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00:06:11.840You mentioned the change in tone and style.
00:06:15.820I've talked to several premiers about that, and they all give them high marks, but that
00:06:21.300might be because we lowered the bar so much with the past guy and the description that i've been
00:06:27.560given is that justin trudeau would show up late for meetings with the premiers uh not um not listen
00:06:35.160to them would lecture them for the first 20 minutes ignore what they said for the rest of
00:06:39.320the meeting and then leave early and mark carney shows up on time so much so that you know one
00:06:46.140premier I spoke with said they were doing a virtual meeting and they were just so used to
00:06:53.020Trudeau being late that they showed up a couple of minutes late. For example, the meeting was
00:07:00.660supposed to start at 11. They logged in at 11.02 as the second person. And the first person there
00:07:06.380was Mark Carney waiting for the other people to join. So I think he's getting a lot of high marks
00:07:15.560there, but you said that our economy has been stagnating for a long time. And you mentioned
00:07:20.620GDP per capita. There was a big debate a little, you know, a couple of weeks back,
00:07:25.700the Globe and Mail did a big takeout that Canada is poorer than Alabama. And those of us that have
00:07:31.980been paying attention to GDP per capita for some time weren't shocked by that. But it sparked a
00:07:37.840conversation saying, okay, how did this happen? But also is GDP per capita a good measurement of
00:07:45.840the economy? And lots of folks came out saying, that's a horrible way to measure the economy.
00:07:51.020You know, what about our healthcare? Well, you know, that's not doing so great at the moment
00:07:55.700as well. And there's other things, but is GDP per capita a useful tool, one of many useful tools?
00:08:03.520is it a good measuring stick for an economy it doesn't tell us everything we want to know but
00:08:10.240it tells us a lot uh gdp per capita is correlated with a lot of the things that we care about
00:08:15.700uh it's it's correlated with employment it's correlated with wages it's correlated with how
00:08:21.440able we are to afford the necessities of life and and and going beyond the necessities of life
00:08:26.660one of the things that's convenient is that it's measured in very similar ways uh pretty much
00:08:31.460around the world. So if you want to see how you're doing relative to the United States,
00:08:35.400if you want to see how you're doing relative to Europe, it's a number that everybody kind
00:08:40.600of understands or at least accepts, whether we all understand it or not. That's another question.
00:08:47.120But if you want to compare, for example, growth in average earnings of people who are working
00:08:54.240over time, GDP per capita is going to give you a pretty good read on that. And I like it partly
00:09:00.900because of the comparability around the world. And you're able to say, what is it that seems to
00:09:06.580support high living standards and growing living standards over time? And that's where you get to
00:09:11.340what I was talking about with respect to capital investment. And the problem, it's a little bit of
00:09:18.780a boiling frog syndrome. This decline has been going on for a long time. And the way that it
00:09:24.740sort of shows up in your daily life um it's a bit of at one remove from some of the key drivers of
00:09:32.160the economy over time you go to the supermarket you notice that coffee's gotten way more expensive
00:09:36.500and you notice that beef's gotten way more expensive or if you're the gas pump lately
00:09:40.000you notice that up 13.9 percent last month well if our wages were growing at the rate that they
00:09:47.740used to you know if you were getting two or three percent real growth in your earnings so
00:09:52.520on top of inflation you wouldn't experience those things the same way and i think mark carney has
00:09:58.880talked a good game i do want to go back i mean thank you for for that comment about the meetings
00:10:04.320with the premiers i think the tone at the top matters a great deal one of the things that is
00:10:09.320frustrating about the federal government over a long period of time now is how poorly a lot of
00:10:14.900it functions uh the cra love them or hate them uh you know they're they at least there are some
00:10:21.540metrics out there that they're trying to beat, not always successfully. But other parts of our
00:10:27.920economy or the federal government's apparatus that you once would have said work tolerably well,
00:10:33.580like immigration, it's a complete mess. And when it comes to making coherent policy and delivering
00:10:40.880on time, and for example, this whole project with the major projects office and trying to clear the
00:10:48.720way for infrastructure projects. I mean, we're simply not seeing the kind of action that we
00:10:53.580would need to see. And I think it's very helpful to have a prime minister who sets that kind of
00:10:58.020tone at the top, but he must find it. I haven't spoken to him about this and I won't put words
00:11:04.100into his mouth, but he does have a reputation for being a bit impatient. And I imagine it's
00:11:10.260enormously frustrating for him to be trying to make this machinery move a little better.
