The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from April 16, 2026. These remarks have been edited for clarity. Check against delivery.
Toronto, ON – Thank you very much to the great Rona Ambrose, former minister, businesswoman, former leader of our party, a great Albertan and a wonderful Canadian. It’s an honour to have you here, Rona, and it brings back memories of a better time; a time when our country was affordable and autonomous, and when we were able to stand on our own two feet as an economy.
In fact, that is really the theme of my speech today. We are here today gathering at a time when we’re in need of both optimism and realism. In fact, it has been said that optimism without realism is a fantasy. Realism without optimism is surrender. I ask today that we do both of these things.
We bring forward optimism for what our country can be, and realism about where we are today.
The good news is that Canada should be the richest, most affordable and autonomous country anywhere on earth.
Aujourd’hui, je vous demande de regarder la réalité en face. Je vous demande aussi de ne pas accepter silencieusement la réalité actuelle parce que la bonne nouvelle, c’est que le Canada peut et doit devenir le pays le plus riche, le plus abordable et le plus autonome au monde.
We have more resources per person than any country in the history of the world. It should be laughably cheap to buy a house, to heat that house and to drive a car off its lot. Food prices should be so affordable that price is an afterthought when you walk down the grocery aisle with all the farmland we have.
Our mission should therefore be to make Canada affordable and safe at home and unbreakable abroad. That is our potential. Now, let’s look at our present-day reality.
On electricity, we have the world’s third largest supply of uranium, the most rivers to power hydro, the cheapest natural gas anywhere on earth to power stations. And yet, this year, for the first time ever, Canada is unable to produce enough electricity to supply itself.
We have the fourth most oil anywhere on earth, and yet we are now importing from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. We have the most oil in the G7, and we are the only G7 country without an oil reserve.
We have 10 times more land per person to live on, and yet we have the fewest homes per capita in the G7. We have the third most farmland per capita in the world, and yet 2.2 million people line up at food banks every month – that is a 100 per cent increase over the last seven years. And the bad news, I’m afraid, continues.
Under Mark Carney, Canada has the highest household debt in the G7, the most unaffordable housing in the G7, the lowest investment per worker in the G7, the worst food price inflation in the G7, the second lowest productivity in the G7 and the second highest unemployment in the G7.
An outflow of a half-trillion dollars of investment has left our country under the liberals for the United States. Twice as much investment has left Canada in the last 10 years than has returned, according to an RBC report released just two days ago. And twice as many Canadians are opening businesses in the United States as in Canada.
Let that sink in: twice as many Canadians are opening businesses in the United States than in Canada. And we got a solution to this problem at the Liberal convention: they want to put a half-million-dollar exit tax on anyone threatening to leave the country. Any country that feels it must punish people for fleeing is not a place of hope and optimism.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business wrote this week that after a year of Mark Carney, “More businesses have been closing than opening in Canada. It’s time to admit it: We’re in an entrepreneurial drought. High costs, red tape, labour challenges and never-ending uncertainty discouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. More businesses in Canada have closed than opened for six consecutive quarters, and more than half (55%) of small business owners say they would not recommend starting a business right now.”
“In the second quarter of 2025, exit rates reached 5.6%, while entry rates fell to 4.8% in Q4 2025, marking some of the highest closure rates and weakest startup activity outside the pandemic.”
“High costs, tax and payroll pressures, complex rules, red tape, and ongoing labour challenges against a backdrop of persistent global uncertainty, all make entrepreneurship more difficult and less attractive.”
“Canada’s economic foundations are crumbling. Governments need to stop just papering over the cracks and really refocus efforts on policies that improve the small business environment. We cannot afford to regulate ambition out of our economy. When more than half of current small business owners are telling you they wouldn’t recommend starting a business, it’s time to listen.”
Under these numbers are real lives. Canada’s happiness ranking on the Global Happiness Index has gone from fifth in the world 10 years ago to 18th last year, and now we have risen to 25th under Mark Carney. What’s worse is that among youth, we rank 71st.
