Transcription
Hello everyone. I'm Greg Mlan. I'm the conservative member of parliament for Calgary Center.
Thank you. Well, thank you very much for that and thank you for joining us here today for this important announcement. I have the honor, the great honor of introducing the honorable Pierre Polyv, member of Parliament for Battle River Crawford, leader of his majesty's loyal opposition in the House of Commons and leader of the Conservative Party of Canada as he officially kicks off his campaign for a stronger Alberta within a united Canada.
Pierre Polyav is a proud Albertan. He grew up right here in Calgary as the adopted son of school of two school teachers. He and his wife Anita are proud parents of their two children, Valentina and Cruz. As a member of parliament and a former minister in Steven Harper's Conservative government, Pierre had many accomplishments. He helped to keep the cost of living and inflation low. He balanced budgets. He delivered affordable homes. And he cut taxes and red tape to grow the Canadian economy and unleash the power of Alberta's energy sector. And we shouldn't forget under former Conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper, there were no separatist threats in Canada.
Under Pierre's leadership today, the Conservative Party of Canada continues to advocate for a stronger Alberta within a united Canada. Pierre and I were at the Lilac Festival yesterday doing just that, listening to the views of Calgarians. And the topic of the referendum Albertans will have in October was raised many times. I know under Pierre's leadership, we will keep fighting for a united Canada. My Conservative colleagues and I stand together proud to continue continue to do what we were elected to Parliament to do. Address the issues holding our country back and build a stronger Canada for all Canadians now and into the future. Ladies and gentlemen, as a proud Canadian and a proud Albertan, it is my honor to introduce Canada's next prime minister, the Honorable PIERRE POLIAN.
GREAT TO SEE YOU. Thank you. Thank you very much. It is great to be home to launch our campaign for a stronger Alberta within a united Canada. And speaking of home, 104 years ago, this building was home to our veterans, a clubhouse for the Great War Veterans Association. A place for Calgary's heroes to gather, tell stories, support each other, and mourn the brothers who did not return. The ghosts of Canadian heroes walk these halls. Among them, young men who left rural Alberta to fight for Canada in far away lands. Farm boys who put down their spades and picked up their rifles. Their mothers kissed them goodbye at train stations in small Alberta towns like Inisfail. Hannah Olds's high prairie and watched through tearary eyes as the locomotive pulled away across the expansive prairie horizon. Many of them never to return. Those that did return from the battlefield to the farm field would then survive the dust bowl, see their children fight another world war, pay off the country's entire war debt, and hand to the next generation the richest and freest nation on earth. Century farm plaques at the end of rural Alberta laneways still stand as monuments to the legacies they left their great great grandchildren who still plow the same soil. Those farms and this country are here today because no matter the hardship, they never gave up on Canada and neither should we. They fought for Canada and now we must fight for Canada.
I was blessed to grow up in the province and the country that they built. Among my uh earliest memories are attending the medal ceremonies at the 1988 Olympics here in my hometown of Calgary. I remember standing downtown looking at the ceremonies. I was a nine-year-old boy watching athletes step onto the podium to accept their awards under the Canadian flag. I remember Brian Orser winning the silver medal in skating and Elizabeth Manley delivering one of the most memorable performances in Canadian history. Like millions of Canadians, I felt overwhelming pride seeing our country celebrated around the world. And growing up here, I felt something else. Pride in Alberta. Pride to be a Calgarian. Pride in the thousands of volunteers. Pride in the entrepreneurial spirit that built this city from a prairie grassland to a global energy capital. Pride in the workers, ranchers, roughnecks, farmers, and small businesses who made this province the engine of Canada's national economy. My attachment to Alberta grew from long days playing on the outskirts of Calgary, the endless horizon, the big sky, the foothills rising to the Rockies. That drive on Highway One on prairie land that slowly starts to move up and down as you reach the foothills. And then all of a sudden you reach the peak and the majesty of the entire Rocky Mountain range appears before your eyes like a work of art put there by God. Living on the edge of Calgary where city met country, I grew up with the spirit of Alberta. I love this province. What I love about it, it's independent, hardworking, generous, unpretentious, resilient. The Calgary Stampede captured that energy. As a kid, I worked moving trash off tables at a concession. And I saw how the stampede symbolized the spirit of the West, earning success, not inheriting it, building things, not blocking them, taking risks, not asking permission. Freedom, not freebies.
