and didn’t survive the crash.” And the man said, “what about your third husband? What was his condition?” She said, “well, he was a Liberal and so every night he would just sit at the end of the bed and promise how good it would one day be.”
You all heard Mark Carney gave this big hyped up speech. It was an address to the nation. He pulled these poor young people into a lecture hall and boy did he ever give them a sleepy lecture. It was very, very slow and very, very boring. It was almost like a gigantic tranquillizer.
But there was something different about this particular speech. He’s been making all these grand promises, but that was not the case in this speech. Gone were the grand promises, replaced with grim warnings. He said that things are going to get worse and the change will take a very long time, after he had promised to move at unimaginable speeds.
And then he let the truth out of the bag. He said, young people are going to have to make more sacrifices. Mr. Carney, the young people in this room and across this country have already sacrificed enough. They have worked hard, they’ve done everything right, and they deserve a bright future of homes, jobs and hope.
Think of what you’ve already sacrificed for this costly Liberal government. You’ve sacrificed home ownership after they doubled the cost of buying a home. You’ve sacrificed your nutrition and health after Liberal food inflation drove up the cost at the grocery store. You sacrificed your paycheck at the altar of high Liberal income taxes. You sacrificed even your job to employment-killing taxes, red tape and Temporary Foreign Worker programs.
In fact, this generation, and I mean this literally, this young generation has sacrificed more than any generation since the Second World War. There is no doubt in my mind that all of you are working harder and longer for less than your parents and probably your grandparents. And it hasn’t been since the heroes that won us our freedom in the forties that we have seen a generation work so hard and so long for so little – all because of Liberal policies that have deprived you of the basics that you should have been able to take for granted here in Canada.
Let’s start with jobs. Youth unemployment today is 15%, the highest in a decade and a half. It is up from 13.7% when Mark Carney took office only seven months ago, after he promised he would create more jobs. In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s not just the unemployment rate; it’s the three-decade record lows for the employment rate. Only 53% of youth who are between the ages of 15 and 24 are working. 53% is the lowest level since 1998. Most of you in this room weren’t even born in 1998. That’s how bad it is.
And many of you are asking, as you drive around town, dropping off your resumes, you ask, “what did I do wrong? Why can’t I find a place to work?” Hundreds and hundreds of resumes, no phone calls returned. The answer is: you did absolutely nothing wrong. You did everything right. Your phone should be ringing off the hook with job offers because you are qualified and you have been preparing for this moment to contribute to our economy. And my message to you is that Conservatives will fight for your jobs, and better than that, we will put in place the policies that will allow you to have a job again.
I want to invite up on this stage an incredible young man, Liam. Liam, get up here and tell us about the state of jobs in this country.
Liam: Many of my friends have shared the same story: sending out countless hundreds of applications only to receive a handful of responses. In my first year of university, I was lucky enough to obtain a full-time internship that paid. Since then, it’s become increasingly difficult to find meaningful work. Just this last summer, even getting a part-time minimum wage job has become more and more competitive with more and more applicants. Although I was eventually able to receive an unpaid internship, I’m worried as a graduate this year that I will not be able to find long-term, meaningful work.
Tragically, a story that’s all too common. But Liam, we’re here with a message of hope. We are not going to let the Liberals sacrifice your future. You will have a great job, and you will bring home great pay and have a beautiful future.
It used to be that young people had no problem getting jobs. I remember there was a time not long ago when there was a shortage of workers. There were more jobs than people. A young person who showed up with a clean shirt, a decent resume, a nice smile and a good attitude would walk away with a job in just a few days.
But today, that entire equation has changed as we’ve seen that jobs have been blocked and killed by Liberal taxes that make our small businesses uncompetitive. They brought in anti-energy and resource laws that prevent us from digging mines, building pipelines and generating other major private sector economic activity.
Then they have further replaced Canadian workers with low-wage Temporary Foreign Workers, that drive down wages to profit Mark Carney’s corporate lobbyist friends at the expense of Canadian youth.
