The following is a transcript of the Hon. Pierre Poilievre’s remarks from February 20th, 2025. These remarks have been edited for length. Check against delivery.
Thank you very much everyone for coming here.
I want to thank this wonderful food bank for the incredible work they’re doing to feed the hungry. I understand that the Sai Dham Food Bank had 10,000 people it was serving in 2020. That number is going up to 70,000. Incredible. 2020 was the year Mark Carney became economic adviser to Justin Trudeau.
How’s it going? Apparently, Mr. Trudeau has been following his advice, but it goes the other way too. Yesterday, Carbon Tax Carney announced that he was going to repeat the exact same promise that Justin Trudeau made in 2015 on the budget.
Get this, in 2015 Justin Trudeau said he will run three small deficits. Remember that? And that it would fund the largest infrastructure investment in Canadian history to help the middle class and grow the economy. What has been the result? Well, those three deficits turned into nine deficits. $25 billion of new debt turned into $700 billion of new debt. The debt, in fact, doubled in that time and the middle class, 80% of them, are paying more income taxes. None of them can afford a home, and we’ve had the worst economic growth in the G7. That is the result of the promise that Trudeau made 10 years ago.
And now Mark Carney is promising three small deficits, which he says will somehow cause economic growth and help the middle class. My friends, this is deja vu all over again. Carney has the same advisors, the same MPs, the same ministers and is making the same Liberal promises that Trudeau made a decade ago. But he expects Canadians to be duped for a fourth time.
Mr. Carney has been Trudeau’s economic advisor for the last five years, and the only difference between Carney and Trudeau is that Carney is now making a promise to cook the books. He’s planning to cook the books with a sneaky accounting trick to take billions of dollars of new Liberal spending off the budget records altogether. To be clear, this is not simply about differentiating between investments and spending. We already have that. It’s called accrual accounting. Anybody who’s taken a high school course in accounting knows that means that capital expenditures are amortized over the life of the asset they purchase. That exists in the federal budgeting already. What Mr. Carney is talking about is taking tens of billions of dollars of new spending off the books, hiding it from Canadians, so that he can artificially lower the deficits.
But that doesn’t mean Canadians won’t have to pay the price. In fact, every single dollar the government spends is paid for by Canadian taxpayers, either through taxes today or in inflation and debt tomorrow. Mr. Carney’s promise will be that the operating budget will somehow balance while limitlessly spending inflationary dollars on pork barrel spending, pet projects and Liberal waste in order to reverse disastrous electoral consequences that the Liberals now face.
Carbon Tax Carney cannot change the fact that money will come out of the pockets of the Canadian people. There’s no magic to this. Every dollar government spends comes out of Canadians’ pockets. Mr. Carney has not identified a single program from Justin Trudeau that he would cancel. On top of that, he has announced billions, if not tens of billions of dollars of additional spending he would tack on top of the current Liberal government’s spending.
My friends, you cannot get a change from the Liberal government by electing a Liberal government. A fourth Liberal term in office will be just like the previous three. It’ll mean higher taxes, higher housing costs, more food bank lineups and raging crime in our streets.
Only Common Sense Conservatives will fix the budget for real. We will cut bureaucracy, consultants, corporate welfare, foreign aid and other wasted money. We will also bring in a new dollar-for-dollar law that runs the finances of the country like how small businesses, seniors and single moms run their budgets.
A new dollar of spending would have to be matched with a dollar of savings. Do you want to spend more over here? You have to spend less over there. And that will be passed into law. The dollar-for-dollar law.
We will bring down deficits, income taxes and inflation. We will get rid of the carbon tax. We will lower income taxes. We will take the GST off new homes to save up to 50 grand on the purchase of a house so that our young people can afford a place to live like they could before the Carney-Trudeau Liberals doubled housing costs.
We will pass a big, beautiful Bring It Home Tax Cut on work, investment, savings, homebuilding and making stuff in Canada. The purpose will be to bring home the half trillion dollars of investment that the Carney-Trudeau Liberals have driven out of our country to the United States of America. I want that money in our country, for our people.
That’s what it means to bring it home. We’re going to bring it home to our country. We’re going to put Canada first. Canada always, Canada forever. Thank you.