Pierre Poilievre – Canada First Speech

February 15, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Hello Canada! 
I know that snow storms shut down Washington D.C., but here in Canada’s capital, we will never let a few snowflakes ruin our Flag Day. 
Why would Ana leave a tropical climate for earmuffs and toque? 

Ana and I know that our stories would only be possible here in Canada. Only in this country could a refugee from Venezuela who started in a basement Montreal apartment and the son of a teenage mother raised by school teachers make it to this stage, leading Canada’s founding political party. That is because of the promise this country makes to Canadians of every birthplace and background—that anyone from anywhere can achieve anything. That hard work gets you a great life, with a beautiful house, on a safe street, under our proud flag.

Ana and I are so grateful that this beautiful country made and kept that promise to us. And we are in this fight to restore that promise to every Canadian who has lost it over the last nine years. 

Conservatives, as the Party of Confederation and Sir John A. Macdonald, will restore the promise of Canada. Our founding party leader united our country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and warded off American designs to dominate our continent. In the words of our first Prime Minister, Conservatives will fight to “give us a great, a united, a rich, an improving, a developing Canada, instead of making us a tributary to American laws, to American railways, to American bondage, to American tolls”. That is the Conservative legacy for Canada. Now more than ever, we owe this country, we love this country and we fight everyday and in every way to pass down to our kids the blessings we inherited from those who came before us. Simply put: we must all put Canada First.  

Wake-Up Call

Sometimes it takes a threat to remind us of what we have and what could become. The unjustified tariff threats of President Donald Trump and threats to turn us into the 51st state have united our people to defend the country we love.  

We must respond with strength. 

And strength means leverage. 

America has leverage. But WE have leverage. 

And I will use it. 

Retaliation is only the beginning. Yes, we will need to retaliate. If they put tariffs on our steel and aluminum, I will tariff their steel and aluminum. If he hits us with generalized tariffs, we’llrespond dollar for dollar–carefully targeting American goods we don’t need, can produce ourselves or buy from others to maximize impact on the Americans and minimize it on ourselves. 

100% of the proceeds of any counter-tariffs will go to reimburse businesses and workers that are directly impacted and the rest will go to tax cuts for Canadians. Not one penny will go to other government spending. This cannot be a tax grab.

But we have more leverage: We will make sure Americans know that they will be paying the tariffs they impose on us. Refinery workers, homebuilders, automakers and others need to know that their jobs depend on buying our goods–and that tariffing those goods will lower their wages. 

It doesn’t stop there—America cannot power its energy-hungry future without buying our surplus power. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are all turning to nuclear power to run their AI data centres. We have the nuclear, natural gas and hydro that can power those centers here with cold weather that reduces the cost of cooling them. Let’s leverage that. 

America needs our radar, surveillance and ongoing cooperation to keep us both safe against intercontinental missiles and other threats. They need our minerals, uranium, oil and gas.

Finally, we must remind our American friends that a trade war will simply reduce the funds both our countries have for our shared North American defence. 

Winston Churchill has been quoted saying you can count on Americans doing the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities.

So let me spell out the options for our American friends: 

Option 1: You carry out an unprovoked attack on our economy. Your consumers pay more, and your workers make less. Gas prices skyrocket. You turn a loyal friend into a resentful neighbour forced to match tariff with tariff and to seek friends everywhere else. Both our countries’ economies will weaken, leaving less money for defence and security. And our enemies will grow stronger.  

OR

Option 2: We trade even more than we are now. Both our workers make more, and consumers pay less. The resulting GDP boost allows Canada to further strengthen the border and up our military spending to 2% of GDP; we stop fentanyl, terrorists, supersonic missiles and other threats. We team up against the unfair trading practices of other countries. Both our countries end up safer, stronger, richer.  

Oh, and there is something else I’d like to say to our American friends: 

We’ve always loved you as neighbours and friends. There is no country with whom we would rather share a border—the longest undefended border in the world. We know America is the biggest economic and military superpower the world has ever known. 

We have been a good neighbour. We fought on the same side of the same wars. We paid with Canadian lives and treasure to fight for America, avenging the 9/11 attacks. You have your grievances, and we have ours. But I ask, which other country would you rather have as your neighbour? If Canada is not your friend, who is? 

