Poilievre says corporate Canada ‘sucking up’ to Trudeau Liberals
Tory leader says housing developers are too complacent with elected officials
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is accusing corporate Canada — including natural resources companies and housing developers — of “sucking up” to the Liberals and is urging them to actively campaign against the government.
The audience for his latest salvo at the corporate sector was the sector itself, a Greater Vancouver Board of Trade breakfast, which Poilievre acknowledged isn’t the kind of crowd he talks to that often.
He told a room of business leaders and numerous Conservatives that his affection for the business world lies with the entrepreneurs who risk it all to make a living — not the lobbyists or CEOs who only focus on what’s best for themselves.
“When I meet with resource companies, they come to Ottawa and all they do is suck up to the Liberal government. They have no backbone and no courage, and they don’t fight for their workers,” he said.
“I want to see corporate leaders actually fighting for their workers and fighting for the paycheques, instead of sucking up to the very people who are blocking these jobs and destroying our working class.”
He also name-checked beer producers, currently fighting against a planned excise duty increase on their products, of deliberately obfuscating when they blame “Ottawa” for the coming hike.
“Ottawa is not raising beer taxes. Justin Trudeau and the NDP are raising beer taxes,” he said.
“I know a lot of corporate leaders don’t want to say things like that, because they want to get along with everybody. But sucking up to the people who are doing the damage has only got us into this mess in the first place.”
A push against the coming beer tax increase has been one of several political lines of attack from Poilievre’s team in recent weeks, along with his standard broadsides against the Liberals on carbon pricing, crime and housing.
On that front Friday, he said that housing developers are also too complacent when it comes to pushing back against the elected officials responsible for green-lighting more construction.
“If these politicians keep getting elected to block homebuilding, then they’ll keep blocking homebuilding. So that’s what I mean when I say the business community actually has to step up,” he said.
“The only way we’re going to make homes affordable for people is to get the gatekeeping out of the way at all three levels of government and it’s time that the homebuilding companies actually play a leadership role in the politics of driving that change.”
But, he warned all businesses, in an echo of a message he began to deliver last year, that businesses also shouldn’t expect a warm welcome from a government under his watch either.
“When I’m prime minister, if you want any of your policy agenda pushed forward, you’re going to have to convince not just me, but the people of Canada that it is good for them,” he said.
Poilievre’s populist promise of fighting against elite interests and in favour of working people has often drawn comparisons to that of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
But with a potential second term for Trump looming, how a Poilievre government might navigate a Trump administration remains unclear.
On Friday, he sketched out some early thoughts as to what Canada U.S. trade policy could look like under his watch.
He said his priorities with the U.S. would be eliminating the existing softwood lumber tariff regime — which dates back decades and has been one of the longest-standing trade irritants between both countries.
He also said he’d work toward a full exemption for Canadians businesses from existing Buy American policies, and a guarantee that Canadian metals won’t be subject of future tariffs.
“And I will be focused on that. I will not be focused on woke virtue signalling and other grandstanding like the Trudeau government did,” blaming the Liberals’ approach for what he called a “terrible” new NAFTA that was negotiated with Trump.
Thus far, however, Poilievre has shown no signs of a willingness to work alongside the Liberals in a rehash of the “Team Canada” approach to dealing with a Trump government, though the Liberals have said they’d be happy to hear from him.