The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from March 19, 2026. These remarks have been edited for clarity. Check against delivery.
New York, NY – Whenever you say Brian Mulroney’s name, a rush of memories come to mind and many of the stories he would share of the fond memories he would share of his visits to the United States of America, where he had many friends.
In fact, one of his favourite stories was when he and his Finance Minister were out dining just outside of Washington after a day of long diplomatic meetings. They sat down at the dinner table, the bread came, and then the waiter walked over with the butter and he handed them each just one stick of butter.
There he was with his Finance Minister, who said, “Sir, is it possible for me to have another stick of butter?” And he said, “No, I’m under very strict orders. It’s hard times. Everyone gets a single stick of butter.” And Brian Mulroney said, “Well, do you know who we are? I’m the Prime Minister of Canada, and this is my Finance Minister. He decides who gets the money.” And the waiter said, “Well, I’m the waiter, and I decide who gets the butter.”
It was as simple as that and a good reminder of who’s really in charge in this country and in our shared continent: the people who do the work on the ground, who serve others, and remind us that we indeed are servants ourselves.
What an auspicious time for us to be in the United States of America, on the 250th anniversary of your Declaration of Independence. But it is another 250th anniversary. It’s the quarter-millennia celebration of Adam Smith’s legendary work, The Wealth of Nations, published also in 1776. One of the great economists and philosophers of all time, this dual anniversary reminds us of the roots of Western economic freedoms. Free exchange is really the only key to the well-being of both commoners and country.
As Smith wrote, “Commerce… ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship.” Those words are as true today as when he wrote them a quarter millennium ago. Free markets, free trade, free nations, and free people.
The free market has been the single most powerful discovery for the material improvement in living standards. Based on the free exchange of work for wages, product for payment, investment for interest. In the two and a half centuries since this idea was discovered, we have seen a spectacular increase in the quality of life of the human species.
We went from having basically two millennia of no material improvement, no economic growth whatsoever, no gains in life expectancy. A period of time during which we had, effectively, sailboats and horseback as our mode of transportation
A quarter of a millennia later – 250 years later – we’ve gone to having self-driving cars, jet engines, and spaceships, and annual economic growth has increased 200-fold. Life expectancies have more than doubled, diseases have been cured and life has materially improved.
It works best, this free enterprise system, when it works between countries, between nations like Canada and the US. Free trade between our countries has enriched us both. They have been an unqualified success. Yet, paradoxically, ironically, here we are today: clashing with tariffs, harsh words, boycotts, and other disputes. We need a road to repair the relationship and restore reciprocal free trade and security cooperation.
That is why I’m here to make the case for Canada. I will make the case that Canada must be stronger at home, affordable at home, and safe at home so it can be unbreakable abroad. And I will also make the case that all of these things are mutually in the interest of the United States of America: our two separate countries are always stronger when we work together in friendship.
Aujourd’hui, je vais défendre le Canada. Je vais défendre l’idée qu’on a besoin d’un Canada plus fort, plus abordable et plus sécuritaire. C’est comme ça qu’on va vraiment devenir maîtres chez nous et qu’on aura vraiment un levier de négociation avec nos partenaires américains.
The lessons of the past will guide us into the future. And the lesson of this continental history of ours is that our two countries have both been great and reliable allies and friends.
Le libre-échange, ça fonctionne. Le libre-échange a toujours enrichi nos deux pays. Nos deux pays ont toujours été des amis et des alliés. C’est pourquoi on doit trouver des solutions pour réparer les relations historiques entre nos deux pays. On doit continuer de travailler ensemble afin d’augmenter les échanges et assurer la sécurité de notre continent.
We know that history. We know the history that we share between us, but too often we’ve taken it for granted. So I’m just going to take a quick moment to remind us of the very special thing that we have built together.
We fought side-by-side in the trenches of France and Belgium. The US War Department estimates that there were approximately 30,000 Americans who joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight in World War I before the US joined that war.
We, as Canadians, were in World War II two years before the United States, and we declared war on Japan earlier in the day than you did after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, just to show how synchronized we are in our shared effort to defend the two countries.
In addition to over a million Canadians who fought in Europe and North Africa, about 10,000 Canadians fought in the Pacific Theater, including to defend Hong Kong and your very own Aleutian Islands.