There are 70 countries in the world where young people are happier than young Canadians, and we’re not just behind the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, but we’re now behind Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Moldova. Young people in Kazakhstan are happier than young people in Canada.
Something bad is happening here, and it’s only getting worse. Now, we can take the comforting tranquillizer of blaming global factors for these problems, but all the other countries that were falling behind face those same factors. They all faced tariffs. They faced COVID, wars in Ukraine and Iran.
Why is it that we are doing so much worse than all those other countries? Why is it that our economy is crumbling only here under this Liberal government? Now, it’s also comforting, a comforting illusion to say that these are the problems created by the earlier Liberal government, but that they’ve learned and changed.
That’s what Mr. Carney promised in the last election. He promised that he would backtrack on everything he had said and written for 10 years and everything that his party had done in the previous decade.
So what has changed? Really?
Strip away the adjustments for style, image, ignore the speeches and the promises. What has really changed? If you asked a neutral and objective AI bot to go into all of the policies on the books of the government of Canada, what would you find has actually changed in the last year?
Deficits and spending are both higher, a lot higher. Taxes? They’re about the same. Laws passed by Trudeau to block resource development and free criminals; all of them are still on the books. Those are the facts. Everything else is an illusion. Speaking of illusions, let us go through Mr. Carney’s words and promises one by one.
He promised to spend less and invest more; he’s since doubled the deficit. He’s increased federal spending by 7 per cent above levels he inherited from Trudeau. Outside of COVID, government spending as a share of GDP is higher than it’s been since 1996, and the deficit is the biggest in our country’s history.
He has stacked $90 billion of net new spending above and beyond the spending Trudeau had already budgeted. This is net of promised savings, most of which are not yet realized. And by the way, two-thirds of the new spending is on operations, not the famous capital expenditure we were promised. There’s been no tax reform other than to change the name of the carbon tax to the clean fuel standard.
Mark Carney promised to cut red tape and remove barriers; he’s not removed a single Trudeau-era anti-development law, but he has stacked new laws on top of old ones. He’s not removed a single government, department, agency, or Crown corporation, but he’s created 12 new ones.
He solemnly promised that because we are in an existential crisis, we would need it to move at speeds not seen in generations at an unimaginable scale. So last June, I instructed our parliamentary team to help him pass in five days unprecedented legal powers to fast-track new projects, get them going immediately. There’s no time to waste.
How many projects has he approved since June with those new powers? Zero. Not one. Not one single new major project. Not one oil pipeline, not one port, nothing. And speaking of pipelines, that great symbol of our national sovereignty after a year of Mark Carney’s “unprecedented speeds,” the proposed pipeline to the Pacific has no permit, no route, no proponent, no timeline to start, or to finish.
In fact, the only company that could conceivably build it, Enbridge, has said that Liberal laws and taxes that Mr. Carney has kept in place make it impossible to produce enough oil to put in that prospective pipeline.
Mr. Carney says he will never approve the pipeline unless Alberta builds a $20 billion carbon capture and storage project – a project that has never been done anywhere in the world and that, based on the most rosy scenarios, will lose money forever after $20 billion of expenditures to build it – if it can ever be built at all. By the way, there’s no proponents to build that either. The only thing we’re seeing here is an illusion, and the only thing real is the cost.
Then there’s the famous Davos speech about the need for a middle power alliance. While it had many crowd-pleasing lines in it, the rhetoric was short of details. What has it amounted to in reality? It’s been a year, Mr. Carney has not negotiated a single new free trade agreement anywhere in the world in the last year. There have been dozens of unenforceable MOUs that say in the text they have no legal weight, but there has not been a single new trade agreement of any kind.
The rhetoric simply doesn’t match the results, and illusions are not reality. Lofty summit speeches, meaningless MOUs, symbolic signing ceremonies do not pay your mortgage, gas your tank or fill your grocery cart here at home. They do not grow the economy, make us unbreakable abroad.
So what is really going on here? How can Mark Carney talk such a big game abroad while doing so little to fix the real problems here at home? And why does it feel so much like it’s all announcements and statements rather than results?