The spirit of freedom and opportunity that that settled the West has for most of Alberta's history thrived within a united Canada. Alberta became a province in 1905 because Confederation promised to marry autonomy over local decisions with shared strength of panCanadian trade, defense, population, and landmass. The win-win of Confederation was really crystallized in the British North American Act, often called the BNA. The BNA is Canada's DNA. It's a different kind of Constitution than most countries. There are no lofty ideals expressed, no grand statements. It's an org chart. It's a who does what manual. It's a summary of what the provinces and the federal government should separately do as part of the common project of Canada. It's very practical based on the principle that power should be as close to the people as possible. What an individual can do, let him do it. What he can't, let the locality do it. What the locality can't do, let the province do it. and what the province cannot do then and only then then the federal government steps in. In the British North American Act, schools, hospitals, natural resources are the responsibility of provinces. The federal government does borders, defense, criminal law and movement of goods and services across borders. Each lever of government should do only what only that government can do. That approach for most of our history kept government affordable and accountable and left maximum freedom for people and provinces to do what worked for them. It also kept us out of each other's hair. And that all made sense. You don't need a federal government to put up a stop sign, approve a mine, build a road or a hospital that is only inside one province. You do need it to clear the way for a railway or a pipe pipeline that crosses many provinces or to buy fighter jets that can protect all 10 provinces and three territories.
The problem lately has been that the federal government has been terrible at the things that are its job while sticking its nose in things that are not its job. For example, for example, on defense, borders, immigration, criminal law, interprovincial pipelines, just to name a few, the federal government has failed brutally. And by the way, they admit this now. Those are all federal responsibilities. And yet they have had the audacity to impose themselves on provincial areas like taxing industrial carbon, seizing people's hunting rifles, and blocking oil and gas projects that are strictly within provincial jurisdiction. That has gotten in the way of Alberta's and Canada's biggest industry at massive expense to our entire country. While these intrusions drive our country apart, a destructive ideology has tried to erase the things that used to bring us together. Downgrading and denigrating our common identity and history by cancelling our symbols, shaming our heroes, dividing us by group, and promoting a postn state leaves us leaves less holding us together and more driving us apart. We must be prepared, my friends, to have some honest conversations over this next several months. You see, a country is a lot like a family. And every family has problems. Families fail not because they argue about those problems, but they fail when they sweep those problems under the rug and pretend they do not exist. The problems don't go away. They get bigger. Those who caused the problems in Canada today will tell you to pretend those problems don't exist and they will denounce as unpatriotic anyone who speaks honestly about them. Doing that in this referendum would only drive people further away. If you want frustrated Albertans to vote for Canada, the absolute worst thing we can do is dismiss their legitimate grievances and thus signal there's no hope of fixing them at all.
Here are the undeniable facts. 10 years ago, under the leadership of a great Albertan, Steven Harper, there was no separatist movement in Alberta. When Mr. Harper left office, the the Psy Quebec had been defeated and the block Kebeekqua had been reduced to four seats. It didn't even have party status. We thought referendums on separation were a thing of the past. Today, 10 years later, hundreds of thousands of Albertans have signed a petition to leave and polls put the Separatist Party Quebec in first place in Quebec, running on an explicit platform of separation. How do we get here? Over the last decade, federal inflationary spending and taxes have forced an affordability crisis on Albertans and on Quebecers for that matter. The Liberal Party carried out a publicly stated plan to phase out Alberta's biggest industry using anti-development laws that are still in place today. Big promises to reverse course on these issues are very nice, but they will take shovels moving dirt and steel pipe in the ground to show the Liberals have really changed their minds on oil and gas. Albertans can be forgiven for demanding results, not just more promises. I can say from meeting people in my east central rural Alberta riding of Battle River Crowoot that these policies did real harm in people's lives. Grown men in tears after they lost their jobs and homes. All due to a federal attack on their industries. Young people who watched their parents buy homes in their early 20s now worry they never will be able to afford one of their own. And by the way, for those out there who will say there goes Polyv complaining about affordability again, make no mistake, many of the political divisions we have in this country today are precisely because as hard as they work, our people cannot afford to live anywhere in this country right now. Beyond that, liberal governments have intruded into provincial jurisdiction, seizing the lawful firearms of law-abiding Alberta farmers, First Nations, and rural people. And the federal government has become bigger and bossier than ever before. Outside of CO, federal spending is now a bigger share of the economy than at any time since 1996, three decades ago. That means too much of Alberta's money goes to Ottawa and too little returns. The government is rich and the people are poor.
These problems echo through history. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents losing their savings, a home and two little rental properties that my mother, who's here with us today, saved up. There she is. She's, for any of those who don't know, she's the mayor of Shaughnessy. Um and um Shaughnessu the neighborhood where we grew up. We moved there though after we lost our home in Deer Run and she lost her two little rental properties that she'd spent her 20s and 30s saving for. Interest rates and inflation combined with a massive liberal recession all drill driven by Pierre Elliot Trudeau smashed all of the things that we had worked so hard to build. Very similar to today. My folks had to scrimp and save. And with a little help from my grandfather, we got a loan for a down payment on a house further out so that we could find a place to live and start all over. Hundreds of thousands of Albertans have a very similar story. But you know what's amazing? After all of that and after all we've been through through the last decade, Albertans are not even looking for an apology or compensation. They just want these things to stop happening. They want They're not actually looking for Ottawa for a handout. They're looking for Ottawa to get out of their way and off their backs for the province to finally have respect within Confederation. And the truth is that is easy to do. We've done it before. In the 1980s, Canadians elected a new government. And over the following 30 years, we scrapped the National Energy Program, signed free trade with the United States, unblocked and unlocked the oil sands, shrunk the size of the federal government by a third, and unbridled Alberta to become the richest place anywhere on Earth. We can do that again. The good news is that the problems that we need to fix are easily fixable. And what I would say is listen carefully to the concerns of those who are saying they want to leave. and you will find that they do not have a problem with their fellow Canadians or even with Canada itself. They have a problem with the federal government. We don't need a different country in Alberta. We need different government policies in Ottawa.
Restoring affordable homes and food. unblocking resources, pipelines, respecting firearms owners, locking up criminals, relieving taxpayers, respecting provincial autonomy and personal freedom, unlocking free enterprise. We know these are the things that Albertans have been demanding. The best news of all, it's not a zero sumum game. All of these things would make the entire country better off. All Canadians want these things. The answer there for Albert therefore for Albertans is not to pull away from our friends in other provinces, but to lock arms with them to make Canada affordable, safe, self-reliant, and united here at home. Lock arms with all Canadians for an affordable federal government that allows an affordable life for Canadians. Lock arms with Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador to double oil production by replacing C48 and C69. the anti-pipeline and anti-energy laws with fast permits and low taxes on energy and construction. Lock arms with steel workers in Hamilton and Sue St. Marie to eliminate the industrial carbon tax. Lock arms with Toronto communities for tougher criminal justice laws to end the wave of violence and theft that has washed over their communities and ours. lock arms with indigenous hunters and rural communities across the country so that we can end the gun grab and farmers, hunters, and sport shooters can keep their lawful property. Lock arms. Lock arms with Quebec to restore constitutional autonomy of the provinces so Albertans can make decisions for themselves on things like immigration. Both Quebecers and Albertans and probably many others agree that provincial governments that pay for the social services and housing of newcomers must have more control over who comes in and how many enter the country. Locking arms with other provinces is a practical, realistic pra path to a stronger Alberta within a united Canada. Province program Thank you. And by locking arms with all of those people, by building these alliances, we can achieve the things that Albertans and Canadians want to have together. We have to ensure that Albertans are able, just like Quebec Quebecers, to be masters in their own houses.
