Full Comment - The epic trolling behind Trump’s ad-trashing trade tantrum

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00:00:30.240 Events, dear boy, events.

00:00:34.120 That is what Harold Macmillan, the former British Prime Minister, once said when asked what scared him in the world of politics.

00:00:40.860 Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.

00:00:42.960 My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and we are dealing with events.

00:00:47.180 We had already recorded an episode of the Full Comment Podcast dealing with, well, the fact that premiers are not as united as they used to be,

00:00:56.640 dealing with cross-border trade, all of the issues of the day.

00:00:59.520 And then, well, events happened.

00:01:02.960 Donald Trump decided at 10.39 Eastern on a Thursday evening to announce that all talks for trade with Canada were off.

00:01:13.180 Why?

00:01:13.480 Because the Ontario government had dared to air an advertisement, a TV ad in the United States that used Ronald Reagan and his voice to say tariffs were not such a good thing.

00:01:27.200 When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs.

00:01:36.460 And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time.

00:01:43.320 But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.

00:01:49.900 Now, Trump had previously acknowledged this ad in a statement, remarks that he was making at the Rose Garden earlier in the week.

00:01:58.180 I even see foreign countries now that we are doing very well with taking ads.

00:02:03.820 Don't go with tariffs.

00:02:05.040 They're taking ads.

00:02:05.720 I saw an ad last night from Canada.

00:02:08.040 If I was Canada, I'd take that same ad also.

00:02:10.980 But they're actually on television taking ads.

00:02:14.240 But I do believe that everybody is too smart for that.

00:02:18.020 But no one expected all of this to blow up.

00:02:21.100 Now, since all of this has happened, we have seen the trade talks called off between Canada and the United States.

00:02:29.120 Mark Carney and Donald Trump are both on their way to Asia for the APEC and the ASEAN conferences.

00:02:34.400 And Doug Ford has announced that he is pausing his ads.

00:02:38.320 Well, he will as of Monday, not quite right away.

00:02:42.040 But on Monday, he will pause his ads after Games 1 and 2 of the World Series, where the ads will air.

00:02:48.200 All of that leading to us having to regroup and re-record this podcast, but still joined by two great individuals.

00:02:57.560 Lauren Gunter is a columnist with the Edmonton Sun, Edmonton Journal, and Chris Selle is a columnist with the National Post.

00:03:05.340 Both of them well-versed in these issues.

00:03:08.380 Gentlemen, welcome back to the re-record.

00:03:12.480 And thank you for making extra time for this.

00:03:15.060 Because would any of you, either of you, would you have thought on Thursday that, yeah, the biggest issue in Canada-U.S. relations is going to be this ad of Doug Ford playing clips of Ronald Reagan saying tariffs are bad?

00:03:32.900 Sure, why not?

00:03:34.620 Yeah, it's 2025.

00:03:36.880 Look, Lauren, you did not think that yesterday.

00:03:40.380 You know, you're dealing with Donald Trump.

00:03:42.280 He's now talking about going back on his support for Israel because of some sort of personal insult they thought J.D. Vance suffered during a trip there.

00:03:51.980 The man is flighty.

00:03:54.580 He takes off and goes in any direction at any time.

00:04:00.980 I mean, I like the fact last weekend that they had no king's demonstration because he thinks he's an emperor.

00:04:09.260 Chris?

00:04:09.540 Yeah, I mean, in hindsight, it almost seems like a lot of the things Trump does, in hindsight, it's like, oh, yeah, I could totally see how he would pick up on this.

00:04:20.900 Because he sees it as an opportunity where he clearly saw it as an opportunity for sort of some of his, I mean, just quintessential troll work here.

00:04:35.640 Using this fact that, and I mean, the Reagan Presidential Foundation weirdly objected to this, saying, you know, like, we didn't ask for their permission to use it.

00:04:48.180 Like, they have copyright over presidential speeches, and they said that we'd sort of misrepresented it, which we really didn't.

00:04:55.460 I mean, Reagan was anti-tariff, but Trump used that.

00:05:03.500 He sort of piggybacked on that and said, ah, see, the whole thing's a fake.

00:05:06.500 And, in fact, Reagan loved tariffs, which is exactly the sort of thing, in hindsight, it's like, oh, I can, of course he would say that.

00:05:15.960 Like, there's a demented brilliance there, that he would latch on to that.

00:05:23.300 So, yeah, I mean, these are insane times, and I wouldn't have thought he would care, and I suspect he doesn't, what Ronald Reagan thought.

00:05:34.740 I don't think that many U.S. Republicans care what Ronald Reagan thought.

00:05:38.880 They like the idea of Reagan, but his ideas are very much out of vogue, and he doesn't have the same sort of stranglehold on the Republican imagination that he did maybe, you know, 25 years ago when he was just sort of this icon.

00:06:00.480 So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have predicted it, but then that's the genius of Trump, right, is that you can't predict it, but then when it happens, it seems like it always would have happened somehow.

00:06:14.900 I would say it was genius if it was intentional and thought through, but I think it's just impulsive.

00:06:21.540 I think he really feels that he's being set upon by the entire world, that he's the one who's being offended, and he's the one who's being singled out, and he strikes back.

00:06:33.720 And he thinks that he has the power to do it every time.

00:06:39.380 Look at the fact that he thought he could fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she put out a job report he didn't like.

00:06:48.720 I mean, this is, the man is, he likes strongmen.

00:06:54.180 We knew that from his first term.

