SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

  • Member of Parliament
  • Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada Leader of the Opposition
  • Conservative
  • Carleton
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 64%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $61,288.13

  • Government Page
  • May/29/24 2:50:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is announcing a catalogue. Come on, give him a round of applause. People cannot afford a home, they might end up in a tent and their rent has doubled, but they have a brand new catalogue. Will the Prime Minister build 550,000 new homes, yes or no?
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  • May/27/24 2:23:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we have voted against everything the Prime Minister has done to balloon the cost of living of Canadians, to increase food bank use by 50% over three years, to send one-quarter of all young people to the food bank in three months alone, one-quarter of all Canadians skipping meals because they cannot afford a home, a 38% increase in homelessness since 2019, 50 new homeless encampments in Toronto, now a total of 256 of them in the biggest city in the country. Why is it that the more they spend, the more Canadians hurt?
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  • May/23/24 2:19:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, it is clear that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. Homelessness is up by 38% and a quarter of Canadians skip meals because they cannot afford to eat. The Bloc voted for $500 billion in centralist, inflationary spending to hire an additional 100,000 public servants and double spending on consultants. It says it had no choice, because the government would shut down otherwise. Could the government inform the Bloc that this spending was going to pass with the NDP's help, regardless of how the Bloc voted?
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  • May/8/24 2:42:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, since the Prime Minister introduced his carbon tax on the farmers who grow the food and the truckers who ship the food, it has raised the price on all who buy the food, with a record-smashing two million visits to food banks every single year, 50% of Canadians buying food past best-before dates and 20% of them becoming sick as a result of it. The Prime Minister promised he was going to help the middle class and those working hard to join it. Now the so-called middle class cannot afford food and homes. Is that what he meant by help?
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  • May/1/24 3:02:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister did turn it around. Obviously, nine years is too long for him because he is starting to attribute to the previous government words he said himself. He was the one who said the federal government is not responsible for housing construction or affordability and that is after he doubled the cost. When I was housing minister, we built 89,000 apartments at an average rent of $973. Since then, the rent has doubled. The mortgage payment has doubled, and the needed down payment has doubled. With all this failure, why is the Prime Minister doubling down?
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  • Apr/18/24 11:42:47 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I wonder if the Speaker might check the Standing Orders to find out if $973 a month is considered affordable today. Most communities would consider that to be affordable. Do you have an answer to that?
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  • Apr/18/24 11:07:22 a.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-5 
The same approach that will allow us to unleash energy, abundance and affordability is the approach we will take to build the homes; that is to say getting the government gatekeepers out of the way. Why do we have the worst housing inflation in the G7 after nine years of the Prime Minister? Why have housing costs risen 40% faster than paycheques? It is by far the worst gap of any G7 country. Why did UBS say Toronto had the worst housing bubble in the world? Vancouver is the third most overpriced when comparing median income to median house price according to Demographia. Why? Because we have the worst bureaucracy when it comes to home building. After nine years of the Prime Minister, Canada has the second slowest building permits out of nearly 40 OECD countries. These permitting costs add $1.3 million to the cost of every newly built home in Vancouver, and $350,000 to every newly built home in Toronto. Winnipeg blocked 2,000 homes next to a transit station that was built for those homes. The City of Montreal has blocked 25,000 homes in the last seven years. Literally hundreds of thousands of homes are waiting to be built, but are locked up in slow permitting processes. What do we have as a solution? The Prime Minister has taken the worst immigration minister in our country's history, the guy the Prime Minister blamed for causing out-of-control temporary immigration to balloon housing prices, and put him in charge of housing. Since that time, the minister has said that his housing accelerator fund of $4 billion does not actually build any homes. Since he has doled out all of this cash to political friends in incompetent city halls across the country, home building has dropped. In fact, home building is down this year and, according to the federal government's housing agency, it will be down next year and again the year after that. That is a housing decelerator not accelerator. That is what happens when a minister is chosen because he is a media darling and a fast talker, rather than someone who gets things done, as I did when I was housing minister. The rent was only $973 a month for the average family right across the country, and the average house price was roughly $400,000. That is results. There was less talk and less government spending, but far more homes. That is what our common-sense plan will do again. Our plan will build the homes by requiring municipalities to speed up, permit more land and build faster. They will be required