Manny Montenegrino accuses Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem of keeping interest rates artificially low—despite $500B in COVID spending and inflation hitting 2% by February 2021—until after Trudeau’s October 2021 election, boosting his re-election. High immigration (1M annually) inflates GDP growth while labor participation drops to 65.5%, leaving 450K fewer workers. Trudeau’s carbon and nitrogen taxes worsen affordability for low-income earners, like minimum wage workers pushed into higher tax brackets. Montenegrino contrasts today’s leftist focus on climate and identity politics with past conservative economic pragmatism, warning that without PPC votes, Trudeau’s governing alliance with Singh would collapse—yet institutions still favor him despite public backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, on this Canada Day-long weekend, a special half-hour conversation with our friend Manny Montenegrino.
We're going to talk about a lot of things, including is the Bank of Canada, Governor, fudging interest rates to keep Justin Trudeau in power.
Manny's got some things to say about that.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight is the Bank of Canada fudging the numbers to keep Justin Trudeau in power.
It's July 3rd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Macklum almost sounds like a made up name.
Tiff Macklam, no, that is the name of the head of the Bank of Canada.
And what is the Bank of Canada?
Well, their number one job, I suppose, is to set interest rates low enough.
It encourages people to borrow, to expand their businesses, to buy homes.
That motivates people to stop renting and start owning.
But if the economy gets too fast, too hot, then the Bank of Canada can increase interest rates, cooling off the economy.
That's another way of saying making things too expensive, making home ownership too expensive, making business expansion too expensive, making people less employed.
It's a brutal business.
Here's what Tiff Macklam said shortly after the pandemic struck.
Take a look.
Interest rates are very low, and they're going to be there for a long time.
We recognize that Canadians, Canadian businesses, are facing an unusual amount of uncertainty.
And so we have been unusually clear about the future path for interest rates.
If you've got a mortgage or if you're considering to make a major purchase or you're a business and you're considering making an investment, you can be confident that interest rates will be low for a long time.
Well, that's what Tiff had to say.
And Tiff wouldn't lie, would he?
Tiff wouldn't tell millions of Canadians to go ahead and load up on mortgages and business loans only to change his strategy.
Would he?
Well, joining us now to talk about that is one of our favorite guys, Manny Montenegrino, the CEO of Think Sharp.
Manny, if I was someone looking to rent or buy, listening to Tiff Macklam would make me say, boy, this is the time to buy.
Money's going to be cheap.
Not just the time to buy, but to have what's called a variable rate mortgage because you can get a better deal on it.
What do you make of what Tiff Macklam said there?
And guess what?
There's a second video we're going to show in a second to tell you how the story ends.
But why don't you unpack a little bit, Manny, what we just saw there.
Well, he couldn't be any clearer.
He basically told Canadians.
And by the way, the Bank of Canada never tells us what it's doing in the future.
It rarely tells us.
And this time, this was about six months after COVID struck.
And this time, the Bank of Canada went forward and said, be rest assured, low interest rates for a very long time.
And that means people went out and bought homes.
People went out and took variable mortgages.
And Ezra, in my law practice of 35 years, I practice in real estate law pretty heavily as well.
And a long time in real estate law means a minimum of five years.
At the time that Tiff Mackman said that, the governor said that, we have now had almost 0% or 1% mortgages, 2% bank rates from 2008 to 2020 when the pandemic hit.
So that's 12 years of really low rates.
And when the bank of governor comes up and says a long time, one could reasonably expect it's at least five years, if not another 10 years of low interest rate.
So people went out and listened to this independent Bank of Canada governor and acted accordingly.
Then what happened?
Yeah, well, let's take a look at video number two.
Here's Tiff again.
Going forward, nobody should expect that interest rates are going to go back down to the very low levels that we've seen over the last decade or so.
So we're in a transition period to a world where interest rates are going to be higher than what many people have gotten used to.
Well, there you have it.
So everyone who got a variable rate mortgage, everyone who invested borrowed to build their business or build their home.
