By Graeme McNaughton/Active Senior’s Digest
Kevin O’Leary isn’t a politician – in fact he’s sick of them. And he says others across the country feel exactly the same way.
It is this notion, plus his background in the world of business, that the former Dragons’ Den star wants to be the leader of the Conservative Party.
The leadership contender was in Durham Region on Friday to drum up support for his campaign and tell people what he would bring to the table for Canada – and for him, that’s money.
“Our economy is no longer growing – it’s going into collapse. It’s gone down since Trudeau arrived on the scene with 1.5 per cent, down to 1.1 per cent then 0.9 then 0.7. The way it manifests itself for people here and everywhere else in Canada is no jobs. No wage inflation,” says O’Leary during a media roundtable prior to his campaign events.
“Canada does not work when the economy isn’t growing at three per cent. You don’t get healthcare, you don’t get support for education, huge issues around military spending, and of course what makes Canada unique is its social net, its ability to take care of its people. Can’t do that either. Trudeau is on a track to bankrupt the country.”
O’Leary says the current system with career politicians isn’t working, and that people are starting to recognize that.
“The body politic around the world – in England, in Switzerland, in Colombia, what’s going on in France right now – people are tired of politicians. They’re tired of the lack of executional excellence,” he says.
“Politicians, career politicians don’t know the challenges of payroll. It works when you have a naturally growing economy, but all of a sudden you slow down and you can’t afford healthcare…people have realized they need executional excellence in government, and I think that’s why they’re opening their arms to people that have had a long experience of doing exactly that.”
One of the politicians O’Leary singled out for this was Ralph Goodale, currently serving as the federal public safety minister under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I don’t know who Ralph Goodale is, I’ve never met him, but I listened to him last Saturday or Sunday when Evan Solomon asked him a simple question, ‘What are you going to do about the porous border and the hundreds of people streaming…across the Manitoba border and Quebec?’” he says.
“And then I listened to him for about eight minutes and realized maybe if you stay in Ottawa too long, you catch a disease as a politician because he spoke for eight minutes and said nothing. That’s my definition of incompetence – I’ll be firing him when I get to Ottawa too.”
The Conservative leadership contender did not mince words when it came to a frequent target of his barbs: Premier Kathleen Wynne.
“The reason that Ontario is no longer competitive is brutal costs of energy, particularly electricity. This actually began in the McGuinty era and was accelerated by the weak leadership of Kathleen Wynne,” he says.
“As a federal leader, what do you do when you get a black swan event like a Kathleen Wynne? She’s a toxic cocktail of mediocrity and incompetence. She needs an immense amount of adult supervision in these policies, and I’ll be giving it to her from Ottawa.”
O’Leary went on to say that, should he be elected prime minister, he would withhold money from Ontario and Alberta should they choose to keep what he sees as destructive policies.
“For example, if she wants to maintain the carbon tax, I’ll deduct it out of her transfer payments. I will not allow her to destroy the manufacturing base of Ontario because I can’t fulfill my mandate of three-per-cent growth if Alberta and Ontario…are managed by incompetent leaders. We need a much stronger federal leader that can help incompetent leaders like (Alberta premier Rachel) Notley and Wynne do the right things. I can encourage her to understand the plight of her people,” he says.
“If they worked for any of my companies, I would’ve fired them a long time ago. I can’t fire them, but what I can do is make damn sure they don’t get a second mandate of destruction.”
Another program introduced by Wynne and Notley that O’Leary disagrees with is their views on how to combat climate change – cap and trade programs.
Under a cap and trade program, industries passing a certain threshold, such as the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, must pay penalties if go over government-set targets. Companies are also allowed to purchase credits from other companies that would be below those targets.
In Ontario, the program applies to electricity importers, any facility or natural gas producer that emits 25,000 tonnes or more of greenhouse gases per year and fuel suppliers that sell more than 200 litres of fuel per year.
The aim of the program is that, with increasingly stricter limits, companies would be forced to operate greener and more environmentally friendly.
Citing his degree in environmental studies from the University of Waterloo, O’Leary says he would be the one to better balance the needs of environmental stewardship in the face of climate change along with a strong economy.
“Let’s say you two plants. One is a five-smokestack plant, the other is a small start-up with one smokestack. The first company is rich, it has a huge balance sheet and easy access to capital,” he says.
“So if you have a cap and trade program, they simply use their balance sheet to go buy credits and continue to pollute – how stupid is that? The small company can’t afford to do that – what they do is innovate, use carbon sequestration technology perhaps, whatever they have to do to reduce their emissions because they know they can’t afford to buy credits.”
O’Leary says the solution is not for the government to get overly involved, but allow businesses to set their own targets.
“Better to just go to the entire industry and say, ‘Look, just like we did a few years ago in the automotive industry, what can you do in terms of getting more productivity out of a gallon of gasoline and reduce emissions over the next decade?’” he says.
“Set targets for us, and the government will monitor what you’re doing. You can keep your money, you can keep your employees, keep your innovation, and innovate those changes.”
O’Leary says that he agrees something needs to be done about climate change, but that the cap and trade program being implemented both provincially and nationally will only hurt the economy and do nothing to help the environment.
“Most Canadians want to meet the Paris Accord, but we’ve got to leave the capital in the hands of those that can actually deliver it,” he says, citing the 2016 international agreement with 194 signatories making a commitment to limit annual temperature growths, which is caused by climate change.
“Cap and trade does nothing to improve air quality and it’s evident by what’s happening in Ontario right now because the air hasn’t changed at all and we’re bankrupting the economy there by extracting money from businesses and then completely wasting it.”
As for why O’Leary is entering the race, the answer is simple: get rid of Trudeau and the Liberals.
“In 2019, it will not be an election. It will be an exorcism. I am going to excise him out of Ottawa and then reverse all the damaging economic policies he’s put in place because he doesn’t understand what he’s doing.”
According to a mid-March poll among Conservative Party members by Mainstreet Research and iPolitics, O’Leary is currently leading the field with 23.65 per cent, ahead of Beauce, Quebec MP Maxime Bernier’s 19.3 per cent and former house speaker Andrew Scheer’s 10.33 per cent.
However, according to a projection by the CBC, which also takes into account endorsements, fundraising and various polls, Bernier is seen as most likely to become the party leader.
