We Grilled Pierre Poilievre, Conservative Leader, on Big Tax Cuts and Investing in Canada

Ahead of the April 28 federal election, the TLDR team reached out to the major parties and asked to interview their leaders about critical economic issues. Not every party responded to our invitation, but representatives of three major parties found time to speak with us. And we’re delighted they did, because we want our readers to be as informed as possible when they head to the polls. The interviews were conducted by Michael Katchen, the CEO of Wealthsimple, our sponsor, and lightly edited for length and clarity. You can read our election guide for a concise summary of the parties’ platforms. —The Editors 

The Interviewees (click to read)

•  Pierre Poilievre. Conservative Party leader. Member of parliament for Carleton, Ontario. 

• Peter Julian. NDP House Leader. MP for New Westminster/Burnaby, British Columbia.

• Jonathan Pedneault. Green Party leader.

Pierre Poilievre won his first campaign to become a member of parliament in 2004, when he was 25 years old. He went on to serve as a cabinet minister under then prime minister Stephen Harper. In 2022, Poilievre was elected Conservative Party leader. He was raised in Calgary by his adoptive parents, both of whom were teachers. He and his wife, Anaida, a former Senate staffer, have two children. 

Michael Katchen: A big concern for many voters, especially for young voters, is housing. I know you’ve been out meeting with Canadians ahead of the election. Have you heard anything surprising in the past couple of weeks on the campaign trail? 

Pierre Poilievre: I wouldn’t say I’ve been surprised in the last couple of weeks because I’ve been marinating on the issues of youth housing and the inflation problems for a long time. I would say that the surprise really hit me in about 2021 when the inflation started to take off and the housing crisis was sparked. [Note: the housing crisis accelerated dramatically during the pandemic but began years before.] 

My wife bought her home when she was 25. She had a good job, but she didn’t come from a rich family, and she got a nice attached home in Ottawa. Today, a 25-year-old with that background wouldn’t even be able to contemplate that. We have, I think, the biggest land mass per capita in the OECD [a group of wealthy nations], which means that land should be abundant and cheap. Yet we have pretty much the most expensive housing. That’s a homegrown problem. It’s the result of government goosing demand with loose, aggressive money printing; excessive immigration; and blocking supply with bureaucracy that holds up permits and stops builders. [Note: The Bank of Canada has said it did not contribute to inflation by “printing money.”] And the people who suffer most are the working class who don’t have assets; the youth who haven’t had time to acquire assets; and newcomers to the country because, by nature, when they arrive here, they don’t own anything. And those are the people who feel most left out and left behind. 

Housing has clearly been one of the key pillars in each of the parties’ platforms, and I think you’ve been very clear about removing taxes and the permitting process— 

And the regulation that gets in the way of building. 

Yeah. I’m curious if there are other countries that Canada can learn from, or other models you like in terms of dealing with the housing crisis. 

You know, I don’t think we need a new model. I think we just need to get the bureaucracy out of the way. Bureaucracies in this country have grown like a weed. It’s astonishing how big and aggressive they’ve become. In Toronto, for example, a third of the cost of a new home in Ontario today is direct taxes — that’s sales, taxes, development charges, land transfer taxes, etc. And then probably another third is the incalculable cost of delays, consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, accountants, and other things you need to get permission to build. And so, given we know these things are the problems, creating more government programs is not the solution. It’s like trying to fight lung cancer with cigarette smoking, or fire with gasoline.

My practical solution to the housing crisis is to take the federal sales tax off new homes under $1.3 million. I’m gonna pay the municipalities to reduce their development charges. And I’m going to require that they speed up permits as a condition of getting any federal funds. [I also plan to] sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land so that we can build more and faster, and I believe that we will have homes that people can afford 

Let’s move on to the economy. Right now, Canada does two things really well: we pull things out of the ground, and we finance pulling things out of the ground. You’ve been clear about wanting to unleash the natural-resource economy. But what ideas do you have about the innovation economy and fostering more innovation here? 

The problem we have today is that Canada’s a great place to take money and a terrible place to make money. If you want to get a subsidized grant to do R&D or university-based research, Canada is a pretty good place for that. But when you graduate and your IP is profitable and you’re making a lot of money, you don’t want to stay in Canada, because you are paying [as much as] 53% or 54% marginal tax rates. And your business is paying very high tax on investment and on earnings. So what happens is that, as soon as Canada develops IP that’s profitable, the owners say, “Well, let’s shop it around,” and they move to Ireland or the U.S. or Singapore or Switzerland or some other place with significantly lower taxes. And then Canada only gets the losing part of the lifecycle. So I want to make it a winning proposition for the brightest minds and the best technology to stay here.

To do that, I have something called the Canada First Reinvestment Tax Cut. It’s simple: if you reinvest in [Canadian companies], you pay no capital gains tax. And, as long as you keep reinvesting in Canada [by the end of 2026], it’s capital-gains-tax free. Now, when you decide to cash out one day, then you’ll obviously pay tax on the full freight. But the irony is that the government will get more [tax revenue], just later, because they’ll get the same share of a much larger pie. It’ll be a net benefit.

Staying on the economy: how would you deal with the very real risk of President Trump’s trade war and a possible recession? 

On my first day, I would say to the president, “Let’s expedite the renegotiation of the Canada-U.S. free trade deal and suspend tariffs in the interim.” I think the president is going to come under a lot of pressure domestically as they get closer to midterms. And some might say, “Well, why would he care?” Well, he will care because he won’t be able to get things through Congress if he’s got a bunch of angry [lawmakers] who are saying, “We’re not gonna let you pass things unless you get these tariffs off.” And, you know, they’ve got factories in Michigan and Ohio that are under strain because their supply chains have been messed up. So the politics are in our favour to get these things solved. 