00:06:55.620 He liked Erdogan in Turkey.

00:06:57.420 He liked Putin in Russia.

00:06:59.100 He liked the Hungarian president whose name I forget.

00:07:02.420 He liked all these people who were strong men.

00:07:06.620 And so now he's just, he spent the last four years when he wasn't in power thinking up how he could be a strong man in the United States.

00:07:16.100 Oh, we're going to get letters, Lauren.

00:07:18.040 We're going to get so many letters.

00:07:20.120 Good. 0.99

00:07:20.400 Emails, DMs, whatever, with people saying, you've got Trump derangement syndrome, and you're just awful and evil people. 0.97

00:07:27.540 But look, let's unpack a couple of things here. 0.94

00:07:31.740 So the Reagan Foundation put out this statement saying that the Ontario government didn't ask for permission to use it.

00:07:41.420 Let me explain something to everyone.

00:07:43.980 As someone who, like, there's one class that I paid attention to in journalism school, and that was media law.

00:07:52.140 And if someone who is working for the American government in the course of their daily duties, part of their job, creates something, it's public domain.

00:08:04.220 So, yeah, Ronald Reagan's speech, they didn't need to ask permission to use it.

00:08:10.160 It's public domain.

00:08:11.920 And there's no, oh, well, you can only use six seconds under fair use.

00:08:16.100 That's a fallacy, by the way.

00:08:18.000 Six seconds is not the fair use, you know, metric. 0.56

00:08:21.860 So the idea that this somehow violated some copyright that the Reagan Foundation had on the president's public comments is ridiculous. 0.84

00:08:34.000 But I would also say this, the idea that the Ontario government misrepresented Reagan's view is also ridiculous. 0.75

00:08:43.560 Of course it is.

00:08:43.680 We can have a wider debate.

00:08:45.380 Of course it is.

00:08:45.680 And I welcome a wider debate on whether this ad campaign was wise or foolish.

00:08:51.940 But can I just get comments from both of you on the idea that they had to ask for permission, which is not part of U.S. law, and that they somehow misrepresented the idea that Reagan disliked tariffs when, in fact, he really loved tariffs.

00:09:10.860 Yeah, I mean, I don't understand why they did that.

00:09:15.680 Do you mean the Reagan Foundation?

00:09:18.400 The Reagan Foundation, it was quite odd to me.

00:09:23.480 So here's my theory, and then I'll get you both to respond to this.

00:09:27.740 My theory is Trump saw the ad, complained to someone on his team about the ad.

00:09:35.080 They then called the Reagan Foundation and leaned on them, and the Reagan Foundation felt like they needed to put out a statement.

00:09:42.620 And I've said that publicly on social media, and folks have said, oh, how dare you say that?

00:09:48.780 That's disrespectful.

00:09:50.520 I've been around politics a long time.

00:09:52.780 That's exactly how things work.

00:09:53.960 That's exactly how it works.

00:09:54.920 If you watch the entire six-minute address that Reagan gave in 1987, he says on numerous occasions, tariffs are not good.

00:10:04.240 They lead to trade wars.

00:10:05.600 They cost jobs in both countries.

00:10:08.600 They lead to inflation.

00:10:10.200 But I'm going to have to impose some tariffs on Japanese semiconductors because the Japanese are violating our trade agreement and dumping cheap conductors in the American market. 0.95

00:10:21.220 That's all he was saying.

00:10:22.620 He wasn't saying, I love tariffs.

00:10:25.080 He said, I hate tariffs.

00:10:26.340 But in this case, I have to impose them because the Japanese are cheating. 1.00

00:10:31.240 Thank you.

00:10:32.000 Well, I just don't understand why.

00:10:37.020 I mean, OK, it's certainly plausible, yeah, that Dwight has called the Reagan Foundation.

00:10:43.320 I'd be surprised if they had it on their top of their contact list and leaned on them.

00:10:52.260 But then what does the Reagan Foundation have to lose here?

00:10:57.500 The buy included the World Series playoffs, and so he might have seen it Monday in Game 7 with the Blue Jays.

00:11:06.600 He might have seen it on Fox News.

00:11:08.040 He saw this at some point and was annoyed because on Tuesday he mentioned it in his remarks in the Rose Garden.

00:11:14.520 Yeah, and, you know, maybe Ford could argue that's, I mean, this is, I saw, you know, to tell you how much times have changed since Reagan's era.

00:11:27.260 I mean, I saw an NDP Manitoba Premier, Wab Canoe today, basically jumping on board the campaign and saying that Trump is violating Reagan's legacy on free trade.

00:11:43.580 And he cheered on his good friend Doug Ford at Queen's Park.

00:11:47.940 The NDP defending Reagan's trade legacy.

00:11:50.780 Yeah, I mean, this is how much times have changed.

00:11:57.320 I am surprised that Trump got so worked up about it, and maybe that's a good sign.

00:12:06.380 It's certainly under people's skin.

00:12:09.440 But, yeah, I mean, this idea that you can't use a presidential speech in a situation like that, and, frankly, the idea of the president leaning on a previous president's foundation to facilitate slandering their own namesake are very kind of disturbing artifacts of the current era, as Lawrence says.

00:12:39.440 I mean, it's this sort of nihilism that Trump seems to traffic in, and I don't think he was at any risk from these ads. 0.96

00:12:52.120 Like, I don't think any Republicans were going to say, like, oh, my, I've been such a fool. 0.86

00:12:58.180 You know, here I was thinking Ronald Reagan loved terrorists, and goodness knows I fall asleep and wake up every day thinking about Ronald Reagan. 0.71

00:13:06.360 I mean, I mean, this is, it's 2025.

