What can you say about the last week in Canadian politics other than, Oh my God, what happened? by Post Media columnists Chris Selle, Lauren Gunter, and Gents who wants to take a first kick at the can at Justin Trudeau firing his finance minister.
00:02:38.460But this is where we are with the Trudeau government and where we're at.
00:02:43.460Joining me to talk about all of this are two esteemed columnists from Post Media.
00:02:48.180We've got Chris Selle from the National Post, Lauren Gunter with the Edmonton Sun, and gents, who wants to take a first kick at the can at Justin Trudeau firing his finance minister three days before she's supposed to deliver the fall economic statement,
00:03:03.740so that he can replace her with someone who didn't say yes to the job or apparently backed out after, and then getting torpedoed by him all at a time when we're facing a national crisis of 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods into the United States.
00:03:18.620And Donald Trump is just lapping this up.
00:03:43.660Chris said something in a column earlier this week that I thought was absolutely bang on.
00:03:48.840And he said, Trudeau and his entourage think that celebrity and communications are 90% of governing, that you don't really have to do anything.
00:03:58.700And even Chrystia Freeland, in her parting shot at Trudeau, said, no, we have to do things.
00:04:06.440And you don't seem capable of doing it, so I'm leaving.
00:04:10.200I went back and looked in our archives for columns that I had written after Trudeau had become the leader in 2013, but before he'd become the prime minister in 2015.
00:04:22.120And on three occasions, I called him an intellectual lightweight.
00:04:25.260I think we're seeing the proof of that.
00:04:28.380I mean, the man is not capable of running a government.
00:04:31.940I mean, he's a narcissist, he's an egotist, he is self-absorbed, and he's not very bright.
00:04:39.300And that's not a real good combination.
00:04:43.400Chris, you want to take a run at this?
00:04:46.840I mean, I think it's, I mean, two things stand out to me, first of all.
00:04:55.160I mean, does he actually have no one in his inner circle, or even some other, somewhat outer circle, who are telling him that he has to go?
00:05:05.740And if he doesn't, how is that even possible?
00:05:08.560I mean, how has he lasted this long with no one, with an ounce of common sense, talking in his ear?
00:05:16.200And the second thing is, just to go back to what you said, like, he told Christopher Freeland that he was going to replace her as finance minister with someone who had not agreed to become the finance minister.
00:05:31.720Like, that's almost sort of degenerate gambler behavior, right?
00:05:34.360Like, you owe the one bookie $500, so you bet $1,000 on the Steelers or something to try and cover that off.
00:05:43.940The next, I mean, I just don't understand how, you know, everything that we've seen to me in the last week is kind of in keeping with Justin Trudeau's character that we know of him, but like, but like multiplied by two, like taken to the maximum extent.
00:06:03.360And I just can't imagine what he thinks he's doing, hanging on.
00:06:08.180Where does he think, you know, it's like he's hanging on to a rising balloon.
00:06:11.160And at some point, he's going to have to let go.
00:06:14.820Well, hanging on to a leaking balloon.
00:06:17.680Yeah, it's a terrible metaphor now that I think about it.
00:06:20.020You know what used to happen in cases like this is that the power brokers in the party who were largely big fundraisers, but not necessarily, they would all be senior people.
00:06:31.600And they would get together at the time when the leader's shelf life had run out.
00:06:37.740And they would say, hey, you've done a great job.
00:06:41.380We'll find you something very cushy to fall into.
00:06:46.720But since we've had the change in how parties are funded in Canada, and no one can give more than a few thousand dollars a year, there aren't those big fundraisers anymore.
00:06:58.060And there isn't sort of a Senate for the party.
00:07:02.360There isn't this brains trust up at the top who can say, yeah, we're not going to win an election with you again.
00:07:09.780And for the good of the party, the good of the country, let's step out.
00:07:32.780And so there isn't someone who can easily move him in or out.
00:07:36.720Well, I would argue that caucus has all the power they need to move in or out.
00:07:41.040They've just been so they're just so used to being lapdogs at this point.
00:07:45.580They can't envisage anything about their jobs that isn't working for Justin Trudeau.
