Donald Trump has called off all trade talks with Canada because of an anti-tariff ad that uses clips from Ronald Reagan to say that tariffs are not such a good thing. What does that have to do with the Toronto Maple Leafs and the World Series?
00:00:34.120That is what Harold Macmillan, the former British Prime Minister, once said when asked what scared him in the world of politics.
00:00:40.860Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.
00:00:42.960My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and we are dealing with events.
00:00:47.180We 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,
00:00:56.640dealing with cross-border trade, all of the issues of the day.
00:01:13.480Because 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.
00:01:27.200When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs.
00:01:36.460And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time.
00:01:43.320But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.
00:01:49.900Now, Trump had previously acknowledged this ad in a statement, remarks that he was making at the Rose Garden earlier in the week.
00:01:58.180I even see foreign countries now that we are doing very well with taking ads.
00:02:08.040If I was Canada, I'd take that same ad also.
00:02:10.980But they're actually on television taking ads.
00:02:14.240But I do believe that everybody is too smart for that.
00:02:18.020But no one expected all of this to blow up.
00:02:21.100Now, since all of this has happened, we have seen the trade talks called off between Canada and the United States.
00:02:29.120Mark Carney and Donald Trump are both on their way to Asia for the APEC and the ASEAN conferences.
00:02:34.400And Doug Ford has announced that he is pausing his ads.
00:02:38.320Well, he will as of Monday, not quite right away.
00:02:42.040But on Monday, he will pause his ads after Games 1 and 2 of the World Series, where the ads will air.
00:02:48.200All of that leading to us having to regroup and re-record this podcast, but still joined by two great individuals.
00:02:57.560Lauren Gunter is a columnist with the Edmonton Sun, Edmonton Journal, and Chris Selle is a columnist with the National Post.
00:03:05.340Both of them well-versed in these issues.
00:03:08.380Gentlemen, welcome back to the re-record.
00:03:12.480And thank you for making extra time for this.
00:03:15.060Because 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?
00:03:36.880Look, Lauren, you did not think that yesterday.
00:03:40.380You know, you're dealing with Donald Trump.
00:03:42.280He'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.
00:04:09.540Yeah, 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.
00:04:20.900Because 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.
00:04:35.640Using 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.
00:04:48.180Like, they have copyright over presidential speeches, and they said that we'd sort of misrepresented it, which we really didn't.
00:04:55.460I mean, Reagan was anti-tariff, but Trump used that.
00:05:03.500He sort of piggybacked on that and said, ah, see, the whole thing's a fake.
00:05:06.500And, 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.
00:05:15.960Like, there's a demented brilliance there, that he would latch on to that.
00:05:23.300So, 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.
00:05:34.740I don't think that many U.S. Republicans care what Ronald Reagan thought.
00:05:38.880They 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.
00:06:00.480So, 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.
00:06:14.900I would say it was genius if it was intentional and thought through, but I think it's just impulsive.
00:06:21.540I 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.
00:06:33.720And he thinks that he has the power to do it every time.
00:06:39.380Look 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.
00:06:48.720I mean, this is, the man is, he likes strongmen.
00:07:43.980As someone who, like, there's one class that I paid attention to in journalism school, and that was media law.
00:07:52.140And 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.
00:08:04.220So, yeah, Ronald Reagan's speech, they didn't need to ask permission to use it.
00:08:45.680And I welcome a wider debate on whether this ad campaign was wise or foolish.
00:08:51.940But 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.
00:09:10.860Yeah, I mean, I don't understand why they did that.
00:10:10.200But 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.
00:11:08.040He saw this at some point and was annoyed because on Tuesday he mentioned it in his remarks in the Rose Garden.
00:11:14.520Yeah, 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.
00:11:27.260I 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.
00:11:43.580And he cheered on his good friend Doug Ford at Queen's Park.
00:12:09.440But, 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.
00:12:39.440I 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.
00:12:52.120Like, I don't think any Republicans were going to say, like, oh, my, I've been such a fool.
00:12:58.180You know, here I was thinking Ronald Reagan loved terrorists, and goodness knows I fall asleep and wake up every day thinking about Ronald Reagan.
00:13:12.880You 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.
00:13:25.280You know, these tech bros and the young males and things who came together through social media to support Trump, they won't remember Reagan.
00:13:35.820They're all too young to remember Ronald Reagan.
00:13:38.680And, 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.
00:13:50.520Yeah, more cowed than I realized, apparently, by Brian's theory.
00:13:56.560I mean, if that's true, if they just picked up the phone and said jump and the Reagan Foundation said how high.
00:14:03.200I mean, I was looking at its board of directors.
00:14:07.780You know, it's not a mega group of people, as you would expect.
00:14:12.220But I don't think I saw a single person who had anything to do with Trump on that list.