00:11:14.200And maybe one of the things that people are responding to positively in this change of tone is that they, you know, here's a guy who occasionally he lets it show. And it's not a good thing for him to be, you know, snapping at people in public in its own right. But it certainly shows that he's motivated and that he's trying to make a difference.
00:11:31.820And I think whatever whatever our views are about some of his priorities or, you know, if you might be partisan one way or the other, it would certainly be nice to see a prime minister who's a little more able to make the things that need to happen happen.
00:11:46.380We want the CRA, you know, the tax side of things to work well. We want the federal government to be sending out its payments on time. We want them to be paying the public servants, whether they're paid too much or too little. But at least, you know, that ought to be working. We want the immigration system to work a little better.
00:12:00.680And these are all areas where the federal government has struggled for a long time.
00:12:04.820Well, the Phoenix pay system, which is how civil servants are paid, has been a disaster for more than a decade.
00:12:14.240And I lived in Ottawa when that was really a huge issue.
00:12:18.440And well, if you live in Ottawa, you know a lot of civil servants.
00:12:22.540And I talked to people who were not getting paid for weeks or months.
00:12:26.680I talked to other civil servants who suddenly had $100,000 show up in their bank account,
00:12:31.820and they called and said, you've got to take this back and it wouldn't work.
00:12:36.040That was a pay system that was put into development under the Harper government.
00:12:46.080They were told it wasn't ready, so they didn't implement it.
00:12:49.520When the Trudeau government came in, they said, well, just go with it.
00:12:53.900And 10 years later, it still isn't fixed. And civil servants aren't being paid properly. That's a government that's putting up with incompetence as opposed to, you know, I agree with you. The new guy, such as he is, still a new guy a year in, doesn't seem to want to put up with that level of incompetence.
00:13:16.440Um, you know, I, I, I got the, the access to information document showing that the Trudeau
00:18:47.160For individuals, yes. And they do run together. I mean, when you look at the parts of the
00:18:52.100economy that are really booming in the united states right now and you think about what's
00:18:56.040happening in the tech economy i think you can make an argument that the taxation system both
00:19:01.860for individuals and for businesses matters because the the entrepreneurs that are moving to the united
00:19:09.700states and that's a problem in canada that we've faced for years but it seems to have become more
00:19:15.120intense lately uh they're they're responding to both of those things they're responding to
00:19:20.660the ease with which you can build up your capital, how well you're treated if you reinvest in the
00:19:26.880business, and also what the personal tax rates look like. So you made the point that I just want
00:19:34.500to come in and support you on this point about what I would describe as the elasticity of the
00:19:40.380tax base. The corporate income tax as a share of GDP, it doesn't change that much. When you raise
00:19:46.220the rates the base shrinks and you you raise less per uh you know a unit of activity there when you
00:19:52.600lower the rate uh then the base expands it's the same with high income earners it's a losing game
00:19:58.920to raise those marginal rates because you do see the base shrink and one of the reasons it shrinks
00:20:04.360if you're canadian is the activity goes to the united states so we really need to get some
00:20:09.200urgency about that one of the things and just to take it back to mark carney and the the change in
00:20:14.740tone, I'm sorry that when it comes to some of the fiscal messaging, that he hasn't done more of what
00:20:23.200he has done when it comes to major projects, getting the investments moving, getting the
00:20:27.380economy moving, and diversifying trade. Because in those areas, he has said very clearly some
00:20:32.920things that people needed to hear. And even if it's taking a long time to get it going, you can
00:20:37.940see the effect of that kind of verbal leadership, and maybe just a bit more than verbal, when it
00:20:44.500comes to the the what the federal government is talking about with respect to trade diversification
00:20:49.020and getting some major projects moving he should be saying the same things on the fiscal front
00:20:54.040because if the federal government if he doesn't lead on that then the objections and you cited a
00:20:59.420few of them some of the things that people are saying uh that's that's what everybody is hearing
00:21:03.780and we're not going to get past this idea that yeah we should hammer the rich harder and if they
00:21:08.780leave, big deal. I think that's a big gap in federal fiscal leadership that Mark Carney
00:21:16.140should turn around. We hear a lot, if you pay attention to American media, we hear a lot about
00:21:22.680how California is a high tax jurisdiction and a lot of people are leaving. They recently brought
00:21:27.640in a billionaire's tax and a whole bunch of people in the tech world and Hollywood moved elsewhere.
