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00:00:48.420Spotify. It's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? Scrolling through spreadsheets,
00:00:57.980searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social?
00:01:03.200Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They
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00:01:21.760you're at war when you get attacked we got attacked is canada at war with the united states
00:01:29.020well that's what mark carney said on august 22nd the day after the trade talks collapsed with the
00:01:33.820americans the americans they don't call it a trade war they dispute that idea they also dispute how
00:01:39.420the trade talks collapsed and who is to blame what's that old saying truth is the first casualty
00:01:45.060of war hello and welcome to the full comment podcast i'm brian lily your host and today we
00:01:49.680try and pierce through the fog of war the competing claims and break down well what actually happened
00:01:55.340to help me do that two very intelligent people some people say the smartest some people say the
00:02:01.100best i don't know if that's true but some people say it i'm speaking of course about stuart thompson
00:02:05.920and tasha keridan stuart thompson is national post parliamentary bureau chief national political
00:02:10.840columnist Tasha Carradine, the team behind Political Hack, PostMedia's exclusive VIP
00:02:16.580community for twice-weekly deep-dive politics newsletters and early access to some guy named
00:02:23.020John Iveson that writes columns, also subscriber-only videos, and more. Make sure you subscribe.
00:02:29.620Stuart, Tasha, welcome to you both. It's been a quiet summer, not much going on, huh?
00:02:35.800All right. Before we get going into who's to blame, I want to play a little bit of Mark Carney and a little bit about Donald Trump. So here's Mark Carney at a recent news conference in Thunder Bay describing why he says the talks and the deal on offer were not acceptable.
00:02:53.300In terms of Canada's position, our position is clear.
00:02:58.140We need to have retained the right to protect and promote the French language,
00:04:13.280I'll let you guys decide who wants to start.
00:04:15.520I think that this fell apart because Mark Carney couldn't get an acceptable deal on autos, and when he realized that, he pulled out and jumped on the hand grenade of, I've got to protect the French language, I've got to protect our sovereignty, and he used that for all it was worth for the by-election in Chicoutimi.
00:04:35.640He's letting Christine Frechette, Quebec's premier, use it in the Quebec election, and he's using it to boost his poll numbers.
00:04:43.540It was a bad deal, had to walk away, but let's pump up these other issues for political gain.
00:12:22.160It was about the money that's given to Canadian producers,
00:12:26.360particularly in Quebec, to support French language production,
00:12:29.700which is a very sensitive point there.
00:12:32.620And if it's about the labeling, what we heard is it costs more to label
00:12:36.400if you have to do labels that are bilingual for American, you know,
00:12:40.340producers, which is so absurd. You order anything on Amazon, Brian, it'll come in 14 languages. I
00:12:45.640mean, is it really that hard? I think that what we saw was both sides picking the issues that
00:12:51.720mattered most to their constituencies. But the fact that this stuff fell apart is the bigger
00:12:58.440story. You're right. And I think the auto piece was probably, and my understanding is the first
00:13:04.780time this collapsed, that was a big piece of it. And Lutnik has said this, and I do believe
00:13:10.320him on this one. He said, you know, we're going to make cars in the U.S. This was last year because
00:13:15.260they're not being made in Canada anymore. Get used to it. He literally said this to a business
00:13:19.080audience. So the view of the Americans is that they want to just kill our auto industry. We can
00:13:24.120make parts. It's fine. You can buy some of those. OK, but they're all the cars to be assembled in
00:13:28.340the U.S. because they want to repatriate manufacturing. So if that is their goal and
00:13:31.780Carney's mentioned it this week, he said that they want to destroy our industry, basically
00:13:35.200hollow it out completely. How can we sign that? That is impossible. So whether he uses the
00:13:40.200French puts that in the main window as opposed to the other. At the end of the day, it's the same
00:13:44.880thing. They gave us a deal that was unacceptable. They poison-pilled it, and we didn't swallow it,
00:13:52.200and that was it. And now we're here in a very bad place, arguably, but it would have been worse if
00:13:57.300we had committed something like that. Well, I'm sitting here in Western Canada. I'm in Saskatoon
00:14:01.860right now, but I was speaking to people here, speaking to people in Calgary, and they said to
00:14:06.880me, why should we walk away from this deal just because of the auto industry in Ontario? And I
00:14:14.600say, well, it's our second largest export. It's worth hundreds of thousands of jobs. Oil and gas
00:14:21.260drilling and extraction is worth about $150 billion a year in Canadian dollars, $150 billion
00:14:30.060worth of exports the second most valuable export is automobile and light duty motor vehicle
00:14:38.880manufacturing 48 billion dollars about a third of just a shy of a third of the oil and gas industry
00:14:47.680so that's why we don't want to walk away from it but is there an argument to say that
00:14:52.100we should just let it go because that would be very popular in certain parts of the country
00:14:57.400Australia did it. Well, let's just import Chinese vehicles. Let's import European vehicles, American vehicles. Why do we give up this for a, you know, and screw over the rest of the country?
00:15:11.240This is actually U.S. strategy, too. I mean, I think Trump sometimes gets a—people underestimate him in terms of his strategic maneuvering. And if you look at University of Calgary economist Trevor Toome did a great chart about the job effects of all these tariffs. They are concentrated in central Canada, and they create regional differences in Canada.
00:15:35.520So what that means is we have divided premiers and we have a country that's divided, which makes it harder for us to negotiate and be unified. So that alone is just good strategy by the U.S. in terms of getting this deal.
00:15:50.720And I think the thing to remember, though, is and I find this a genuinely hard question to answer. It's not we're not comparing this deal to what used to be. We're not comparing it to the pre-Trump status quo. We're comparing it to the world without this deal.
00:16:09.140So tariffs, whatever escalating retaliatory tariffs we have down the road, whatever happens on January 1st with those other new tariffs that Trump has promised, if Mark Carney is rejecting a deal and Doug Ford is saying, don't take this bad deal, and pundits and analysts are saying this was a bad deal, we shouldn't take it, we have to kind of reckon with what might be down the line.
00:16:33.260And I think it's fair to say we can't accept this because we just can't accept this attack, even if it is worse for us down the road, because you can't just lie down when someone attacks you.
00:16:45.600But I think politicians have to start getting Canadians braced for what might be coming down the road.
00:16:50.580Tasha, John Iveson, that guy I made fun of at the beginning, John's a great columnist, great writer, just teasing John, he had a piece out this week citing a source that said the Carney government is willing to let the auto assembly industry die.
00:17:10.460Now, here's how I think it went down with how we ended up at the impasse on autos.
00:17:17.040You know, negotiations start out verbally, and it was, well, we want the tariffs lowered from 25% to 15% on autos, and the Americans said yes.
00:17:26.660And, of course, if they're lowered to 15%, once you get the discounts for American parts inside a Canadian-assembled vehicle, it goes below 7.5%, and they can live with that.
00:17:36.480the industry can survive um so that starts out verbally and then they get the start drafting the
00:17:44.300text of the deal and the canadians say wait a minute we set autos and the americans say yeah
00:17:50.080autos is in there well medium and heavy duty trucks which is the gm plant in oshawa and soon
00:17:56.380to be all they make at the ford plant in oakville uh those won't be economical they'll have to shut
00:18:02.300down. And the Americans say, well, no, we're not giving you that. How do you accept a deal where
00:18:07.860two out of five assembly plants shut down within a year or two? You don't. That's the thing. And
00:18:14.980this is why. This is why I'm saying it's poison pill, because we asked for those light trucks and
00:18:19.620medium trucks, the F-150 series, to be... But do you think Mark Carney would sign off on that?
00:18:27.480to get rid of no i i don't think so i think and i don't think it's just electoral i think that
00:18:33.520you know from just a practical perspective um you stab the auto industry in the heart that way
00:18:41.780um and that quickly too because this would be a this would be fast right it'd be like an immediate
00:18:46.360like no um you're going to have major economic dislocation in ontario major and it will ripple
00:18:51.800across the country this is not like this is the thing is that the american have a have it's great
00:18:55.540for the divide and conquer strategy because they know Westerners will be like, well, we have all
00:18:59.260this. And like, why should we care about Ontario? Like they have to care because everything affects
00:19:03.880everybody else. If the economy goes south in one part of the country, it affects the rest of the
00:19:10.160country. So I think Carney looks at this and goes, no, he's playing a waiting game, too. Look,
00:19:17.560there's two more years of Trump. Who knows what comes after? But you're not going to sign a
00:19:20.860terrible deal that locks you in for, you know, a decade or whatever, when in two years, maybe you
00:19:26.360can get a better deal with somebody else. Right. And I think he's thinking that he'll still be in
00:19:30.020power at that point or, you know, facing an election that could be around the new deal.
00:19:35.540It can think if you want to think really electorally, he has very little to lose.
