Revolutionary Pierre Poilievre

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The attempt by Canadian mainstream media pundits to portray Pierre Poilievre as a simplistic, unsophisticated thinker resembles past media attacks on Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, both of whom would eclipse their detractors and be recognized as transformative and consequential leaders.

If there is any lack of seriousness, it is not in Poilievre, a conservative with such a revolutionary platform that his success would transform Canada from the idiot of the Western world to one of the most brilliant.

Poilievre has one fundamental and overriding goal – to make Canada the freest nation on Earth – and a sophisticated but simple mechanism for accomplishing it is to “fire the guardsthat prevent Canadians from realizing their ambitions.

Health care — where Canada’s single-payer system vies with those of Cuba and North Korea to ban the private sector — illustrates how Poilievre’s reforms would play out.

In the current system, according to a recent Angus Reid Poll, more than 60% of Canadians describe the current state of their local health care as “poor” or “very poor”, and 50% do not have timely access to a family doctor or none at all. The doctor shortage stems from many bureaucratic obstacles, including the several roadblocks guards set up to deny licenses to qualified foreigners.

Poilievre would dismantle gatekeeper barriers by getting provinces to adopt what he calls “60 day warranty– a requirement that regulatory bodies quickly decide whether immigrants are qualified to practice medicine in Canada based on “a single proof of ability through tests and other competency examinations that everyone , regardless of where he studied, must succeed”.

This simple, common-sense approach would do more than ensure that Canada’s many qualified foreign doctors are no longer forced to support themselves in less specialized professions such as drive taxis, and do more than encourage the immigration of other foreign doctors to ensure that Canadians are well supplied. Firing the gatekeepers of family doctors — and specialists, nurses, and everyone else who is qualified but now excluded from the health care field — would transform Medicare.

With patients no longer beggars but pickers, physicians and the health care system as a whole would suddenly be subject to competition, forcing Canada’s antiquated systems to modernize and improve services while cutting costs. Like a Commonwealth Fund 2021 analysis of 11 developed countries found that lack of competition has not served Canada well: Canada spends more on health care as a percentage of GDP than Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand – countries that allow competition – at the moment rank near the bottom, in 10th place, on performance criteria, including access to care and health outcomes.

Poilievre would also stop guards who rule out architects, engineers and other skilled professionals and artisans. And guards who censor what students can debate on campus or what Canadians can say and see online. And gatekeepers who micromanage and meddle in issues that shouldn’t be the government’s business.

Poilievre is a recipe for small governmentachieved not abruptly by widespread budget cuts that would inadvertently reduce needed government services – Canada needs more courts to clear up the backlogs that delay justice and more road crews to fix potholes – but surgically through perverse tax cuts and a sophisticated freedom agenda that weeds out middlemen who substitute the desires of Canadians for those of bureaucrats.

Poilievre’s sophistication is also evident in his favorite way to fight today’s destructive inflation, the product of government that printed more money than warranted by the size of the Canadian economy. Rather than slashing inflation by raising interest rates to crushing levels – the hard-line conventional approach that burdens homeowners and businesses with higher mortgage and financing costs – Poilievre would stop unnecessary spending and focus on growing the Canadian economy to a size that justifies the previously printed excess funds. “Put simply: Make more goods that cost less by increasing paychecks, not debt.”

How do you grow the economy and the paychecks that go with it? Remove the gatekeepers that hinder homebuilders in cities, resource developers in our rural areas, and pipeline developers in between. Under prohibitively restrictive laws passed over the past decade, environmentalists and social activists have been empowered to impede the development of brand new resources. By firing the guards, Poilievre would energize industries across the country, especially those run by the many indigenous communities that are also being blocked by the activists.

To allow these developments, such as at the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba, Poilievre would negate the gatekeepers by pre-approving the permits required to export oil to world markets.

“Creating regulatory certainty for investors will allow the port and rail line owner, Arctic Gateway Group, to secure the financing needed to restore the rail line and unlock the port’s potential. Poilievre explained in the campaign literature that led to his landslide leadership victory. “The Arctic Gateway Group is owned by OneNorth, which is owned by 29 Indigenous communities and a dozen non-Indigenous communities that own and operate the 627-mile rail line between The Pas and Churchill, as well as the only deep region grain terminal from Canada. arctic seaport.

Poilievre’s goal of making Canada the freest country in the world won’t resonate with his critics in the media, but they will with many members of the general public, given the lockdowns and vaccination mandates that have so severely limited freedom, and given Canadian truckers, who came to symbolize freedom around the world. Poilievre’s approach to achieving his goal – his identification of Guardians as a general evil to be overcome wherever possible – will resonate with much, much more.

“Fire the gatekeepers” represents, like the truckers, a revolutionary cry heard around the world.

The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Epoch Times.

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Patricia Adams is an economist and president of the Energy Probe Research Foundation and of Probe International, an independent think tank in Canada and around the world. She is the publisher of the Internet information services Three Gorges Probe and Odious Debts Online and the author or editor of numerous books. His books and articles have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesian. She can be contacted at patriciaadams@probeinternational.org.

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Lawrence Solomon is an Epoch Times columnist, a former National Post and Globe and Mail columnist, and the executive director of Toronto’s Energy Probe and Consumer Policy Institute. He is the author of 7 books, including “The Deniers”, a #1 environmental bestseller in the United States and Canada. He can be reached at LS@lawrencesolomon.ca.