00:21:33.740They made their principal residence elsewhere.
00:21:36.540I did a couple of quick calculations maybe six months ago.
00:21:42.360And, you know, Ontario's not great, but not bad within the Canadian scenario.
00:21:48.680I think Alberta has the best tax rates for high income earners.
00:21:52.960But just someone making in the U.S. to be considered 1%, you've got to be making almost a million dollars a year or more.
00:22:01.360In Canada, you get there just over 200,000. We do not have high income earners, in part because we punish you for earning a high income. So I did a $250,000 personal income tax compared Ontario to high tax California.
00:22:19.960in high tax California, you would keep more of what you earned than in Ontario and pretty much
00:22:26.520every other jurisdiction in, in this country. We are on the personal side, completely non-competitive.
00:22:33.780Do you see Mark Carney making any moves in that direction? Um, you know, I've never had a
00:22:41.600conversation with the man about this sort of thing. So I don't know. I've read values, which
00:22:47.760doesn't necessarily drill down on that, but what would your assessment be? Would he look and say,
00:22:53.260look, we need to increase investment. We need to make it more competitive for corporations,
00:23:00.580but we also need to make it more competitive for high income earners. Do you see him ever
00:23:05.220lowering the corporate or personal income tax rate at the high level, as opposed to the low
00:23:11.080hanging fruit is always at the lowest level, which everyone gets that. But do you see him
00:23:18.120potentially ever saying the hard part out loud, which is we're unfair to people at the top. We
00:23:24.880want to attract and keep these people. Let's lower rights. I'm sure he thinks about us. He knows as
00:23:32.000well as anyone what talented people earn on the Canadian side of the border versus the US side of
00:23:39.540the border and how much they get to keep after tax. He's worked in international businesses
00:23:43.720and he, you know, he has kids. Everybody that I know of thinks about the attractions for their
00:23:53.980kids of staying in Canada versus going and working somewhere else. And so it's on his,
00:23:59.940I guarantee that it's on his mind. I can't read his mind in detail, but I guarantee he thinks
00:24:06.280about these things. The problem that I have, and this is where I would not give a high mark
00:24:11.580to the new federal government, if we can still call it that, is on fiscal leadership.
00:24:19.940The federal budget is showing massive deficits as far ahead as the eye can see,
00:24:27.300and they're taking more and more risks as well. When you run up high debt, you run an obvious
00:24:32.720risk that the interest rate is going to go up and that's going to squeeze you. But also they're
00:24:37.340using their balance sheet very aggressively. They're investing in stuff that I suspect is
00:24:42.580going to turn out not to be very good investments. A lot of the stuff in green energy we know about
00:24:48.320on defense, we're just getting started. But I'm very concerned that the federal government's
00:24:55.420fiscal situation is headed nowhere good. And that's one of those areas where you would really
00:25:01.680like to see a bit more leadership on the part of the prime minister to say, we've got to turn this
00:25:07.400around. Instead, if you just look at the baselines for spending that were set by the Trudeau
00:25:12.920government, this current government is overshooting them just as the Trudeau government repeatedly
00:25:19.120overshot its own baselines. So if you don't do something about that, how are you going to find
00:25:24.160the room to lower taxes? He's got to get control over that spending. He's got to get control over
00:25:30.140that borrowing. He was critical of the Trudeau government for, I mean, in his own words, I don't
00:25:38.800have the direct quote in front of me, but he was critical saying that they increased spending on
00:25:44.020average 9% a year. And then he was bringing in his austerity budget. And when you look at total
00:25:51.360spending, not just program, because I believe you have to look at total spending, including what
00:25:56.360were spending on servicing the debt, total spending, his austerity budget still increased
00:26:02.840spending by 7%. That's unsustainable. Yes. One of the things that really
00:26:08.960disappointed me was this latest move to turn the GST credit into a renamed benefit and having
00:26:18.940groceries. Other people have pointed this out. I'll just underline it. Putting groceries into
00:26:25.420the name of the benefit was all the more ludicrous because there is no GST on groceries.
