The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from August 22nd, 2025. These remarks have been edited for clarity. Check against delivery.
Ottawa, ON – Our purpose is to put our country first. To defend our workers and their jobs. To ensure that they can continue working and selling our world-renowned steel, aluminum, autos, lumber and other products to the world. We know that they have been under attack for a long time now.
Our purpose also is to make this country affordable so our young people can buy homes, start families and our seniors can afford both food and lodging and live out the dignified life that they deserve. We set the priorities for this fall session being to have stronger take-home pay with lower taxes and inflation. We want safer streets by locking up the criminals, secure borders with less immigration and by ensuring those who do come to our country are not criminals or lawbreakers.
A sovereign Canada, a country that can stand on its own two feet, pay its own bills and make its own decisions. That’s why, while we’ll obviously hold the government to account and oppose Liberal policies of high inflation, out-of-control immigration, crime, housing costs and youth unemployment, we’ll also propose positive ideas to lower the cost of living, make paychecks go further, make our streets safe and secure our country’s future.
We’ve even proposed a very detailed bill, the Canadian Sovereignty Act, which would make Canada the fastest place in the world to get a pipe in the ground, to dig mines, harvest lumber, open ports, grow food, do all the things that a nation needs to do to stand on its own two feet. My message to Mr. Carney: steal this idea, come steal it. I’ll go into your office with my policy team, and we’ll hand it all over to you. You can even get the credit. You can draft it up. Let’s pass it in September and let’s get building.
We also continue to extend our hand to Prime Minister Carney to work together to get a good deal with the Americans. I promised that and I offered that to him multiple times directly. My Shadow Minister of Canada-US Affairs has said the same thing to her counterpart. So far, no response.
The Liberals seem to want to play partisan games and score political points rather than working with all parties to get a good deal for Canada. My message to Mr. Carney: put partisanship aside and work with all parties to get an actual deal with the Americans that stands up for Canada’s interest.
We have to judge Mr. Carney by his performance. Not by the standards I set, but by the ones that he set out for himself. So let’s do that today. I was happy to hear that he got the President on the phone. I know that Mr. Carney has been trying to do that now for about a month. Today, the President accepted his call, and the Prime Minister took the opportunity to make a series of very generous concessions to President Trump.
I was expecting that when the call was reported, that we’d find that President Trump had given us something in return, that Mr. Carney – being the negotiator he promised he would be – would get something after giving something. But not so. Today we learned that it’s been yet another capitulation and climb down by Mark Carney.
His elbows have mysteriously gone missing, and this call follows other concessions. He promised during the campaign that he would have dollar-for-dollar retaliation. He pulled that back. He made concessions on the military while getting nothing in return. He pulled back on his digital services tax – a terrible tax – but you’d think he’d get something in return for it. Nothing. And today, he removed almost all of the tariffs on the United States and got none lifted from Canada.
This continues with the weakness that he’s shown on the world stage. Continuing ahead with a $1 billion loan to the dictatorship in Beijing to build ships for Canada; creating jobs for foreign workers in steel and shipbuilding while that same regime hits our farmers and fish harvesters with increasingly high and unfair tariffs. Mr. Carney’s capitulations would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic. They will harm our farmers, our workers, our people.
More importantly, from his point of view, they are a broken promise. They are exactly the opposite of what Mr. Carney ran on. His signature promise in the last election was that he was going to put elbows up, negotiate a win and match American tariffs. Let’s go through the list. He’s not thrown one elbow since he took office, except at our own workers. He did not meet his promise of a July 21st deal with the Americans. Again, his promise, not mine. He has backed down while claiming that he would stand up, and he’s gotten absolutely nothing in return.
In fact, American tariffs are twice as high on Canada today as they were when Prime Minister Carney took office, promising to deploy his negotiating skills to get us a win. He promised he would have elbows up. He promised he could quote ‘handle Trump’ and that he would quote ‘negotiate a win’. Those are his promises and he needs to be judged by his word.
This was not just any promise – just any old promise on page 73 of his platform – it was the promise on which he ran his entire election campaign. Now he’s abandoning it. So either he admits that he was wrong all along or that he knowingly spread falsehoods to get elected. He needs to explain which of those two things it is.
But it adds to a long list of broken promises. Remember, he was going to build more and at faster speeds than ever before. Well, he’s getting breathless media coverage because he’s setting up a new office that will one day approve projects that may one day get built. 160 days in and he’s bragging that he’s close to setting up a construction office of bureaucrats who don’t swing hammers or operate heavy machinery, but sit in front of computer screens in Ottawa department buildings.
Not one pipeline has been identified, not one LNG plant, not one nuclear plant, not one hydroelectricity dam. Not one major project has been identified, let alone approved, in the 160 days since he took office, and all of the anti-resource laws that will make them impossible to complete remain in place.
On housing, he said he’d double home building. His housing agency says home building will drop by 13% over the next two years, and the housing crisis has tripled in its different directions. Under Trudeau, it was just that they were too expensive for anyone to buy. Now, it’s too costly for builders to build, buyers to buy or sellers to sell – an almost impossible triumvirate. A failure in housing hell that only a Liberal prime minister could have accomplished.
He said he would invest more and spend less. Well, look at the numbers. Spending is up 8% under Mr. Carney, and it looks like the deficit will be twice the one that Trudeau left behind. Though we don’t know because Mr. Carney, the genius banker, still hasn’t introduced a budget. Then, there is the investment side, down $60 billion in what the Financial Times says is ‘the single biggest net outflow of investment in any five-month period.’ That is Mr. Carney’s track record on investment. He is spending more and investing less.
Meanwhile, immigration numbers continue to be out of control. Liberals have lost track of 600 non-Canadian criminals who were supposed to have been deported. They’re still on our streets. Crime is raging to such a point where people are now demanding the ability to defend themselves in their own homes because they know the law will not defend them. And rightly, Canadians believe that they need to defend themselves if an intruder, who’s probably out on bail for the hundredth time under Liberal laws, comes into the house. Frankly, they should have the right to defend themselves and their property against an intruder. But it is sad that we’ve come to a place where people feel the law will not protect them.
Mr. Carney has sent home Canadian MPs while crime, the cost of living, housing costs and immigration are all up while elbows are down. That said, we’re prepared to work with Mr. Carney, and with anybody, to put our country first to tackle the cost of living. Our purpose is to unlock Canada’s potential, make this a land of opportunity again.
We will prioritize stronger take-home pay, safer streets, secure borders, a self-reliant Canada. I say to Prime Minister Carney, and to all the other party leaders: let’s get to work in the fall, let’s tackle these problems for real, because our country is worth fighting for and worth working together for. So let’s get it done. Thank you.