I want to say to the Americans, “We’re going to protect our sovereignty. We’re going to end tariffs on both sides of the border. And, by the way, here’s what we have to offer: the more you trade with us, the faster we can rebuild our military and unburden you of our defence. So we can protect our waters, our skies, our soils against China and Russia, and our continent will be safer.” 

I think that’s a great value proposition, which will help get us a resolution, and then we can get back to focusing on solving our own problems here at home. I think we certainly have a crisis with President Trump’s wrongheaded tariffs. But most of the crises we face in Canada are created by our own government [be it crime, or inflation, or housing]. That might sound very pessimistic. But actually it’s very optimistic, because if the government is causing the problem, we know how to fix it. We have to reverse all the policies that caused these homemade problems. And then we’ll see things turn around very quickly. For instance, you stop overspending, and very quickly, your money starts to restore its value. Unleash your resource sector pretty quickly, and the paycheques start to pour in. Cut taxes and bureaucracy, and pretty soon, new homes pop up. Lock up the worst criminals, and pretty soon your streets are a lot safer. 

You’ve outlined a lot of bold policy ideas, but it can be hard for governments to get things done. How will you make your policy ideas a reality if elected? 

You have to bulldog it. You really do. I think we’ve gotten too polite in Canada. What happens is that a lot of interests get their claws into the bureaucracy, and then the bureaucracy decides to block [a new idea] from moving forward. And then [the bureaucracy] spins in circles: there are committees that write reports and reports about reports, and then discussions about the reports about the reports. You need a bulldog at the head of each department as a minister who’s going to say, “This is what we are going to do, and I want it on my desk.” 

I remember in the Harper government we had the great global recession. And our infrastructure minister said we got to build stuff real quick to get our people working. And he said, “I want a one-page application form for municipal infrastructure projects.” And they said, “Minister: it’s 500 pages now; we can’t get it down to a page. He said, “One page.” Then they came back with 300 pages. He said, “One page.” They came back and said, “Minister: you’ll be thrilled. We got it down to 75 pages.” He said, “One page.” Then they came back with 20, 25 pages. And he said, “Go away and don’t come back until it’s one page.” So finally they brought one page and he said, “Now I want you to protect the species and the water, and I want you to do it with one environmental review for each level of government.” The end result was that we got [something like] 23,500 projects completed in two years. It took a minister who was a bulldog to make that happen. And I know it doesn’t sound pretty, but that is the kind of approach that actually gets you over the finish line.

Another topic our readers care a lot about is competition and financial services. Ten years ago, to open an investment account in Canada, you needed a fax machine or the mail to do it, and it took months to go through. How would you foster competition, especially when it comes to financial services? I know you’ve been supportive of things like open banking [which is a set of rules that would give Canadians more control of their financial information].

I think it needs to be a lot easier to move your assets between financial institutions. I’ve heard stories of people just trying to move from one traditional financial institution to another, and it’s just months of jerking around and waiting. And the banks wear you down.

I know our readers have dealt with that. 

Yeah. People don’t really want to devote all these hours just to changing their financial institution. Open banking would allow people to move their assets to other new financial institutions and drive competition. And we need that because the banking sector in Canada today has become overly focused on just government-backed mortgages. That’s where their bread and butter is. The government backs the mortgage, so it’s a risk-free proposition. But the reality is that they don’t have to make bold loans to fund a new startup that’s going to make a great new invention. And the only way to change that is to open the market up to more competition.

Let’s follow that thread on innovation: I read a stat not too long ago that there are 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs in Canada today than 20 years ago. And, in my view, entrepreneurship and building new stuff seems like the only antidote to Canada’s economic crisis and productivity loss. You talked about a tax regime to help keep the best and brightest here. What else should Canada do to inspire people to build great companies here?

I think we need a culture that rewards risk-taking. It’s clear what the downside is when you start a new venture: you could lose your shirt. But it’s not entirely clear what the upside is in Canada. If your company breaks through, you’re going to get nailed with very high taxes. And you’re going to be looked down upon as some kind of villain because you’ve been successful. And so why would people take the risk? I think we need to change, obviously, the tax system, but also the culture. We need to view entrepreneurs as the heroes they are, and I’m going to try to use my megaphone as prime minister to honour entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Maybe you can leave us with your vision for Canada. I know for many people it’s been hard to look at the direction our country is going — we’re economically stagnating and questioning our place in the world. I’d love it if my kids grew up and decided to make their homes and build their lives here. How do we make Canada a vibrant place for them? What would that look like for you? 

Well, it looks like your story of being a 12-year-old who won a stock-picking contest, and then you turned it into one of the biggest entrepreneurial success stories in Canada — and probably the biggest in the financial sector — in my lifetime. That’s the story. That’s what I want the country to look like. You know, [the innovation] doesn’t have to be just in finance. I want a seven-year-old kid in an Indigenous community to tell his dad he wants to cure cancer, and 40 years later he does it. Or the kid that says, “I want to start my own business one day,” and then grows up to be a great business leader.

That’s the Canadian promise. It’s better than the American dream. Why? A dream is something you wake up from, and it’s not always real. But the Canadian promise is a very simple contract: you work hard, you get a great life, and it doesn’t matter where you start. You can start right at the bottom, and you can climb right to the top as long as you work at it. And that’s the country that I want to restore. 

Written By

The Editors