00:26:33.280And this is an increase in an income support program that when you're running these big
00:26:39.440deficits, it's paid for with borrowed money. And so it's just viewed in isolation. It's an
00:26:45.860unsustainable thing. You're giving this new kind of enhanced welfare program. You're putting it in
00:26:51.680place on the basis of money that you're borrowing. So you know that in the long run, you're going to
00:26:57.420have to renege on some of these promises. That was a crazy move under current circumstances,
00:27:04.040and it was an unforced error. There was no reason that they had to do it that way. There were other
00:27:08.220things that they could have done to address the affordability issue. Such as what? What else
00:27:13.780could you have done? Because I would argue that if you're paying for people's groceries,
00:27:19.100If a government has to pay for your groceries, that's an admission of failure, that the economy
00:33:37.020Despite what the Minister of Artificial Intelligence had to say in the House of Commons recently, the unemployment rate in Canada is not rising due to the war in Iran.
00:33:47.500Last week or so, the unemployment rate rose to 6.7%. We added 347,000 people to the population, 15 and over, that they measure for the unemployment rate over the last year.
00:34:03.78082,000 entered the labor force. There were 51,000 who got a job and 30,000 were added to the
00:34:11.640unemployment rolls. But when you look at where those 51,000 new jobs came from, it was almost
00:34:17.820all the private sector, 49,000 private sector jobs added between February, 2025 and February,
00:34:24.3602026 bill um is that the sign of a healthy economy it has been a very disturbing to see
00:34:34.880how the uh growth of public sector employment in canada has outpaced growth in private sector
00:34:42.160employment uh and so much of it is deliberate i mean it's i think just to give people a quick
00:34:49.700comparison, it was 49,000 were added in the public sector, 49,900, 22,900 were added in the private
00:35:00.100sector, but there was a drop in self-employed people of 21,000. So pretty much the only growth
00:35:07.600was in the public sector. Yeah. And over time, over the last decade, the public sector has
00:35:14.460increased its share of employment in Canada fairly relentlessly. I mean, we're now back to
00:35:20.780where we were ahead of all the fiscal problems that we ran into in the 1990s. So the progress
00:35:26.820that was made in slimming down the public sector has essentially reversed since then.
00:35:32.800The federal government is particularly at fault here. I have some sympathy with the provincial
00:35:39.320governments. We could run our healthcare system more efficiently, it's true, but over time it
00:35:43.960does make sense that there'd be more employment delivering health care services because the
00:35:49.040population is getting older and we're able to treat things more than we used to be able to do.
00:35:54.460Education, again, maybe we could be more efficient with what we're doing in that sector,
00:36:00.100but it's very labor intensive. You do need people providing education and there are a lot of
00:36:05.760frontline services, especially, you know, provincial, municipal level, however efficiently
00:36:09.600they're delivered there's no question you need cops on the street you need people out there
00:36:14.240working on the roads the reason I go on at some length about that is because the federal government
00:36:20.040is so different the federal government has a few duties that do require people on the front lines
00:36:26.020and so we would miss them if they didn't provide us with defense in fact we'd like them to do more
00:36:31.900of that there are certain types of things when it comes to administering things at the border
00:36:36.080administering the tax system and so on we might not love them but they're necessary and we need
00:36:40.860them done and they require people but the explosion in employment at the federal level
00:36:45.360so much of it has been in sort of policy departments these aren't frontline people
00:36:50.160these are people that are right they're not delivering us services they're they're not
00:36:55.740delivering services and i think that the federal government is actually long past the point where
00:37:01.480adding a person uh adds any uh output at all i think they've gotten so big that it's dysfunctional
00:37:08.680and you've got a lot of people who are just using up each other's time uh uh you know on in
00:37:14.500communications uh uh outward looking communications because the federal government is such a
00:37:19.420communications oriented organization rather than service delivery uh writing each other emails um
00:37:25.180they they could actually do a better job if they were slimmed down the trudeau government ramped
00:37:30.940up hiring like crazy. I think perhaps it was quite... I think it was up 40% under Trudeau.
