The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from April 28th, 2026. These remarks have been edited for clarity. Check against delivery.
Ottawa, ON – I want to congratulate the minister for his speech and thank him for his commitment, as a father, to simplify the disability tax credit. Our people should be spending their time living their lives rather than filling out forms. We want to make life simpler for people.
Unfortunately, then comes the bad news. This Liberal prime minister has now doubled the deficit that Justin Trudeau left behind from $31 billion to $65 billion. Everyone thought it would be impossible to outspend the reckless Justin Trudeau, but then this new Liberal Prime Minister came along and said, “Hold my champagne, Mr. Speaker.”
On this day, as the Prime Minister congratulates himself for putting an 11th Liberal budget on the national credit card and tells Canadians that affordability is the best it’s been in a decade, let us remember that his illusions are not reality.
With Canada’s food prices rising the fastest in the G7, just last week in Calgary on April 25th, thousands of families lined up for hours at the Guru Nanak Free Kitchen. Many with suitcases, Mr. Speaker, so that they could take away 80,000 pounds of free potatoes and groceries because they cannot afford to feed themselves.
In Moose Jaw, the food bank has had to limit visits to once a month instead of two. I don’t know what people are doing for the rest of the year. A 150 per cent increase in the demand at that local food bank under this Liberal government.
Nationwide, food banks are recording nearly 2.2 million visits per month – that’s double from seven years ago. Working parents are skipping meals so their children can eat. Seniors are choosing between groceries and medication. Young families are staring down mortgage increases as inflationary government spending drives up their mortgage costs.
And all of this, Mr. Speaker, is leading to real misery in people’s lives. Real human costs that we saw with the report of the World Happiness Index, which saw Canada fall from fifth happiest in the world to 25th during the span of this Liberal government.
Among Canadians under the age of 25, we now rank 71st, behind the US, UK, Australia and even Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Moldova. Who would’ve thought that Kazakhstani youth, Vietnamese youth, Moldovan youth would be happier than Canadians in their youth in the springtime of their lives, Mr. Speaker?
That is the tragedy of Liberal credit card budgeting that imposes higher costs on people’s lives. Here’s how it works: they put the nation’s bill on the national credit card, and they force Canadians to put their bills on their personal credit cards. Meanwhile, a small group of Liberal elites and corporate insiders get fantastically rich off government handouts, bailouts and carve-outs.
Today’s Liberal fiscal update brings more costs, more debt and more bills on the national credit card. This Prime Minister is just another Liberal.
Here are the facts: He doubled the deficit from $31 billion to $65 billion. The Prime Minister broke his promise that he would reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio over the fiscal horizon. Today, he reported the debt-to-GDP ratio will go up, not only over the fiscal horizon, but in every single year that this government serves.
He broke his promise to spend less, with spending year over year going up 4.9 per cent, which is far more than the combined inflation and economic growth, and about twice inflation plus population growth. He’s added $37 billion of brand-new spending measures in this economic update alone, on top of tens of billions of dollars already announced in the last year.
Since taking office a year ago, this Liberal Prime Minister has created 13 new government agencies. Outside of COVID, last year’s was the largest deficit in Canadian history, and this year’s spending is the highest as a share of GDP since 1996.
Interest on the national debt will hit $59 billion this year, more than we transfer for healthcare and more than we collect in GST. That means every penny you pay in GST goes to bankers and bondholders, not to doctors and nurses. Shame, Mr. Speaker. Every Canadian will spend $3,400 on interest payments.
An increasing share of spending goes to Liberal elites and corporate insiders, so not everyone is hurting. The Prime Minister’s so-called Sovereign Wealth Fund, which has no wealth to put in it, is relying a hundred percent on the national credit card.
And today we learned that they’re going to spend millions of dollars to set up a transition office that will eventually set up a permanent office to borrow on the national credit card to place bets on Liberal chosen corporations.
Then there’s $3 billion for international climate finance. The same money scheme this Prime Minister used to enrich himself at Brookfield and through his now-bankrupt Net Zero Alliance. This Prime Minister has been wrong about everything, by the way. Everything.