to permit 15% more homes per year as a condition of getting federal funding, and to permit high-rise apartments around every federally funded transit station. We will sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build. We will get rid of the carbon tax to lower the cost of building materials. Finally, we will reward the working people who build homes, because we need more boots, not more suits. We will pass the common-sense Conservative law that allows trade workers to write off the full cost of transportation, food and accommodation to go from one work site to another, so they can build the homes while bringing home paycheques for themselves. These homes will be in safe neighbourhoods. We will stop the crime by making repeat violent offenders ineligible for bail, parole or house arrest. That will mean no more catch and release. We will repeal Bill C-5, the house arrest law. We will repeal Bill C-75, the catch-and-release law. We will repeal Bill C-83, the cushy living for multiple murderers law that allows Paul Bernardo to enjoy tennis courts and skating rinks that most Canadian taxpaying families can no longer afford outside of prison. We will bring in jail and not bail for repeat violent offenders. We will repeal the entire catch-and-release criminal justice agenda that the radical Prime Minister, with the help of the loony-left NDP, has brought in. The radical agenda that has turned many of our streets into war zones will be a thing of the past. We will also stop giving out deadly narcotics. I made a video about the so-called safe supply. I went to the tragic site of yet another homeless encampment in Vancouver, which used to be one of the most beautiful views in the entire world. Now it is unfortunately a place where people live in squalor and die of overdoses. Everyone said it was terrible that I was planning to take away the tax-funded drugs and that all of the claims I made were just a bunch of conspiracy theories, but everything I said then has been proven accurate, every word of it. I noticed that the Liberals and the pointy-headed professors they relied on for their policies have all gone into hiding as well. Why is that? It is because the facts are now coming out. Even the public health agency in British Columbia, which has been pushing the NDP-Liberal ideology, is admitting that the tax-funded hydromorphone is being diverted. The police in Vancouver said this week that 50% of all the high-powered hydromorphone opioids are paid for with tax dollars and given out by public health agencies supposedly to save lives. Now we know that those very powerful drugs are being resold to children, who are getting hooked on them, and the profits are being used to buy even more dangerous fentanyl, tranq and other drugs that are leaving our people face-first on the pavement, dying of record overdoses. The so-called experts always tell us to ignore the bumper stickers and look at the facts. The facts are in. In British Columbia, where this radical and incomparable policy has been most enthusiastically embraced, overdose deaths are up 300%. They have risen in B.C. faster than anywhere else in Canada and possibly anywhere else in North America. The ultraprogressive state of Oregon has reversed decriminalization, recognizing the total chaos, death and destruction the policy has caused. What does the radical Prime Minister, with the help of his NDP counterpart, do? They look at the death and destruction that has occurred in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and other communities and say we should have more of that. They took a walk, or better yet, these two politicians probably drove through the Downtown Eastside in their bulletproof limousines. They looked around at the people who were bent over completely tranquilized by fentanyl, saw the people lying face-first on the ground, saw the tents that the police would have pointed out are filled with dangerous guns and drugs, saw all the small businesses that were shuttered by this policy and said that we should have more of that. They want to replicate all the policies that have created it so that we can have tent cities and homeless encampments in every corner of the country. That is exactly what they have done. In Halifax, there are 35 homeless encampments in one city after nine years of the Prime Minister, his NDP counterpart and the Liberal mayor of Halifax. If we look at every town in this country, we will find homeless encampments that never existed before the last nine years. This policy will go down in infamy as one of the most insane experiments ever carried out on a population. Nowhere else in the world is this being done. The Liberals gaslight us. They love to say that all the civilized people believe that giving out these drugs will save lives, but nowhere else is this being done. When we tell people this is happening, they have a hard time believing that we are giving out heroin-grade drugs for free to addicts and expecting it to save lives. Now they spill into our hospitals, where nurses are told by the NPD government in B.C. and the Liberal government in Ottawa that they are not allowed to take away crack pipes or knives or guns. They are just supposed to expect that someone is going to consume the drugs, have a massive fit and start slashing up the hospital floor. This is something out of a bad hallucination and a hallucination that will come to an end when I am prime minister. We will end this nightmare.
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  • Apr/15/24 2:22:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we cannot see the value of homes and food that do not exist after eight years. The Liberals have a food program that, after eight years, has no food, and an affordable housing program that has doubled housing costs. They are not worth the cost, and now their deficits are driving up the interest obligations for the average family. For a family with a $500,000 mortgage, deficits are adding 10 grand in additional interest payments per year. When will they realize that, after eight years, this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost?
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  • Mar/19/24 12:28:28 p.m.