00:37:37.500Yes, the head count expanded dramatically. And there is no way you can argue, and the
00:37:43.320Parliamentary Budget Office had some very strongly worded comments about this, that there was
00:37:48.000anything like a proportional increase in the value of services that we got. And so you could trim
00:37:53.820that way back. And Mark Carney has talked about that. The difficulty that he faces is that when
00:37:59.880you turn to the public sector and you say, okay, now where would you trim? There's an old story
00:38:06.580about how the RCMP's musical ride was first on the chopping block back in the 1990s. It's kind
00:38:12.800of a vivid example. They will not serve up to you the areas that will be the easiest to chop. They
00:38:18.460will serve up to you some of the painful areas first. And so we're hearing stories about the
00:38:24.000federal government cutting back in areas that we would probably say are useful to get, like
00:38:28.680statistics or some of the fundamental research that they do. And that's something that Mark
00:38:35.560Carney has to get a handle on because it is crowding out the private sector. I have said
00:38:41.120already, and I'll say it again, we have a problem with private sector investment and productivity
00:38:46.640in this economy. One of the reasons that we are seeing people losing their jobs in the private
00:38:51.880sector is because we are losing competitiveness. We've got a big trade war going on with the
00:38:57.060United States, as everybody knows. We've got other parts of the world that have continued to power
00:39:01.680ahead, and we're not equipping our workers properly. And one of the reasons we're not
00:39:05.500equipping our workers properly is because the public sector is crowding it out. For every dollar
00:39:11.180that you spend on something in the public sector, consumption of all the things that governments
00:39:18.160use up, including paying people, that's a dollar less that's available for private sector
00:39:24.300consumption and private sector investment. So there's a bit of a slow strangle going on here
00:39:28.660when it comes to the private sector in Canada, just getting less room to breathe, less nutrition,
00:39:34.300if you like, and less money available for investment because of the growth of the public
00:39:38.420sector. Can you explain a bit more how that crowding out works? Why does the public sector
00:39:47.640spending so much hurt the private sector? How and why? If you think of an economy that's operating
00:39:55.680over time at capacity, so leaving aside the effective cycles and with inflation, you know,
00:40:01.300having been around target now, it's clear the Canadian economy on average has been operating
00:40:06.120close to capacity for a while. So under those circumstances, if one thing grows, something else
00:40:11.300has to shrink. We can only produce so much output at a time. And what concerns me in Canada is that
00:40:17.120uh we have become a very consumption oriented economy uh the the government of course they
00:40:24.040talk about investment they like to use the word investment but when you look at what government
00:40:28.080is doing mostly it's it's providing uh you know it's it's paying wages and salaries of public
00:40:33.540servants uh it's using things up uh the amount of actual investment that yields lasting benefits
00:40:41.320over time in the public sector is actually quite small um in the private sector you've got
00:40:46.240investment that happens in plants and equipment and machinery uh that the businesses invest in
00:40:52.920uh you you also in canada this is a big deal for us there's a lot of investment in housing
00:40:57.500you add all those things up it all has to it all has to work out right we can produce so much and
00:41:03.440so you look okay how much of it's getting consumed how much of it's getting invested one way or
00:41:07.120another and over time what we've seen is that the public sector has just generally gotten bigger
00:41:11.960one of the things that really concerns me about all this deficit spending is that the same thing
00:41:17.800is happening in a way that's a little harder to see if the government tells you oh we're going to
00:41:22.060you know provide this new income support and we're going to pay for it with borrowed money
00:41:25.440then at the time there's no additional tax raise to pay for it you get to the end of the year you
00:41:30.620might have in your portfolio you got a few more government bonds you feel richer but the country
00:41:35.320isn't richer because they took that money and they turned it you know they they gave it away
00:41:38.860and most of it got consumed. So over time, it really does matter how much you invest versus
00:41:43.980how much you consume. And as the government sector has gotten bigger, we've seen less
00:41:47.640investment and more consumption. Well, the amount that we're spending on
00:41:54.000that government overspending is unreal. This year, it's going to be $55.6 billion in this
00:42:03.440fiscal year, that's more than a billion a week just to pay off the minimum payment on the national
00:42:09.880credit card. Next year, it'll be 60 billion, then going up to 66, then 71. That crowds out
00:42:17.000spending that could be going into actual frontline services. Yes, it does. So Mark Carney promised
00:42:26.140he would get that under control and his own projections say he won't. No, that is an area
00:42:32.540where there has been no significant change in direction we've had two problems that have
00:42:39.840continued one is that the projections were always kind of irresponsible yeah the ratio of debt to