00:13:10.200 It's not, it's not 1995.

00:13:12.880 You know, if you look at who put Trump in the White House, they're almost all people who either don't remember Reagan or don't care about Reagan.

00:13:25.280 You know, these tech bros and the young males and things who came together through social media to support Trump, they won't remember Reagan.

00:13:35.820 They're all too young to remember Ronald Reagan.

00:13:38.680 And, you know, the rest of the party, the Reagan wing of that party is so cowed by Trump's strong-arm tactics that they won't say anything.

00:13:50.520 Yeah, more cowed than I realized, apparently, by Brian's theory.

00:13:56.560 I mean, if that's true, if they just picked up the phone and said jump and the Reagan Foundation said how high.

00:14:03.200 I mean, I was looking at its board of directors.

00:14:07.780 You know, it's not a mega group of people, as you would expect.

00:14:12.220 But I don't think I saw a single person who had anything to do with Trump on that list.

00:14:23.620 So let me play this clip, though.

00:14:25.980 I want to play a clip.

00:14:27.120 I shared it with you guys earlier.

00:14:29.260 Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, was asked about this.

00:14:33.200 And had he talked to his Canadian counterpart, which, sadly, is Anita Anand, about the whole ad, which, by the way, has now been pulled.

00:14:44.500 The Ford government has announced on Friday afternoon that they're going to pull the ad at the request of Prime Minister Mark Carney.

00:14:51.920 But that had not been announced when Rubio was asked about this.

00:14:56.580 And even Rubio, who was probably someone that a few years ago would have been Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, is now saying, well, they misrepresented him.

00:15:10.300 Here's the clip.

00:15:10.920 I think what happened is one of the leaders in Canada was running ads in the United States on tariffs that took President Reagan's words out of context.

00:15:22.240 Even the Reagan Foundation criticized him for it.

00:15:24.440 But I have not spoken, I've been traveling since yesterday, I have not spoken to the foreign minister since then.

00:15:30.100 But, I mean, the president made his announcement that he suspended any trade talks with Canada for now.

00:15:36.420 So there's even Rubio, who I would have considered once, you know, principled, you know, conservative, just jumping in on this and acting like Ronald Reagan loved tariffs.

00:15:50.420 You listen to that full five to six minute radio address, which, again, I just want to hammer this point.

00:16:00.840 The White House would record and the White House would distribute free of charge to every media outlet in the world to play without copyright because they wanted it out there.

00:16:12.240 There is no way that you can listen to Reagan's radio address on April 25th, 1987, or any of his other many, many comments on tariffs and come away with the idea that he loved tariffs.

00:16:27.040 And yet there's Marco Rubio acting like he did.

00:16:29.460 Yeah, but then they've understood in the Trump administration, and I'm always reluctant to give them credit for seeing through something and understanding it and doing it deliberately.

00:16:41.100 I think this is just reflexive.

00:16:43.340 Trump is such a narcissist that he thinks he's right on everything.

00:16:47.420 And so he doesn't care or listen or research or do any of that sort of stuff.

00:16:52.960 But you get you get this idea that if you tell a big enough lie, people will believe it.

00:17:02.800 And so we can tell this lie that Reagan was pro tariffs because most people aren't going to look it up.

00:17:10.500 Most people don't remember him.

00:17:11.880 And to the extent that they do, it's a great name to have on our side.

00:17:19.260 I'm sorry.

00:17:20.120 Were you talking about Donald Trump or Catherine McKenna?

00:17:24.540 I believe she said if you repeat the same lie over and over again and loud enough, people will believe it or something to that effect.

00:17:33.200 Rolling Stones also followed that.

00:17:35.100 Like who dubbed the Rolling Stones the greatest band in rock and roll?

00:17:39.680 The Rolling Stones.

00:17:40.400 And they kept repeating it.

00:17:43.100 And all of a sudden people are like, oh, Rolling Stones is the greatest band in rock and roll.

00:17:47.500 I can argue both sides of that coin.

00:17:50.280 But the fact is one band put it out there and that was the Rolling Stones.

00:17:55.400 So here's what Trump posted just a few hours ago.

00:17:58.560 He said Canada cheated and got caught.

00:18:00.680 They fraudulently took a big buy ad.

00:18:06.260 That's bad grammar.

00:18:07.240 saying that Ronald Reagan did not like terrorists when actually he loved terrorists for our country and its national security.

00:18:15.840 Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our country.

00:18:22.980 Do you think that the Ford government sat there and planned this out and I say this knowing neither one of you are fans of the Ford government?

00:18:33.240 But do you think that anyone in the Ford government said, let's do this ad buy to influence the United States Supreme Court?

00:18:42.260 No, I thought it never even occurred to me.

00:18:48.460 I don't think it occurred to them.

00:18:50.240 Yeah, no.

00:18:51.480 And I know many of them.

00:18:53.320 And they're smart people, like in all governments.

00:18:55.860 They're smart people. 1.00

00:18:56.460 They're dumb people. 1.00

00:18:57.080 But they're smart people in there. 1.00

00:18:59.020 And they wouldn't have thought, oh, yeah, this will sway Clarence Thomas.

00:19:03.760 No, I think they thought it would sway rank and file Republicans into finally accepting that tariffs are paid by the citizens of the country that levies them.