00:14:29.260Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, was asked about this.
00:14:33.200And had he talked to his Canadian counterpart, which, sadly, is Anita Anand, about the whole ad, which, by the way, has now been pulled.
00:14:44.500The Ford government has announced on Friday afternoon that they're going to pull the ad at the request of Prime Minister Mark Carney.
00:14:51.920But that had not been announced when Rubio was asked about this.
00:14:56.580And even Rubio, who was probably someone that a few years ago would have been Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, is now saying, well, they misrepresented him.
00:15:10.920I 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.
00:15:22.240Even the Reagan Foundation criticized him for it.
00:15:24.440But I have not spoken, I've been traveling since yesterday, I have not spoken to the foreign minister since then.
00:15:30.100But, I mean, the president made his announcement that he suspended any trade talks with Canada for now.
00:15:36.420So 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.
00:15:50.420You listen to that full five to six minute radio address, which, again, I just want to hammer this point.
00:16:00.840The 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.
00:16:12.240There 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.
00:16:27.040And yet there's Marco Rubio acting like he did.
00:16:29.460Yeah, 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.
00:18:07.240saying that Ronald Reagan did not like terrorists when actually he loved terrorists for our country and its national security.
00:18:15.840Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our country.
00:18:22.980Do 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?
00:18:33.240But do you think that anyone in the Ford government said, let's do this ad buy to influence the United States Supreme Court?
00:18:42.260No, I thought it never even occurred to me.
00:18:59.020And they wouldn't have thought, oh, yeah, this will sway Clarence Thomas.
00:19:03.760No, 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.
00:19:23.740I mean, if I were Trump and I actually cared what Doug Ford thought, and I doubt he does.
00:19:28.760But 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.
00:19:41.400I mean, this is the biggest irony to me is like, dude, you're in favor of tariffs.
00:20:16.160Lauren, this has been the biggest contradiction for Doug Ford is that he denounces tariffs as a tax.
00:20:23.960Tariffs on Canadian products are a tax on the American people.
00:20:29.740So we need to impose tariffs on American goods.
00:20:33.580Yeah, and I think that comes from, you know, that's basically every party's position, right?
00:20:41.340Like, 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.
00:20:55.960But 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.
00:21:12.100It's like, it's an instinct for fair play, right?
00:21:15.780Like, if we're going to have tariff-free access to the Americans, they should give it to us.
00:21:21.680I agree with that as a general principle, but you either think tariffs are a bad thing or you don't.
00:21:27.700And 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.
00:21:42.860Okay, 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.
00:22:02.280You know, tariffs are really bad, we shouldn't have to pay them, but those SOBs over there, they should have to pay them.
00:22:08.480Do 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?
00:22:19.140I think that's exactly what's the thinking.
00:22:22.060But it also comes from a general misunderstanding of who pays tariffs.
00:22:27.580So if we impose tariffs on American goods, our consumers pay those tariffs, not Americans.
00:22:36.200You 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.
00:22:45.580I 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.
00:22:53.940And 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.
00:23:05.300The increase in the price of coffee when we still had the retaliatory tariffs on non-Kuzma goods, which in itself was ridiculous.
00:23:15.860Like, 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.
00:23:25.420And, like, the price of coffee goes up by 20%, 25%.
00:23:29.540The price of all these grocery goods goes up.
00:24:26.340There 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.
00:24:39.740I did not want Mark Carney to be prime minister.
00:26:12.400This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?
00:26:15.300where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:26:22.640Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:26:27.820If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?
00:26:33.700I'll admit that I have been back and forth on the position that Doug Ford has taken regarding negotiations with the United States.
00:26:43.180But, you know, sometimes I think he has been just right.
00:26:48.320Sometimes I think he's been too strong.
00:26:50.140Often of late, I think he has been far too personal with Donald Trump.
00:26:54.780But watching what's going on right now, I have a very serious question for both of you.
00:27:02.440Is anyone more impactful in getting through to Donald Trump than Doug Ford?
00:27:07.940And I ask this in the context of the fact that, well, Trump responded to Ford in his ad.
00:27:16.960You know, our colleague Warren Kinsella, columnist at The Sun, he said,
00:27:21.420I actually think that Trump freaked out about the ad because it might have been working.
00:27:25.580And he was probably hearing from Republicans of, hey, this is not a good thing for us.
00:27:30.060And 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.
00:27:47.840And 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?
00:32:51.000He's as upset that the bottling is moving from Windsor to Quebec as he is about it moving from Windsor to the United States.
00:33:00.200Well, some of that bottling is going to the States.
00:33:03.240And he's somehow equating that to tariffs when it's not.
00:33:09.920You know, you talk to Diageo, and they're going through a whole global restructuring.
