One Year Later... Was Canada Better Off Choosing Carney?

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Canada, are you waking up this Friday to the patriotic sovereignty you feel after a little more than a year of Mark Carney's reign? Do you feel that? The lower grocery prices now, the better housing, the affordability... Oh, no. No, you don't. Well, Mark Carney was the right man for the job, wasn't he? Because he did give the serious speeches, he used impressive language, he traveled the world, he talked about grand strategy and took a lot of credit for it, and then also made Canada sound important again among the Laurentian elite. But here's the question I think not enough of us are asking ourselves. Did those speeches lower our grocery bills? Did the global summits build a new house for your kids? Did the Polish press conferences bring investment back to your town? How booming is your downtown right now? Did the serious man for the serious times, the elbows-up dude routine, and all of the things he showed stop the economic weakness, the trade uncertainty, the rising food costs, the unaffordable housing in a country where young people were wondering if the Canadian dream itself had expired? Because Pierre Polyave's argument for the last year has been brutally simple, but quite the opposite to Mark's. Canada does not need a prime minister who sounds impressive while managing decline. Canada needs a prime minister who understands that sovereignty starts right here in our own country, within our own borders. You cannot have leverage abroad when you are too weak here at home. You cannot negotiate from any kind of strength when your economy is so bloody fragile. You cannot protect workers by making energy, housing, food, cars, and investment so much more expensive. And you cannot rebuild a country by signing another MOU, announcing another strategy, or holding another press conference while ordinary Canadians keep falling behind. Let's tap into the truth. Welcome to Bakes on Things! Welcome back to Tap the Maple here on the Bakes on Things channel. It's Friday, a coffee and tea. Cheers to you, no matter what you drink. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Subscribing is even more important now, as you may lose this show in your algorithm in the coming weeks, as the liberals have rammed through their digital privacy bills. And now, YouTube may have to restrict some viewers from watching this show, just simply because it doesn't align with their message. So the best way to get around that, and to get this still in your algorithm every day, and to get notifications of these episodes, is to subscribe. All right. The case for Polyev over Kearney is not that Polyev gave prettier speeches. It's not. It is that Polyev spent the last year identifying the actual pressure points within this country, within our borders. Affordability, housing, energy, crime, trade, investment, and national self-reliance, while Mark Kearney tried to manage the optics of a system that is clearly not working from mobile places around the world. He missed 100 question periods. But let's start with the economy. Canada's economy did not need more elite language. It needed oxygen. It was on life support. May 2026, this May, Canada's own data, showed that Canada's first quarter growth had stalled with real GDP slightly negative on an annualized basis. That caused a recession because real GDP declined for two consecutive quarters and three of the four quarters that Mark Kearney has been prime minister. And even when the May jobs report looked better, the unemployment rate was still 6.6% after reaching 6.9% in April. Statistics Canada also noted the employment rate had only just increased for the first time since November. November of 2025. So when liberals say Kearney was the right man for the job, he's doing a great job. Give him time. Well, the obvious response is, the right man for what exactly? Jokes overseas with his Laurentian elite? Managing decline elegantly? Because Pauly Ebb's answer was not vague. His plan was to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, build homes, unlock resources, bring investment back, and make work pay again. His 2025 platform promised to cut the liberal deficit by 70%, lower income taxes by 15%, build 2.3 million homes, and focus on jobs, affordability, and sovereignty. That's the first major difference, because none of those things have been seen from Kearney's reign. Kearney's governing style is institutional. He claims he's an economist. Pauly Ebb's governing style is mechanical. What actual work can we get done to make a difference? See, Kearney talks about the systems, but Pauly Ebb talks about what is broken inside the machine that needs fixing. And when the machine is broken, Canadians do not need another lecture from the guy standing beside that machine in a suit. They need someone willing to pull the thing apart, to go and talk to workers, to go and figure this thing out. On housing, this contrast has actually been devastating over the last year. Pauly Ebb did not simply say we need more homes. Everyone says that. All of the parties said that. He identified the blockers, though, the taxes, the municipal delays, the federal land, the building codes, and the gatekeepers. But did