Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre told a packed warehouse of party supporters that Canadian housing prices have skyrocketed and crime is out of control, placing the blame squarely on the Liberal government.
The exuberant crowd of thousands was eating up every word at a Canada First Rally held in a hangar near the Region of Waterloo International Airport with parked cars lining the unpaved shoulders along Fountain Street.
Poilievre was joined by local Conservative candidates including Cambridge’s Connie Cody and Kitchener South-Hespeler’s Matt Strauss.
“Do these Liberals deserve a fourth term?” Strauss asked the crowd who responded by screaming “no.”
Strauss introduced Anaida Poilievre, the wife of the Conservative leader, who spoke about her husband’s upbringing as an adoptee and her own experience as an immigrant.
She said she worked full-time while going to university in Ottawa and had saved enough money for a down payment on a small two-bedroom townhouse which cost $230,000 in 2012—three years before Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power, she noted.
“That was the Canadian promise; if you work hard you can get ahead, you can make it in this country,” she said. “That’s what the Poilievre’s stand for, that’s what we are fighting for to restore the Canadian promise.”
Poilievre touched on multiple topics during his 45-minute speech including increased housing prices, income tax rates, cost of living, crime, and drug addiction.
“Connie Cody was telling me many of these people from Cambridge have been crying on her shoulder telling stories of how stressed they and their families are just trying to make ends meet,” he said. “It’s time that we put those people first for a change.”
To address rising housing costs, he said a Conservative government would cut the federal sales tax on new homes, require municipalities to speed up permits and cut red tape as a condition of receiving federal infrastructure money.
Poilievre said the Conservatives plan to tap into Canada’s natural resources by approving major projects faster and sell resources to Asia and Europe and incentivize the trades by allowing travelling trade workers to write-off the full cost of food, transportation and accommodation.
Conservatives certainly want more jobs but the leader said they want those jobs to be in safe neighbourhoods.
Poilievre said he regularly meets grieving family members of someone victimized by crime. Often, he added, the perpetrators are someone who is out on bail or parole.
“The good news is we don’t have a lot of criminals in Canada, but the bad news is they’re very productive,” he said. “A small group of criminals do almost all the crime because they’re released almost the same day that they’re arrested.”
To combat this, he promised a tough on crime approach which includes repealing catch and release laws, imposing mandatory jail time for human traffickers and passing a ‘three strikes’ law—under which individuals convicted of three serious offences would no longer be eligible for bail, parole, probation or house arrest.
He noted the opioid crisis plays a large part in this and had a plan to fund treatment for 50,000 people to help get them back on their feet as contributing members of society.
“We will ban the hard drugs, stop giving out tax funded opioids, we will bring life sentences for anyone who sells more than 40 milligrams of fentanyl,” he said.
Throughout his address, Poilievre criticized Liberal leader Mark Carney and stressed the only future for Canada is by electing a Conservative government.
“You’re going to vote for the future to be brighter than the past, to turn the page on a dark, lost Liberal decade so that we can once again be a self-reliant, sovereign people that stands on its own two feet,” he said.
