00:00So, do you hear anything to change your mind?
00:09Well, we had a good conversation.
00:12My message, of course, to the Prime Minister is that people can't afford to pay any more.
00:18That they're tapped out, their grocery bills, their rent is too high after 10 years of excess spending.
00:24So, I shared my view that we need the government to bring down its inflationary deficits and taxes.
00:31I was grateful for the chance to sit down with the Prime Minister.
00:34We had a good conversation.
00:36He didn't make any commitments.
00:38And so, I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.
00:41You said you hoped he was in listening mode.
00:43Did you feel that was the case?
00:45I think we both were.
00:47We had a good back and forth.
00:49And we shared our respective views.
00:52I'm not going to report to you anything that he said because that was in the four walls of the room.
00:56I can only speak for myself.
00:58And I reiterated that we need this to be an affordable budget.
01:02We've seen over the last 10 years of Liberal deficit spending is driven up the cost of living and driven down investment in our country.
01:10So, my message is it's time to reverse course on the costly decade of deficit spending that has given us more expensive food and housing.
01:22The Canadian people deserve a break.
01:24The cost of government is driving up the cost of living.
01:28And so, if the Prime Minister is serious about making Canada a more affordable country, then he needs to bring forward an affordable budget.
01:35Do you get the sense that this is a budget that you can support?
01:38Sorry, go ahead.
01:39We can take both.
01:40Okay, you go first.
01:41Do you get the sense that this is a budget you could support?
01:44I haven't seen anything, but I've sort of laid out my conditions for the party and we'll see what he comes up with.
01:52I mean, history though is that opposition parties, official opposition parties, do not support the budget.
01:56I mean, you just don't.
01:57It's not part of your job.
01:58So, do you know what I mean?
02:01Do you see a world in which this is possible for you?
02:04The world would be, it's an affordable budget that gets rid of taxes, excess taxes on investment, home building, work, energy, that brings the deficit down to the level that the Liberals promised only a year ago.
02:18Pretty reasonable to go back to the deficit they were running only a year ago.
02:22These are the things that he would have to do for us to consider it.
02:25At the end of the day, our number one priority is people's take home pay has to grow and that comes through more affordable food and homes.
02:33The current Liberal policy is driving up the cost of living.
02:37If they sharply reverse that, then they can bring down the cost of living.
02:41And that's what I asked for with this meeting with the Prime Minister.
02:44Just a few meetings.
02:45Yeah, just curious.
02:46After meeting with him, what are your impressions as far as where the deficit might go?
02:50I didn't press him too hard.
02:52But, you know, the spending has been out of control since he took office.
02:56In a lot of ways, he's spending faster and more than the Liberal government was when he became Prime Minister.
03:02Spending on the bureaucracy is up 6%, on consultants is up 37%.
03:08It seems like he's got a new agency for every problem in Canada.
03:14It's going to be an alphabet soup of different acronyms around the city.
03:18And so, my sense is that his spending, Mr. Carney's spending with great respect is totally out of control.
03:24And Canadians are paying the price for his out of control spending.
03:28So why not press him a little bit further on it?
03:30Well, I didn't expect I would get an answer to that question in this meeting.
03:36And if I did, I'm not going to repeat things he said to me in private anyway.
03:40There seems to be like a shift in the narrative where it used to be the job of the government was in a minority situation.
03:45Right.
03:46It's the opposition to support the budget.
03:48Yes.
03:49And instead, it's become it is the opposition's fault if you don't support the budget.
03:53That's right.
03:54And I just wonder if you could reflect on that tension, like this idea that if Canadians truly do expect, in a minority situation, everybody to work together, then where is it with all your parties to sort of sit down and hammer this out?
04:05Or who owns that, ultimately?
04:08I think it will be up to the Canadian people to judge when they see the substance and measure it against the votes.
04:14But what I've tried to do is be fair-minded in just holding him to the promises that he made.
04:19You know, it was a year ago the Liberals promised this year's deficit would only be $42 billion.
04:23So I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that they would keep that cap.
04:26He said he would be judged by the prices at the grocery store.
04:29Well, those prices are rising at 4% now, twice the Bank of Canada's target rate.
04:33My goal is to bring that food price inflation down.
04:38He said that he would create jobs.
04:42So we're putting forward policies that would actually do that.
04:45So I think we've been very reasonable in basically assisting that the Prime Minister live up to the very big promises that he made of himself.
04:53And for me, the biggest and most important promise of it all is that people can actually start to afford their lives again.
05:00Do you get the sense he wants an election out of this?
05:02We didn't discuss that.
05:05Alright, thanks very much everybody.
05:08Thank you very much.
Comments