00:19:38.820The country has a lot to lose. And I really don't think that, you know, he would have signed off on
00:19:43.280a deal that would have killed this industry because it would not make sense either electorally
00:19:47.600or economically. They've got the most seats in Ontario. It would hurt them trying to get
00:19:54.060anything along the 401 corridor if they signed off on this. I want to play you another clip
00:19:59.980because after the talks fell apart, of course, we had Doug Ford saying, kiss my ass. You had1.00
00:20:05.340Donald Trump calling Ford a flunky. You had name calling all over the place. And then eventually
00:20:11.040we ended up at this. We're going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately
00:20:18.780to Lake America. That's going to take place right now as I sign the order. I said at the beginning
00:20:26.060that I think that Mark Carney jumped on, when he couldn't get a deal, jumped on some of the other
00:20:31.880issues because it would help him politically. We'll dive into that later. You know, where does
00:20:36.800that end and doug ford did the same because he's you know just had by elections he won two out of
00:20:42.280three which is what he needed and what he wanted but i think donald trump is also leaning into this
00:20:48.260with the america thing and we don't want your cars i know there are republicans saying this
00:20:53.480is hurting us in the midterms but he's leaning into it thinking it might help him in places like
00:20:59.440ohio and michigan saying i'm standing up for your auto jobs the other guys let them go i'll keep
00:21:05.000your auto jobs here. I don't know if it's going to work, but I think Trump's leaning into this
00:21:08.680politically as well. That's always the question with Trump is, is there a legitimate political
00:21:13.980strategy here or is this just his kind of muscle memory that whenever there's a fight, he just
00:21:19.060always has to swing back hard? And I do think it is an interesting situation because if you're Mark
00:21:26.320Carney, you do have this giant reservoir of benefit of the doubt with the Canadian people
00:21:31.220because of this stuff. So I think on the Friday night, as that deadline approached for the deal
00:21:37.360and the Canadian team was discussing, what are the ramifications if we pull out of these talks?
00:21:43.320They do know that it's very likely we're going to have exactly what played out, which is the big
00:21:48.600war of words, which is statements from Trump that enrage Canadians. And we know from the last year
00:21:54.300that makes people rally around Mark Carney. So all this stuff, I think if you're the Canadian
00:21:59.480negotiating team, it just gives you that buffer. You know, you can make a few mistakes and you'll
00:22:04.760get away with it because Canadians hate Trump so much. And I think Carney is quite happy to play
00:22:10.640into it. I mean, he does it in his own way, but this week he took a couple of swings at Trump and
00:22:16.180obviously there's going to be swings back. And I don't think he minds that.
00:22:20.060All right. Well, pick that up when we come back. How do you end this when there's so many incentives
00:22:24.900for the politicians to keep fighting? We'll talk about that when we come back. But first, hey,
00:22:29.480We've got merch from hoodies and hats to tote bags, mugs, and more.
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00:22:51.360Recently, our company softball team lost the big game by one run.
00:22:55.740Then Dale tried to console us with the quote, winning isn't everything.
00:24:24.480Because we, unless something happens between when we're talking and when this comes out, we're going to be levying countervailing duties against the Americans, dollar for dollar tariffs, although not on fish like we originally thought.
00:35:33.540And if you lose Brantford, Brant South, which they've held for 18 years and which the Liberals won back when the conservative movement was divided, but not really since, if they lose that, Stuart's right.
00:35:48.020You're going to have MPs looking over and saying, OK, do I let you keep my job so that I can lose mine?
00:35:56.260Because unlike the Liberals, the Conservatives have the Reform Act, which Pierre Polyev and his team used to dispatch Erin O'Toole.
00:36:04.840So, you know, it will be the Conservative MPs that do them in, I think, if we get to that point.
00:36:10.340So Polyev has to, you know, have a save the furniture campaign for Brant for Brant South.
00:36:16.520Yeah, it's a different situation than in Quebec.
00:36:18.620My understanding in Quebec is they didn't run much of a campaign because they were hoping the Bloc would beat the Liberals, right?
00:36:23.320And the Conservative vote would have split the Bloc vote.
00:36:41.620Brandt is a different story because there is, yes, it could be in play, but the conservatives are going to throw everything at that one, right?
00:38:55.760I'll just say, too, that, you know, our minds always go to the electable centrist candidate, but that's not what the conservative base wants right now.
00:39:04.880And if you look at the main reason I've been a skeptic of Polyev being deposed anytime soon is that if you look, if you dig into the polling, the conservative party is not doing great.
00:39:16.020It's on there below 30 in some polls nowadays.
00:39:18.320But if you look at favorability with Pierre Polyev, people who vote conservative still love him.
00:39:23.140And he got 87 percent in the leadership convention. And so there's two problems there. One is if you're an MP that takes it upon yourself to boot him, you have to explain that to your party members and they may hate you for it.