00:33:15.720There are layoffs in Kentucky, there's layoffs in Scotland, there are Johnny Walker facilities, there's layoffs in Italy, around the world.
00:33:25.380And depending on who you talk to, between 160 to 200 jobs, he wants to torch an entire company and then say,
00:33:35.480we'll take all of your products off the shelves.
00:33:37.720I 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.
00:34:39.180I 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.
00:34:50.880And so, especially if Trump gets rid of the incentives for EVs in the United States, those battery plants are useless.
00:35:00.840I mean, we already lost the Northvolt one in Ontario and Quebec because its European parent company has gone out of business.
00:35:08.980So Ford is losing a lot of these high-profile plants, and I think it all comes down to one thing for him.
00:35:17.240He thinks he has to stand up for Ontario workers, no matter whether it makes sense or not.
00:35:22.600Yeah, 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?
00:35:40.920But, 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.
00:36:00.420The fine print, the terms that each side has to uphold are in the fine print.
00:36:10.660I 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.
00:36:23.620If they did, then you're going to get criticized for it heavily down the line.
00:36:30.400And 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.
00:36:42.440Yeah, and I think he's definitely guilty of that at the moment.
00:36:46.280I'll say this about the EV plans, the EV battery plans, because there's a lot of misunderstanding around that.
00:36:55.360If 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.
00:37:10.600So, like, they were never going to hit the $15 billion per plant for Stellantis and Volkswagen.
00:37:51.800So 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.
00:38:07.220And 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.
00:38:16.080One way or the other, the Americans are always trying to screw us.
00:38:24.100I mean, that's the Canadian condition.
00:38:26.800I mean, we're the elephant – or we're the mouse living next to the elephant.
00:38:33.920And 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.
00:38:47.060You know, there's lots of countries that don't produce cars, lots of countries that don't produce airplanes.
00:38:55.040But we do it, so we think, well, we have to keep pumping public money into it, or people might lose jobs.
00:39:06.200I mean, a lot of these – a lot of the jobs that we're talking about are skilled positions.
00:39:17.920Some of them are assembly line workers.
00:39:19.680But, 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.
00:39:39.940And it's very limited, I find, in terms of economics.
00:39:44.120I 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.
00:39:57.720Yeah, or any of the other victimless crimes.
00:40:00.560I mean, if I am prepared to pay you three times the face value for the ticket that you have, who's the victim?
00:40:06.960You know, you're offering a product or a service I'm prepared to pay for.
00:40:13.480I 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.
00:40:42.620But we're not going about it in the right way.
00:40:45.660He has so many environmental restrictions in his head that we're not going to get more pipelines.
00:40:51.820We 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.
00:41:02.220We're not going to have what the world wants to buy.
00:41:59.240We'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%.
00:42:12.500So, like, we signed all these trade agreements and then said, eh, we don't really care about them.
00:42:19.400So, you know, we can go out and seek more trade agreements, which Mark Carney is ostensibly doing in Asia right now.
00:42:53.180And they need our oil, first and foremost.
00:42:57.300And our auto parts, and, you know, it was...
00:43:03.420Well, they don't arguably need our auto parts.
00:43:06.980Auto parts don't form under the ground like oil does.
00:43:10.500But, 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?
00:43:37.060I 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?
00:43:50.480I know that's, you know, overwhelmingly, you know, the result of Lauren's liquor of Alberta oil going to the U.S.
00:44:03.160But, you know, should we, shouldn't we be looking elsewhere, including for oil?
00:44:08.860I think we should be having the Northern Gateway pipeline for oil.
00:44:14.300I think we should be doubling or tripling the LNG off of the West Coast.
00:44:20.260We should have Quebec exporting LNG to Europe.
00:44:24.840All of these things should be happening.
00:44:29.380I completely agree with that, that we shouldn't be satisfied, including with natural resources.
00:44:36.420And I think that Canadians aren't satisfied.
00:44:40.040If you look at, you know, there are provinces that are considered, well, British Columbia and Quebec are essentially the biggest obstacles to new pipelines.
00:44:52.080If you look at popular opinion in both provinces, it's pro-pipeline.
00:44:57.640So this is a political, like in Quebec, Quebecers support not just an east-west pipeline through their province,
00:45:09.180but also resuscitating an LNG project that Quebec cancelled after its almighty environment, sort of arm's-length environment commissioner said,
00:45:29.020So 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.
00:45:43.600Lauren, can we, can we actually diversify away from 75% of our exports going to the U.S.,
00:45:51.280or are we just too focused on making sure that we don't do what we need to do?
00:45:57.340Well, yes, I think we can get a better rate.
00:46:02.460We 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.
00:46:12.680Oh, I think it's good that we're there, but I think we should do more.
00:46:16.140Yes, I think we should do more to trade elsewhere.
00:46:19.380But 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.
00:46:28.040We'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.