Well, sorry, Tiff has new instructions now.
What's been the impact of this high interest rate?
And combine that with inflation.
First of all, what has it done?
And second of all, how did it happen, Manny?
Well, I think it's important to know how it happened.
I looked into very carefully, and I have graphs that I can present.
But basically, the Bank of Canada's job is to keep inflation around 2%.
That's its primary job.
And the biggest tool that it can do that is with interest rates.
So it starts with inflation.
Now, when the Bank of Canada made that pronouncement after COVID struck that interest rates are going to be there for a very long time, he knew that the drivers of inflation were in place.
And let me list them for you.
The biggest driver of inflation is government spending.
Now, at the beginning of COVID, we spent, the government of Canada spent about $500 billion in CERB and other payments to keep people at home.
$500 billion, Ezra, the budget of Canada is only about $300 and some billion.
So we basically spent the whole budget, if not twice as much, in one or in a few months.
That is inflationary.
The governor knew that happened when he made that statement that interest rates will be long for a long time, very low.
The second driver of inflation is supply chain disruptions.
COVID, when everyone shut down around the world, and we know this, and he knew at the time he made that statement that the supply chain was disrupted.
The third driver of inflation is pent up demand.
Ezra, when you have people staying at home for a year and because of COVID, you know, everyone knew you didn't have to have an economist degree that demand will start ramping up because we shut everything down.
And the fourth is low interest rates.
It's very important to know, Ezra, that the interest rates, the bank rate was around 2%, and they dropped, this is remarkable.
They dropped it to almost zero at the beginning of COVID.
Now, think of that logical step.
You actually shut down the economy on purpose, yet you lower interest rates to stimulate the economy.
It doesn't make sense.
They shouldn't have done the lowering in the first place because we weren't facing, we faced a lowered economy because we chose to shut down everything.
Everything was temporary.
And my point, Ezra, is if your goal is to keep inflation at 2%, you knew that inflation was going to breach the 2% very quickly because of those four factors.
Interest rates would slightly go back up.
That's inflationary.
The pent-up demand, people start buying whatever they didn't buy for a whole year.
And the government spending of $500 billion flowing through everywhere.
That's going to, so he knew.
So I don't understand how the Bank of Canada's job is to keep it at 2%.
And he knew that inflation was going to breach 2% within months of after the first year of COVID.
Yet he made that statement that he's going to keep interest rates low for a very long time.
Well, you sent over a graph, and we'll put it up on the screen here.
It's a pretty simple graph, but I think there's a powerful message to it.
When the last election was afoot in late 2021, interest rates were still manageable.
Tiff did his job to help get Justin Trudeau re-elected.
But as soon as Trudeau was re-elected, Tiff let go.
And that's when interest rates and inflation truly went nuts, didn't they?
Well, that's a very important point.
In fact, Ezra, once again, the Bank of Canada's job is to keep inflation at 2%.
We see four factors that were going to just pop inflation past 2%.
And it actually happened.
Ezra, it happened around February 2021.
There was the first breach.
The Bank of Canada could have easily at least brought interest rates back up to before where they were COVID because we breached the 2%.
He did it.
And he left them at almost 0% right up to the following year, which is after the election.
So, Ezra, for 10 months, inflation kept going up to almost 6% before a year after it breached the 2% before he started implementing the very sharp increases in interest rates.
So it is just, there is no explanation.
And particularly, Ezra, if you take the premise that the vaccines were all going to bring us back to normality, the two-shot miracle drug was going to just make everything tick-e-boo.
And that's what all the public officials were telling you.
That means you knew by July, or at least by June of 2021, that everything would be back to normal and interest rates should have gone up.
He did not increase interest rates, knowing all these factors and knowing that the inflation rate was about 4.5%.
It was 4.5% at the time of the election, and interest rates were still at virtually zero.
You know, I think the number one cause for inflation is when governments just print money.
I mean, when you get to print as much money as you want, it's sort of like counterfeit money.
The bad money, the fake money, drives out the good money.