00:19:21.740 Now, it's somewhat awkward.

00:19:23.740 I mean, if I were Trump and I actually cared what Doug Ford thought, and I doubt he does.

00:19:28.760 But if I were, I would have my video team assemble a giant montage of Ford talking about how essential it is that Canada levy tariffs against the United States.

00:19:41.400 I mean, this is the biggest irony to me is like, dude, you're in favor of tariffs.

00:19:49.360 Retaliatory tariffs.

00:19:50.560 Yeah.

00:19:51.460 But the argument still holds.

00:19:54.240 We either pay them or we don't.

00:19:56.320 Even just this week, he says it's time to get tough with the Americans.

00:20:02.500 And Carney says, yeah, but we're not going to do any retaliatory tariffs.

00:20:05.500 And then Ford says, yes, but, you know, the prime minister and I are on the same page.

00:20:10.800 No, you're not.

00:20:11.740 You're wingy when it comes to this.

00:20:16.160 Lauren, this has been the biggest contradiction for Doug Ford is that he denounces tariffs as a tax.

00:20:23.960 Tariffs on Canadian products are a tax on the American people.

00:20:29.740 So we need to impose tariffs on American goods.

00:20:33.580 Yeah, and I think that comes from, you know, that's basically every party's position, right?

00:20:41.340 Like, I don't know another, I don't think I know an elected politician in the position of power in Canada who would argue that we should just, that we shouldn't retaliate.

00:20:55.960 But that's just how tenuous the free trade logic is, I guess, in Canadians' minds, that it's really, you know, to them it's, and I think it comes from an honest place.

00:21:12.100 It's like, it's an instinct for fair play, right?

00:21:15.780 Like, if we're going to have tariff-free access to the Americans, they should give it to us.

00:21:21.680 I agree with that as a general principle, but you either think tariffs are a bad thing or you don't.

00:21:27.700 And we've just kind of, all of Canadian politics has just basically come to terms with that contradiction and just pursues and just goes forward as if it doesn't exist. 0.97

00:21:42.860 Okay, I'd like a reaction from both of you before we take a quick break, is that my view is that most average Canadians say, oh, tariffs are horrible, unless they're on those bastards, which, you know, is like so many things. 0.95

00:22:02.280 You know, tariffs are really bad, we shouldn't have to pay them, but those SOBs over there, they should have to pay them. 1.00

00:22:08.480 Do you get that kind of the sense that where Canadians are, Americans shouldn't impose tariffs on us, but we should impose them on them? 1.00

00:22:18.400 Absolutely.

00:22:19.140 I think that's exactly what's the thinking.

00:22:22.060 But it also comes from a general misunderstanding of who pays tariffs.

00:22:27.580 So if we impose tariffs on American goods, our consumers pay those tariffs, not Americans. 0.58

00:22:36.200 You know, I think the thinking is we need to impose tariffs on the Americans because they're putting tariffs on us, and so they should be punished as well.

00:22:43.600 Look, we're punishing ourselves.

00:22:45.580 I mean, and that's one of the big things that comes out of that Reagan address is he said, if you put a tariff on it, you're going to cost yourself jobs, you're going to cost yourself inflation.

00:22:53.940 And so they're not a good thing to do, and I think that people who say, yes, we have to have retaliatory tariffs, don't appreciate who will pay those tariffs.

00:23:05.300 The increase in the price of coffee when we still had the retaliatory tariffs on non-Kuzma goods, which in itself was ridiculous. 0.72

00:23:15.860 Like, okay, I get we're annoyed the Americans imposed tariffs on us, but then we imposed them on non-Kuzma goods, which the Americans didn't do. 0.73

00:23:25.420 And, like, the price of coffee goes up by 20%, 25%.

00:23:29.540 The price of all these grocery goods goes up.

00:23:33.320 That is literally taxing yourself.

00:23:35.860 Yeah, I mean, it's really, the more I think about it, it is kind of a dystopian thing, right?

00:23:47.600 Like, it's this idea that you can misrepresent a speech like Reagan's that, like, 180 degrees misrepresented.

00:24:01.860 When anyone can go and watch the whole thing on YouTube, it's not long.

00:24:09.180 And you can have a reasonable expectation of getting away with it.

00:24:15.320 I've got Canadians arguing with me that, no, Reagan supported tariffs.

00:24:21.220 Doug Ford misrepresented him.

00:24:24.640 Doug Ford didn't seek permission.

00:24:26.340 There seems to be this view that, well, I hate Doug Ford and I hate Mark Carney so much that I'd rather cheer for Trump that I just don't understand.

00:24:39.740 I did not want Mark Carney to be prime minister.

00:24:44.220 I do not support the Liberal Party.

00:24:46.240 But I have to want him to succeed because if he doesn't succeed, the country is in a bad spot.

00:24:54.380 And there seems to be this whole group of Canadians that say, no, I hate these SOBs so much. 0.99

00:25:00.220 They should all fail.

00:25:01.680 I'm going to cheer for Trump even as he's attacking us on a baseless ground.

00:25:06.320 So quick answer from both of you.

00:25:08.020 We'll take a break.

00:25:09.780 I agree.

00:25:10.720 I mean, I think that that's what a lot of people think.

00:25:13.220 And I think Carney has done, I don't like Carney.

00:25:17.480 I think Carney's too much of a green. 0.99

00:25:19.940 And I think that he doesn't understand economics and finance as well as he thinks he does.

00:25:24.820 But he has done a better job in dealing with Trump than Ford because he has not taken as confrontational a stance.