See, the problem is, at times, we might be too polite, soft-spoken and humble for our own good. We are slow to anger and quick to forgive, but never confuse our kindness with weakness. We love our country and flag. We are a strong people with a proud history as a warrior nation, whose soldiers have proven fierce enough to crush the fascists, the communists and Al-Qaeda, yet humble enough to never once brag about their heroism. We are mild-mannered and made of steel. 

Let me be clear: We will never be the 51st state. We will bear any burden and pay any price to protect our sovereignty and independence. 

Which option Americans choose will be up to them. But we must be prepared for the worst. Simply put, we cannot no longer depend on the Americans alone for trade and defence.  

These threats are a wake-up call. 

We should be the wealthiest and most self-reliant economy in the world today, given our natural riches. We have the 4th biggest supply of oil—yet we must import 179 million barrels of foreign oil every year because of the Liberal No-New Pipelines Act. We are the 5th biggest supplier of Natural Gas—but we still can’t export a single cubic meter of it overseas because Carney-Trudeau Liberals say there is no “business case” for LNG export plants. We have the fewest homes per person in the G7 even as we have ten times as much land to build on as the next biggest country, because taxes and bureaucracy block homebuilding, leaving our youth without houses. We sell twice as much to the U.S. as we sell to other provinces because of the trade barriers we impose on ourselves. We have the 3rd most farmland per capita in the world, yet food prices have risen 37% faster in Canada than in the U.S. because of the Trudeau-Carney Carbon Tax on the farmers and truckers who feed us. 

What have the Carney-Trudeau Liberals done about this: they have doubled the debt, doubled housing costs, doubled food bank line ups; blocked Canadian energy in favour of dirty dictator oil, raised taxes on work and investment and driven an astonishing half-trillion dollars of investment out of Canada to the U.S. All of this before the tariffs!

The reality is the opposite: If Carney-Trudeau policies caused this much economic harm BEFORE the tariffs, imagine the devastation they would cause AFTER tariffs.

We need a Prime Minister who will put Canada First—our workers, our businesses, our economy, our borders, our military. And we must be able to stand on our own two feet, no longer helplessly dependent on the Americans. 

The media says I should change my plans because of this tariff threat.  In fact, the Trump tariff threats have proven Conservatives right on everything. Everyone now admits, or claims to admit, we were right on the Liberal capital gains tax hike, the carbon tax, pipelines, LNG, fentanyl, the borders, immigration and the need to celebrate rather than cancel our history and our country.

First, the Liberals said I had no policies. Then they said my policies were scary. Now they pretend dishonestly to agree with all my policies, 60 days before an election. I take it as a compliment, but don’t believe them for a minute. If you want Conservative policies, you must vote Conservative to get them. 

Take the carbon tax. Before the threat of tariffs, the carbon tax was the issue of the election. Now, I have to concede…it is an even bigger issue: combining Trump’s tariffs with Carney’s carbon tax will decimate our industries and destroy the jobs of our workers. 

The worst Liberal tax of all has been the carbon tax, championed by Justin Trudeau and his economic advisor, Mark Carney, whose only complaint was that the tax was not high enough. Now, he plans a pre-election trick. Next month, just days before the election, and after years of pushing the tax—he will pause it. The media will tell you to forget all about it until after the election when he will massively raise the tax, only this time with no rebate. 

He said just a few days ago he doesn’t want to “axe the tax” he wants to QUOTE “change” the tax. Right, he will take the CHANGE right out of your pocket.  Mr. Carney’s new and bigger carbon tax will help America take every industrial job from Canada. Our industrial towns will become ghost towns if Carney gets his way.

The coming election will decide whether Canadians want Mark Carney’s sneaky, job-killing, inflationary carbon tax or whether they want to axe the tax for everyone, for real, forever with the Common-Sense Conservatives.

Mark Carney will plagiarize all my policies right before the election–policies he has long opposed. But don’t believe a word. Just a few months ago, Mark Carney moved his company headquarters OUT OF CANADA to Donald Trump’s hometown of New York, shifting jobs and investment to the U.S., just like Trump wanted. He opposed pipelines in Canada while his company bought them in the Middle East. He supported Trudeau’s carbon taxes in Canada, while his company invested in and profited off coal in the U.S. He put his profit before our people. Carney cashed in. Canadians lost out. If he wins, Canada loses.

