Steven Bartlett: Trump threw the election and then thereafter said that Canada should honestly become our 51st state, which is never going to happen. Pierre Polyv, leader of his majesty's loyal opposition. There's a significant probability that you could be Canada's next leader and your team said I can ask you whatever I want. So it appears that the United States have made the decision to kind of go it alone in the world and that is a very big strategic mistake.

Pierre Poilievre: In Canada's case, we have everything the United States needs if they treat us like a friend. So, for example, we have the fourth biggest supply of oil. And if you look at the leading five, which of these countries do you think the United States can most rely on? Is it Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Iraq? No, it's Canada. We could cooperate better on this if we got a friendly posture and a fully tariff-free trade arrangement with the US.

Steven Bartlett: And I'm looking at the third vial there in the row, Iran. Has Trump taken the right course of action?

Pierre Poilievre: The Iranian government has been extremely hostile and very dangerous to Canada. They killed 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents by shooting a civilian aircraft out of the sky, PS752. And there's no doubt in my mind that the only reason that they are enriching uranium is for the purpose of developing a weapon. And there's a far greater risk to them having a nuclear weapon than even North Korea. The regime in Thran has a theocratic dream. So any action to stop them from doing that is necessary for world peace.

Steven Bartlett: One of the books that I realized you'd read at that time from some research is this book Adam Smith the theory of moral sentiments. And how did that change your perspective and therefore your policies and your career?

Pierre Poilievre: Adam Smith in 1776 wrote this book which described what we now call the free market system. The economy is guided by the invisible hand of the free market. But the other half was in this book called the theory of moral sentiments in which he explains how self-interest overlaps with virtue, what he called fellow feeling. I have found that those who push a socialist ideology have a gross contradiction in their view of human nature. They say that human beings are wretched when they're in the private voluntary economy, but they're angels when they're in the governmental economy. My ideology is that we should disperse power that it should be a bottom-up system.

Steven Bartlett: I guess if there's socialists listening now, they might think, well, we tried this sort of capitalistic approach and it's resulted in inequality, people can't buy homes anymore.

Pierre Poilievre: Well, what we have now is socialism for the very rich. Government is actively intervening in the economy to forcefully redistribute wealth up the chain. In Canada, the vast majority of the cost that goes into building a new home is not land, labor, or lumber. It's government. We have the second slowest building permits of any country in the OECD. My goal is to remove all of that bureaucracy and make it tax-free to build homes.

Steven Bartlett: Canada have consistently dropped down the sort of happiness league table. Why?

Pierre Poilievre: Part of it is food. But more broadly, it's the monetary inflation. We've doubled our money supply in Canada in 10 years. It is not actually that these things cost more. It's that the money with which we buy them is worth less. There's something called the Catalon effect, which is that the first people to touch the money in a monetary expansion are those who are already wealthy. By the time it trickles down to the working-class people, their wages have been destroyed.

Steven Bartlett: Anthropic released a report showing where job disruption will take place. Do you think this time is fundamentally different than those prior technological revolutions?

Pierre Poilievre: I would say yes, because of the speed of disruption. This technology is built on the internet which has global distribution. My concern is the near-term displacement. As these technologies bring down costs, those savings should be passed on to people. The public policy objective is to ensure that it becomes an enabler of humanity, not a replacement for it. The rules around technology should always be geared towards giving people more agency.

Steven Bartlett: Your upbringing, your biological mother adopted you at 16 years old. How has it changed you as a man?

Pierre Poilievre: I was adopted by two school teachers. My biological mother made a selfless decision when she was 16. My adoptive father would eventually come out as gay. My parents taught me an important lesson: to thine own self be true. I'm a believer in a stoic approach, like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Put all of your emphasis on the things that are within your control. When you focus on what you can control, you are the actor rather than the acted upon.

Steven Bartlett: What are you most afraid of for Canada and for the world?

Pierre Poilievre: The biggest fear I have for Canada is that we just keep blocking our own potential and decline and opportunity vanishes. My biggest fear for the world is that the western world does not stay true to its foundational principles, the principles that grew out of the Magna Carta. But I'm actually optimistic about the future. The future belongs to Canada if we do the right things.