And now I have a message for everyone who's participating in this debate. A message on how we treat each other. I want to speak to Canadians across this country. As we debate the fight for a united Canada, we must remember that those who are choosing separation from Canada are not our enemies. They are our fellow citizens, family members, loved ones, business partners, neighbors, friends. Demonizing people who have lost it hope in Canada is no way to restore it. Name calling, fear-mongering, and ostracizing will only worsen and broaden the divide. A better way is to listen, understand, persuade, and address the easily solvable problems they are asking us to fix. nor will threats work. We should not just tell Albertans how bad it would be to have separation. Let's instead talk about how great it can be if our country is truly united and respectful of Alberta. Just as I speak to Block Keebe members of Parliament every day on Parliament Hill, I will be speaking to Albertans on both sides of this referendum to hear their thoughts and to make the respectful case for Canada. The goal should not be to beat one another in this referendum. It should be to unite us all when it is over. To show our fellow citizens, all of them, that they belong in Canada, that they are a treasured part of our national family. We need a project hope, not a project fear. Hope that this province within this country can be the richest, safest, and most affordable place in the world. that it's young can have the greatest opportunities in the world and that making Alberta stronger within a united Canada should be a big part of our national project. Thank you.
And now, if I could speak to Canadians from other provinces, I encourage you now more than ever to reach out to Albertans. Tell them how much you appreciate and love them. Really listen to them and support their ambitions because our destinies are intertwined. One for all, all for one. The whole of Canada should now wrap its arms around Alberta and its people. At the same time, we should reignite our patriotism. No more tearing down statues, lieling our heroes, or cancelelling our history. We must bind this country together with the love of our common history, our common achievements, our common heroes, and our common belief that this is the best country anywhere on earth. We must be a country that sings its songs, tells its stories, and waves its flags. Alberta is at the heart of those stories. those songs and that flag.
And now a message to my fellow Albertans. Let me speak directly to you. In the midst of our legitimous legitimate complaints, let us not forget what we have here and what we've built together. You know, sometimes in life, we forget what we have. We sometimes take for granted the things that have always been around. But I tell you, look around the world. Where else would you really rather live? Canada is a very special country and a very rare one. It took 800 years of evolution from the time of the Magna Carta to the present to develop our democracy. The Magna Carta being the first ever law designed to restrain the government rather than to restrain the people. Did you know that Canada is actually the fourth oldest democracy on Earth? We have solid foundations. There is a reason why millions of people from around the world leave behind their ancestral homes, families, jobs, and countries to flock here. There is a reason why millions more would come if they could. And that reason is that there is no better country anywhere on planet Earth than Canada. Sure, we can and should complain about our government. But Canada is more than a government. It is a land, a flag, a common defense, laws, borders, folklore, stories of heroes, and hardship. A promise passed down from those who came before, upheld by those here now, and handed to those who come next. A promise is what this the country offers all of us. It's a promise of a government that is servant and not batmaster. A promise of free people, free speech and free markets. A promise of meritocracy, not aristocracy. A promise that anyone from anywhere can achieve anything. A promise for which the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of Canada sacrificed. A promise that is precious and rare. Making Canada was hard. Before we risk it, let us remember the Albertans who sacrificed to provide this inheritance. The people who through hardship and heroism never gave up on Canada. The brilliant engineers and rough necks who extracted the miracle molecules out of muddy bumen to power our lives. They never gave up. So we should never give up. The traders who followed the winding rivers across the unmapped prairies to build the lonely forts which would become our future cities. They never gave up and neither should we. The par p pioneers whose callous hands plucked the weeds and moved the rocks to turn raw dirt into fields of golden grains. They never gave up and we should ne never give up. The mothers who fought starvation so their babies would survive the great depression and the prairie dust bowl. never gave up. So we should never give up. The CRE code talkers from Alberta who saved countless Canadian lives during the Second World War relaying battle plans in their language to outsmart Nazi interceptions. They never gave up. So we should never give up. The veterans at the Waynewright Legion who told me that I should do as they have done which is to fight for Canada and never give up. The warriors who built this legion and haunt its halls and the brothers that did not return. They never gave up and neither should we. The Canada for which they died is the Canada for which we must live. Thank you very much.