At the most basic level, Mr. Carney is and always has been a big-government Liberal. He believes in the same top-down, government-run economy that concentrates money and power in the hands of a small group of political authorities for the benefit of corporate insiders like him. The theory they have – it’s trickle-down economics – is that a group of credentialed central planners can spend your money, take from one industry and give to another, and decide who gets what.
It’s the same liberal approach that doubled our debt and drove up the cost of living over the last decade; nothing has changed. And the problem is that when politicians decide who gets what, those with the most power end up getting it all, and everyone else gets the bill.
The well-lobbied-for corporate insiders fill their pockets with tens of billions of dollars of projects that go over budget, over schedule and often belly up. Governments block competitors from taking on political favourites, and they redirect resources from money-making businesses to money-losing businesses.
Take the Alto Rail Project as the worst example. It’s a project whose proponents say it will cost $90 billion to build – $8,000 per family in Canada – after which it will continue losing a billion dollars a year forever. All of this by the way, not to take cars off roads, but to take passengers out of airplanes. So we’re going to take people out of a faster money-making mode of transportation to put them in a slower and money-losing mode of transportation. According to McGill University, that project will never make money and will never be able to pay back the original governmental investment.
Furthermore, if you look at the real result, it will be that insiders will get the contracts and the lobbying benefits; the project will not even be completed for the next 12 years, during which time Canadians will pay taxes for consultants and insiders to receive more and more.
Every time we prop up money-losing projects like this, Canada gets poorer, while a small group of insiders get rich off the grease, and Canada is plunged into a cycle of bad policy to compensate the original bad decision.
This is how it works: to pay the cost of a bad investment, the government raises taxes, further slowing economic growth, so it begins printing money, and as money outgrows the stuff it buys, prices rise and inflation grows.
Mark Carney not only supports this agenda, he is its global symbol. It’s the policy he pursued as a central banker and then as Justin Trudeau’s economic advisor. Now that he is Prime Minister, he’s doing it all over again. And none of this is to disparage Mr. Carney, who’s a perfectly fine gentleman. It’s just to point out, and with the greatest respect, that Mr. Carney has been wrong about every major economic issue of the last decade.
When he was the head of the Bank of England, he printed money, leaving that country with the worst inflation in the G7 and a housing crisis that deprived an entire generation of youth of homeownership. He wrongly predicted that COVID would cause deflation, that prices would drop, and the result was that he advised governments to print copious amounts of money, giving us the worst inflation in 40 years.
All through 2020, while I was warning that inflation would result from this spending and printing, what did Mr. Carney say? In a December 2020 interview, well after the realities of COVID were very well known, he said, “Do I worry about inflation? Look, in the horizon of a normal central banker, two to three years, the horizon for monetary policy, it is unlikely to materialize to a serious extent.”
Two years later, on schedule, we had the worst inflation in 40 years.
I say this because he’s doing the same thing all over again. He also wrongly opposed the Enbridge pipeline to the Pacific. He wrongly argued in his book that we should keep half of our oil in the ground. He founded the Glasgow Financial Alliance of Net Zero, a global coalition whose stated purpose was to financially starve off the oil and gas sector, which employs hundreds of thousands of people in Canada.
That alliance attracted enormous attention and considerable prestige, and then it collapsed. Its members fled, and the alliance dissolved. Sure enough, he was gone before the bill came.
He was wrong to enthusiastically support carbon taxes and EV mandates. Then he became Prime Minister, claiming that he had changed his mind on those things before bringing them back under different names.
Now, his defenders will call these decisions and these reversals pragmatism. But in reality, it is an illusion.
As the London Telegraph wrote, “The years Carney spent running the Bank were characterised by stagnant growth, stalled living standards, and declining productivity, and while there are many explanations for that, the ‘rock star Governor’ clearly did nothing to improve the performance of the British economy… By the time he left office, Carney had created a mess which his successors have struggled to clear up. Inflation spiked up to a peak of 11.1 per cent in the UK, compared to 5.2 per cent in France, or 8 per cent in Italy, hardly a country known for controlling prices effectively, largely because the Bank had printed too much money.”
