From gas to crypto: Massive crowds turn out for Pierre Poilievre's BC tour

Apr 11 2022, 3:54 pm

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre completed his first tour of British Columbia over the weekend, packing several events with the kind of large crowds that reinforce his early front-runner status in the party’s leadership race.

Almost 1,600 people attended Poilievre’s rally at the Croatian Cultural Centre in Vancouver on Thursday, and the lineup to get a photo with him afterwards stretched three hours long.

An event for students at the University of BC attracted 150 people, reportedly one of the largest crowds for on-campus young Conservatives in years. By Friday, attendance had swelled to more than 3,000 people for a rally at a golf club in Kelowna.

In an interview with Daily Hive, Poilievre said he recognizes his message is resonating with supporters, and in particular those who find themselves unable to afford housing, gas, groceries and other household items during a period of rapid inflation.

“I think people feel like they’ve lost control of their lives, I really do,” he said.

“That’s what I hear again, and again, and particularly in young people.”

Poilievre was only 24 when he won his Ottawa-area seat in the House of Commons in 2004. Now 42, he has made waves with a leadership campaign heavy on the use of the word “freedom,” as well as for his engaging speeches and highly-combative debate style.

“You know, I just meet so many youth in inner cities who have been locked up in their 400 square foot rented condo for two years and haven’t been able to date or go to the gym, or a nightclub and who have lost hope in ever buying a home,” he said.

“And what does that mean? It means they can start a family and have kids. And so the normal decisions that we all took for granted in this country 20 years ago are robbed of people. 

“So really not my purpose in politics is to give people back control of their lives. By making the country the freest place on Earth. We need to remove the gatekeepers to build more houses, produce more energy, grow more food, so people can afford to choose the lives they want. And that’s really why I’m in this.”

Poilievre quickly zeroed on housing affordability in British Columbia, where real estate prices have soared higher, and more quickly over recent years than elsewhere in the country.

“This is the biggest issue in this province, as far as I can tell,” he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government last week tabled a new budget, with billions in spending for new housing projects, incentives for municipalities to approve projects more quickly, a two-year ban on foreign real estate purchases, a tax on flipping properties within a year and a new tax-free down payment savings account.

The measures appear targeted at the same under-40 crowd of disaffected middle-income voters frustrated at years of political inaction in curbing housing prices. 

Housing and crypto

Poilievre in his messaging has linked housing to rising inflation, and also dangled the carrot to young angry voters of expanding the use of cryptocurrencies in areas like real estate.

“The financial system is broken – inflation, particularly housing inflation, has vastly outstripped incomes for many years now, leading to a major wealth gap,” he said.

“Those with assets are becoming vastly richer, and those who are living on wages are becoming poorer as their purchasing power declines. So we clearly have a system that favours the very wealthy and hurts the working class.”

“Obviously the first solution to that is for the government to stop inflating the cost of living with money printing. But more than that, we also need to give people the freedom to use other money that they that politicians and bankers cannot manipulate. One of those is Bitcoin, as you know.”

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not legal tender in Canada. Poilievre said he’ll institute “simple, easy to comply with rules” with the multitude of provincial and federal financial regulators where crypto assets are regulated the same way as non-legal tender currency, where if it’s used as a security or title of ownership it is regulated as that similar tangible commodity.

“You create a level playing field, and then you let the free market decide,” he said. “People can decide what to buy and sell.”

Beyond that, his housing policy consists of eliminating “cheap easy credit” for “the investor class” that bought up houses and bid up prices.

Transit and housing

More aggressively, Poilievre said he’ll “tie infrastructure money to the number of housing completions in a given big city” in a bid to force municipal governments to eliminate red tape and permitting bureaucracies that delay housing project approvals.

“The increases in infrastructure funding for big cities will depend on how many housing units get completed,” he said. “And so that will incentivize mayors and councils to remove the red tape and allow more construction.”

It’s a move that, oddly, puts him somewhat in alignment with the BC NDP government, which is targeting delays at municipal councils in its bid to increase housing supply. 

Housing Minister David Eby has said he could remove some municipal powers this fall to speed up projects. A new bill last week proposes to allow government’s transportation financing arm to buy up land around transit projects to force housing density in a move Transportation Minister Rob Fleming said amounts to a “choice” for municipalities on whether they are willing to approve more housing units to obtain provincial transportation dollars.

Climate Change

Poilievre is also calling for the elimination of the carbon tax, in a bid to lower record-high gas prices. BC was the first province in North America to implement a carbon tax in 2008, and the measure has proved generally popular since then.

Poilievre said he’d eliminate the federal requirement that all provinces create a carbon tax, but would ultimately leave it up to the BC government if it wanted to keep its own in place. The rest of his environmental plan consists of supporting small modular nuclear reactors instead of goal-fired electricity, enabling carbon capture and storage, banning overseas oil imports into Canada within five years, exporting more natural gas to Asia and boosting mineral production in the country with shorter wait times for permits.

Poilievre finished his BC tour with rallies in Prince George and Langley. The deadline for new candidates to enter the federal Conservative party race is April 19. Candidates have until June 3 to sign up new members. The party vote is September 10. Eleven other candidates have declared they are running, including BC MP Marc Dalton and former Quebec premier Jean Charest.


Rob Shaw is Daily Hive’s Political Columnist, tackling the biggest political stories in BC. You can catch him on CHEK News as their on-air Political Correspondent.”

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