And speaking of newcomers are young people, who come from around the world with qualifications as doctors, engineers, nurses and architects are banned from effectively working in the professions for which we need them by bureaucratic gatekeepers that won’t grant them a license to practice even though they are well qualified.
So while we have young immigrant doctors who are forced to drive Uber, we have 6 million Canadians who don’t have a doctor. This is insane. They say in Toronto, if you have a heart attack, don’t call 911, call an Uber because the driver’s probably a doctor. Yet we block those brilliant young immigrants from working in the field for which we so desperately need them.
Speaking of our immigration system, we had the best immigration system in the world, where we brought people in reasonable numbers that we could absorb into our jobs, our healthcare and our housing market. But Liberals totally destroyed the system with chaos, numbers that were too high, and without doing proper criminal background checks on people coming to this country. This has served nobody: not newcomers, not multi-generational Canadians, not our economy, housing market or healthcare. And our young people have suffered the most.
Young people in Canada are welcoming, and we want to bring people – the best people from around the world – but we should only do it in the right numbers, in numbers we can absorb, so that we can have housing, healthcare and jobs for all.
Speaking of housing, you are the first generation in Canadian history that cannot afford a home. It used to be taken for granted that if you got a good job right out of school, you paid off your student debts quickly, you could buy a house and start a family in your twenties. It was normal for 26 and 27-year-old couples to own a house with a yard and space in a safe neighbourhood. That is what we took for granted in this country.
But over the last decade, Liberals have literally doubled the cost of housing with regulatory red tape that blocks home builders from building, high taxes that make up more than a third of the cost of a new home, and by delaying building permits so it now takes seven years to get a subdivision approved. Now, obviously, that hurts everyone, but the young people are harmed the most.
Look at the state of our housing market after 10 years of Liberal promises. Today, we have rent exploding. Young people are paying more and more for smaller spaces. Almost 60% of all Canadians worry they won’t be able to keep up with their rent or mortgage and might actually face the loss of their home altogether.
A majority of Canadians, 55%, say that they are giving up on home ownership. In fact, a recent poll found that a majority of Canadians have now accepted that they will live in a smaller house, further away from their jobs, and in a lower quality.
My friends, maybe this is what Mark Carney was trying to do with his hypnotic speech. He was trying to lull you into accepting a worse quality of life. This is what worries me the most about Liberals. It’s not just that they’ve allowed crime and chaos and joblessness to rage out of control. It’s not that they have broken our immigration system. They’ve done all those things.
My worry is that they’re going to try and get Canadians to accept this permanent reduction in our quality of life. That their strategy to win reelection is not one of hope, but one of deliberate hopelessness: to tell you that better is not possible after they ran an entire campaign promising that better was possible.
My friends, my message to you here today is that you don’t have to accept a reduction in your quality of life or in the expectations of your future. You deserve better than this, and we will deliver better than this.
I want to invite Doreen and Juliet up on the stage to tell us a little bit about the hopeful future that we have.
Doreen: I’m working and studying full-time, and I want to start to plan my future. However, for my friends and I, even with education and multiple jobs, saving up for a down payment feels impossible. My parents were able to buy a home in their twenties, but for my generation, rent alone takes up most of our income. We want to build stable futures here in Canada, but right now, it feels like that stability is slipping away further and further.
Juliet: And I have to say I’m part of the group that’s worried. I don’t see how I can plan to have my career and life here. It’s just becoming a much more distant dream for me. I’m studying pre-med health sciences, and I want to become a Canadian doctor because I care about people and I want to serve my community. But in order to do that, I need a country that’s going to provide a foundation and support for young students like me to actually be able to find these jobs and positions that we were promised after years of studying.
Friends, give it up for Doreen and Juliet. When Mark Carney comes before our youth and says that people like Doreen and Juliet should sacrifice more, I wonder what it is that they haven’t already sacrificed. They sacrificed the chance to have a job and a home to start a family. They’ve sacrificed their time and their energy to work extra hours.