the liberals listen? No. His plan promised to build 2.3 million homes over five years by tying federal infrastructure money to cities permitting 15% more homes annually, requiring density around federally funded transit, cutting the GST on new homes under $1.3 million for everyone, cutting GST on rental construction, and selling federal land for housing. All things that would have structurally helped the machine. That is a government plan. For those that say he's a sloganeer, none of that is a slogan. It's not a photo op. It's not a ministerial roundtable that gets nowhere. It's not a plan with pressure points. It's not a reward that doesn't let the cities build. Penalize cities that block and cut taxes that raise prices. That's what he was saying. Use federal land instead of hoarding it. That is exactly the type of thinking Canada needed over the last 12 months. Because the housing crisis is not just a housing crisis anymore. It is well beyond whether you can go out and buy a home because it has a real estate sign on the front lawn. It is a family formation crisis now. It is a birth rate crisis in this country. It is a productivity crisis. It is a youth hopelessness crisis. It is a national identity crisis. And Pierre Polyev has real solutions for all of those things. Polyev understood something that Carney's upper class personality still refuses to admit. You cannot invite young people to believe in Canada while pricing them out of Canada at the exact same time. And then there is trade in the United States, which that's been bungled like you wouldn't believe. Liberals will say that Carney was steady. They will say that he was respected internationally. They will say he knew the global system. But if you saw the G7 lineup in the photo this week, he was at the back. Polyev's argument was sharper and more useful. In his February 2026 stronger at home speech, the leveraging of abroad, Polyev said Canada cannot control what foreign leaders do. But we can control whether our own economy is solid or fragile, dependent or self-reliant. His stated goal was tariff-free trade with the United States that was backed by stronger domestic leverage. The problem Mark Carney has is he hasn't created any leverage. And that's the argument. Not performative anti-Americanism, elbows up, you're so bad, orange man. Not theatrical nationalism, but actual leverage because we are actually pulling things out of the ground. Canada does not win by sounding tough in Ottawa and then needing American access, American defense, American markets, American investment, and American patience. Here's the thing. 80% of our trade still goes there. That's not going to change. Canada wins by becoming harder to ignore, though. Polyev's plan included a Canadian-controlled strategic energy and mineral reserve, stronger domestic technology or ownership, and policies to make Canada more resilient before and during the Kuzma negotiations, not 10 years after. That is the real sovereignty here. That is what real sovereignty looks like. It is not a speech about sovereignty and then doing nothing and promising that everything will be fine in 2050. It is the industrial capacity to back it up today. And this is where Polyev's energy position becomes central to this argument that he would have been much better as prime minister. Because during the 2025 campaign, Reuters reported that both Carney and Polyev talked about fast-tracking energy projects, but Polyev pushed for faster six-month approvals, while Carney emphasized a two-year permitting timeline and created a brand new bureaucracy in the way. That difference matters because the major projects office hasn't approved anything yet. Canada has a massive resource shortage now. Canada has a permission shortage, more so. The resources are just in the ground. We have oil, gas, uranium, critical minerals, farmland water, ports, workers, and engineering talent. And no, the MOUs at the G7 did not create a whole new seven deals of getting this stuff out of the ground. They are just memorandums of understanding, which Donald Trump himself admitted yesterday don't mean a thing. Pierre Polyev's Canadian Sovereignty Act argument was exactly what we needed. Make Canada the fastest place in the world to get pipelines, mines, ports, lumber, food, and major projects moving. He even challenged Carney to steal the idea and pass it. That is one of the strongest debate points here. The man just wanted to share the ideas so that we could get moving on this stuff. Polyev was not just opposing Carney in the traditional way. He was offering Carney the blueprint of how to get this fixed. And Carney still chose liberal process culture. More announcements. More frameworks. More offices that stand in the way. More managed decline. And on affordability, Polyev had another simple advantage in all of this that could have worked very, very well. He understood that people do not experience the economy as a GDP chart, or as he says often, as spreadsheets. They experience it as the pump. They experience it in the grocery store, the rent payment, the mortgage renewal, the insurance bill, the car lot, the bank account. All of it. Days before payday. That's when you experience it. That is why he kept hammering taxes on essentials. Because that's what helps