I mean, if there's, I'm just going to make up a number.
If there's a trillion dollars that people are buying and selling, and then the government prints another trillion dollars, now there's still $2 trillion for the same amount of goods and services.
So everybody's money just got caught in half, cut in half, but the government stole that half.
The Poor Are Being Destroyed00:03:44
I'm simplifying, of course.
But when you pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, of course everyone's going to be poorer.
And of course there's going to be inflation.
But here's the crazy part on top of that.
They're deliberately making energy and food more expensive.
They're raising the carbon taxes.
They raise the carbon tax every April Fool's Day, even during the pandemic.
So everything that needs energy from your home to transportation to farm vehicles, all more expensive.
The war on carbon is their excuse.
But now they're doing the same to food, Manny.
We see it in the Netherlands.
We see it coming to Canada.
The war on nitrogen to make food more expensive.
I don't know why they're doing it, but I think that's going to be a problem too.
Inflation, higher costs for anything needing energy and food.
And I think it's a kind of rationing.
And I think it's madness.
I don't understand it.
What's your thinking about their plan to make energy and food more expensive?
Well, I mean, clearly it's a plan.
If you took out the carbon taxes on gas, if you took out the bump of interest rate, we have no inflation.
Our economy is not doing well.
It's all government created.
The sad thing is, Ezra, I actually did an exercise.
And you know how income tax works.
There is a it begins at a low level.
If a person's making minimum wage, and let's say minimum wage is at $15 and works 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that person's making 30,000.
That person still pays $4 to $6,000 in income tax, depending on where they're at, plus all the other taxes, the carbon taxes on gasoline and everything else.
Now, that person's purchasing power is about 15% less than it was two years ago.
The poor are being destroyed because it is the food and the gas that are going up.
That's what's driving this inflation.
And what's really ironic is that the governments are taking taxation on it.
And it just, it makes no sense that you have someone that gets a bump in their minimum wage, and that bump leads to more taxation, although it has no purchasing power.
Right, because they sort of get inflated into a higher tax bracket.
Is that what you mean?
Right.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, if you look at a person, I mean, if you go to $18, $19 an hour, well, your purchasing power at $18 an hour is probably equivalent because of the base goods that you're buying at $12 an hour three or four years ago.
Yet now you're at $18 an hour.
You're being taxed at $18 an hour.
You're behind.
And the government is making money.
Now, the government makes money, of course, on the four or five carbon taxes that Trudeau's put on and the carbon tax on the delivery of your food and everything that poor people need, which is hydro, food, and transportation, is being viciously attacked with these new taxes.
It is an attack on the poor.
It is a vicious attack on the poor.
I mean, you know, people that are making lots of money are not paying attention to this.
But the working poor have now become poor.
You know, this statistic that I heard about a week ago, which is that Canada passed the 40 million people mark, which sort of caught me by surprise because the last official number I heard was 38 million.
40 Million Mark Mystery00:08:08
I thought, boy, we sort of skipped over 39 million.
And if you look at the stats, Canada, through all kinds of immigration, visitor status, student visas, all together, it's about a million people a year, a million, not 250,000 or 300,000, but a million.
That's how we just suddenly jumped up to 40 million people.
And, you know, I know that some of that immigration is entrepreneurial or high-skill immigration, but not all of it.
My initial reflection is, oh, now I know why housing is so expensive.
Now I know why traffic is so bad.
Now I know why schools are crowded, hospital waiting rooms, there's a lineup.
Now I know a lot of those things.
But it also hides a weak economy, because if you bring a million people into the country every year, just to give them housing and food, you're going to get some GDP going up.
But if you've increased the population by 3%, but GDP goes up, I don't know, 4%.
Well, three of that was just these newcomers, and you actually have a very weak economy.
I think that's sort of the point you were making earlier, wasn't it?
Exactly.
That's the third point or fourth point that the Bank of Canada, I don't know, I call it gross negligence, Ezra, but the Bank of Canada is now hesitating, dropping the interest rates, even though the inflation rate is down to 3.4.