00:07:50.340And as you say, for all of the people that he's installed within the party, I mean, if they just if they just refuse to do anything the PMO says, then he's screwed.
00:08:23.500But we don't know what the result will be.
00:08:25.320But you've got greasy pole climbers like Mark Gerritsen, who is most likely to lose his seat.
00:08:30.860Kingston and the islands, you know, that survived when when Stephen Harper had his sweep in 2011.
00:08:38.960That was, I think, pretty much the only liberal seat between basically the GTA and Ottawa was Kingston in the islands, likely going to turn blue in the next election.
00:08:50.540But he's hanging on for hope beyond hope that he's going to get in cabinet for the final days of Trudeau's regime.
00:09:00.560Well, as we've all been hearing, I'm sure, there are backbenchers who have turned down the prime minister's invitation to join the cabinet.
00:09:09.500In all of my time, I mean, you hear one or two people over time, hey, Mr. Prime Minister, I have some skeletons in my closet.
00:09:36.180But now we're hearing like four and five and maybe more backbenchers who've been offered cabinet posts have said no.
00:09:45.940And for Francois Philippe Champagne, Frankie Bubbles, as I call him, a guy that I've touted many times as a potential successor for Trudeau, apparently said, yeah, I don't want a promotion.
00:10:11.120That's another scandal going back a little bit longer.
00:10:14.380Let's remind people of something that's a little embarrassing for Lauren's past and get his take on it, that you used to work for a liberal MP years ago.
00:10:25.180I mean, I'm sorry for bringing up your big red liberal past, Lauren, but I mean, you spent time around the hill.
00:10:34.040Have you ever seen anything like this?
00:10:36.240I, you know, on Monday, when it initially happened, I said, well, I can kind of put like a small comparison to when Paul Martin was fired from Gretchen's cabinet.
00:10:48.100But that happened over a weekend, and everyone knew there was tension between them, and they'd, you know, Martin had been trying to overtake the party.
00:10:56.100But it wasn't really a real comparison.
00:10:58.740I said, that's as close as I can think.
00:11:00.520I haven't seen anything like this ever.
00:11:02.320And it comes at a time when we're dealing with this very real threat of Trump tariffing everything coming out of Canada, and he's lapping it up.
00:11:11.780He's up there on True Social making fun of Trudeau the whole time.
00:11:23.520The two of them both wanted to be leader of the same party, so they had to have this saw on.
00:11:28.780There is no competing power base against Trudeau.
00:11:34.860He's avoided the creation by anyone else of a power base within the party that could challenge him.
00:11:43.960He's unrivaled, he's unchallenged, and he is still self-destructive.
00:11:50.660Well, and I'm amazed, you know, this offer to Christopher Freeland, I mean, boy, what a plum job, dealing with the Trump administration 24-7.
00:12:01.320But remind people, I mean, we'll give kudos to the Globe and Mail for this reporting.
00:12:06.540Stephanie Levitz, great reporter over at the Globe.
00:12:12.080Well, so the offer, as Stephanie reported it, was that instead of being finance minister, she would be in charge of sort of the Canada-US relations file.
00:12:22.660But without a ministry to run, this would just be her, you know, I mean, what an offer.
00:12:31.820Well, yeah, I don't know, but what struck me, first of all—
00:12:35.560They were going to clean out a storage room over at Global Affairs, and she could go in there to this windowless room and have a phone or something.
00:12:42.660I mean, what struck me, first of all, was if that plan had been in place for more than, like, 72 hours before he came up with it, wouldn't he have taken Christopher Freeland down to Florida to meet with Donald Trump for that dinner?
00:12:58.420I mean, wouldn't that have been a logical thing to do if he was planning to put her in charge of Canada-US relations?
00:13:03.320And then Trump comes out with this tweet, or I don't know if it was on Twitter or on—
00:13:10.100Which I've had to join just so I can know what the president-elect is saying about Canada.
00:13:16.080Where he basically implies, and I mean, I don't know, but he basically called her totally toxic, which basically undermined Trudeau further and just made the whole plan, if that's the right word for it, that he had, look even more crazy.
00:13:33.320So, look, we're laughing heartily at this, and I'm having a bit of schadenfreude with Trudeau's problems, but at the same time, this is incredibly serious for her country.