00:42:46.900gdp is going to level off after a while and then go down sometime in the out years so that was never
00:42:52.900any kind of sense of urgency there's nothing like a in my in my view there's nothing like a balanced
00:42:57.860budget to exercise some discipline. If you're targeting the debt to GDP ratio, that doesn't
00:43:03.280speak to anybody. That's not a serious constraint. So that was one problem. The other problem was
00:43:07.360that they always overspent. The projections we learned over time just weren't anything that you
00:43:13.760could bank on because you knew that at the end of the year, they would jam all this spending in at
00:43:18.700the last minute. And so that has continued and that's very disturbing to see. I think that what
00:43:24.960is on many people's minds right now is they look around the world and they say, well, everybody's
00:43:29.380doing it. Just look at the fiscal inferno that's burning south of the border. That's true. But to
00:43:35.320me, that doesn't say, oh, it's okay for us to be the same. What that says is there's way too much
00:43:41.260hyperextension of governments all around the world. That's why we're seeing long-term interest
00:43:45.940rates moving up. And it may be that Canada doesn't look as bad as the United States. Maybe we can
00:43:50.660borrow at a lower rate than they can but that's going to be pretty cold comfort if the rate on
00:43:55.68030-year bonds goes up you know three four five six seven eight percent which can easily happen
00:44:00.840it's happened in the past yeah maybe we're borrowing at a lower rate than they are but
00:44:05.260all of a sudden that burden that you mentioned is going to get you know one quarter one third bigger
00:44:10.460and at that point you're talking about serious tax hikes or program cuts just to stop yourself
00:44:16.100from getting further into the hole yeah i the american overspending is out of control but
00:44:23.820unlike them we're not the reserve currency of the world we don't have that sort of uh leverage
00:44:31.140that they do how much of the fiscal problems the economic problems that we're facing
00:44:39.440are a result of the trade war with the U.S., the tariffs, etc., and how much of it is just
00:44:48.180bad policy? Because the government tends to try and say it's due to what's happening in Washington
00:44:59.080or in the last little while, they blame both the housing prices being so high and the unemployment
00:45:06.060rate being so high on the war in Iran, which started after the statistics they were rebutting
00:45:12.380had been collected. But how much of this is our own fault versus external factors?
00:45:18.920Well, I would say that it's mostly our own fault. It's true that Donald Trump's trade war is hurting
00:45:24.880us. Businesses do not like uncertainty with Canada as exposed to the United States as it is.
00:45:30.660you can see the impact on confidence. And I'm sure that that has, there are clearly some sectors
00:45:36.560like steel, for example, where it is doing a lot of damage. But this problem that we have started
00:45:42.340more than a decade ago. And so Donald Trump was not president during most of that time.
00:45:48.740And when he was president, he wasn't hitting us with the same kind of tariffs that he
00:45:52.620has in his second term. So you have to look much more broadly to understand why Canada has been
00:45:58.480in such a mess for a while. And I think it's a bit of a problem that we've got Donald Trump to
00:46:03.120blame it on now. If it were spurring us more effectively to action, get another pipeline to
00:46:08.140the West Coast, maybe even get some fossil fuels shippable off the East Coast, that's harder to do.
00:46:14.300But we're certainly seeing reasons why you would want to do that now. Maybe it's going to do us
00:46:19.820a little bit of good. In the short run, though, what it ought to be making us think about is,
00:46:26.180you know, what can we control? Well, we can't control Donald Trump. We can certainly control
00:46:31.460our own corporate tax rate. We can control the speed with which we issue permits for various
00:46:37.980things. We can control our impulses to slap silly taxes on things. I thought earlier we might get
00:46:48.240onto the impulse that causes governments to just do things to hurt rich people because it sort of
00:46:54.280feels good and it's good populism like slapping taxes on expensive boats and airplanes and ships
00:46:59.140and then you you pull back on it when you realize uh how much harm is done uh all kinds of things
00:47:04.780they brought in the the a luxury tax on planes and boats and such um there was a boatmaker in
00:47:12.460the Kelowna area that packed up shop and moved to Texas Bombardier didn't sell a single plane
00:47:18.160in canada uh for their you know cry me a river rich people didn't buy jets uh they didn't buy
00:47:25.880a private plane well those those private planes employ an awful lot of people making good money
00:47:33.620out at uh plants in mississauga and montreal so we we hurt ourselves with those bad policies
00:47:41.300we we did and we backed off or the government backed off uh when uh the the harm that you
00:47:47.400talked about became evident, and it was predicted ahead of time. Other countries have tried taxes
00:47:51.960like that, again, for populist reasons, and they pull back on them because they realize the damage
00:47:57.760that it does and the silliness of it. Taxing expensive cars, well, that looked okay, I suppose,
00:48:04.760when the price of cars was a lot lower, but now they're still talking about switching us all over
00:48:09.080to EVs at some point, which are a whole lot more expensive. So, they'll back away on that one too.