That was a few days ago, 3.4%.
You would expect, because it's now gone down for 12 consecutive months, that there'd be an ease in the interest rates.
Remember, Ezra, it went up 12 consecutive months inflation up to 60% before he acted.
And it's now dropped 12 consecutive months and he's not lowering these interest rates.
The answer, if you just listen to the fake news media and the Bank of Canada, they're saying, well, we have a strong economy and we got to temper it down.
Ezra, the strong economy that they're now saying is 3% GDP.
And as you stated, just the number of people coming into Canada is about 3% growth.
If we did not have any immigration or any new people coming into Canada, our economy is dead flat.
We're in a recession.
It's in trouble.
And when it's in trouble, you reduce interest rates.
So he doesn't even, the Bank of Canada doesn't even net out the extraordinary.
There's no country in the world that's adding more people.
I had a debate with an American friend and he didn't, he said, well, yeah, you're adding 1 million.
We're adding three.
I said, we're one tenth the size.
I mean, they don't get it.
America thinks they're under siege by open borders and immigration.
We have three times what America brings in, 10 times what my old country, Italy, is bringing in, probably 15 times more than Germany.
There's no country in the world that's admitting more people, which is fine.
I mean, if that's the direction that Canada wants to go, but at least the Bank of Canada has to take that factor into account and say, look, real growth in Canada, if you net out the new people, is not 3%.
Our economy is stagnant.
We need to get interest rates down, not up.
You know, you said if that's the direction you want to go as a country.
I don't think we've ever had a debate on immigration, at least not in the last decade.
I think of past conservative leaders, Andrew Scheer, Aaron O'Toole, terrified to even talk about it.
Basically, whatever number Justin Trudeau said, they said, yeah, we agree.
Trudeau, whatever he would say, literally any number, both Andrew Scheer, Aaron O'Toole, and I think Pierre Poly have just said, Yeah, whatever he said, they're too afraid to be seen as racist or whatever they would be called for wanting a manageable number of immigration that could be absorbed into the economy and the community.
And the number is so astonishingly large, a million people a year in a country of just 40 million people.
I have never seen a poll where the people who say more immigration is larger than the people who say less immigration.
I mean, it's like single digits who want more.
Most people say, Yeah, we're okay.
A lot of people say it should be less.
Angress Reed does this poll all the time.
I just don't think we have a national debate on immigration because everyone's terrified of being canceled, Manny.
Well, that's true, but we don't even have an analyzation of the type of immigration.
And let me explain it to you.
When I immigrated to Canada, five strapping boys came with mom and dad, and we all added to the workforce.
And not only that, but we created tons of jobs.
That's the type of immigrant that came to Canada when we came to Canada.
There's a way of measuring it, Ezra.
Now, and I've done this as well.
I've measured how we're doing as an economy.
I already said that our economy is at 0% if you net out in GDP growth.
But in employment, I do not look at the unemployment rate.
That's a terrible number.
It gives you no information.
I look at the labor participation rate.
And people can Google what that is.
Now, Ezra, I've done the math and I've actually posted it, but here's what the labor participation rate is.
It's very simple.
It is how many working, possible working people are there in your country and how many of those are working.
And you express it as a percentage.
Okay?
So now we know that's an important number to look at because we're adding so many people to this country.
And this tells us what type of people are we adding.
If our labor participation rate is going up and we have a million new people in Canada every year, that's a great story.
We're going to have a booming economy.
We're going to have 12.3% plus 3%.
We're going to have 6%, 7% growth because we should have 6% or 7% growth because we added 3% of the population and we've got these entrepreneurs.
But, Ezra, I looked at that.
Back before, in 2014, the labor participation rate was about 67%.
It's now 65.5, 1.5% less.
That means if you look at the working people, let's say there are 30 million people in Canada that are of working ability, not the people that are looking for jobs, not just that's the problem with the unemployment rate.
If I stop looking for a job, I'm not considered a part of the workforce.
No, I am, whether you're starting to look for a job.