The gap between Mr. Carney’s boasting and his results is perhaps unprecedented. As Daniel Borsen said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge,” and he’s doing it all over again here in Canada.
What all Mr. Carney’s policies have in common is that they drive costs up and wages down for the working class people, and they drive wealth into the hands of a small group of well-connected political elites through subsidies, grants and other payouts.
Here’s the point, my friends: after a year of Mark Carney, the economy is poorer, weaker, and more expensive than ever before.
Toutes les politiques de Mark Carney ont une chose en commun. Ses politiques font augmenter le coût de la vie et font baisser les salaires de nos travailleurs. Tout ça pendant qu’une certaine élite en profite avec le BS corporatif et les subventions. En même temps, après un an des libéraux, on voit que notre économie est en déclin. Le coût de la vie augmente plus rapidement et les gens ne peuvent plus payer leurs factures.
His plan in government has been to repeat the same top-down, insider-driven policies of centralizing control. Instead of fixing the many boondoggles left behind by Trudeau, he has compounded and layered on top of them.
We Conservatives believe that there is a better way, but consider the paradox: Mr. Carney keeps in place laws that block resource development, then he creates new laws to go around the old laws. He puts in a heavy carbon tax on the steel sector, and then he subsidizes the steel sector. He keeps taxing home building, and then he subsidizes home building with a brand new agency. He keeps high taxes on business and investment, and then he subsidizes business and investment.
It might seem like a contradiction. In fact, you might reflect on the words of Ronald Reagan. When he said when a liberal sees something that moves, he taxes it. If it keeps moving, he regulates it. When it stops moving, he subsidizes it.
Why not just get out of the way? Ultimately, that would mean no role for the government and the people in power, no need to bow before Caesar, sign another application form or get in line for approval. What we need is leadership with the humility to get out of the way and get out of the way of economic activity and prosperity.
That is the Conservative approach. The answer is clear: we want Canada to be a free market economy, to unleash the genius and work ethic of the common people, to build affordable, abundant lives filled with homeownership, family, nutritious food. A nation that stands on its own two feet and vows before no other.
To be an affordable, strong country here at home and unbreakable abroad, and at the same time to have both economic autonomy and free enterprise. These are not contradictions. So often we think the only way to become self-reliant is for government to get involved and run things.
In reality, if we want to become more abundant and self-reliant, we need to unleash the free enterprise system, which is the greatest system in the history of the world to benefit the material situation of working people.
Now, the work has to be concrete, and our approach and our pillars are fourfold: affordable and abundant energy, low inflation and taxes, free market competition, national self-reliance.
On a beaucoup de pain sur la planche et le plan des conservateurs repose sur quatre piliers : une énergie abordable, des prix et de l’inflation plus bas, plus de concurrence dans le libre marché et plus d’autonomie.
The first of these pillars is affordable energy, which is the key to defeating poverty and powering our economy. Energy is not a luxury. It is the flow-through price of every single thing we buy. It heats our homes, runs our businesses, powers our farms, delivers all of the goods that we bring through the veins of our country that we call highways, railways and power lines.
When it is abundant, it is cheap to buy, and it is affordable for the people – everything else becomes abundant when energy is abundant. That is why Conservatives proposed to get rid of all taxes on gas, at least for the rest of the year, so that we can make it affordable for people to get to work, and we can power the transportation of our goods and services.
We also understand that in order to have abundant energy, you ultimately need to have that energy come above the ground. We need to be able to power the farmer who harvests in our fields. We need to be able to power the factories that deliver the goods where we need them to go. In order for that to happen, we need a change in our entire legal system to make it possible.
That moves me to the issue of the second pillar, which is strong money. Governments that print money destroy its value. Governments that control their money supply, and ensure it only grows at the rate of the output in the country, allow it to retain value. Money is simply a technology to move value over space and time. And when we keep inflation low, we reward earnings and savings, and that is the way that you protect and grow the purchasing power of your people.
