LILLEY: Poilievre says Trump's 51st state comments are no joke
In an interview with the Toronto Sun, Poilievre says Trudeau has wrongly been telling Canadians it's all a joke for the last several months.
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With Canada’s sovereignty at stake, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the Trudeau Liberals shouldn’t have spent the last few months treating it as a joke.
In an interview Friday afternoon, Poilievre was reacting to Trudeau’s comments that Donald Trump is serious about making Canada the 51st state.
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“I’ve always taken it seriously, and I’ve always clearly and consistently condemned it. Canada will never be the 51st state. We will be a strong, independent, sovereign country when I’m prime minister,” Poilievre said.
Trump began posting about making Canada the 51st state in social media posts shortly after Trudeau visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November.
“It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” Trump posted to his Truth Social account in December.
In what appeared at the time to simply be Trump trolling Trudeau, the president also published photos of Canada being purchased by him on Amazon, photos showing the Stars and Stripes over a unified map of Canada and the United States. Trump appeared to be enjoying needling Trudeau, a man the U.S. president has never liked and who was politically weak.
Trudeau’s team of course suggested that this was all just a joke. That was their line until Trudeau’s economic summit in Toronto on Friday where the PM told his audience of political, business and labour leaders that Trump is serious.
“I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may even be why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state,” Trudeau said in a moment captured on a hot mic.
Trudeau went on to call Trump’s annexation threat, “a real thing.”
“Up until now, Trudeau and his finance minister had claimed that this 51st state talk was all a big joke, so they’ve been treating it wrongly as a joke, and now they tell us the exact opposite,” Poilievre said.
The Conservative leader went on to say that in light of the annexation threat and the Trump tariff threats, the country needs a plan to ensure our sovereignty.
“We need a strong Canada-first plan to rapidly approve resource projects Liberals have been blocking, to cut taxes on work, investment, energy, home building and making stuff in Canada,” Poilievre said.
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He added that we need to knock down internal barriers that make it easier to sell to the Americans than each other and voiced his support for a west-to-east oil pipeline.
“And by the way, let’s secure our country with stronger borders and military. That is a Canada-first plan that will make us truly sovereign,” he said.
Poilievre said the current Liberal plan to swap out the prime minister with Trudeau’s hand-picked successor Mark Carney won’t improve the situation for Canada.
“Justin Trudeau has been taking advice from Mark Carney, his top economic adviser,” Poilievre states. “They believed him when he said they should print money uncontrollably. They believed his ideas on increasing government spending. They accepted his plan, which he states on the record, is caught on tape, to massively increase the carbon tax.”
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Poilievre said that as Trump looks to unleash the American economy, to attract investment into the United States, Canada has to match those moves or be left behind.
“We have to fight fire with fire,” Poilievre said.
One thing he tried to make clear is that the Trudeau Liberals got Canada into this economic mess and the Carney Liberals — when Mark Carney becomes Liberal leader — won’t get us out.
Carney has been advising the government on everything from the COVID-19 pandemic, the printing of money and economic measures to grow the economy that simply haven’t worked. Poilievre’s message on Friday, to secure Canada’s future as a strong and sovereign country, we need a change in government, not a change in the Liberal Party leadership.
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