So 1.5% is 450,000 people.
Ezra, that means that since we started this mass immigration, there's been less, 450,000 people that are not working in the same percentage that they were before that, before Trudeau expanded it.
So the type of immigrants that he's getting are not the entrepreneurs.
Of course, they're going to be some, but it's so disproportionate that we are now 450,000 people less working on a percentage basis than we were three years ago.
And that's not good.
So when you sum it all up, Ezra, number one, we don't have a 3% GDP.
There are people buying milk and people buying cars and people buying food that are immigrants.
They are 3% new.
So therefore, we have no real GDP growth.
And if you look at the future of the economy, we have no employment growth.
In fact, it's dropped.
And that's a problem.
How do you tackle this?
Ppc Vote Behind Conservatives?00:13:35
I mean, is Pierre Polyev able to tackle this?
I think that the media is less enthralled with Justin Trudeau now than they have been.
I think he's just getting a little tiresome in some ways.
I think the China influence scandals, I'm not sure if they're resonating with ordinary people on the ground, but the media sort of doesn't trust Trudeau as much anymore.
I think they see him as a bit of an operator.
But I still think that for reasons of class and clubbiness, I still think the media is on Justin Trudeau's side.
I think they don't like Pierre Polyev.
They regard him as a barbarian and an outsider.
And I think that the media are going to help carry Trudeau across the finish line again.
And I don't think Trudeau is going to stop until he beats his father's record of being PM for 16 years.
I think he's going to run it.
Sorry, over to you.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
There's nothing to stop Trudeau because there is no news that's really attacking.
I mean, there are Canadians that are suffering, but they're not part of the landscape, the news landscape.
And it seems to me that every institution works to keep Trudeau going.
And when I say that, I don't say that lightly.
We know that the media does it.
We know that the RCMP, oh my God, you couldn't get more obvious.
Section 139, one of the criminal code, obstruction of justice, every subsection has been met and Trudeau should have been charged and wasn't.
File wasn't even opened up.
The whole Nova Scotia thing to make Trudeau look good is.
So we have the RCP and now we have the Bank of Canada.
In my opinion, the Bank of Canada should have increased its interest rates, knowing all those factors, beginning of 2021, when it knew that inflation broke 2% and slowly get Canadians back on track.
He waited a whole year, a whole election cycle.
I tell you, if interest rates got up 2%, 3% before the election, you would have seen people think twice about their government.
They didn't.
We went on.
And I do believe that you'll see interest rates go down, not this year, which it should, but it will go down before the other election cycle, which is in 2025.
I want to ask you a question about Toronto.
In the last few days, there was an election in Toronto and the socialist candidate won and won fairly strongly, Olivia Chow, the widow of Jack Layton.
Is that just Toronto for you?
I mean, that's just big cities in Canada that vote left.
Is there anything we should extrapolate from that?
Is there any lesson federally, or is that just a quirky city hall, 102 candidates, things fractured many ways?
Is there anything that we should, does this tell us any lessons about Trudeau or the national political scene, or is this just something more local?
Well, I hope it's local.
I hope it's Olivia Chow.
I mean, she was married to an incredible individual, Jack Layton.
I had the honor of meeting him and talking to him.
A really impressive guy.
He understood the socialist side, not the rabid socialist side, not the crazy destroy families and destroy everything social side.
But he understood, you know, what I would, you know, the socialist stuff that I heard in the 70s, that was Jack Layton.
And he was loved by all.
Linda Chow, I think, was helped substantially behind that.
And I also, so I'm hoping, I mean, if Canadians feel that, and she campaigned on increased taxes, I hope that it was all about personality and nothing about policy.
Yeah, you might be right on that.
You mentioned that Jack Layton was a different breed of socialists.
I wasn't that familiar with him, but I come from the prairies originally, and there was a prairie socialist that was a little bit different.
In fact, I remember Roy Romano, the last socialist premier of Saskatchewan, he actually balanced the budget and brought in private sector health care, which, you know, you might say, how on earth did an NDP or do that?