He tells us every day how smart he is. He was wrong to say we needed a bigger and broader carbon tax. Wrong to oppose the pipeline to the Pacific. Wrong to say there would be deflation after COVID. Wrong to say that printing money wouldn’t cause prices to go up. Wrong to say we should keep 50 per cent of our oil on the ground, Mr. Speaker. How can we ever expect him to get anything right when he’s been so wrong for so long?
There’s $11 million to hold a summit: one meeting with a bunch of global financial elites will cost $11 million. And in case you’re worried that this is something new, Justin Trudeau held the same meeting with the same people at the Shangri-La Hotel 10 years ago to set up the infrastructure bank. And how did that work out, Mr. Speaker?
Under this Prime Minister, Canada now has the highest household debt in the G7, the most unaffordable housing in the G7, the lowest investment per worker in the G7, the second worst productivity and the second highest unemployment in the G7.
Half a trillion dollars of net investment has fled to the United States, twice as much capital has left and has returned, twice as many Canadians are starting businesses abroad than they are at home. In fact, more Canadian firms opened in the US than opened in Canada last year.
Last week’s Liberal convention had a solution for all these people with this money leaving. They said they want an exit tax, Mr. Speaker. A gigantic wall of taxes to prevent people from fleeing the costly policies of this Prime Minister. Any country that punishes its citizens for fleeing has lost its hope.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business reports that after one year of this Liberal Prime Minister, more businesses closed than opened, that we face an entrepreneurial drought, that high costs, red tape and uncertainty are crushing the next generation.
Closures have outpaced startups for six straight quarters. Over half of small businesses told a survey they would not recommend someone start a business in Canada today. Canada’s economic foundations, the CFIB concludes, are cracking. We cannot regulate and tax ambition out of our economy and expect to build a strong country, Mr. Speaker.
Nothing has changed; everything costs more. No real tax reform other than the rebranding of the carbon tax to be called the Clean Fuel Standard. He promised to cut red tape, and yet not one anti-development law has been removed and, as I said, 13 new agencies have been created.
He said he would build at speeds not seen in generations, yet after we gave him unprecedented legal powers to approve big national projects, that new office that those laws created has not approved a single one.
Then there’s the pipeline to the Pacific, he promised. Mr. Speaker, it has no permit, no route, no investor, no start date, no end date, no starting point, no endpoint. And the only company that says that we know could actually build the pipeline, Enbridge, says that Liberal laws and taxes will prevent us from creating enough oil, generating enough oil to put in it.
Finally, he wants Alberta to spend $20 billion on a money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere as a condition for building the actual pipeline.
What about his famous Davos speech on middle power alliances? It’s produced a lot of MOUs, but zero new free trade agreements around the world. Announcements are not results. Lofty speeches do not pay mortgages, fill tanks or stock the shelves.
At the root, this Prime Minister still holds the same Liberal ideology of top-down government control that concentrates power and money among insiders like him. That philosophy that doubled our debt, killed growth and priced families out of the basics. He has been wrong on all of those issues all along, Mr. Speaker.
After one year of this Prime Minister, our economy is weaker, more expensive and less hopeful. I share these harsh facts because we must replace the illusion with reality if we are going to fix what the Liberals broke. Mr. Speaker, it has been said that optimism without realism is delusion and realism without optimism is surrender. We will neither dilute ourselves about the harsh reality nor surrender to Liberal failure.
Today, we speak as Conservatives of a different, more hopeful and a better Canada. A Canada that is the most affordable and autonomous anywhere on earth. Everything in Canada should be dirt cheap because we have the most dirt in which to build homes, dig resources and grow food, Mr. Speaker.
We hold the most resources per person of any country in the history of the world. A home with a yard, heat in the winter and fuel in the tank should be easily affordable. With vast farmland, the cost of food should not even be a concern.
We should be able to afford everything we want in this wonderful, splendid country and all of the abundant bounty that we have been given. That is our birthright, and it is our potential.
Our mission – an affordable, autonomous, strong country – is realistic. We possess the third most uranium, the most hydro potential, the cheapest natural gas to produce affordable, abundant electricity. We have the most oil reserves anywhere in the G7 and the shortest shipping distances from the Americas to both Asia and Europe.