00:25:34.280 Yeah, I think that's about right.

00:25:38.040 I mean, it's not what he said he'd do.

00:25:40.440 But then, hey, I mean, this is politics, right?

00:25:44.760 If we held out every politician by that standard, no one would have liked Brian Mulroney or even Reagan, for that matter.

00:25:55.160 So, yeah, here we are.

00:25:57.680 All right.

00:25:58.760 When we come back, I'm going to ask you both a controversial question, especially based on what Lauren just said.

00:26:04.580 But is Doug Ford the most impactful politician in dealing with Donald Trump?

00:26:11.200 Back in moments.

00:26:12.400 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?

00:26:15.300 where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.

00:26:22.640 Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.

00:26:27.820 If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?

00:26:32.220 everywhere you get podcasts.

00:26:33.700 I'll admit that I have been back and forth on the position that Doug Ford has taken regarding negotiations with the United States.

00:26:43.180 But, you know, sometimes I think he has been just right.

00:26:48.320 Sometimes I think he's been too strong.

00:26:50.140 Often of late, I think he has been far too personal with Donald Trump.

00:26:54.780 But watching what's going on right now, I have a very serious question for both of you.

00:27:02.440 Is anyone more impactful in getting through to Donald Trump than Doug Ford?

00:27:07.940 And I ask this in the context of the fact that, well, Trump responded to Ford in his ad.

00:27:16.960 You know, our colleague Warren Kinsella, columnist at The Sun, he said,

00:27:21.420 I actually think that Trump freaked out about the ad because it might have been working.

00:27:25.580 And he was probably hearing from Republicans of, hey, this is not a good thing for us.

00:27:30.060 And you think back to when Ford threatened to impose the big electricity tariff and suddenly the White House is inviting Doug Ford, a subnational leader, down for a meeting.

00:27:46.320 Mark Carney hasn't gotten that.

00:27:47.840 And so as much as I have criticized Ford and said that he's on the wrong track on this, is he getting a bigger impact than Mark Carney and, before him, Justin Trudeau?

00:28:00.120 I don't know.

00:28:02.200 I mean, it depends what impact.

00:28:04.080 I mean, he certainly seems to be able to get under Trump's skin, or at least the people who make his advertisements can.

00:28:15.960 And as I say, I'm still surprised that...

00:28:21.840 I'm surprised this ad bothered anyone.

00:28:24.040 Yeah, that's right.

00:28:25.840 I mean, I would have thought that Trump or that Reagan was just not something that Trump would worry about.

00:28:36.700 Although, I have to say, I mean, I was looking at a Gallup poll from 2023, just earlier today,

00:28:43.320 and 41% of Republicans said that Reagan had been the best president of the past 40 years.

00:28:54.640 And they had Trump in second place at 37%.

00:28:59.380 And what a one-two punch that is.

00:29:03.640 You know, the opposite of each other, essentially.

00:29:07.440 And then George W. Bush at 5%, which, ouch.

00:29:11.580 But, like, I...

00:29:14.320 Yeah, I mean, he's certainly been down there on the morning shows and doing all...

00:29:21.960 You know, if Ford or Trump clearly knows who Ford is, I'm not sure it's doing any good.

00:29:28.320 Oh, I've heard from Trump people that they know who he is and they pay attention to what he says.

00:29:32.820 And Kearney seems to be, you know...

00:29:35.880 In a way, I suppose they're playing good cop, bad cop, right?

00:29:38.920 Like, Trump is...

00:29:41.120 Will flatter Kearney any chance he gets.

00:29:47.120 Ford is sort of the foil to all this.

00:29:51.140 I mean, it's been a long time since we talked about a Team Canada approach, isn't it?

00:29:55.520 But, yeah, I mean...

00:29:57.920 There's no Team Canada today.

00:30:00.220 If all publicity is good publicity, then Ford is doing rather well.

00:30:07.940 But I'm not convinced all publicity is good publicity.

00:30:11.040 Do you want reaction?

00:30:12.820 Do you want reaction or results?

00:30:15.120 Because if you measure impact by reaction, then Doug Ford is impactful.

00:30:20.880 If you measure him by result, I'm not sure that he measures up.

00:30:24.400 Like, so, you know, most of the products that come out of Ontario into the United States

00:30:29.580 are subject to at least a 25% tariff.

00:30:33.360 Oil comes out of Alberta, where our premier has been quite nice to Trump,

00:30:38.300 is subject to a 10% tariff.

00:30:40.320 So we can look at the contrasting styles there.

00:30:43.640 You know, everybody who's elbows up was so mad at Danielle Smith,

00:30:48.060 the premier of Alberta, for going to Mar-a-Lago.

00:30:50.280 I was not.

00:30:51.500 I was not.

00:30:52.540 Okay.

00:30:52.820 But there was a lot of criticism when she made speeches in March to two mega organizations

00:31:00.180 to try and convince them that tariffs weren't any good for them.

00:31:04.000 And I'm not sure it had any impact.

00:31:07.140 They need our oil so desperately that they probably would only put a 10% tariff on it anyway.

00:31:13.020 But nonetheless, she has had a much more measured approach to the Trump administration than Ford

00:31:20.980 has.

00:31:21.140 I mean, Ford's a stuntman, right?

00:31:24.340 He takes the Crown Royal because Crown Royal's parent company is closing a distillery and...

00:31:32.240 Not even a distillery.

00:31:33.840 It's a bottling plant.