00:48:14.600those are all self-inflicted wounds none of that stuff needed to happen so i i i do think donald
00:48:20.500trump is doing us harm uh and i do think it would be good for us to respond to the harm that he's
00:48:25.360doing us with some of the things that we could do to diversify our trade and make ourselves more
00:48:30.540competitive okay if we're going to face a 10 tariff on something to the united states that
00:48:34.620used to be tariffed at zero well let's make ourselves 10 more competitive and then we'll
00:48:39.520just suck it up and we'll still be employed and we'll still be exporting. The rot started back in
00:48:45.7402015. And I think that to say that everything that's gone wrong with the Canadian economy and
00:48:51.640the stagnation of our living standards since then is all the fault of Donald Trump, that's just
00:48:55.440getting it all wrong. Yeah, it's frustrating trying to make arguments for how we can improve
00:49:04.460when that easy argument back is, but Trump. And, you know, even on something as, you know,
00:49:13.600core is food inflation. Look, the overall inflation rate went down in February because
00:49:19.020gas prices dropped compared to February of 2025. That has clearly reversed in the past couple of
00:49:25.740weeks. But food inflation has been persistent and we're persistently higher. And you say, well,
00:49:31.600well, we need to fix this. Here are some ideas how to fix it. Don't you know that Donald Trump
00:49:36.840is hurting us? That cannot be our answer. Well, because you mentioned food inflation,
00:49:43.800I'll mention supply management. I mean, we have cartels that keep the price of dairy products
00:49:48.580and poultry and eggs higher than they would be if we had a freer market. This is going back
00:49:56.880decades now, but Canada used to be a huge dairy exporter. Cheese used to be our second most
00:50:02.840valuable export after timber. It's hard to believe now. Then supply management came along and we
00:50:08.820now have this very struggling, inefficient industry. Donald Trump and the American dairy
00:50:15.100farmers would like to see us lower some of the barriers. They should get their wish. They'd
00:50:19.880suddenly find they got a fierce competitor on their hands, but it's harder to get rid of these
00:50:23.420things when you got donald trump uh uh doing what he's doing so we we have to get past that
00:50:29.780and i would love to see the federal government kind of seize the moment and make a few of these
00:50:36.020changes that are politically difficult on the very straightforward argument that we have to
00:50:40.900make ourselves more competitive we have to make ourselves more efficient and more resilient one
00:50:46.720of the things uh david crane had a piece uh just recently uh david and i argue about many things
00:50:54.980but i thought he had a nice suggestion that the prime minister ought to be providing us with kind
00:51:00.280of a state of the nation report card on how we are doing in a whole lot of areas including the
00:51:07.740ones that we've just been talking about and to sort of put those markers down uh to get his
00:51:14.160government to perform a little better. I'm not sure that's exactly how David would have put it.
00:51:19.960But I think somebody with Mark Carney's orientation, that kind of business background,
00:51:27.240I think he could do a lot if he were to say, here are the things that are going to be different
00:51:32.120in a year's time, in a couple of years' time. And that would get back to something we were
00:51:37.780talking about earlier in this conversation, which is the difficulty that he's making.
00:51:41.660yeah he attends meetings on time he wants accountability he wants the people around
00:51:46.360of him to be delivering around him to be delivering what they say they're going to deliver
00:51:50.500when they're supposed to and to do it right that's all great but to make that example you know sort
00:51:58.480of propagate through the federal government all of its agencies all of the things that it does
00:52:03.040down to the front line that's very hard and I think it would be useful for him to get out there
00:52:07.780and say, here are some indicators of performance where you're going to see a change for the better
00:52:12.260in a year's time, in a couple of years' time. He could do that still. He's got a bit of runway in
00:52:17.220front of him. And maybe that would make the example he's trying to set at the centre propagate a
00:52:22.200little better. All right. So a C from Bill Robson. Let us know what you think. Leave a comment. Great,
00:52:28.820the Prime Minister. Thanks for the time, Bill. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.