00:13:50.220I'm not exaggerating when I call this a national crisis.
00:13:53.540If those 25% tariffs come in, we are going to shave several points off of our GDP within a couple of months.
00:14:02.700There will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Canadians who lose their jobs.
00:14:07.600I read people like Dan Gardner, who used to write for the Ottawa Citizen, then he went to the Trudeau PMO, then he wrote a pointy-headed book that people love that says a lot about nothing.
00:14:18.420And he's out there saying, well, we should just block all of our exports to the United States.
00:14:23.840We should refuse to sell them oil or anything else.
00:14:27.980And I think the only reason this fool can say that is that he is a member of the laptop class that does not rely on any job that involves manufacturing or resource extraction or agriculture or any of the things that put food on the table for millions of Canadians.
00:14:46.620He is of the class that surrounded Kamala Harris during the U.S. presidential election.
00:14:54.600And that is why the Democrats lost, because they are completely out of touch with where ordinary people are.
00:15:01.060They don't have the same worries and concerns.
00:15:04.580They don't have the same risks that ordinary people do.
00:15:07.600Ordinary people know that for the last five or six years, either the COVID or the economy has put them at risk of losing their family income.
00:15:15.580And they're not prepared to then go with some airy-fairy progressive ideas that sound really good to Justin Trudeau and the liberal elite.
00:15:30.040So this is exactly the kind of thinking that, A, leads to the freedom convoy, and B, leads to the liberals being wiped out in the next election.
00:15:41.260I mean, there's always been this theory in Canadian politics that the floor for the conservatives is much lower than the floor for the liberals.
00:15:49.500The liberals can't fall below where Ignatieff took them in the low 30s.
00:15:54.220I keep looking at polls from all sorts of different regions around the country, as both of you have.
00:16:01.000I can see the liberals going down to five seats, 10 seats, 15 seats, like being all but wiped out.
00:16:08.820The latest Ipsos poll has them at 15% in British Columbia.
00:16:16.480And I hear from grumpy people out your way, Lauren, that always blame everything on Ontario and Quebec for voting in the liberals.
00:16:24.380But if you look at Justin Trudeau's success, it has included a strong showing in British Columbia.
00:16:29.540And now he's in third place, like far back third place.
00:16:35.320Chris, this is, this is, he has the real risk of going below Iggy level.
00:16:42.380Ignatieff actually pulled in 19% of the popular vote.
00:16:45.220I mean, I'm looking at it right now, which is astonishing to me when I look at that.
00:16:51.240Um, that was still 34 seats, but, um, yeah, like it's, it's, it's, there's no telling how low it can go.
00:17:01.320And, and to that, to that idea, the tariff thing, I mean, Canadian politicians always do this.
00:17:07.680They always say, well, we'll have to retaliate.
00:17:09.560But to me, it all, it completely undermines the message.
00:17:11.840They're saying, well, if you, if you impose 25% tariffs on us, that's going to hurt American workers, right?
00:17:18.340It's going to hurt, uh, it's going to make things more expensive for Americans at the till.
00:17:22.660But then we say, well, we're going to retaliate.
00:17:24.240So what, oh, well, so we'll make more things more expensive for Canadians at the till from, from American goods.
00:17:32.360What you need is leadership and people with smart arguments and, and, and, and with Trump negotiating skills and an understanding of how his brain works.
00:17:44.040And we're letting it get under our skin that he talks about Canada as the 51st state off for crying out loud and deal with what his main issues were drug and illegal immigrant flooding into the United States.
00:18:00.780Let's jump on that in a minute, but let's, let, let's just stay with the fact for a moment that, um, all of this is happening with the liberal party at this point.
00:18:09.620And Justin Trudeau is nowhere to be found.
00:18:17.220He's spoken to, um, uh, uh, Christmas party for liberal donors of the Laurier club.
00:18:23.380Then he spoke the next night, made fun of the whole situation at a, uh, Christmas party for liberal staffers.
00:18:31.360Um, this is happening at a time of, of great national crisis and, and, and Trudeau, you know, as much as we may enjoy all of this, um, this is going to hurt us in a very big way.
00:18:48.920Well, I mean, he canceled all his year end media interviews.
00:18:52.100I've never seen that, which is, which is just like sending up a balloon that says, you know, help, like we're screwed.
00:19:01.120I mean, why would you, if you're going to hang on, you do the interviews.
00:19:09.460I mean, all he does is all he, all he knows how to do is talk.
00:19:13.400Look, look deep into people's eyes and talk.
00:19:16.460Uh, if he's not even going to talk, what is he in this for?
00:19:20.760Do you think he's going to stick around?
00:19:23.100Um, I, I would take the fact that he's doing the cabinet shuffle as, you know, a proof point that he, he doesn't plan on resigning anytime soon.
00:19:54.100They've been saying that to each other now for two or three years.
00:19:57.620The big cabinet shuffle in July of 2023 was all about changing the communications, not changing the policies, not changing the strategies, just changing the ministers who would go out and take the message to the people because they were firmly convinced.
00:20:11.000And I think they're firmly convinced today that their policies are the very best policies for Canada.
00:20:17.220And all that's getting in the way is their own communications failures.
00:20:23.080But more than that, well, there's disinformation on the Internet.
00:20:26.400That's why we have to regulate what's on the Internet, because nobody's listening to what we're doing.
00:20:31.340It's utter rubbish, but I think he is caught up in all of that and really does believe that he is the best leader for the time and that if he can just weather this, eventually people will see that Polyev is a bad man and Singh isn't as good as he is.
00:20:49.840And, you know, in Quebec, then the BQ don't have the same to offer that they do.
00:20:55.980And I would give him more than a 50-50 betting chance of sticking around.
00:21:01.500It would require, as I said before, it would require the caucus to sack up and refuse to do his bidding.
00:22:18.500I've never seen this kind of tumult in a caucus that didn't lead to somebody going.
00:22:28.080Yeah, I'll say this about the Martin guys who pushed Trudgen out.
00:22:33.900They at least put their faces and their names out there.
00:22:36.520And they went in front of cameras and microphones and spoke to reporters.
00:22:40.180And they said, well, this is why the guy should go.
00:22:42.180And then you were talking earlier, Lauren, about how there's nobody there that can say, hey, boss, time's up, time to go.
00:22:50.280I've spoken to Stephen LeDrew about this extensively.
00:22:53.940LeDrew was the party president for the Liberals at that time.
00:22:57.560And he's told me about driving up to Ottawa to go tell Trudgen, it's time to go.
00:23:03.640And he said it was very nerve wracking for him to do that.
00:23:07.320And Trudgen said, yeah, but you look at the polls, I'm going to win.
00:23:09.960Well, he said, yes, but I'm required to hold a leadership review vote by the party constitution.
00:23:16.000And the Martin guys have completely taken over the party and they're going to beat you.
00:23:20.300That's that's the way that Kretchen ended up leaving, albeit with an 18 month runway.
00:23:25.840Trudeau, I like so he's got a few MPs saying you got to go.
00:23:30.740But not I mean, when when they push Kretchen out, he was at 40 percent in the polls.
00:23:37.360Trudeau's at 20 percent and they can't even get half a caucus to say, get lost, buddy.
00:23:42.440Yeah, I was struck by Anthony House's father, who's a relatively independent minded Montreal MP, who sort of said he had this comment over the sometime in the last, I don't know, 72 hours.
00:23:54.920I mean, time has lost all meaning over the last week.
00:23:58.100But he said he said Justin Trudeau's best day as prime minister will be better than Pierre Polyev's.
00:24:05.740Sorry, Justin Trudeau's worst day as prime minister will be better than Pierre Polyev's best day as prime minister.
00:24:11.520But I think it would be better if we had a new liberal leader.
00:24:15.480And it's like, how many options do you think are on the table here?
00:24:59.500But the liberals just didn't go to the ballot boxes.
00:25:02.280And I think that that's what you're going to see.
00:25:03.660If this chaos continues and an election is called without a clear leader for a new clear leader for the liberals, you're going to see that.
00:25:13.160There are a lot of people who say, well, I won't vote for Polyev.
00:25:15.880But they won't go to the polls either.
00:25:18.900And a lot of liberals are going to lose in three-way races because none of their supporters come up.
00:26:34.760So Trudeau since Monday has pretty much been absent, AWOL, we've said.
00:26:39.960And maybe that's not such a bad thing because the week before he had come out twice in public and, well, angered the Americans in the middle of this, you know, crisis that we're seeing.
00:26:50.700And on the Monday in Halifax, he had spoken about how Americans had voted for change for the sake of change.
00:26:59.460And Canadians shouldn't do that because we need to be smarter and make good choices in implying Americans didn't.
00:27:05.220And then the next day he gives a speech to equal voice and says how awful it is that Americans chose yet again not to elect a woman as president.
00:27:15.800Rich coming from the guy that beat four women to become liberal leader.
00:27:18.920Maybe he should have bowed out when he saw there was a woman on the ballot.
00:27:22.020But anyways, he laments Kamala Harris losing to Donald Trump.
00:27:26.500And that makes all kinds of headlines in the United States.
00:27:30.140So maybe it's good that Trudeau is shutting up.
00:27:33.220But the fact is we need leadership at this point.
00:27:35.700Did either of you have Doug Ford as Captain Canada in this situation and, you know, with a strong supporting second role by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith?
00:27:47.860Because Ontario's Premier and Alberta's Premier, two folks who are not exactly allies of Justin Trudeau, are effectively doing his job at this point.
00:27:57.020I mean, you know, provincial premiers are more known for sloughing off their problems on Ottawa than adopting them as their own.
00:28:59.480So that's the only relationship they have.
00:29:01.180Yeah, but I can see how Trump might, you know, respect Ford a little bit.
00:29:12.100So I but, you know, look, I mean, you see these things with with in Alberta with with Danielle Smith essentially kind of adopting border control as one of her own issues.
00:29:25.100I mean, that's not the way the country is supposed to work.
00:29:27.900But but but this is this is what happens when you have a complete leadership vacuum.
00:29:31.660But yeah, that really surprised me that the provincial government out here decided to spend almost 30 million dollars hiring 51 border security sheriffs, fix fix them up with all weather drones and dispatchers and vehicles.
00:29:51.100Like, it's a genuine border security force for a 298 kilometer long.
00:29:58.440We don't have a huge long border with the United States because the skinny part of Alberta is down there at the bottom.
00:30:04.160But but but this basically was her saying, look, the Americans are threatening us with tariffs because we're letting in too many illegal immigrants and and too many drug dealers.
00:30:44.820But anyways, I had a chance to do a sit down interview with Danielle Smith that people can find on on the Sun's YouTube page.
00:30:51.180But she she told me straight up, you know, I was giving her kudos for this.
00:30:55.860And she said they actually started this about a year and a half ago before Trump's border threats because of all the fentanyl going back and forth across the border.
00:31:04.940And so that was the genesis of this plan.
00:31:08.180And she said we had a running head start by the time Trump showed up and said this.
00:31:23.240You're getting these super labs set up and that it is increasingly becoming a problem.
00:31:28.940She said the migrant issue is a big issue in eastern Canada and especially Quebec, right near where Tom Homan, the Ontario and Quebec border area where Tom Homan, Trump's new borders are is from in western New York.
00:32:31.980I mean, even if the most fentanyl currently coming into the United States doesn't come from Canada, that doesn't mean that it couldn't increase in the future because we know that there's more domestic capacity coming online.
00:32:45.300So to speak, in these in these in these super labs, I mean, the border is is one of those problems that we've just always ignored.
00:32:55.500And I think to me, it's always seemed ridiculous that we don't have some kind of common perimeter, some kind of harmonized visa rules or refugee rules or or whatever.
00:33:07.700Quite apart from anything else is because it's such a long border and neither country does a particularly good job.
00:33:13.320You know, it's it's it's it's hardly sealed on either side and it would require enormous resources to make secure.
00:33:24.960And with Trump, if you know, if Trump goes ahead with his his deportations and stuff, I mean, that's just going to that that's going to send people scrambling north, south, east, west.
00:33:36.220And we don't have any real capacity to do anything about it.
00:33:41.280And I noticed this week, one of the things was was the the Trudeau government said, well, we're we're we're going to they're proposing a was it a joint joint strike force or something?
00:33:54.040We'll work with Washington to do this.
00:33:55.940And it's like, no, that's that's not what he's asking for.
00:34:24.620One is the deterioration of governments in the Middle East.
00:34:29.960And we're seeing that with Syria right now.
00:34:31.940And the whole Arab Spring was on the discussion.
00:34:34.360But the real reason for the meeting and the news conference was Harper trying to work with Obama to harmonize things, just what Chris was talking about.
00:34:43.180And he wanted a fortress North America to secure the border so that Canadians weren't stopped.
00:34:52.460Now you've got the Americans saying, wait a minute, you let in or we've had 198,000 encounters, an 82 percent increase over the last couple of years.
00:35:02.76043,000 of them are Indian nationals that you let into your country on work visas or student visas who then came down to declare asylum in the U.S.
00:36:09.660And we have, as they will admit themselves, there are 4.9 million people in Canada whose visas will expire between now and the end of next year.
00:36:37.300Yeah, I mean, you'll sometimes hear people say, oh, like, well, we don't have exit controls, as if that's like, as if that sort of negates the complaint or negates the worry.
00:36:48.620Like, well, we don't have any way to know when these people leave.
00:36:52.300Like, I mean, it's, I mean, yeah, the number of people that need to leave, and I mean, look, it's true that they're not cutting immigration except relative to their own heights.
00:37:05.500But, I mean, they are projecting a smaller number, like a smaller population of Canadians by a little bit in the next couple of years, which is extraordinary for a liberal government.
00:37:18.080I mean, how badly has this government screwed up immigration that it's now out there saying, well, we need a smaller Canada?
00:37:33.060And, I mean, 4.9 million people, I mean, I remember looking at this a while back, like, that's a significant portion of the international flights that go in and out of Canada in a year.
00:37:44.680I mean, that would drive up airfares just trying to, all those people trying to go home.
00:37:52.440And I'm so sick, sorry to kind of go off here, but, like, I'm so sick of hearing about this immigration backlash that we're supposedly seeing in Canada.
00:38:03.700Oh, people are turning against immigrants.
00:38:05.500They're blaming immigrants for, you know, housing.
00:39:26.740And this is – so that's not just immigrants.
00:39:29.520Of course, I mean, if it was just immigrants overwhelming the system, the system would still be producing a lot more houses.
00:39:35.620But if you take a look, for instance, at the suburbs around Toronto, the cost that developers have to pay to municipalities just for the permission to build a house is somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 per house.
00:39:52.000So you've got to know that you're going to have a huge demand if you're going to risk that kind of money.
00:39:57.980And so there's lots wrong with the housing market, but the liberals took this flawed housing market and poured gasoline on it with all of the numbers that they've been in.
00:40:09.980It's interesting you said you're not anti-immigrant but pro-math.
00:40:13.120I was interviewing Pierre Polyev back at the beginning of September, and that's what he said.
00:40:17.840And he said it in scrums with the media as well.
00:40:20.180Well, somebody asked him about his – he said, well, I'm going to come up with a formula that looks at how many houses we're building, how many doctors we have, the capacity in our health system.
00:40:31.900We'll come up with a way, you know, to set a proper immigration target.
00:40:36.500And there's some comment about him being anti-immigrant.
00:41:29.860You know, and if you have – speaking of Sean Fraser, if you have a minor league third-line winger who suddenly decides to retire from the game, I'm not quite sure whether your favorite NHL hockey team cares.
00:41:49.260Well, I mean, the first thing – what is the first thing that people always say about Sean Fraser?
00:41:54.640It's that he's a good communicator, and that's, to me, just – that's everything about the liberals.
00:42:02.020You know, there were – supposedly the liberals were upset with Christian Freeland for not being able to communicate the economic policies well enough.
00:42:08.960I mean, they do not learn – I mean, she's not a good communicator.
00:42:34.940I was posting some stuff online about – oh, it was our front page at The Sun the other day.