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By the way, I will be splitting my time with the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent, so it is not just the rest of my speech that you will have a chance to enjoy, Madam Speaker, but also his incredible oration. It will be a real treat to hear from him. After eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost. He is not worth the cost of food, which has had the worst inflation in over four decades, with two million people, a record-smashing number, lining up at food banks across the country. Chaos broke out the other day at the food bank in Montreal, where the police were forced to intervene, as the food had run out and many stomachs were still hungry waiting in line. A third of charities are turning Canadians away because they no longer have the resources to feed them after eight years of the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister. After eight years, we now have a Facebook group called the “Dumpster Diving Network”, where 8,000 Canadians share tips on how they can climb into a garbage can and pull out food to feed themselves because they cannot afford groceries. There is nothing left on the shelves at the local food bank; therefore, people have to go digging in garbage. This is the dumpster economy that the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister has given us after eight years. He is not worth the cost of food. He is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled after eight years of funding local bureaucratic gatekeepers who block homebuilding and printing cash, which inflates housing prices. After eight years, he is not worth the cost of taxes. He punishes work. People make it and he takes it. He punishes the people who get out of bed in the morning and work hard by taking the cash off of their paycheques, paycheques that have less purchasing power because after eight years of doubling the debt and printing $600 billion of new cash, he has caused the worst inflation in four decades. That has spiked interest rates, which now force many Canadians to sell their homes or face bankruptcy, which is rocketing higher. In fact, the pace of increase in bankruptcies is vertical. If we look at the graphs, it is straight up, as more and more businesses are declaring bankruptcy because the Prime Minister's inflationary spending has sent interest rates on their debts skyrocketing. It is in this miserable environment that the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister proposes yet another cruel tax hike. He plans to do it on April Fool's Day. It is an April Fool's Day tax hike. Just like him, this tax is not worth the cost. Let us go through the facts. There has been a lot of disinformation spread by the NDP-Liberals and their friends in the bought-and-paid-for media about the economics of the carbon tax, claiming that people are better off by paying the tax. Here are the facts from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Albertans, this coming year, will pay, on average, $2,943 per family while they get only $2,032 back in rebates. That is a $911 net cost. In other words, they pay about 50% more than they get back. In Saskatchewan, the average family will pay $2,618 this coming year and get only $2,093 back, a net cost of $525. In Manitoba, they will pay $1,750 and get back only $1,250, for a net cost of $500. In Ontario, the average family will pay $1,674 and only get back $1,047, a net cost of $627. In Nova Scotia, they will pay $1,500 and get back $963, for a net cost of over $500. In Prince Edward Island, it will pay $1,605 and get back only $1,055, for a net cost of $550. In Newfoundland, it will pay $1,874 and get back only $1,497, for a net cost of $377. I dare the Liberal media that have been pushing this disinformation to contact the Parliamentary Budget Officer, run all those numbers by him and ask him if I have it right. We already did, and he confirmed that we do. Why does this matter? It is because we have to stop the disinformation, the disinformation that has not only polluted the debate but sent countless people to food banks as they cannot afford to pay their bills, the disinformation that will grow in importance as the Prime Minister quadruples the carbon tax. The gap between the cost of the tax and the rebate people get back grows massively, forcing more people to live in these awful tent cities and lose their homes, forcing seniors to choose between eating and heating as they shiver, hungry, in the cold, in their modest homes. That disinformation is dangerous. It must be corrected because the truth is that the carbon tax is just like the Prime Minister. It is not worth the cost. Only common-sense Conservatives will spike the hike on April 1. After the carbon tax election, we will axe the tax. Let us bring it home.
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  • Feb/28/24 2:48:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, this NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is just not worth the cost of food. It is not just that two million people a month cannot afford groceries and are forced to line up at food banks, but also that now those food banks are running out of food, and Canadians are diving into dumpsters, literally. There is an 8,000-member Facebook group called the “Dumpster Diving Network”. How can the Prime Minister look those people in the eyes and raise taxes on their food when they are eating out of garbage cans?
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  • Feb/27/24 2:27:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that answer just proves that, after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost. It is not just that a million more people will visit food banks this year than in last year's record-smashing year; it is that now there is a large Facebook group of 8,000 people who call themselves the “Dumpster Diving Network”. So desperate are they that, not only can they not afford groceries or find food at food banks, they are literally jumping into garbage cans to find food. How desperate do Canadians have to get before the government will finally axe its tax on food?
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  • Feb/27/24 2:25:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what I understand is that after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost of food. If he thought that grocery profits were too high after eight years, one would think that he might have done something about it. Instead, we now have a massive increase. Let us get this straight, Second Harvest predicts there will be a million more visits to food banks this year than in last year's record-breaking year. In fact, many charities can no longer give people food because they have actually run out. In light of the failure of the carbon tax and the pain it is causing, will the Liberals axe the tax so that Canadians can afford to eat?