Again and again, they’re told that this is not enough, that the government wants another pound of salt. The government wants to take even more and add new burdens. I think of the country that I was promised as a young person, where if you worked hard, you got a great life. You could afford a home and you could live in a nice neighbourhood.
I think of people like Adam who are struggling every day and every way. Adam, why do you come up on the stage?
Adam: Something that my generation has been really concerned about is the increased cost of living. We’ve seen rampant inflation, we’ve seen the cost of everyday items such as gas and food going up. Some of my friends work multiple jobs, and they’re still struggling to make ends meet. And so something that I’m personally concerned about is: where is Canada going to be in the next five to 10 years? Are things going to be affordable? Is this going to be a livable city?
You stand tall for all our young people and you will have a bright future. I want to invite up someone else to talk about how we’re going to have more jobs for our youth, jobs and paychecks that will allow them to pay the bills. Everyone, give a big round of applause and a warm welcome to Ben.
Ben: Hi, I’m Ben. Many young Canadians are finding it hard to get jobs that match the skills they’ve gained at university, and despite working hard to build their work experience, many of my friends often find themselves in short-term roles or underemployed. University used to be the ticket to success, but the jobs just aren’t out there anymore. We’re hoping Pierre can help us get them back.
À tous les jeunes Québécois et jeunes Canadiens à travers le Canada, j’ai un message pour vous : vous n’avez pas besoin de vivre comme ça. Vous n’avez pas besoin d’accepter ce standard que les libéraux ont imposé. Vous avez le droit d’avoir des logements, des emplois et un bel avenir. Vous avez travaillé fort, vous avez fait vos études et vous vous êtes préparés. Moi je vise à créer un Canada qui est abordable pour nos jeunes. Un Canada qui permet à nos jeunes d’avoir une maison dans une communauté sécuritaire. C’est la vision pour laquelle les Canadiens ont travaillé pendant des générations. Aux jeunes Québécois qui considèrent la souveraineté, je vous dis : il y a des opportunités au Canada. Je comprends vos frustrations. Vous voyez un Canada où c’est trop cher d’avoir une maison, où notre identité est fracturée par un gouvernement qui dit que nous n’avons pas d’identité nationale. Mon message est que les jeunes Canadiens devraient s’unir pour un meilleur avenir qui récompense le travail et qui permet à chacun d’acheter une maison et d’avoir accès à la propriété. C’est ça le bel avenir que nous allons bâtir ensemble. That was the promise of Canada. The promise of Canada was better than the American dream. We’ve all heard of the American dream, but that’s something you wake up from. A promise is something that is kept. It’s like a deal. You do this, you get that, and that’s what brought so many waves of immigrants from around the world.
It’s what allowed so many generations of Canadians to start at the bottom and climb to the top. And the promise was this: you work hard, you get an affordable house, you get meat and potatoes on the dinner table every single night. When your head hits the pillow, you know that you’re going to be safe as you sleep and that your car will still be in the driveway when you wake up in the morning, and that we’re all united under one common flag.
But to restore a promise, you need to plan. And Conservatives have that plan for our youth, for homes, jobs and hope. It starts with stronger take-home pay. Stronger take-home pay is necessary for you to make your mortgage and rent payments, to pay off your debt and to start a new family.
Stronger take-home pay is three parts. First, you need a job. Second, you need to bring home what you earn. And third, the dollars you bring home need to preserve their buying power. So let’s go through them one by one.
Jobs: we as Conservatives are going to unleash the free enterprise system to generate the high-paying jobs and opportunity that will not only put food on your table, but will allow you to produce the goods and services that our economy needs. That starts with unlocking the trillions of dollars of riches that are right beneath our feet.
We should be the richest nation on earth. We have the third biggest supply of oil. We’re the fifth biggest in natural gas. We have uranium, the biggest supply of uranium. We have the fifth-biggest supply of lithium. We have the longest oceanic coastline. We have the shortest shipping distances from the Americas over to both Asia and Europe.
