WATCH: Poilievre highlights Canada’s surging unemployment under Trudeau

Poilievre started off with, "Last month, a half-million Americans got new jobs as the American unemployment rate fell to just 5.8 percent."

"Here in Canada, we lost 68,000 jobs, as our unemployment rate rose above eight percent."

".... We have the second-highest unemployment rate in the G7. Only socialist Italy, a country whose policies Trudeau is trying to emulate, has higher unemployment than Canada."

"But the UK, the US, Germany, Japan and France all have lower unemployment than Canada. All of them have been working to reverse big-government policies, slowly reducing the size of their deficits, opening their economies to more competition, and leaving more money in the hands of those who earned it."

"..... Furthermore, those countries got themselves vaccines; they didn't waste 100 days getting duped by China. And therefore, their people are vaccinated and safely working, celebrating and enjoying life, while Trudeau and his failure to get vaccines to Canadians has caused another closure of the economy."

Poilievre went to to discuss how to turn things around, in his opinion:

"We need to be the fastest-growing economy with the lowest unemployment, giving the maximum opportunity to our people."

"We need to change our economy from a credit-card economy from a paycheck economy. It is not enough to simply send people a $2000 check; nobody can live off of $2000 a month, and the government certainly can't pay it forever by putting it on the national credit card.

"The only solution is real, productive, unsubsidized private-sector jobs that offer people the chance to earn a paycheck. Trudeau has denied people that opportunity; that is why we have the second-worst unemployment. It is why Americans are going back to work, while Canadians are taking their pink slips home."

"Think for a moment of those 68,000 families who lost their jobs last month. Think of the conversations they had with their children. Think of them up at two in the morning, agonizing over how they're going to make their mortgage payment."

"And think of how bitter it must be for them to look south of the border and know that the exact opposite is happening in the US, where Americans are going safely back to work and leaving us behind."