We have the most land per person of any G7 country, by far, on which to build homes. We rank third globally in farmland per person. We should have the most affordable food.
Conservatives choose a big, open, free market economy where everyone can fulfill their potential, where our money is sound, where it buys more, and where the people are thoroughly in charge of their own lives.
Mr. Speaker, our plan rests on four principles:
One: affordable, abundant energy;
Two: low inflation and taxes by cutting the cost of government;
Three: free market competition; and
Four: national self-reliance.
Energy touches every aspect of our lives. Conservatives, therefore, propose to scrap all taxes for all of the year on gas, and to get rid of all carbon taxes forever. Workers and farmers will pay less, truckers will deliver our goods more affordably.
But we also need strong money. Strong money rewards work and savings. Like Switzerland, we will balance budgets in the medium term by slashing spending on consultants, bureaucrats, corporate welfare, foreign aid and false refugee handouts.
We’ll cancel the $90 billion wasteful Alto rail and enforce a strict dollar-for-dollar rule: every new dollar of spending will be matched with a dollar of savings to pay for it. We will unlock and unblock the free enterprise system.
We’ll end corporate welfare, cut taxes, end taxes on home building, energy, reinvestment, and lower taxes on work by simplifying and lowering the rates in our Income Tax Act.
We will unblock home building and resource extraction by eliminating delays. And, Mr. Speaker, we will do all of this because we believe in an economy that serves the hardworking people of this country.
The choice is clear: we can either have an economy of lobbyists and handouts or hard work and competition. Political aristocracy or economic meritocracy.
I choose meritocracy, Mr. Speaker.
The final principle, of course, is autonomy. Our Canadian Sovereignty Act will bring home paycheques and production through free enterprise and not subsidies. We will repeal the anti-development law C-69, lift the Northern BC oil shipping ban, scrap the industrial carbon tax, cut regulatory burdens by 25 per cent in two years, bring in a two-for-one rule – every new regulation must eliminate two old ones – we will move to the world’s fastest permitting, and we will bring in binding pre-permits so that we can get projects moving quickly and our economy rolling.
We will unblock a dozen LNG plants, create a Strategic Energy and Mineral Reserve for crises and for leverage, and we will use that leverage to fight for tariff-free trade with the United States. That means building up our leverage to end the needless tariffs on our steel, aluminum, autos and lumber.
Pushing a new auto pact will also allow us to work with our American friends to increase production on both sides of the border. We will seek to relaunch the Keystone Pipeline to move hundreds of thousands of additional barrels of oil south of the border, and we will not seek a permanent rupture with our closest customer in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the dictatorship in Beijing, a regime that the Prime Minister admitted was the biggest risk to Canada.
Canada sells 20 times more to the United States than it does to China. That is not going to fundamentally change, no matter how many illusions and falsehoods the Prime Minister promises. The same Prime Minister knows that, that’s why he has 91 per cent of his investments in the United States and not in Canada. Unfortunately, under his leadership, his investments are among those that have fled.
In short, we need to remove the obstacles, the tariffs, the taxes, the red tape and the bureaucracy. Other government obstacles need to be removed. In essence, we need the government to get out of the way. It’s not what they must do; it’s what they must stop doing.
As Saint-Exupéry, the famous French author, said, “Perfection is not achieved when there’s nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.” Removing Liberal burdens, Liberal taxes, Liberal red tape, we will liberate the Canadian people to fulfill their potential.
By lifting 11 years of Liberal burdens, we can free Canadian energy, genius and ambition. There is a Canada in the hearts of every immigrant and pioneer, every Indigenous person whose lineage dates back to time immemorial. And it is this: that with freedom, we can achieve anything; that our promise is not a memory, it is our destiny.
Imagine a young tradesperson able to afford the homes that he builds. A mother filling her grocery cart worry-free, making decisions about her children’s nutrition and not worried about emptying her bank account. Families, breathing freely. Entrepreneurs launching ideas the same day they invent them. Our resources coming out of the ground and enriching all of our people, not foreign coffers.
No limits exist on the potential of the Canadian people when they are free to pursue them. We must be realistic and optimistic because a realist counts the odds while an optimist changes them.
Let’s do both. Thank you very much.