We know how to do it; the Swiss are the model. The Swiss have had almost no inflation for 25 years, including during COVID, where it peaked around 3 per cent. Why? Because they do not print money to spend it. They protect the purchasing power of the franc, which, by the way, is the greatest currency on earth.
They did this by avoiding out-of-control deficits and returning quickly to balanced budgets. A future Conservative government will do what we did in the Harper era. We will balance budgets, we will keep spending low, and we will keep our money strong.
We will cut back the $26 billion spent on consultants. We will cut back foreign aid, corporate welfare, handouts to false refugees. We’ll get rid of the Alto rail projects and similar other projects and bring in a dollar-for-dollar law that requires we find $1 of savings for every new dollar of spending.
That brings us to our next pillar, free enterprise. Canada was not built by bureaucrats and politicians in control rooms, pushing buttons, turning knobs, pulling strings, to quote, “run the economy.” It grew because we freed our farmers, workers, entrepreneurs and investors to make their own decisions.
Conservatives will cut corporate welfare – the grants, subsidies, and loan guarantees – and use the savings to lower taxes on all businesses. You will no longer have to fill out an application form in order to be a success in life.
Instead, you will reinvest your money here in Canada with no capital gains tax whatsoever. Making it capital-gains-tax-free to reinvest will be a form of economic rocket fuel for our country.
We’ll take the sales tax off all homes that are sold for under $1.3 million anywhere in Canada. We will incentivize our municipalities to speed up permits, free up land and cut development charges.
We will cut taxes on work, investment, home building and energy. We will also ensure that you, as businesses, do not have to interact with government in order to succeed.
The question you have to ask is: do you want an economy based on carve-outs, handouts and bailouts, or hard work and competition? Do you want business to make money by having the best lobbyist or the best product? Do you want business to profit by having a chance to please politicians or by pleasing customers? Do you want a political marketplace where corporations compete for wealth through power or a free marketplace where they compete for customers with lower prices and workers with better wages?
In short, do we want a political aristocracy or do we want economic meritocracy? I know which one I want.
But we also need self-reliance because we cannot rely on the rest of the world in this increasingly difficult and unpredictable time. That is why I’ve bundled our policies in this respect into the Canadian Sovereignty Act, designed to repatriate production to our country and make Canada a magnet of economic activity so that we’re always able to provide for ourselves.
To be clear, we want to bring production to our country that makes us richer, not money-losing projects that constantly need to be propped up. That is the fundamental difference between the current Liberal approach and ours. For example, while I said we don’t want the Alto project, we do want LNG projects – these are money makers.
We can be selling natural gas for $11 overseas that costs us $3 to produce here in Canada. That’s why the single biggest infrastructure project in Canadian history, approved by Mr. Harper, the LNG Canada Northern British Columbia project, required no government subsidy and yet generated for $40 billion of investment. We are going to get out of the way and let more of these projects happen.
Conservatives will repeal Bill C-69, the anti-development law, remove the ban on shipping, get rid of the industrial carbon tax to bring back production of steel, aluminum, fertilizer, concrete, cement, gas and oil.
Within the first two years in government, we will reduce the paper burden of the federal state by 25 per cent and pass a two-for-one law requiring that every time a department brings in one new regulation, it will have to get rid of two existing ones, all of which will have to be verified by the auditor general.
We’ll go from having the second slowest building permits in the OECD to the fastest. We’ll approve mines in six months, not 18 years. We’ll have one project, one approval, as a rule, as we did in the Harper era, allowing us to approve, with a one-page document, 23,500 projects from concept to completion in under two years without a single environmental problem.
My friends, it can be done if we allow government to get out of the way and allow builders to build. We will aim to approve roughly a dozen wildly profitable LNG projects, and not only will we produce it, we will make sure we have strategic control over it.
I will initiate a plan for a Strategic Energy and Mineral Reserve where our energy and our minerals that are necessary for warfare and security will be stored at key locations across our country and kept on reserve for the time when they’re most needed.