00:42:40.480The headline was, It's Trudeauver, and I had people saying to me, wow, it's finally good of the mainstream media to notice that Trudeau's a problem.
00:42:51.280And I thought, I take it you've never read any of our publications.
00:42:56.600Let's talk about Pierre Polyev, because polls would say he's going to win.
00:43:40.600I mean, is he going to be the world's whiz-bang at dealing with Donald Trump?
00:43:45.140I don't know that, but he's going to be better at doing it than Justin Trudeau is, because he's a pragmatist.
00:43:53.820He's more realistic than, yes, he's got lots of strong ideological ideas, but he is more of a pragmatist than Trudeau ever was.
00:44:03.860Trudeau is an airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky, artsy type of guy, and that's never changed.
00:44:11.760That's why their wokeism with the liberals has done them in, because they don't know how to do anything practical.
00:44:18.840And my hope is that Polyev at least listens to people.
00:44:22.980For instance, we've been hearing in our business that for about two years, people at Immigration Canada were telling the liberals, you can't do this.
00:44:34.580You simply cannot let this many people in.
00:44:56.300Put not your trust in princes is my view.
00:44:58.640But it was back in April that Justin Trudeau himself said, beginning of April, he said, we're bringing in people faster than we can absorb.
00:45:08.680And I thought, wow, if only you knew someone that could do something about it.
00:45:12.600And it took him until, what, November to announce that he was doing something about it.
00:45:17.860And those announcements won't take effect for quite some time.
00:45:21.320Your thoughts, Chris, on Polyev and the job ahead of him and whether he's up to it.
00:45:28.940I think my impression of Trump with respect to Canada is that he actually understands how important the relationship is trade-wise.
00:45:41.560I mean, if you look at – like, Trudeau is someone who, if he was an American politician, I feel like Trump would have given a nickname and just –
00:46:21.640But when he wants to be mean-spirited and brutal, he's mean-spirited and brutal.
00:46:26.700I don't get that from, you know, as much as I don't think him and Trudeau have anything in common.
00:46:35.260I don't get any – I don't get real antipathy from Trump towards Trudeau.
00:46:41.860And I suspect that that will transfer over to Polyev.
00:46:44.680Like, I – you know, I think personal relationships are definitely very important for Trump.
00:46:50.040Like, you need to kiss the ring, so to speak.
00:46:54.160Like, hopefully as – not as unhumiliatingly as possible.
00:47:00.200But I don't see any reason why Polyev can't at least be as good, be a wash.
00:47:08.400And I could see lots of reasons why it would be better because, as Lawrence says, he's willing to take on – he's willing to actually – well, he believes that the problems that Trump sees actually exist, whereas Trudeau clearly just thinks they're fantasies that he has to deal with with a communication strategy.
00:47:25.860I'll give you one practical example of the liberals' inability to deal with real issues.
00:47:29.980In the fall fiscal update on Monday, they said they were going to spend $1.3 billion on border security.
00:47:55.580But at the same time, in the same fiscal update, they said this year and next, they're going to spend $600 million confiscating long guns from law-abiding Canadian gun owners.
00:48:10.780So they still haven't broken out of their woke, progressive mentality and looked at the real world.
00:48:19.460If you don't do something that satisfies the American administration, that we're doing the best we can to prevent illegal immigrants from going to the states, they're going to put tariffs on that, as you said early on in this, Brian, shave several points off of our GDP.
00:48:39.920If you don't confiscate law-abiding gun owners' guns, what are the Americans going to do?
00:48:46.460But other than that, it's not going to cost anything.
00:48:48.320But that's a higher priority for these guys than dealing with the border issue.
00:48:53.800Well, I mean, Canadians have a border issue, too, not least with guns.
00:48:58.020You know, the vast majority of guns used in crime in Canada come across the border from the United States.
00:49:04.100And, you know, it feels like twice a year we get an announcement from the federal government saying we're going to crack down on this, and nothing ever happens.
00:49:14.620Maybe that's a better place to spend $600 million.
00:49:16.900Yeah, I was going to say, that'd be a better spot for that $600 million.
00:49:20.580But, Lauren, I don't know why you think we would have any fiscal room to spend any money on the border.