00:31:35.000 Just a bottling plant.

00:31:35.880 Right.

00:31:36.440 And he forgets to take the spill stopper out of the bottle, so it takes forever for the Crown Royal to come out.

00:31:43.640 Well, he doesn't drink.

00:31:45.020 He doesn't know about spill stoppers.

00:31:47.280 I guess.

00:31:49.640 And I did ask, like, did he stop and buy that foolishly on the way?

00:31:55.160 And one of the staffers was like, no, that literally came from his home.

00:31:59.840 And as Chris said, he doesn't drink.

00:32:01.740 So he doesn't know that it takes forever with that plastic stopper in the way.

00:32:05.340 So, yeah, that was weird.

00:32:08.940 And then, you know, a little while later, he's standing with Francois Legault, the Quebec premier,

00:32:14.900 saying, yeah, Crown Royal, we're going to take all your products off the shelf and Smirnoff's next.

00:32:20.980 And where Smirnoff made in Canada, or for the Canadian market, Valleyfield's Quebec.

00:32:26.540 Yeah, which is where Diageo is moving bottling for the Canadian supply of Crown Royal.

00:32:35.400 And that's, to me, you know, that was one of the moments, more subtle moments, where I was like, you know,

00:32:43.760 this Canada First thing is an even bigger fallacy than we thought.

00:32:49.020 I mean, Ford is upset.

00:32:51.000 He's as upset that the bottling is moving from Windsor to Quebec as he is about it moving from Windsor to the United States.

00:33:00.200 Well, some of that bottling is going to the States.

00:33:03.240 And he's somehow equating that to tariffs when it's not.

00:33:09.920 You know, you talk to Diageo, and they're going through a whole global restructuring.

00:33:15.720 There are layoffs in Kentucky, there's layoffs in Scotland, there are Johnny Walker facilities, there's layoffs in Italy, around the world.

00:33:25.380 And depending on who you talk to, between 160 to 200 jobs, he wants to torch an entire company and then say,

00:33:35.480 we'll take all of your products off the shelves.

00:33:37.720 I dare you to take Guinness off the shelves just before St. Patrick's Day and not expect the biggest Irish riot in more than 150 years in the city of Toronto. 1.00

00:33:52.980 That will not go over well.

00:33:55.080 No, but Ford is suffering from a lot of plants that he had big dreams for, not coming to fruition.

00:34:07.200 So there's the notice that Jeep will not be making a product in Ingersoll, Ontario.

00:34:15.480 It'll be making it in Illinois instead.

00:34:17.660 Brampton instead of Illinois, yeah.

00:34:22.800 Yeah.

00:34:23.520 But anyway, they're moving it to the States.

00:34:27.560 Yeah.

00:34:27.880 Yeah.

00:34:28.660 Okay.

00:34:29.160 So anyway, he's lost that.

00:34:32.980 There's the GM shutting down a plant to make EVs.

00:34:36.040 There's a switch away.

00:34:39.180 I guarantee you that the big battery plants that the federal and provincial governments have decided to give huge tax credits to, they will not come about either.

00:34:50.880 And so, especially if Trump gets rid of the incentives for EVs in the United States, those battery plants are useless.

00:35:00.840 I mean, we already lost the Northvolt one in Ontario and Quebec because its European parent company has gone out of business.

00:35:08.980 So Ford is losing a lot of these high-profile plants, and I think it all comes down to one thing for him.

00:35:17.240 He thinks he has to stand up for Ontario workers, no matter whether it makes sense or not.

00:35:22.600 Yeah, well, I think that's maybe an underrated factor here is the fact that so many of his bets on Ontario, to use a term that Mark Carney used yesterday, and I said, did I ask you to make wagers?

00:35:40.920 But, you know, all these billions of dollars he's sunk into these things that are not coming to fruition or that are buggering off to the United States, and all the government can tell us is that they're looking at the fine print to see if there's anything they can do about it.

00:36:00.420 The fine print, the terms that each side has to uphold are in the fine print.

00:36:10.660 I mean, if you're not even going to negotiate for some kind of guarantees, and it sounds like they didn't, or I don't know, nobody seems to know that they did.

00:36:23.620 If they did, then you're going to get criticized for it heavily down the line.

00:36:30.400 And if he can't recoup any of those losses, either financially or in terms of jobs, then he's going to want to blame someone other than himself.

00:36:42.440 Yeah, and I think he's definitely guilty of that at the moment.

00:36:46.280 I'll say this about the EV plans, the EV battery plans, because there's a lot of misunderstanding around that.

00:36:53.020 And here's my big hope.

00:36:55.360 If Trump does get rid of the incentives for those in the United States, then we are forgiven for all of our requirements to give any tax credits, meaning a tax break, to any EVs built here.

00:37:10.600 So, like, they were never going to hit the $15 billion per plant for Stellantis and Volkswagen.

00:37:16.480 That was never going to happen.

00:37:18.060 You'd have to have full production, full employment.

00:37:20.660 That was never going to be the case.

00:37:23.020 That was the best-case scenario for the companies, and that was a tax break.

00:37:29.040 Now, so if they – like, I don't want them to disappear because I still want the jobs there.

00:37:34.240 But if Americans get rid of their tax breaks, we don't have to pay or give the tax breaks to these same companies.

00:37:45.880 They probably would anyway.

00:37:46.800 That is my hope at this point.

00:37:50.060 But this is the race to the bottom.