A decade later, we joined with you – 26,000 Canadian troops went and fought to defeat communism in Korea under American leadership, 500 of whom gave their lives for freedom in a faraway peninsula.
Around the same time, our countries established NORAD, an alliance to extend joint air defences across North America, right up to the Arctic Shores of Alaska and the Canadian North. Today, NORAD remains a model of successful military cooperation.
After 9/11, there were 225 American aircraft that had emergency landings in Canada, where 33,000 stranded people were granted and cared for, given warm Canadian hospitality.
Then 40,000 Canadian soldiers leapt into action to fight and avenge America against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, following your invocation – the only ever invocation – of Article 5 of NATO’s charter. In fact, 158 brilliant Canadians gave their lives in that effort.
And let’s be clear, Canadians did not just show up in Afghanistan. We went to the most dangerous parts of that country. We went to Kandahar, to Panjwayi District. Our young men and women drove over improvised explosive devices, and we took on the nastiest and meanest terrorists anywhere on planet earth. In fact, your elite special forces said that our JTF2, the equivalent, was the “first choice for any direct action.”
In 1954, we brought this partnership into economic infrastructure. We jointly built the new seaway, effectively an H2O highway that went all the way from Thunder Bay and Duluth to France. This was an engineering masterclass, possibly unprecedented anywhere in the world. A feat of engineering and diplomacy that has perhaps never been matched by any two countries elsewhere.
Our relationship is a two-way one. On top of the military and economic facts, there’s the countless examples of the way we keep our people fed, safe and comfortable. Even though they don’t grab headlines, there are many things that are not sexy about the work we do together, but it makes our lives possible.
For example, we jointly fight fires together. When Los Angeles was going up in flames recently, it was Canadian water bombers that were dousing those flames, scooping up water from the Pacific and dumping them on the fire.
Your Coast Guard, our RCMP – they literally get on the same ships to patrol the Great Lakes. Our officers intermingle with yours with the common goal of securing our countries against smuggling and trafficking.
Dans les dernières années, Hydro-Québec, une grande fierté des Québécois, et l’État de New York ont conclu une entente importante, une entente à long terme sur l’échange d’électricité. C’est la preuve que quand on travaille ensemble, nos deux pays peuvent avancer et prospérer.
Closer to home, for most of you in this room, we have long-term electricity agreements where Quebec sells its surplus electricity into the New York market, powering your industries and so that the lights come on when you flip the switch.
These are the kinds of practical things that make us better off on both sides of the border. And this summer, of course, our two countries, along with Mexico, will be co-hosting the world’s biggest and most-watched sporting event: the World Cup, where we all expect Canada to win. It’ll be a little different than the last hockey game we had.
President Kennedy addressed our parliament, and he said:
“Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”
So what has then gone wrong if the relationship is so solid and practical? Well, I think we have to go backwards in time to see how we got here.
Just ten years after the power of Western capitalism had buried rusted-out Soviet communism, we provided a new opening for an authoritarian powerhouse to quietly and rapidly sneak up on us. Beijing’s communist regime was able to pursue economic enrichment without the corresponding political liberalization that the West had expected.
And then one day, the West woke up, and we found that much of our industrial heartlands had been hollowed out, and regions were collapsing from job outsourcing. Our economies were reliant on a country that was, at best, a serious rival and, at worst, a hostile threat.
Now I seek no fight with China or its people, who constitute a brilliant and extraordinary civilization. In fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, China and its people have been outworking, outsmarting, and outhustling us in the West for the last 30 years. This is a country that went from having 80 per cent of its people living on less than $1 a day to being the second-biggest economy in the world in 50 years – it has never happened.
But China’s rises come at a serious cost to political and economic freedom in the world. Too often, Western countries and corporate interests have enabled it, sometimes naively, sometimes cynically.
We, Canada and the United States, cannot afford to continue to ignore the ways in which Beijing’s communist regime has used its growing economic power to threaten our vital interests. President Trump’s efforts to prepare and protect the United States from this growing challenger – which is a regime, by the way, that our own prime minister in Canada called the single biggest threat to Canada – is fully founded.
Canada, however, should be seen as a friend and not a foe in that effort. Instead of treating each other as rivals, Canada and the US should look at the big picture. The real threats to our economies and to our security come not from each other, but from Beijing, from Moscow, from Tehran, and from their proxies.