What we need is a Bring it Home Economic Plan

We need to bring home our jobs, investment and companies and break our dependence on the United States. We will unleash a fierce free enterprise economy to bring home control of our economic future from outside forces. We will stand on our own two feet and be masters of our economic destiny. 

Axing the carbon tax is only the beginning.  We will also go ahead with the biggest and most patriotic tax cut in Canada’s history. The Bring It Home Tax Cut. It will lower taxes on energy, work, homebuilding, investment and making stuff in Canada. We will axe the sales tax on new homes, sparking 30,000 extra homes built per year–which means more jobs for our trades workers.

Bring Home Resource Jobs

We will repeal Liberal taxes and anti-resource laws to Bring Home Production and Paycheques. In 9 years, the Carney-Trudeau Liberals have pushed  a half trillion more Canadian investment dollars to the US than have returned to Canada—that is Canadian money building American businesses and creating American jobs. 

Much of it is in the energy sector. They passed the “No-New-Pipelines” Law C-69, and killed Energy East, Northern Gateway and countless other projects. 

So we can’t deliver our energy to the world without going through the States. In fact it’s much worse than that, we cannot deliver our oil to ourselves. Western oil must travel through the United States to get to Quebec. The Americans have even threatened to shut down the flow of Canadian oil to Canadian customers. 

Mr. Trudeau—with his Economic Advisor Mark Carney—said there is no business case for selling our natural gas to countries like Germany, Japan, Greece, and others who were begging for it. Now the Americans and Qataris are beating us to the punch. So, we sell all our natural gas exports to the Americans at roughly $4 per million British thermal units, instead of selling it to Europe for $13. Again, simple math. When you can take something that is $4 and sell it for $13 that is a business case. 

This all raises the question: could we even build the Canadian Pacific Railway today? Or would some squeaky, keep-it-in-the-ground liberal cabinet minister like Guilbeault have chained himself to a tree to stop it? 

Again, the keep-it-in-the-ground, anti-resource policies of the Liberal party were damaging before these tariffs, now they are outright dangerous.

This tariff crisis has proven Conservatives were right all along on natural resources. 

We need a Bring it Home Economic Plan to bring home control of our resources. 

Our Bring it Home Resource plan will

First, we will incentivize indigenous leaders to support these projects by letting companies pay a share of their federal corporate taxes to local First Nations,

Second, I am announcing that within 60 days of taking office I will repeal the unconstitutional No-New Pipelines Law C-69 and replace it with a new law that protects nature and gets projects approved within a year of an application. 

Third, I will rapidly approve LNG plants, pipelines, mines and other major projects. 

We will move from a North-South economy towards an East-West economy. So let me say clearly and unapologetically in French and English, I support a national West-to-East pipeline from the prairies to Saint John, New Brunswick.

We must have the courage and backbone to stare down Liberal eco-fanatics—like Guilbeault, Trudeau and Carney—who together killed the last east-west pipeline. I stand with the 74% of Quebecers who support building pipelines to transport oil and gas. 

Canada Free Trade

We need new trade partners. And I can think of no better country for Canada to trade with than… Canada.  

Within 30 days of becoming Prime Minister, I will bring together the Premiers with the aim to to remove the hundreds of pages of carve-outs and exemptions in the Canada Free Trade agreement that slow or stop goods from moving province to province. We will set up a Blue Seal Test and License that provinces can accept to allow doctors, nurses, engineers and other professionals to work anywhere in Canada and to allow our nearly 20,000 immigrant doctors and 34,000 immigrant nurses to quickly prove they meet our standards and get to work reducing health care wait times. 

To get the deal done, I will offer the provinces a Free Trade Bonus.

Border

While people can’t currently bring alcohol across Canada, they can easily traffic deadly doses of fentanyl, guns and illegal migration INTO CANADA. We must take back control of crime, drugs and the border from the radical borderless woke ideology of the Carney-Trudeau Liberals. They allow 99% of shipping containers to enter uninspected and the government’s own report says there could be as many as 500,000 people here illegally but have lost count. 

My Canada First plan will deploy military helicopters and surveillance to the border; add 2,000 new border agents and expand their powers to patrol the full border; install new high powered scanners, towers and drone systems; and track departures so we know when those ordered deported from our country have actually left.