Well, they're a little bit different, or at least they were a generation ago in the prairies.
Now I think the left is about being woke, which can be described as cultural Marxism, critical race theory, critical gender theory.
And I think if you ask a young socialist today, a young progressive, half of the kids in universities, what do you stand for?
They wouldn't even talk about economics other than, of course, they're for big government.
They would say, you know, the climate crisis.
They wouldn't really know what that means, but they would say it.
They think we're all going to burn up.
And they would talk about gender and microaggressions and how we're all racist and sexist.
And they would really focus on those identity politics.
I think that's the heart of the NDP.
That's a new NDP.
Like, Ezra, you forget 2019 election, 2019 election, every political leader said they were going to balance the budget.
That included the NDP.
Jack Layton, a perfect example.
He's like a prairie socialist with a little bit of downtown in him, which was fine.
We've now gone to a socialism, a communism, an abstraction of reality.
And that's where the new party is at.
So, yeah, I mean, it's not the same socialism that you and I understood it to be or that we understood Canada.
There was a great prairie socialism that was responsible, strong family-oriented, strong church-oriented, but more of fairness for the individual person.
Now, I know you've been a critic of Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada before.
We've had you on and you've been very blunt about that.
A few weeks ago, there was a by-election in Portage Lisgar, which oddly enough, or maybe it's not odd at all, had the highest vote count for the People's Party in the whole country.
So it made sense that Bernier ran there in a by-election.
The conservative incumbent wasn't running again.
There was a lot of things that could have made it the perfect storm for a PPC breakthrough.
Alas, it didn't happen.
In fact, Bernier's vote declined a little bit from the last election.
I admire Maxime Bernier.
I know that you and I have a bit of a difference of opinion on him, but I would concede that that's two general elections and two by-elections in a row.
That's four opportunities to break through that he couldn't do.
I like the guy, but I see him more as a pundit and an activist than a political alternative now.
I really think it's uniting the right, so to speak.
It's like a signal that, all right, conservatives like Pierre Polyev more than they liked Aaron O'Toole or Andrew Scheer in the most PPC-friendly riding in the country.
That was sort of proved again.
I think that that's good news for Pierre Polyev.
It says that he's sort of reuniting the right, at least a fair bit.
That's my analysis of it.
What do you think?
You're absolutely right.
Ezra, I want to say this.
There's nobody better skilled to talk about this topic than me.
I think I was mentioned in one of the PPC conventions in ridicule because I was not a supporter.
Ezra, not only did Maxine do worse, he remember the very clear aspect is that riding that he went in Manitoba was a riding with a PPC member that did very well, nowhere near winning, but did very well.
Maxine took that riding because he knew is the strongest writing of the PPC.
He brought the power of his leadership, the power of his money, the power of his personality, and dropped the vote by 25%.
That's a big sign.
And then I looked, as I do always, I looked at the other ridings.
They all went down.
PPC went down.
Now, Ezra, the first time that we met, we were a lot younger.
And I was, you might remember, I was a lawyer for the Reform Party and Preston Manning.
I think it was 1991.
So I'm not one of these guys that doesn't do change.
I'm one of these guys that does change.
I was part of the Reform Party.
I put my legal career at risk.
I put everything at risk because I wanted to see this Western movement.
And it was a great movement.
Now, let me just do an analogy, a comparison.
Preston Manning's, the Reform Party, first election was 1998, one seat.
Then 93, I think 46 seats, and then 97, leader of the opposition.
And Preston knew by that time we could never form government as a conservative party when the conservative vote was spit.
It took us that long, but with great success.
Now, you look at Maxine Bernier, he's going backwards, absolutely backwards, had a seat, lost a seat that he and his father had in Bose since 1984.
I mean, that seat was a Bernier seat for almost my adult lifetime.
He lost that seat.
He goes to Manitoba and takes the best seat that there is and knocks it down by 25%.
It's going nowhere.
It's been two by-election, I'm sorry, two federal elections and two by-elections, and everything's regressed.