Instead of fighting tariff wars with each other, Canada and the United States should be tearing down tariff walls that we have and forging a closer tie. We should be promoting the principles of free trade among free nations.
I reject the idea that we can afford to treat the current and very real problems we have between Canada and the United States as a permanent end to our relationship. They’re not. We’re always going to live next door to each other; we’re always going to have friendly relations between people.
I’ve just finished an incredible tour: Detroit, Houston, Austin, here to New York. Everywhere I go, people love Canadians! We have an incredible friendship. Our peoples love each other, and we live right next door to each other. We have the longest undefended border in the history of the world.
As you know, geography is permanent. No country can call a realtor and just move somewhere else, and the truth is, we wouldn’t want to. This relationship has been a very spectacular success over two centuries. My goal, therefore, is to rebuild that relationship. To promote free trade, to end US tariffs on aluminum, autos and lumber, to name a few.
Let’s forge a new tariff-free auto pact to protect North American production. Let’s have a full exemption from Buy America so that Canadian construction companies can sell into American procurement markets. And let’s relaunch the Keystone XL Pipeline to deliver more affordable Canadian energy into American hands at good prices.
I’m here today to restore and renew our friendship and to bring affordability, security, and strength to the peoples of both of our two separate countries. I’m here to pitch Americans on a simple proposition: Canada can help you solve the biggest challenges in America – affordability for your citizens and safety in a dangerous world.
For example, Americans today, more than ever, are overpaying for food, fuel and homes. Canada can help with all three: we are home to the world’s fourth-biggest supply of oil, and we provide by far the most stable and reliable of all of the countries that you could buy from.
For comparison, the other three in that top four are Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Take your pick. All of them are in the news and not for good reasons right now.
I was just in Houston the other day at the Houston Tank Terminal, and I saw where the Keystone pipeline actually emerges from the ground. So I very playfully asked the engineer, “What if I were to crawl into that pipeline and could keep crawling until my head surfaced somewhere? Where would I end up?” They said, “Well, in the middle of rural Alberta, where it goes in, in the town of Hardesty” – incredible town, 600 people live there, and their tank farm handles $100 billion of oil.
So in this town of 600 people, they handle what is equivalent of the GDP of many countries (just to illustrate the incredible genius of our trades workers and our engineers). But that oil then comes to Houston, where it is treated and shipped to the world. It is actually controlled out of a command center in downtown Calgary, even though it’s in Houston.
Not far away from there, in Baytown, Texas, 2,000 workers refine and turn Canadian energy into asphalt, jet fuel, gasoline and every other use. I just want to put this into perspective, because it is true that Canada has a trade surplus with the United States of America. For one reason: because we sell the United States an enormous quantity of underpriced natural resources, which you then feed into your industry and turn around at massive profits to your people.
The $100 billion of oil that we sell the United States of America is converted into $350 billion of products that you consume or sell to the rest of the world. And the difference goes into the paychecks of your workers. 70 per cent of our exports to the United States of America is not for end-use consumption, but for production and increased value that you add to those things.
So, in other words, we are not competing with you for production. Canadian workers are not replacing American workers in the supply chain. We are feeding into your supply chains, and you are massively increasing the value and turning that value into bigger paychecks, particularly for blue-collar, working-class Americans.
It is ironic that, because we have not built up more infrastructure East-West in our own country, your workers are able to use our resources for their paychecks. So you are big winners as a result of importing our resources.
Now, if you look at what we could do with this relationship today, we could increase Canadian oil exports to the United States of America by two million barrels, which would allow you to bring down your gas prices and ultimately become less reliant on what happens over in the Middle East.
Now, we can’t obviously do it in time for this particular crisis. However, what about the next one? When is the best time to prepare for a crisis? Ten years ago. Well, we should be preparing now to make sure America has a reliable supply of oil for the medium and long-term so that never again do Americans have to pay $5 a gallon for gas.
A renewed USMCA that includes permitting additional oil production and approving US pipelines on the south side of the border could both create jobs for Americans, but also reduce costs for your consumers. While none of this can be done in the short term, we have to get moving now to prepare for the next time.
Then there’s trucks. The Ford F series has been the single greatest-selling truck in the United States of America for 45 years. It has a military-grade aluminum shell for a body, one of its great features. That’s the good news.