00:37:51.800 So this is the difference between the Democrat protectionism and the Trump protectionism, is the Democrats would go in and say, we're going to use our tax dollar largesse to suck all of your jobs down to the states.

00:38:07.220 And Donald Trump just says, you're going to move the jobs to the United States, or we're going to charge you a tariff to get there.

00:38:16.080 One way or the other, the Americans are always trying to screw us. 1.00

00:38:20.660 Okay. 0.96

00:38:22.380 Not much to disagree with there.

00:38:24.100 I mean, that's the Canadian condition.

00:38:26.800 I mean, we're the elephant – or we're the mouse living next to the elephant.

00:38:33.920 And we've kind of trapped ourselves, painted ourselves into this corner with this concept that any industry we currently have, we have to maintain at all costs.

00:38:47.060 You know, there's lots of countries that don't produce cars, lots of countries that don't produce airplanes.

00:38:55.040 But we do it, so we think, well, we have to keep pumping public money into it, or people might lose jobs.

00:39:06.200 I mean, a lot of these – a lot of the jobs that we're talking about are skilled positions.

00:39:13.860 These are very employable people.

00:39:16.360 I mean, not all of them.

00:39:17.920 Some of them are assembly line workers.

00:39:19.680 But, you know, there's no – you know, this is the thing, is that we're dealing with economic orthodoxies and what Canadians and Americans can wrap their minds around.

00:39:39.940 And it's very limited, I find, in terms of economics.

00:39:44.120 I mean, Ford is currently trying to make hay out of banning ticket scalping, which is a little bit like trying to ban prostitution, it seems to me, or, you know, any of the other oldest vices.

00:39:57.720 Yeah, or any of the other victimless crimes.

00:40:00.560 I mean, if I am prepared to pay you three times the face value for the ticket that you have, who's the victim?

00:40:06.960 You know, you're offering a product or a service I'm prepared to pay for.

00:40:13.480 I might not like what you're charging me, but as long as I pay for it, there's nobody who's out on this thing.

00:40:20.400 But, you know –

00:40:20.700 We all agree what you are, Lauren.

00:40:22.980 Now we're just haggling over price.

00:40:24.720 Exactly, exactly.

00:40:25.880 So I've been – I mean, at this game now, 30-plus years.

00:40:30.100 And I don't know how many times I've heard Canadian politicians say we have to diversify our trade away from the United States.

00:40:38.340 Carney has said it in the last week, but he's right.

00:40:41.580 We do.

00:40:42.620 But we're not going about it in the right way.

00:40:45.660 He has so many environmental restrictions in his head that we're not going to get more pipelines.

00:40:51.820 We might get one more to the West Coast from Alberta, that they're not going to do the kind of critical minerals mining that they should do.

00:41:02.220 We're not going to have what the world wants to buy.

00:41:05.400 So how do we diversify then?

00:41:08.640 All right.

00:41:08.980 So let me ask this.

00:41:12.560 You know, we've been trying to diversify our trade for decades.

00:41:16.820 Decades.

00:41:17.520 Pierre Trudeau talked about this.

00:41:19.580 Didn't do much about it, but he talked about it.

00:41:23.580 Under Paul Martin, they started to talk about it.

00:41:26.440 I remember sitting and interviewing the late Jim Peterson, who was Paul Martin's international trade minister.

00:41:33.440 And he was starting talks on the Canada-South Korea free trade agreement.

00:41:38.900 He started it.

00:41:39.960 Stephen Harper finished it.

00:41:41.320 Stephen Harper also added, like, Colombia updated the free trade agreement with Israel.

00:41:46.820 The TPP, the Canada-European trade agreement.

00:41:51.380 Stephen Harper completed more trade agreements than anyone else.

00:41:56.660 And then what happened?

00:41:59.240 We've got 75% of our exports going to the U.S., which is more than we had going to the United Kingdom and the British Empire at the height of the British Empire when it was 66%.

00:42:12.500 So, like, we signed all these trade agreements and then said, eh, we don't really care about them.

00:42:19.400 So, you know, we can go out and seek more trade agreements, which Mark Carney is ostensibly doing in Asia right now.

00:42:27.920 But will it amount to anything?

00:42:29.460 Well, I mean, Canada and the U.S. are natural, I mean, are as natural trade partners as you could ever really imagine.

00:42:39.620 We need their, we need everything from their produce to their...

00:42:46.460 I do like celery and oranges in the middle of winter, yes.

00:42:51.100 Yeah.

00:42:53.180 And they need our oil, first and foremost.

00:42:57.300 And our auto parts, and, you know, it was...

00:43:03.420 Well, they don't arguably need our auto parts.

00:43:06.980 Auto parts don't form under the ground like oil does.

00:43:10.500 But, you know, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I, I, of course, no one would argue against trade diversification, but it seems to me that, I mean, how much can Colombia and Israel and South Korea realistically do for us, regardless, considering where they are?

00:43:37.060 I get what you're saying, Chris, but I'll ask you, and then I'll ask Lauren, and then we'll wrap, is, you know, should we be satisfied with 75% of our trade going to one country?

00:43:50.480 I know that's, you know, overwhelmingly, you know, the result of Lauren's liquor of Alberta oil going to the U.S.

00:44:03.160 But, you know, should we, shouldn't we be looking elsewhere, including for oil?

00:44:08.860 I think we should be having the Northern Gateway pipeline for oil.

00:44:14.300 I think we should be doubling or tripling the LNG off of the West Coast.