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  • Feb/14/24 2:42:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, he did not answer the NDP leader's question. The question was, how can the Prime Minister waste millions of dollars on the arrive scam app when Canadians cannot afford to eat, heat or house themselves? The answer is because the NDP keeps the Prime Minister in power, that is how, and votes consistently in committee to cover up the scandal and shut down investigations. This app was supposed to cost 80 grand, said the Prime Minister. Now it is at least $60 million, but we do not know for sure because of missing documents. What is the full and final cost of the arrive scam app?
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  • Feb/7/24 2:27:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, those are the same promises he made eight years ago before he doubled housing costs. He is not worth the cost of housing, which is up 100%. In the last two years alone, according to Rentals.ca, rent is up 20% or $400 for the average family. Now we learn that construction is in free-fall, down 28% last December versus the December before. Will he stop funding bureaucracy and driving up interest rates, so we can bring homes Canadians can afford?
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  • Jan/31/24 3:13:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the question was about rent and instead he turned and made false attacks against me. Apparently, I am living rent-free in his head. Here is the reality. Rent is going down in the States while it is coming up in Canada. Housing costs have risen 40% faster compared with the incomes of Canadians. Canada has the worst record in the G7 and the second worst in the OECD. If the Prime Minister's plan were really working, why is it that housing costs have doubled and our housing is becoming less affordable than that in almost any developed country in the world?
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  • Dec/13/23 3:13:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I voted against an approach that has spent $87 billion on affordable housing, to double the cost of housing. He thinks that if he is expensive, he is excused for his failures. Failing is bad. Failing expensively is even worse. Our common-sense plan would require cities to permit 15% more housing, as a condition of getting their financing. Give them bonuses if they beat the target, link the dollars they get for transit to requirements for apartments around them and sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build. Why can he not get behind that common-sense plan?
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  • Dec/13/23 3:09:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, he is doing the same thing he has done for eight years. He spent $87 billion on housing affordability to double housing costs. We have fewer homes per capita than we did when he took office, the fewest homes of any country in the G7. He doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments and doubled the needed down payment to the point where the Bank of Canada reports this week that Canada has the worst housing affordability in 41 years, and rentals.ca reveals that it is now more expensive to rent one room in a shared apartment than it was eight years ago to rent the entire apartment for oneself. When will he realize that ballooning inflation and the bureaucracy does not build homes?
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  • Dec/13/23 2:26:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is yet another example. The Prime Minister has had eight years to build that bypass, but has not even begun to do so. That is so typical of this Prime Minister, who makes announcements and spends loads of money but produces zero results. The same goes for affordability. He spent $87 billion on housing affordability, but that just doubled the cost. According to the Bank of Canada, the cost of housing is the worst it has been in 41 years. Will the Prime Minister finally reverse his inflationary policies, which have doubled the cost of housing for Canadians?
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  • Dec/12/23 5:23:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I love how when the first nations people do extraordinary things, Liberals show up to take all the credit. The member reminds me of the rooster who thought that just because he crowed when the sun came up, he made the sun come up. He did not make the sun come up; he just crowed about it. It is actually the first nations people who are building this project, and it is a shame that Liberals try to take credit for it. If we could just get the Liberals and the government out of the way, we could do many more great things because we know that, prior to the current government, housing was affordable in this country, taking a fraction out of a family paycheque to afford a home. The good thing is that housing was not like this before this Prime Minister and it will not be like this after he is gone. The second cause of the housing hell, which I pointed out in my documentary, was the rampant money printing that the government unleashed. While it was technically done by the Bank of Canada, it was clearly in total collaboration with the elected government and with the total support and the lack of discipline from the government to print $600 billion. The government has created 32% more cash in a period of time when the economy has grown by 4%. In other words, the cash is growing eight times faster than the stuff the cash buys. The Liberals did this through a program called quantitative easing, where the government sells bonds to the private sector and the Bank of Canada buys them right back at a higher price, profiting the financial institutions, freeing up easy money for government to spend, but also flooding the financial markets with easy cash that is lent out to wealthy investors. In my documentary, I use a Bank of Canada graph demonstrating the total liftoff in the number of homes bought by investors that happened exactly—
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  • Dec/8/23 5:47:52 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I believe if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for the following motion: That the House acknowledge that Canadians cannot afford— Some hon. members: No.
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