Imagine, for example, if we had 200 million barrels of oil in storage when the prices spiked after the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. We could profit while reducing global prices and increasing our diplomatic leverage around the world.
We have 10 of the 12 NATO-defined critical minerals, some of the most important to wage a war. We should be using this, by the way, as leverage with the United States of America. They understand that they need these minerals, many of which they do not have.
If we had them on reserve and made an agreement to guarantee their supply in the event of a global crisis to those countries that give us tariff-free access, all of a sudden, we would have massive power in the forthcoming renewal and negotiations of CUSMA. That is how we’re going to get through these negotiations properly: by building up our leverage and converting it into our objectives, which should be clear: a tariff-free trade agreement with the United States of America – the biggest market anywhere on earth.
We need to end the tariffs. We need to end the tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and lumber. We need a tariff-free pact with the United States on automotive capabilities and supply chains, and we need to do it by limiting Chinese vehicles. We will make it clear to the Americans that if they let our vehicles in, we will keep Chinese vehicles out.
We need a full exemption to Buy America so that we can supply the US military, government and state-level administrations. We need to relaunch, even if we have to rename, the Keystone Pipeline to move another 800,000 barrels of oil down to the US Gulf Coast.
We have learned that the Americans – they might have hit us with these tariffs in the past – but they just got a lot worse on April the 2nd. In a whole spate of new tariffs that very few people have even talked about, we’ve seen the American administration now expand aluminum and steel tariffs to apply to unrelated products that are in similar components.
Just today, I was on the phone with businesses out of Windsor who are going to be hit by a billion dollars in that city alone. The tariffs from the United States are actually getting much worse.
There is an urgency for the Prime Minister to finally get moving and deliver the deal that he ran on and promised in the last election. There’s no more time to waste, no more jobs we can afford to lose.
Finally, we’ve already seen how Mr. Carney was wrong about every major economic issue of the last decade, but he’s wrong again about something else and perhaps even more dangerous. He’s wrong to suggest that we can have a permanent rupture with our biggest customer and closest neighbour in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the regime in Beijing. A regime, the Prime Minister said himself a year ago, was the biggest threat to Canada.
Let’s get real. We sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. That ratio might change a little bit; it might moderate. But at a fundamental level, they will always be our biggest customer. We need a tariff-free deal; we need to get these obstacles out of the way.
Removing obstacles is really the theme of the speech – unleashing our potential. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that perfection is not achieved when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to remove. When we remove the obstacles, burdens, and entanglements of the last 11 years of Liberal government, we will add so much more to our economy.
We will liberate the energy and brilliance of our workers, entrepreneurs, inventors and creators. When they are free to exchange, build, invest, undertake, they will make themselves and all of us richer. There is a Canada that lives in the heart of every man and woman who has ever arrived at the shores with nothing but calloused hands and unbreakable will.
A Canada that lives in the memory of every family that cleared a field, dug a well or built a business from the ground up. Not because someone in Ottawa told them to do it, not because the government paid them to do it, but because they were free to do it.
That Canada is not just a memory, it is a promise. Imagine, if you will, a Canada like that, a Canada that is in our reach.
A land where young tradesmen and women can afford the homes they built. Where a mother can fill her grocery cart without choosing to forego her rent. Where a family that has worked and saved can breathe freely, not gasping beneath the weight of tax upon tax upon tax.
Where an entrepreneur can wake up in the morning with an idea and by nightfall, get it off the ground. Where our reserves in oil and gas, our forest timber and veins of mineral wealth flow not into the coffers of foreign governments, because we have tied our own hands, but into the prosperity of Canadians and our people because we have unshackled them.
There are no limits to our potential, my friends. When Canadians are free to achieve their dreams, we will be a nation that fulfills our destiny. That Canada – affordable, autonomous, and bursting with opportunity – is the Canada that we must build.
We must be realistic and optimistic because while a realist counts the odds, an optimist changes them.
Let’s do both.
Thank you.