00:39:36.020And the second thing is that if Pierre Polyev decides to go full bloody minded, stubborn political leader, he could run to replace himself and probably win. So I don't fully see a way out of this for the conservatives unless they find someone that they can, you know, run as the as the vanguard, the guy who was waiting in the wings like Mark Carney was.
00:39:57.200I don't see anybody waiting in the wings, and Polyev is very popular with the base.
00:40:04.800But that Reform Act, as I said, do you let the leader keep his job if you think you're going to lose yours?
00:40:12.980And I'm hearing about writings that people consider very safe that conservatives are now saying, oh, my God, it's in play.
00:40:22.940But as far as where the base is at, I want to play you a clip.
00:40:26.600But it was a bit of a meme war because Mark Carney was asked standing outside of Langevin block.
00:40:31.140I still call it that because that's its name, where the prime minister's office is.
00:40:35.700He was standing there and he's being questioned about, well, when do you get back to talks?
00:40:39.600And he said, well, when the Americans stop with memes and they stop throwing shade, we'll get back.
00:40:47.840And some of it's funny and it's, you know, people joking around.
00:40:51.160And some of it, I think, is going too far.0.57
00:40:54.440And it's people, in my view, cheering for Trump and a bunch of this coming from conservative influencers who are incredibly loyal to Polyev.
00:41:05.640So this is one of them. I'm going to play you the audio. You'll get a sense of what it is.
00:41:10.560It's the audio that matters, although it does end with an eagle carrying away a carny goose.
00:41:17.120What's a carny goose? You'll find out here.
00:41:18.880Here is a marked carny goose in its natural habitat of shitty Canada.0.94
00:41:24.440above there is a trump eagle soaring in the sky looking for its next meal0.98
00:41:39.520okay and with that the trump eagle carries the carny goose away to be killed others throw0.89
00:41:52.160Carney being thrown into Lake America, dressed up in a Chinese Communist Party dress and falling
00:41:59.220down the stairs of an airplane. That's a really weird place for part of the conservative base to
00:42:05.680be at, that they hate Carney and the liberals so much that they revel in the idea of Canada being
00:42:13.540humiliated or our leader being physically assaulted by another foreign leader. I think
00:42:20.080that turns off any centrist voters. And the party keeps going down this way. There won't be any
00:42:25.840centrist for them to appeal to. This is the Trump problem that the conservatives have, because polling
00:42:31.900consistently showed that there was a much larger percentage of conservatives who liked Donald Trump.
00:42:36.340And this polling hasn't been done in a while. So I just the last one I saw, it was in the 30s,
00:42:41.240but they approve of Donald Trump. And that's a problem for the conservatives. It's rearing its
00:42:47.180head now because exactly this, Brian, you're right. It's like, okay, our hero is the guy over
00:42:53.240there. We hate the prime minister so much. We're willing to make fun of our own country and feed
00:42:59.440into this whole American anti-Canada zeitgeist that we are experiencing. I mean, they're actively
00:43:05.860pushing at us, prodding us, goading us, memeing us on purpose for their own purposes. So they're
00:43:14.120buying into it. And yes, every centrist voter and a lot of conservative voters, too, are just like
00:43:19.900turned off. And they're like, this is crazy. I mean, they did it to Trudeau, right? They attacked
00:43:25.420conservative voters. They attacked. There were memes of Trudeau. I mean, all over the place.
00:43:29.360But Trump wasn't in office. I don't remember it being physically attacked by Trump, though,
00:43:35.300making fun of him. Yeah. No, exactly. Because Trump wasn't around. That's my point. They made
00:43:39.000fun of Trudeau, but it wasn't at the expense of the country. It was different. But those same
00:43:43.180people are channeling their energies into this. They think it's the same. It's not the same. It's
00:43:46.620not the same because you're not attacking him. You're attacking him as a symbol of Canada and
00:43:53.420that the other guy is a better guy than he is, which is just terrible. I think it's terrible.
00:43:57.980Stuart, what are your thoughts? Do I have a point that this goes down a wrong path? Or
00:44:03.440as I was told online, am I just a Karen and a liberal loser who needs to get a sense of humor?
00:44:09.180Well, the real problem here is, if you're a political party, you really have to keep these people at arm's length, because the incentives of the algorithm will sometimes line up with the incentives of the political party, but it's not always going to be the case.
00:44:25.680And I remember when we started The Hub in 2021 and we started doing stories, and that was at like almost peak PolyEv.
00:44:36.040Whenever we ran stories about pure PolyEv, they would just blow up in a way that it just seemed like we'd hacked the algorithm.
00:44:45.220And you start to get carried away with that where you say, well, we just have to write a story about pure PolyEv policy once a week and we'll get a barn burner of a story.