The only thing standing in the way is the government that blocks our brilliant workers and businesses from bringing these riches to the surface and putting them in the pockets of hardworking Canadians. In fact, if you look at our molecules, our atoms, our rocks, our water, our land, our dirt, we should be the richest country on earth, and Conservatives are going to unlock those riches for our youth.
We would rapidly repeal Liberal anti-development laws. C-69? Gone! We are going to approve pipelines to build with Canadian steel that takes Canadian energy to Canadian markets. We’re going to get rid of the ban on shipping oil off the Northwest Coast of British Columbia. If the Americans can ship oil through those waters, we can do it better, safer, and more effectively.
We will get rid of the industrial carbon tax so that we can produce our steel, aluminum, cement, and concrete. Yes, we will axe the whole tax for real, for everyone, for good and forever. We will ensure that our energy comes to the surface by getting rid of the energy cap. We will give the fastest building permits of any country in the OECD. We will bring in shovel-ready projects. They’ll be shovel-ready zones, pre-approved to dig the mines, build the pipelines, expand the ports, and build all of these things.
It will be blue-collar six-figure jobs primarily for our young trades workers. And we will ensure that our young tradespeople get their fair share of federal tax dollars for training and job placement. We want the boots and the suits so that we can get our people into the jobs. And we’re going to make sure that Canadian jobs go to Canadian workers.
Multinational corporations want to drive down wages and drive our kids out of jobs by exploiting low-wage Temporary Foreign Workers from poor countries. Now, Mark Carney was asked about my idea to solve this problem, and he said, well, he’s talked to a lot of corporate lobbyists and they’ve confirmed that they need to bring in low-wage workers from abroad.
Even while we have more unemployed youth than at any time in a decade and a half, Carney’s corporate cronies say they need to bring the jobs to low-wage Temporary Foreign Workers. Now, let’s be clear, these Temporary Foreign Workers, they’re good people, they’re decent, they just want the best for themselves. But we cannot bring in people from abroad to fill jobs that we do not have ourselves. Our young people need those jobs. We will get rid of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and we will ensure that it is Canadians first for Canadian jobs.
Then you need to be able to take home the paycheck that you earned. Right now, you’re spending more money on taxes than on food, clothing and shelter combined. No good deed goes unpunished in Liberal Canada. I saw this incredible meme of this man sitting with his boy in a park, and the boy was bawling his eyes out, and the boy had said in the speech bubble, he said, “dad, what is an income tax form?” And his dad said, “well, it’s kind of like your school report card, except the opposite. The harder you work, the worse you do!”
Income tax is the fine you pay for the crime of working hard, and you young people see it every day. You go in, you earn a paycheck, and then you do the extra hours, you get paid the overtime. And when you get that paycheck, what do you find out? That the government took the biggest bite of all – they contributed nothing to your work, and yet they get the biggest part of your paycheck.
Conservatives are going to cut income tax so that your hard work pays off and you bring home more of each dollar you earn. In fact, we will cut taxes on work, investment, home building and energy to unlock more production and paychecks here in Canada and to strengthen our economy against any threats from abroad.
But we also need to make sure that your dollar has buying power. Mark Carney and the Liberals have destroyed that with inflation. Inflation is the worst tax of all. It is an immoral tax because it takes from the poorest people, especially young people. Why are young people the hardest hit by inflation? Because you’ve not had the time to build up inflation-proof assets that protect you against the attack on your buying power.
You live off cash. The money that comes from your paycheck is the money that you use to buy things. And when every year that money buys you less, you’re getting poorer despite working harder. Why does inflation happen? Too much money chasing too few goods. It’s very simple. If you have an economy with 10 apples and $10, it’s a buck an apple. If you double the number of dollars to 20 and you still only have 10 apples, you’re not twice as rich. It’s just that each apple costs twice as much.
Liberals have grown our money supply from $1.8 trillion to $2.5 trillion in the last five years. That’s a 40% increase in the money supply during which time the real economy has only grown by 4 or 5%. In other words, they’re growing the money 10 times faster than they grow the stuff that money buys.