now. In April 2026, Conservatives were arguing for removing federal fuel taxes to save Canadians up to $0.25 per litre and roughly $1,200 a year. Liberals can mock that as simplistic if they want, but the $0.10 that they removed is already erased by the new gas prices. But for a family commuting to work, taking kids to hockey, driving to appointments, or living outside downtown Toronto, fuel is not really a luxury. It's a necessity. It's a survival infrastructure, and they need good pricing. Polyev's instinct was correct. Stop making necessities more expensive, and then pretending government rebates are the generosity to give back. They're just giving you back your own taxes you paid. But that's the liberal cycle, isn't it? Tax the pain. Subsidize the wound. Take credit for the bandage. And then when the bandage gets old and moldy and falls off, say, well, we at least bandaged it. Polyev's message was, stop causing the wound in the first place. On cars, the contrast is just as strong. Polyev pledged to scrap what Conservatives branded the carny tax on gas, and the gas-powered vehicles, for that matter, argued it would raise costs to families and promised to cut GST on Canadian-made vehicles while U.S. tariffs remained in place. He also said Conservatives would honor existing EV and battery agreements while supporting Canadian autoworkers and bringing them back to work. That is a much smarter political position than liberals want to admit it is, because they just hate them to hate them. That's really all they do. But it says, build EVs, yes, but support autoworkers, yes, as well. But do not punish families who cannot afford a forced transition to EVs on Ottawa's timeline. That is not anti-environment, and it also does not mean go to China and get cheap EVs for those families. That is pro-reality what Pierre is talking about. In reality, it is where Polyev has been stronger than Carney since the beginning. Carney governs like the country can be modeled in some way, in some financial modeling spreadsheet. Polyev campaigns like the country has to be lived in to be understood, to be fixed. And then there's China. We talked about it already a little bit. Carney's defenders will point to global engagement and MOUs. Polyev's defenders should point to clarity, or will point to clarity. Polyev criticized Carney's strategic partnership with China, arguing it contradicts Carney's own campaign language about China being a major security threat and created risks for Canadian workers and national security. And the fact of the matter is, Mark Carney did say that in the leaders' debate. It's not anything that's been made up. But there's no consistency here. You cannot tell Canadians that China is a security threat during an election, and then pivot into partnership language right afterward without expecting serious questions to be asked about that. Polyev's frame is stronger because it asks who benefits from any deals with China, other than China, of course. Canadian workers, they don't benefit really. Canadian security, maybe, maybe not. I doubt that with China. Canadian supply chains, Canadian leverage, or does it benefit the same elite class that always seems comfortable trading principle for access to an economy? That is the real debate here. Carney's world is comfortable with complexity when complexity protects the powerful, when it protects the elite. Polyev's world asks whether the deal makes life better for Canadians itself. That is why this debate is not just Carney versus Pierre Polyev. And you can't look at it that way. It is the managerial class versus the accountability class. Let's take some action here. It is speeches everywhere versus consequences of not doing anything. It is status quo competence versus actual change being made. There's not a whole lot different about this Liberal government than the one preceding it. Do we remember Polyev's 100 days of change agenda? It promised immediate legislation focused on affordability, crime, and economic growth, including a tougher approach to repeat violent offenders. We have yet to see the Liberals take action on any of that. Liberals love to frame this as fear politics. But Canadians living with what's actually happening on their streets, living with a disorder, they don't think that this is a talking point, as a matter of fact. They'd like to maybe go on their front lawn and have a beer every once in a while and not worry about being accosted. You cannot have freedom if people are afraid to ride transit, open a business, walk in front of their house, walk downtown, or let their kids use public spaces. A prime minister's job is not to explain crime sociologically while communities subsequently deteriorate as well. A prime minister's job is to make lawful people feel protected and lawless people feel the consequences of their actions. That's what Pierre Polyev was going to bring to all of this. Polyev understands that. Kearney sounds like a man trying to preserve institutional credibility, while Polyev sounds like a man trying to restore public trust. I'm not saying he's perfect, but the ideas would have changed this country. And that matters because public trust is collapsing so dramatically right now. People do not trust Ottawa because Ottawa keeps announcing solutions