I’m making this blog post and video to document (practical?) policies that I’ve heard/read Pierre Poilievre express. For each policy, I will include the excerpt as well as my analysis of it to connect the dots between stated policy and desired / expected results. This is evident in the first policy that incentivized me to create this blog post.

Housing Affordability

Timestamp Pierre Poilievre C-31 Response @ 10:08.

[En Français] The conservative government will tie infrastructure dollars for major cities where properties are too expensive to the number of housing units built. This will help to reduce the cost of construction permits, allow us to build more, and we will insist that every time the federal government has a new transit station that the land around must have houses and apartments in order to densify so that people can live near public transit. And third, we will sell 15% of the 37,000 [5,550] federal buildings in order to transform them into housing and create millions and millions places for young people to live and start their families.

Analysis: By tying infrastructure $ to # houses built for specific cities, cities will have a great incentive to allow more houses to be built, and since they want to get more net money, they would have to allow more permits, speed up constructions (possible by improving efficiency of inspections since the city itself isn’t the builder); To allow more permits, either costs go down so that more builders apply (I’m not sure how expensive construction permits are but if they are 100k+ then yeah its a barrier to entry and causes higher housing prices), or approval process improves. A faster approval process means there is a greater incoming supply of housing every year. The next point is to INSIST not ENFORCE federal departments to build public transit stations around places where people live. The intention is to densify (true, cities like Toronto have low density compared to other cities) as areas with public transit are more desirable and thus more housing units will be built there (higher willingness to pay therefore higher incentive to supply). It’s important that this is an insist and not an enforcement to account for the « rare » case that near max densification and public transit has occurred. There will always be edge cases on building transit like for example planned development. So by saying insist and not enforce the government doesn’t have to add more bureaucratic measures. An enforcement would basically entail a/many new minister(s) in charge of approving every transit station proposed by the relevant department in charge of public transit (department of transportation?). Additional bureaucracy would be hypocritical for the CPC, specifically Poilievre.

Poilievre’s last point is to sell ~5,500 federal buildings and transform them into housing to create MM and MM¹ of places to live, and this is an obvious hyperbole. It’s impossible to put a fine number but if we assumed each of these buildings were to be replaced by an apartment, we could see 132 * 5,500 = 742,000 housing units. The 132 units per apartment building comes from Quora so the total units is ball park figure but better than a hyperbole.

In conclusion, I myself had not thought of this policy and it’s great Poilievre came up with something new that can be summarized as bullying (my words not his) or incentivize cities into submission rather than trying to impede their municipal rights. This is a heck of a lot more practical than simply stating “we will increase construction permit approvals.” The policies I had come up with to address housing affordability can be found here.

Repealing Bill C-69

Constitutional challenge successful

The Impact Assessment ACt (IAA) stipulates that an impact assessment is necessary when a designated project (a physical activity on Canadian land and has been designated by the Minister of Environment. Where that list of regulations made for physical activities is? No idea).

There isn’t much information on this topic, but from https://atbcapitalmarkets.com/insights/the-bill-c-69-aftermath, it seems Bill-69 could potentially create infinite delays; incorporate ’traditional Indigenous knowledge’ and ’the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors’ which is ridiculous if the topic at hand is natural gas, oil sands, or a Uranium mine; THE MINISTER OF THE ENVIRONMENT HAS VETO POWER WITH EVERY PROPOSAL!!!!

Even without any funding by corporations, being against this bill has merit. Poilievre is arguing from a point of improving energy independence, however I feel that the benefits are much more broader and not just restricted to energy. The bill supposedly impeding pipelines does have some merit as presently any pipeline proposal could be declined simply because the Minister of Environment doesn’t want it approved or stalled by the Governor in Council.

Disability Benefits Will Continue With Employment

Bill C-395 was sponsored by Poilievre in 2018 as a private member’s bill. The goal of this bill was to ensure that people with disability benefits could continuing receiving those benefits while working.

Sources

• Pierre Poilievre on C-31 Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2 9/22/2022

Every Dollar Spent Should be Accompanied with a Dollar Received

The idea is that politicians need to be forced to keep the budget balanced in order to reduce debt and prevent excess aggregate demand (→ inflation). Poilievre used the bill under Clinton as an example.