Pierre Poilievre’s Remarks on American Tariffs – Bring Back Parliament and Put Canada First

February 2, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Thank you everyone for coming. We must put Canada first and that is why Common Sense Conservatives condemn President Trump’s massive, unjust and unjustified tariffs, which will damage both the American and the Canadian economy.

Canada is the United States’ closest friend, greatest ally, and most important neighbour. We share the longest undefended border. We fought alongside the Americans in two world wars, Korea and Afghanistan, where we lost 158 of our brilliant young men and women to avenge the attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington. There is no justification whatsoever for these tariffs or this treatment. Canada will never be the 51st state. We are an independent, proud and strong nation.

I’d like to speak first to our American friends. You are our friends. You are our neighbours. We share the longest undefended border in the history of the world. You buy our products, and we buy yours. You have a trade surplus with us when energy is excluded. And when it is included, the deal is even better for you because you buy our oil and our gas at massive price discounts, not because we’re nice Canadians, but because here at home we’ve made really dumb decisions to prevent us from exporting our energy to any other countries.

But either way, Americans are better off with this friendship. We share a continent. We share the same risks and the same potential enemies from around the world. Those kinds of enemies can metastasize into real dangers and actual attacks as you saw suddenly and unexpectedly on 9/11. It’s good to have friends when those sorts of things happen. And let me ask my American friends this question. Even if you believe in tariffs, how is it possible to put a 25% tariff on Canada and only a 10% tariff on China? In what strategic mindset does that make sense? If it’s to do with fentanyl, that’s coming from China. It’s killing our people too. We both have to do more to stop it, but we can do more when we do it together.

Now, here at home, my message to the Liberal government: put aside partisan interests and recall Parliament. It is insane that in this great crisis, Parliament is shut down to deal with a crisis and a power struggle within the Liberal party.

Let’s put aside partisan, political interests and recall Parliament to pass into place a common sense Canada first plan, and here’s that plan: One, we must retaliate dollar-for-dollar. Carefully aiming those tariffs at maximizing the impact on American companies while minimizing the impact on Canadian consumers and businesses. That means targeting US products that A, we can do without and B, we can buy elsewhere, or C, best of all, that we can make here at home. A best example of that would be steel and aluminum. We make the best and cleanest steel and aluminum here, but we’ve lost a lot of jobs to China and the United States.

We should put tariffs on American steel and aluminum so that we can bring home that production to this country. Two, the tariffs must not be a tax grab. None of the money from the tariffs should stay in government coffers or be spent on unrelated government priorities. All of it should go back to the workers and businesses that are affected, and most of it should go back in the form of a massive tax cut. And that is why I’m calling for the passage of an immediate emergency “Bring It Home Tax Cut.” The tax cut would be designed to save jobs, create jobs, crush inflation and boost our economy.

We need to cut taxes on work, investment, energy, home building and making stuff at home. Let’s start by axing the Liberal carbon tax and the Liberal capital gains tax hike. They should be the first on the chopping block.

Four, we must immediately scrap the Liberal anti-energy laws C-69 and green light job-creating projects now. That includes LNG plants, pipelines, mines, factories, port expansions, so that we can get our products to overseas markets without going through and profiting the United States. It was insane for us to block our industries before this crisis. It is a fatal mistake now. No longer can we tolerate special interests, politicians and, worst of all, corporate lobbyists who profit by shutting down industries, blocking resources in Canada while profiting off them in Brazil, the Middle East, China and elsewhere. We must bring home production and self-reliance to our country.

This brings me to five: we need to knock down interprovincial trade barriers to have truly free trade across our country. We are in this state because we sell twice as much to the Americans as we sell to ourselves.

These interprovincial barriers are destructive. They kill jobs, they drive up consumer prices, and they cost the average family $6,000 a year. Let’s knock them down and let’s be a truly free trading economy ourselves.

Six, we must rebuild our military and take back control of our borders to regain the confidence of our partners, assert our sovereignty, protect our people and put Canada first. Let us be clear. Our border needs to be taken back into our control, not to please the President, but to protect our own people. The fact that we have 20,000 to 500,000 people here illegally, according to the government, was a problem before these tariffs. The fact that we’ve lost 47,000 people to fentanyl overdoses should never have been allowed to happen. We must secure our border to stop the guns that are killing our people. 85% of gun crime is done with illegal guns smuggled over the border.

We must secure our border to protect our own people and save the lives of our own children. And we must rebuild our military to protect our sovereignty, assert our strength, and keep our nation strong and free. Finally, we must lock arms with American economic interests that favour Canada. The workers and businesses that depend on trade with Canada should be marshaled to pressure the administration to back down. We must go to key states that will be up for grabs in the congressional elections two years from now and let their Congressmen and Senators know that they will be running on a bad economic record if refinery workers have lost jobs because Canadian oil can no longer make it to them. Or, if young families can’t buy homes because lumber is even more expensive for home builders or families that are already suffering from inflation are paying more for gas because our energy has become more expensive due to American tariffs. We must lock arms with all of those economic interests in the United States to build an American coalition against the tariffs and in favor of free trade between our two great countries.

As always, we will stand strong with growing confidence. We are the second biggest landmass in the world. 41 million brilliant people. The third biggest supply of oil. The fifth biggest supply of natural gas, the biggest supply of uranium and potash. We have the biggest supply of fresh water anywhere on earth. The fifth biggest supply of farmland. We should be the richest nation on earth.

These tariffs are wake up call that it is time for us to meet our potential. It is time for us to be a country that can trade with itself, a country that builds homes quickly for its youth. A country that allows entrepreneurs to succeed quickly and profitably so that success is once again rewarded. A country that allows hard work to pay off a country that harnesses its own resources; that secures its borders to protect its people; that builds its military to protect its sovereignty and unites its people. To protect our common history and common future.

We will always put Canada first today, tomorrow, and forever. Let’s bring it home.

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