that do not solve the problem. No action is ever taken on those announcements. Housing strategies are without affordable housing following that. Food strategies are showing that groceries are still rising. We're throwing $3 billion at it this week, which will only make the prices increase. Trade strategies have no certainty. Climate strategies that punish consumers but somehow benefit the environment. Deficit plans that produce bigger deficits. Immigration systems that outgrow the housing market itself. Industrial policy that somehow still leaves Canada completely dependent on everyone else. Polyev's entire case was built around one principle to deal with these things. That government should work for the people who pay for all of these things. Who pay for the government itself. Not for consultants. Not for insiders. Not for the Laurentian elite or anybody in Davos. Not for international applause at their speeches. Not for bureaucratic self-preservation. But for Canadians. It's who the government should work for. And yet we have a prime minister who's missed 100 question periods. The strongest argument for Polyev is that over the last 12 months, the problems Canada faced were exactly the problems he had already been warning about. He's been right over and over and over again. Housing was not fixed by liberal spending. Affordability was not fixed by liberal programs. Trade leverage has not been fixed and created by liberal speeches. It's beyond crazy to really look back and see everything he was actually right about. Investment did not flood back because Carney sounded serious or happened to be the big economist. Everybody thought that was going to change on a dime. Food prices did not fall because Ottawa discovered another strategy of giving you a grocery rebate. And young Canadians did not wake up feeling the promise of Canada had returned to this country. They still don't today. And it's May 2026. Well, it's actually June now. So when a liberal creator says Carney is the right man for the job because of his speeches and his actions supposedly that he's taking, the answer is, well, fine then. Show it to me. Show the receipts. Judge him by the job he's doing, by the things completed, by the projects underway. Is Canada more affordable? Is Canada safer? Is Canada building faster? Is Canada richer per person than it was in April of 2025? Is Canada less dependent on others, including the United States? Is Canada more respected because it is stronger or just louder because it is weaker? There's a lot of questions to be answered here, but that is the ballot question. There's many of them. Poliev's advantage is not perfection. No politician is actually perfect. No politician has ever been perfect. But his advantage is diagnosis. He's very, very good at that. He can point out and figure out the problems. He identified the disease and does so very well. Carney keeps treating the symptoms with announcements. Patching it over with a cold medicine when you can't cure the cold. That's why Poliev said Canada needs to produce more, build more, approve faster, tax less, punish crime properly, protect workers, defend sovereignty, and stop turning every national problem into a government-managed communications exercise. That is why Poliev would have been the better prime minister over the last 12 months. And Canada, I sure hope you've learned a lesson from all of this. Because Canada did not need a central banker to narrate decline. Canada needed a builder to reverse it. Canada needed a guy who was going to get his hands dirty and get right into the problems. Carney gave Canada words and vocabulary and Davos speeches. But Poliev gives Canada the pressure points that we need to fix. Carney gave Canada managed expectations. While Poliev gave Canada a flight plan. And a fight plan. And that is what we always needed. Carney asked Canadians to trust the system. But the system is a liberal system that doesn't work. We saw it over 10 years. Poliev asked why the system keeps failing us as Canadians. And for the last 12 months, Pierre Poliev was the person making that case. But not as prime minister. Was he perfectly making the case? Probably not. Was it always polite? Maybe not. Because wouldn't you be angry too in the state we're in? But he made it with clarity. And right now, clear beats polished. Because polished is how they sell you failure. It's how you get duped into failing. And this is a country that right now is governed like they want you to just simply fail forward. Fail into the next failure. And into the next failure after that. But somebody talking clearly and with actual conviction and with solutions. Well, clear then is how you finally fix it. That's how you tap into the truth. Don't forget to like, subscribe, join the conversation about this down below. I want to hear your thoughts on all of this. Poliev versus Carney. Where do you sit now here in June 2026, a year and a bit into Carney's reign? Let's hear about it in the comments. Let's talk about it all day. Then we'll be back at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning for your Saturday morning edition of Tap the Maple here on the Bakes on Things channel. Thanks for being here. Don't forget to subscribe. 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