Great news for Brookfield, by the way. Their CEO actually says, it’s on tape, the CEO of Brookfield, Mark Carney’s company, in which he continues to have tax-protected interests, actually said Brookfield profits off high inflation because they can raise the rent on all their tenants.
So Mark Carney and the privileged Liberal elite get rich off the same inflation that makes you poor. That is an ultimate conflict of interest. That means that he is better off when Canadian youth are worse off. But the good news is Conservatives are not only fighting to put an end to his profiteering, we are going to cap government spending and cut government waste, cutting bureaucracy consultants, foreign aid, handouts to phony refugees and corporate welfare so that we can bring down deficits, stop printing money and bring back the purchasing power of the dollar.
We want your paycheck to go further, and that includes buying a house. We are the only ones with a practical plan to ensure you can actually own a home. And yes, you do need to own a home throughout your life in order to build up equity, secure collateral, and a credit history to eventually borrow and start a business.
And to have a home, we need to build more homes. Why don’t we have the homes? Bureaucratic gatekeepers stand in the way. Conservatives will incentivize municipalities to speed up permits, free up land and cut development taxes. We will get rid of all federal taxes on home building.
In fact, we will sit down with every level of government and set out a plan to eliminate all taxes on home building to bring down the cost of a new home by hundreds of thousands of dollars. We will eliminate the capital gains tax on anyone who reinvests in Canada and hires our youth.
I look across and I look at the young people I see today, and so often I see a sense of hopelessness and despair. And I want you to know that I see you, Conservatives see you. We see the sadness in your voice, the hopelessness on your face, those big, dark bags under your eyes as you’ve gone out to deliver one more Uber Eats delivery so that you can pay your rent.
We as Conservatives know what you’re going through, and we know that you’ve done everything right. We know that many of you have fallen into a life of addiction because of that hopelessness. Fentanyl has taken 50,000 lives, most of them young people. And our government gives out more and more drugs, and goes softer and softer on the killers who hand out those drugs. We are going to protect our youth from drugs.
To the mothers of Canada, know this: we will protect your kids from drugs. We will fight for your kids. I was at a treatment center just the other day in Windsor where they turned around lives, 71% success rate in getting these young men and women off drugs. And I went to meet with them. These are recent graduates or new clients at this drug treatment center.
Oftentimes, politicians show up at these places and say, “I’m here to help.” They know something; they don’t need my help. In fact, I came there to challenge them. I had a job for them. I looked at all of these young men and women who are fighting their addiction – many of them are defeating their addiction – and I said, “you have a job to do.”
“You need to get better because Canada needs you. It needs you to go out on the street and reach down to the next person who’s addicted, and you’re going to drag them in here, and you’re going to get them off drugs. And then they’re going to go out into the street, and they’re going to bring someone else in here, and we’re going to get that person off drugs. And we’re going to save every one of our brothers and sisters and friends and neighbours, and we’re going to give them hope.”
That’s what this country needs now more than ever. We need a country where people can get back up on their feet, where they can dream again, where they can believe that their dreams are possible. And so our message tonight is exactly the opposite of what youth heard in that sombre dystopic speech from Mark Carney.
Our message is: you don’t have to live like this. You deserve better. Canada’s youth are the best and the brightest in the world, and they deserve a future to match that. We will build a country that once again rewards work, celebrates ambition and empowers our young people to take back control of their lives. We will ensure that young people can again own homes in their twenties, launch businesses, start families, be authors of their own stories. In other words: take back control of their lives.
Powerful paychecks and stronger dollars are not just about mathematics and economics. They’re about the freedom and opportunity to do the things that fulfill you and make you happy. We will be a nation, not of bureaucrats and busy bodies, of rulers and rule makers, of gatekeepers and grandees.
Instead, we will be a nation of artists and adventurers, of entrepreneurs and explorers. A nation that celebrates warriors and workers, pioneers and patriots. A nation that gives a chance to every single person, no matter where they started off in life, to have a bright future, to have homes, jobs, and hope in the freest, the richest, and the best country on earth.
Canada first, Canada forever. God bless our youth. Thank you.