Fentanyl 

Even worse than the gun crime is the fentanyl deaths–which Mark Carney said the other day is only a challenge, not a crisis. He should tell that to the families of the 50,000 Canadians who have lost their lives to overdoses in the last 9 years, more than died fighting for Canada in World War II. The Trudeau-Carney Liberals passed bill C-5 & C75 allowing drug kingpins out on easy bail or house arrest. They legalized fentanyl possession and gave out tax-funded opioids that ultimately got resold to children. 

They ban you from using a plastic straw, but allow you to use cocaine. Just make sure you snort it through a paper straw to save the planet.

This radical drug liberalization has increased drug deaths by 200%. Recently, police in BC shut down a super lab that had enough fentanyl and ingredients to kill 95 million people. Selling large amounts of fentanyl is like firing bullets into a crowd: you might not know who you are going to kill, but someone will surely die. 

We must call mass fentanyl traffickers what they are: mass murderers. 

That is why my government will repeal Liberal laws C-5 and C-75 and bring in mandatory life sentences for trafficking or producing over 40 mg of fentanyl–which is enough to kill 20 people.

More important than what I will do, is why I will do it. I am not stopping fentanyl to please President Trump, I am doing this so that never again must a Canadian parent collapse on the floor in the anguish of learning their child died in a back alley somewhere. 

We will invest in treatment and recovery to bring our loved ones home drug free. 

My message to those struggling with addiction: Hang on, have hope, help is on the way.

National Defence

We will protect our people, and our seas, skies and soil. 

We will stand on guard for our people and our home before all else. Our military will protect our national interest—including by carrying our weight in North America to secure and leverage more trade with the United States, all while becoming less reliant on them for our defence. 

After 9 years of Liberal incompetence and disdain, our military is weakened, and our allies no longer respect us.  

Job One is protecting our True North. 

Hostile powers like China and Russia want our resources, our shipping routes, and to be within striking distance of our continent. We won’t let them. We will defend our seas, our skies and our soil. We are the true north, strong and free. 

Part One of our Canada First Plan for Our North will add 2,000 more Canadians Rangers, our eyes and ears in the North. It will deliver 4 heavy icebreakers for the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard. And we will establish Canada’s first permanent arctic military base since the end of the Cold War: CFB Iqaluit. 

The new base will host new F-35 fighter jets and Poseidon P-8 aircraft to detect, deter and destroy threats in our North. The base will also help NORAD protect our continent.

We will cut red tape to speed up delivery of the already-planned:

missiles, refuelling aircraft, upgrades at the Forward Operating Locations in Inuvik, Yellowknife, and Goose Bay; Early Warning Aircraft, new submarines, tactical helicopters, and a new satellite ground station in the Arctic. 

We must bring home our money by ending wasteful aid to dictators, terrorist and global bureaucracies—like the Asian Infrastructure Bank and UNRWA.

Conservatives will honour the service and sacrifice of the patriotic women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces and give them the tools they need to defend Canada. 

And our military will be guided by a warrior culture not a woke culture. 

Citizenship

We are a strong nation. No outside force can stop us, unless we let them. Just like Liberal tax hikes and anti-resource policies threaten our economic independence, so too their post-national view that Canada has no core identity threatens our national sovereignty. 

As the great Nova Scotian Joseph Howe said: 

“….a wise nation 

preserves its records, 

gathers up its muniments, 

decorates the tombs of its illustrious dead, 

repairs its great public structures 

and fosters national pride and love of country 

by perpetual reference to the sacrifices and glories of the past.” 

We will end cancel culture and stop the war on our history. Our national museums will celebrate the great achievements of Canada telling the unvarnished truth: that on balance, this is the greatest country in the world precisely because of the goodness of those who came and sacrificed before us. And we will celebrate, rather than tearing down, our heroes and history. 

We will defeat the insidious and divisive cancel culture that has sought to destroy our national pride, our national monuments and the legacy of our nation’s first Prime Minister. 

This must end. Under a Conservative government, I promise you it will. It will be the official policy of my government to reinstate Sir John A, his statues, and his name, in our parks, public structures and our places of national importance.

I will preserve and defend our proud military traditions. The men and women of the Royal Canadian Navy will continue to sing the “Heart of Oak” like the generations of Canadian sailors before.