And I think you're right.
I think that the conservative family obviously has a large spectrum.
And there's no question that O'Toole said one thing when he ran for the party and campaigned in a different way that was more to the center.
And that certainly helped the PPC.
But I don't get that feeling from Pierre Polivera.
Pierre Polivera, in my opinion, is a truest conservative.
And I've had, you know, I've served under, as you know, Treston Manning, Stockwell Day, and Stephen Harper.
I would put Pierre pretty close to the top of that list if he gets the chance.
The only thing I fear is the weight of the institutions, the weight of the media, just literally crushing him if he takes them on.
But I do think that he could.
Well, it'll be very interesting.
And I think we might have that chance sooner rather than later.
Last question for you, Manny, and it's great to catch up.
When do you think we will have that next federal election?
Do you think it'll be sometime in 2023?
Do you think it'll be in 2024?
I mean, theoretically, Trudeau could hang on with Jagmeet Singh's support as long as 2026 if he stretched it.
When do you think we're going to go to the polls?
Well, that's a great question.
And you know that there's this unholy alliance between the NDP and the Liberals.
Now, I'm going to go back a bit with respect to what the PPC have done.
I analyzed every riding in Canada after the last election and weighted the PPC voters, half conservative and half other.
And in 17 ridings, they went to either the NDT or to the Liberals.
And my point is very simple.
Although the PPC vote was less than 5%, in many ridings, about 17 switched to the NDP and the Liberals.
Without the PPC in 2021, Jagmeet, Singh, and Trudeau could not make the unholy alliance deal.
They would have needed another party.
And we would have been in an election a lot sooner.
And we would have not seen this devastation that Canada is seeing.
So there is something to that.
Now, to answer your question, they're going to wait until the economy is back down.
Like I say, this inflation is going to slow down, mainly because there are, you know, we are in, I think we're in a recession, although our growth of immigration has stopped it.
But the inflation is going to slow down.
It's dropped down to 3.4%.
We're pretty close to the 2% target.
Interest rates will come down.
It'll be rosy in a year or two.
And that's when I think Trudeau and Jagmeet will stretch the tape as long as they can.
It'll be 2025.
There'll be no incentive to do it earlier.
So I think we're in it for at least a year and a half or if not more.
That's very interesting.
I just want to say, I know that if there was a PPCer in the room right now, they would say you cannot simply put the PPC vote behind the Conservatives.
Many of them would never.
Inflation Dropping?00:02:03
I did.
Yeah, no, I know what you mean.
No, no, but I took half of it.
You see, what I did, I understand that.
So I said, no, I mean, listen, I'm as close as you can get to a PPC in ideology.
The only difference is I don't suffer cognitive dissonance.
I do know that the way that our parliament works, we need to be in the house to make change.
And so, you know, you got to put a little water in your wine.
Because, I mean, look what's happened.
We literally gave Jagmeet and Trudeau a kind of marriage license to do whatever they want.
So believe me, I know what you mean, Manny.
I mean, I remember during the height of lockdowns in Ontario where you had a number of MPPs in Ontario, Roman Baba, Randy Hilliard, Belinda Karahalios, you had a number of dissonant MPPs who wanted to talk more about freedom, but because they couldn't get it together pragmatically, because they couldn't join forces, each one of them wanted to be the boss, they were not effective.
And Maxime Bernier, if he's not in the House of Commons, he's like those other names I just mentioned, like Derek Sloan.
These are good guys, ideologically solid activists.
But if you're not in a legislature, you're just a pundit.
Manny, go ahead.
Last routine.
No, that's absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think we have to be more pragmatic.
I don't know how we could get any worse, but when you have, you know, the NDP aligning with Trudeau and they're both trying to see who can spend the country's money faster and sooner and not care about our traditional values and institutions.
If there's a race there, can we at least throw something into the spokes so we slow them down?
Yeah.
Manny Montana Grino, what a pleasure to catch up with you.
Happy Canada day-long weekend.
Look forward to talking to you again soon, my friend.