00:44:20.260 We should have Quebec exporting LNG to Europe.

00:44:24.840 All of these things should be happening.

00:44:27.020 Yeah, I completely agree with that.

00:44:29.380 I completely agree with that, that we shouldn't be satisfied, including with natural resources.

00:44:36.420 And I think that Canadians aren't satisfied.

00:44:40.040 If you look at, you know, there are provinces that are considered, well, British Columbia and Quebec are essentially the biggest obstacles to new pipelines.

00:44:52.080 If you look at popular opinion in both provinces, it's pro-pipeline.

00:44:57.640 So this is a political, like in Quebec, Quebecers support not just an east-west pipeline through their province,

00:45:09.180 but also resuscitating an LNG project that Quebec cancelled after its almighty environment, sort of arm's-length environment commissioner said,

00:45:26.720 no, we can't go ahead with this.

00:45:28.120 They support this.

00:45:29.020 So somehow we have to bring, it's, it's, politics gets in the way of him, ironically, even now, when it's never been more essential that we diversify trade.

00:45:43.600 Lauren, can we, can we actually diversify away from 75% of our exports going to the U.S.,

00:45:51.280 or are we just too focused on making sure that we don't do what we need to do?

00:45:57.340 Well, yes, I think we can get a better rate.

00:46:02.460 We could probably get it down to 60% or 65%, but we are fortunate in that we are positioned right next to the largest market in the world.

00:46:12.680 Oh, I think it's good that we're there, but I think we should do more.

00:46:16.140 Yes, I think we should do more to trade elsewhere.

00:46:19.380 But in order to do that, we're going to have to work on east-west corridors, not just pipelines, but all sorts of transportation corridors.

00:46:28.040 We're going to have to bring down interprovincial trade barriers, which people were talking about in April and May, but they're not talking about it now.

00:46:34.840 And they're all still there.

00:46:37.920 I mean, we just, as Chris said, politics gets in the way every time we try to diversify,

00:46:44.740 because it'll be an environmental regulation, or it'll be a provincial labor law, or it'll be some other kind of impediment,

00:46:53.400 that if we got it out of the way, we could trade more with Europe and with Asia,

00:46:58.040 but we don't, because we put those political problems ahead of everything else.

00:47:04.200 Gents, thank you for reconvening with me on a Friday afternoon to record this.

00:47:10.480 And we had the events of Thursday night get in the way, and then just before we started recording,

00:47:18.180 we had Doug Ford put more events out there, pausing his ads.

00:47:23.020 Let's hope that nothing blows this up between now and when the podcast comes out on Monday morning.

00:47:29.220 Thanks so much.

00:47:29.600 Monday morning? Good grief.

00:47:32.480 The world could have ended by Monday morning.

00:47:35.480 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:47:38.060 My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:47:39.720 This episode was produced by Andre Pru.

00:47:42.220 Theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:47:43.940 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:47:46.300 Please help us out by leaving a note, a review, subscribe, wherever you can.

00:47:51.180 Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

00:47:56.900 Here's that clip from Canada Did What? I promised you.

00:48:03.680 Imagine yourself inside a Boeing 767 operated by Air Canada.

00:48:09.380 It's July 1983.

00:48:11.520 You're traveling between Montreal and Edmonton,

00:48:14.260 and a couple hours into the flight, the comforting roar of its two jet engines

00:48:18.360 suddenly stop, and most of the power cuts out.

00:48:21.820 Good evening. It was a metric mix-up.

00:48:24.880 Air Canada has confirmed the plane that landed at Gimli, Manitoba last Saturday

00:48:29.620 ran out of gas because of an error in metric conversion.

00:48:33.420 I regret to inform you that you're inside the Gimli Glider,

00:48:37.300 one of history's only incidents of a civilian airliner running out of gas

00:48:41.940 in the middle of the sky.

00:48:44.080 And this happened because someone didn't know how to properly measure out enough jet fuel.

00:48:49.780 Now, I mention the Gimli Glider only to note that systems of measure

00:48:53.520 are not just numbers on a page.

00:48:55.680 They're cultural objects.

00:48:57.520 They might not be on par with language or religion,

00:49:00.780 but they're ways of understanding the world around us.

00:49:03.960 And if you screw with them,

00:49:05.860 even with the best of intentions,

00:49:07.760 you might get the occasional airliner falling out of the sky.

00:49:10.800 Fortunately, in this instance, it miraculously worked out fine.

00:49:16.180 The pilots in control of this particular Air Canada flight

00:49:19.220 just happened to be two of the only people on Earth

00:49:22.220 perfectly suited to safely bring down a crippled full-size airliner

00:49:26.980 in the middle of Manitoba.

00:49:29.380 One of them was an experienced glider pilot.

00:49:31.980 The other one was a former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot

00:49:35.320 who just happened to have served at a Manitoba airbase

00:49:38.860 that was now directly underneath them.

00:49:40.800 If you want to hear the rest of the story,

00:49:45.220 make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?

00:49:48.220 Everywhere you get your podcasts.

00:49:49.800 I'm out of the way there.

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00:49:57.220 Andafe to the world.

00:49:58.220 I love an stranger.

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00:50:00.440 If you're out of the way there.

00:50:00.560 Thanks for having me.

00:50:01.220 I love it.

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00:50:03.740 I love it.

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00:50:13.220 It's certainly not in my opinion.

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00:50:14.580 I love it.

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Full Comment - October 27, 2025

The epic trolling behind Trump’s ad-trashing trade tantrum

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