00:44:55.260That is the temporary thing. And everybody who's worked in journalism knows that sometimes the algorithm loves you and then it moves on to something else. So I think the true mistake here was that the conservatives, you know, they invited some of these people into their convention. And now you are tethered to them in a way that, you know, some elements of the media will try to hold you accountable for the things they say, which that's a tough spot for a party to be in.
00:45:20.100And I think that, you know, the big problem here is that these are American audiences that they're now appealing to. So it's almost like Canadian influencers are looking south and seeing dollar signs just with the massive amount of people there. So there's going to be a conflict.
00:45:35.960All right. Let's end on a couple of things that are coming up. We've had two resignations. Laura Broughton resigned as the head of Investment Canada. Doug Guzman apparently leaving the defense procurement agency that we've set up because you can't get anything bought. We're still going slowly.
00:45:53.560I find both of those resignations odd, especially since, you know, Laura Broughton's heading up this big investment summit that's coming up in Toronto.
00:46:03.420So now we've got two resignations and a Dominic Barton returns.
00:46:08.480I'm not sure that this is a good idea, having Dominic Barton go in.
00:46:12.400But have either of you caught any wind of what's going on in Carnyland, that he has two significant resignations from people he appointed?
00:46:21.340I know, but I also raised my eyebrows at that. I raised my eyebrows at the Dominic Barton piece because of the sensitivities around China. Mr. Barton is extremely linked to China, you know, from his time in private business. And it's a bit odd considering we know that is one of the things the irritants the Americans have with us is our closeness to China and that they're right on that piece. We are, as a country, we have been way too accommodating of China.
00:46:49.580So this sends an odd message for the Carney government at this time when we're, you know, we're saying no more memes, no more poking the bear, that sort of thing.
00:46:57.620And yet this is this is a stick in their eye to put him there. So I think I can't make complete sense of it.
00:47:04.220I don't have the I wish I had some some scoop for you, Brian, but I do not.
00:47:07.920But I do think it is odd that both of these these figures are leaving at this time after, you know, basically very, very small footprint in what's a very important job for both of them.
00:47:19.580Stuart? Yeah, well, you know, Mark Carney came in as a guy with a reputation to get things done.
00:47:25.480And there was always the question of in Mark Carney's experience as a bureaucrat. So the
00:47:32.300question was, in Ottawa, can he actually do that? And maybe the highest mountain to climb is
00:47:37.580penetrating that Defense Department bureaucracy. And you give these people money and they literally
00:47:43.680can't spend it. Like, it's the strangest thing. And I think for Guzman, like, I wouldn't be
00:47:49.880surprised if it's just frustration, because that has actually been one of the problems with us
00:47:53.680spending up to, you know, the NATO targets on defense spending is we just can't do it. So maybe
00:48:00.780that was the true limit to Mark Carney's talents is spending money at D&D.
00:48:05.400After the investment sum, which I think is a good thing, bringing all these people,
00:48:38.140I think if you're going to declare that we're at war, you should probably recall parliament.
00:48:43.940Am I being too demanding there, Tasha?
00:48:48.240I know the conservatives have said recall parliament so we can examine what's in the deal and go over it.
00:48:52.820I'm not quite sure what that will achieve.
00:48:54.320And secondly, I do think that when you're negotiating a deal, if there's any hope of it, you know, salvaging it or going forward again and renegotiate, you don't say what was in the original.
00:50:18.920But if you ever want to get a travel request approved in journalism these days, just say, I think this might be like a Davos-style speech.
00:50:27.440And that's like that was the big foreign policy moment that you had to be at. So who knows? I mean, if you're a Canadian, I think by now you have come to realize that Mark Carney likes to swan around. That's a big part of his personality and a big part of how he does this job.
00:50:45.560One of the first things he did when he became prime minister was he jetted off somewhere else. And I think that that's probably not going to change. It seems like he's made the calculation that however this affects him politically, he's still going to do it. And, you know, these are these are the things that you burn capital on. I think there's nothing more Mark Carney likes more than giving a speech to a foreign parliament.
00:51:09.780Well, we'll see when we get a speech from him next, and we'll continue to watch to see if Canada gets hit with retaliatory tariffs for our retaliatory tariffs, and when the trade war ends, we'll eventually talk about that again.
00:51:23.340Thank you both so much, and a reminder to everyone to subscribe to the Political Hack newsletter so that you get their wise insights, even when they're not on full comment.
00:51:32.520Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host.
00:51:36.640This episode was produced by Andre Pruth, theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:51:40.220Kevin Libin is the executive producer. Please remember to hit subscribe, share this on social media, tell your friends about us.