We will promptly complete a long-overdue monument to the brave Canadians who fought in Afghanistan. We will add or strengthen the criminal code penalty for tearing down or defacing our statues and monuments. We will restore Terry Fox, Vimy Ridge, the Famous Five, the Bluenose, the Fathers of Confederation, Indigenous People and our military heroes to our passport. 

Our Heritage and Citizenship departments will have an official policy of promoting our common national identity. The goal is not to erase our differences but to bridge them. We will strengthen bonds of common country between Canadians of different regions, race, background and birth. 

It starts with the institutions that bring us together. I will massively expand the Cadet Corps and the Junior Rangers to bring together our youth from across the country and learn, under the mentorship of members of the armed forces. There will be more exchanges so, for example, a teenager from Mississauga might get the chance to do an Arctic Patrol in Inuvik, learning the wilderness and survival secrets of the great Inuit Rangers. 

We need more exchange. When I was in University and had lost much of the French my father had taught me, I did a French immersion in Chicoutimi staying with the Dube family. We need more of this and we’ll  double these immersion spaces so that every year, 10,000 youth will have the opportunity to cross the two solitudes and strengthen our official languages. 

Becoming a citizen of Canada is a precious inheritance. Yet, ever since COVID, the Liberals have been winding down in-person citizenship ceremonies, and now they are considering having people officially become citizens through a few clicks on a government website. The citizenship oath is special and should not just be a simple administrative nuisance, like renewing your drivers’ license. My future government will restore in-person citizenship ceremonies and add the following words to the existing oath: “I pledge gratitude to those who worked, sacrificed, and gave their lives to defend the freedom I now enjoy and to build the country of Canada I now call home. Like them, I pledge to fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.”

We have seen the government divide people by race, religion, gender, vaccine status and more. No wonder hate crimes are up 251% in 9 years. Places of worship are now firebombed and shot at. And, for the first time, the world’s problems are spilling onto our streets. That must end and when I am Prime Minister it will end. 

Laws will be enforced. We will treat all our people—regardless of their race—as Canadians First without hyphens. And we will leave the world’s problems at the door. Et on va laisser les problèmes du monde à la porte.

Ours is a nationalism not based on bloodlines, birthplace or background. Whether one’s name is Martin or Mohammad, Poilievre or Patel, Tremblay ou Tang, Singh, Smith or Steinberg, whether we’re from Tuktoyaktuk ou Trois Rivieres, Okanagan or Oromocto, Calgary or Cavendish, we are all Canadians and Canadians First.

Canada will be self-reliant, sovereign and stand on its own two feet. We will reward work, unleash entrepreneurs, harvest our resources, make our own goods, trade with each other, build homes for our youth, rebuild our borders and military, honour history and raise our flag. 

What binds us together is the Canadian promise. That anyone from anywhere can do anything—That hard work gets you a great life, in a beautiful house, on a safe street, wrapped in the protective arms of a solid border, defended by brave soldiers under our proud flag; To preserve that flag and its promise we must work together, fight together and win together. That is what it means to put Canada First.

It will not be easy. But do you think Canada came easy? 

Do you think it was easy for the Inuit to sleep in homes of snow, pull dinner from icy waters, and survive thousands of winters at minus 45? 

Do you think it was easy to drive the spikes of the Canadian Pacific Railway into the frozen ground? Through rock, muskeg, and mountains, Chinese labourers toiled in brutal conditions, forging a steel ribbon that unites East and West.

Do you think it was easy for Canadian teenagers living in frozen, rat-infested trenches only to run out towards flying metal and attack and beat the Germans in World War I as their sons and daughters would do again in World War II?  

Do you think it was easy for Terry Fox’s cancer-ravaged body to run across our land, pounding his one and only leg again and again on lonely highways with chipped bones and blistered limbs to fight the disease that would later take his life?

No. None of this was easy. Making Canada was hard.

Those who built and defended it did not sacrifice this much and struggle this long so we could take the easy way out and give up. Like them, we are part of something bigger than ourselves; we are in this together. We are at this place, in this time, because we have a job to do. 

To pass on intact what we inherited from those who came before us to those who come after us.

Because our country is worth fighting for: For our people. For our land. For our home. For Canada First, always and forever. Let’s bring it home.

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