The bad news is you simply cannot make enough aluminum in the States for those trucks. You don’t have the bauxite or the affordable electricity necessary to turn bauxite into aluminum. We do. We have enormous surpluses of aluminum.
But the current tariff drives up the cost for Ford to make those trucks, which makes it harder for them to produce trucks made by America, and ultimately drives up the cost of those trucks for electricians in Ohio, miners in Appalachia and energy workers in Texas. Get rid of that tariff, and you lower the cost of trucks for working-class Americans, and you increase production of those vehicles.
Then there’s lumber. Your young people struggle to afford homes, particularly in cities like New York. 80 per cent of your lumber imports for homebuilding come from Canada. The 45 per cent tariff on Canadian lumber increases housing costs by making it more expensive to build. Eliminating this Biden-era tariff would make home building more affordable, which means more jobs for your carpenters and more homes for your youth.
There are countless other goods and services Canadians can profit from delivering to you tariff-free that will make life more affordable for American consumers and businesses. Simply put, a strong Canada is vital for your economic interests, but also for your security interests.
Obviously, we control the biggest airspace, seas and landmass in the hemisphere. We are the only thing between you and Russia. We forget that sometimes. I mean, other than Santa Claus, he’s up there too, but he’s not going to protect you from the Russians.
There’s unanimous consensus that Canada needs to massively build up its military. The Canadian armed forces must be capable of protecting every square inch of sea, skies and soil. We understand we have to do more. That will not only secure us, but it will keep your northern flank secure.
What is more, we have the materials of modern warfare. For example, Canada produces 10 of the 12 NATO-defined defence critical minerals that are going to be necessary to fight a future war.
Aluminum that strengthens aircraft and armoured vehicles. Gallium that powers semiconductors and radar systems. Germanium, which enables night vision technology. Graphite is essential for batteries; we also have lithium for the same purpose. Tungsten goes into armour-piercing ammunition and also into medical imaging equipment. Cobalt brings heat-resistant alloys that you put in your fighter jets so that they can operate under incredible stress.
Canada is actually the global producer of more than 60 minerals and metals and holds the largest deposits of high-grade uranium, which you will need for nuclear power and other uses. And of course, we have the biggest supply of potash, which is one of the three top ingredients for fertilizer, so that you can eat.
No modern economy or military functions without secure energy and minerals. That’s why I proposed that Canada establish a Strategic Minerals and Energy Reserve that would be available to our tariff-free allies, giving preferred access to those countries that work with us.
It will give us increased leverage in these forthcoming negotiations, and it will keep both of our countries secure if, God forbid, we ever have to fight a common enemy. Access to this reserve could be a key part of the renewed USMCA following this summer’s review.
Canada is also going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an unprecedented buildup of our armed forces to rebuild our capabilities. We believe that the degree to which we make those purchases from our American friends should be directly proportional to the degree we get access to free trade in the forthcoming review of the USMCA.
Ma vision pour le Canada est très simple. Je veux construire un Canada plus fort et plus abordable pour rétablir notre amitié avec les États-Unis et faire la promotion du libre-échange avec nos alliés historiques. C’est comme ça qu’on va défendre nos valeurs et assurer notre sécurité.
That is my vision for a stronger Canada: a renewed friendship with the United States, a world in which free trade between free markets works for free people. A bulwark against the alternative vision promoted by unfree powers, nations that do not share our values or our interests.
Now, many of you will have recognized the quote I used from John F. Kennedy not long ago, that geography, history, economics and necessity have bound us together. But what you might not know about that speech is that he actually spoke much more frankly about the challenges in that relationship, about its inevitable stresses and tensions, but that those things could be overcome with a common vision and pursuit. The pursuit of freedom, of individual liberty, of democracy, provides us with the perspective to work through our many differences.
So let me close by quoting the prescient words of JFK that he gave to our House of Commons in 1961:
“We are bound to have differences and disappointments – and we are equally bound to bring them out into the open, to settle them where they can be settled, and to respect each other’s views when they cannot be settled. Thus ours is the unity of equal and independent nations, co-tenants of the same continent, heirs of the same legacy, and fully sovereign associates in the same historic endeavour: to preserve freedom for ourselves and all who wish it.”
Thank you very much.