The Core Argument

In a nearly two-hour conversation with British entrepreneur and host Steven Bartlett, Poilievre — first elected to Parliament at 25 and the winner of the 2022 Conservative leadership race with a record 68% first-ballot victory — made the case that Canada’s biggest barrier to entrepreneurship isn’t access to capital or talent. It’s the cost and friction of government itself.

“The resources we have are massively profitable for the private sector,” he told Bartlett, “as long as they can get the permits and the low enough taxes to do it.”

That framing — government as obstacle, not enabler — ran through every economic policy point in the interview.

Permits, Housing, and the Real Cost of Starting Up

Poilievre used Canada’s housing crisis as a window into a much broader regulatory problem. Canada, he noted, issues the second-slowest building permits of any OECD country, despite having ten times more land per person than the next closest G7 nation. The result is that Canada is the most expensive country in the G7 for housing — a direct drag on any entrepreneur trying to attract and retain employees in major urban centres.

“More of the money for your purchase would go to bureaucrats in office buildings than to the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who actually built the home,” he said.

For small business owners, the parallel is clear. When the cost of compliance, licensing, and regulatory approval outpaces the cost of production, growth stalls. Poilievre’s proposed fix — the fastest permits in the OECD, zero sales tax on new home construction, and aggressive removal of development charges — would, if enacted, reshape the operating environment for entrepreneurs in construction, real estate, trades, and the skilled labour market those sectors depend on.

The Credentialing Gap Is a Business Problem

One of the interview’s more striking data points was the scale of Canada’s immigrant professional licensing backlog. According to Poilievre, 20,000 immigrant doctors and 32,000 immigrant nurses currently cannot practice medicine in Canada — not because they lack qualifications, but because the credentialing process takes up to eight or nine years.

He described meeting a technician who performs eye surgeries in the UAE ten days a month but is only permitted to work as a technician back home in Ottawa. “The UAE is a more technologically advanced country than Canada,” he said, “and eyeballs are the same in the UAE as they are in Canada.”

For Canadian employers across sectors — healthcare, engineering, finance, technology, and trades — this bottleneck represents a real constraint on their ability to build qualified teams. Poilievre’s proposed solution is a merit-based testing system to replace the current multi-year credentialing process, a reform that would meaningfully expand the skilled talent pool available to growing businesses.

AI and the Skills Gap Facing the Next Generation

The conversation’s most direct relevance for Canadian entrepreneurs came when Bartlett raised the accelerating impact of AI on hiring. Speaking from his own experience running a global media company, Bartlett described a shift already underway: AI-proficient employees are now dramatically more productive than those without those skills, and entry-level roles are disappearing fastest.

“If you know how to build AI agents, it’s kind of like you come with 50 team members of your own,” he said.

Poilievre acknowledged the disruption is real — and different in speed and scale from previous technological revolutions. His policy principle: AI should expand individual agency and reduce costs, and any productivity gains should flow to working Canadians rather than being absorbed by government through inflation or new taxes.

For entrepreneurs, the immediate implication is practical. Youth unemployment is at a 30-year high in Canada. The labour pool is large — but the AI skills gap is widening, and the education system has yet to respond at scale.

GDP Per Capita and the Singapore Question

Poilievre referenced Canada’s flatlined GDP per capita over the last decade and pointed to Singapore as a counterexample worth studying. A city-state with no natural resources — one that imports its own water — Singapore has become one of the wealthiest nations on earth through low taxes, accessible business registration, and a policy culture that rewards entrepreneurial risk.

The contrast with Canada is pointed. Canada holds the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, vast deposits of critical minerals, and the largest freshwater supply on the planet. The gap between what Canada has and what it’s economically producing is, in Poilievre’s analysis, entirely a policy problem.

“We are a resource superpower,” he said. “And I want to leverage that.”

What’s Next for Canadian Business

Poilievre expressed optimism about Canada’s trajectory, pointing to the country’s resources, diverse population, and land mass as foundational strengths. He is currently serving as Leader of the Official Opposition following the federal election earlier this year, in which the Conservative Party received its highest vote share since 1988.

With a federal election possible before 2029, the policy positions he outlined — deregulation, permit reform, tax cuts on work and investment, and credentialing overhaul for immigrant professionals — represent a meaningful potential shift in the operating environment for Canadian entrepreneurs.

For business owners tracking what comes next, the key variables to watch are federal permit timelines, the status of the industrial carbon tax, and whether credentialing reform for immigrant professionals gains any legislative traction under the current government.

The full episode is available now on the Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett.