Juno News - February 04, 2025


Canadian premiers back down on retaliatory tariffs

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Chris Danielle Smith Pierre Poilievre Doug Ford Donald Trump Elon Musk Franco Roxham Road Bill C-63 Mulroney Ebby
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Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

168.63

Word count

1,961

Sentence count

121


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this week's episode, we discuss the fallout from Canada's trade relations with the United States, including the Canadian premiers' decision to strike back against the Trump administration's 25% tariff on Canadian crude oil exports to the U.S.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, let's talk about interprovincial trade barriers. Let's talk about, well, first, actually, let's talk about the premiers and all of the huffing and puffing that we saw in the last 72 hours. It's all kind of falling apart. So, you know, we have an election here in Ontario. Doug Ford is trying to get another majority mandate. And he was kind of out being the loudest with retaliatory measures against the trade bearers, you know, cancelling Starlink, saying that the LCBO, the liquor store in Ontario is no longer going to carry American whiskey or wine.
00:00:29.700 And then, of course, he had to undo all of that after things changed yesterday afternoon. Chris, what did you think of all of the premiers? You know, on the one hand, we're saying that tariffs are bad, that we don't want to have a trade war. And then on the other hand, we had premiers from just about every province except for Alberta, jumping up and down, saying like no to the Americans.
00:00:49.780 You know, it kind of reminded me of like the 2003 moment where Americans stopped selling French fries and it became freedom fries. Right.
00:00:57.840 And at the time, I just remember thinking it was so cheesy and so silly. It was all because France refused to join the coalition to go and take part in the invasion of Iraq, which turned out to be a disaster.
00:01:09.580 But at the time it was freedom fries, freedom fries. And I think Canadians used to kind of like laugh and mock that idea that the Americans were so, you know, down this rabbit hole of patriotism that they would, you know, take products off the shelf.
00:01:21.000 And yet, yeah, I saw Canada's premiers doing that over the last couple of days. So what did you, what did you make of all that?
00:01:28.000 So just at a human level, I understand where somebody comes along and they punch you in the nose. You don't want to turtle, right? You don't want to like, you know, skate off the ice. You want to throw the gloves down too, man.
00:01:40.900 Like that's a normal, I think human response, especially if you feel like you're defending your people, but to Franco's point all the time, it gets back down to the facts and the data here.
00:01:53.240 And that if we start throwing punches too, we're going to get tied up in each other's sweaters and we're going to wind up punching ourselves, right?
00:02:01.700 So you don't want to wind up with constant tit for tat retaliatory tariffs because all they are, are trade taxes and it is going to make our pain even worse.
00:02:10.920 But on a human level, I understand, especially if you have to be seen as doing something. I do think that Premier Smith's approach was much more an effective way of doing something and that is going right into the lion's den.
00:02:27.100 I think she, I think she has her own microphone now at Fox News Network. Like she was on there all the time. She was meeting them where they are. She was speaking their language. She was talking about deals. She was talking about money, talking about energy, talking about security, right? This idea of kind of fortress America. Hey, don't you want to have this great two-way street when it comes to energy?
00:02:47.100 I will point out, you know what it's like sometimes where you have visitors come into your town and you're showing them around and you start noticing things yourself for the first time or it's that much more stark? Hearing it repeated over and over again on a major news network that Canada does not have a big east-west pipeline for our own energy from like the Pacific to the Atlantic was crazy when you think about it.
00:03:15.460 It was almost like one of those things where somebody overhears you saying it. You're like, wait, that is kind of strange. So I think, I think Smith's approach was very effective. She withstood a lot of criticism coming from the east. And again, it's in order to save us all huge economic pain because the idea of having a retaliatory 25% tariff on, on our energy would have been disastrous for Albertans. Like I can't even picture it. It would have been horrific.
00:03:45.460 And so it was really important for premiers to stand up and do stuff, but that stuff had to actually be effective. I haven't checked online yet this morning, but I was kind of laughing to myself wondering if Premier Ford had a ceremonial big roll of tape where he was taping his Starlink contract back together.
00:04:03.960 Yeah. I don't know if that was real or not, but probably not. But yeah, so, so, you know, Doug Ford had promised to rip up Ontario's nearly a hundred million dollar contract with Elon Musk's Starlink.
00:04:21.960 Elon Musk, who's hilarious, just quoted it and said, oh, well, because, you know, when you're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, a measly contract like that doesn't help.
00:04:34.180 And actually, you know, Starlink is, is probably a better service for Ontarians in rural areas to get internet much cheaper than the alternative.
00:04:42.020 So again, like, you know, these reactionary things are not usually that helpful.
00:04:47.460 Well, that, that was sort of the, what I saw as like the negative response in terms of all of this, you know, particularly when it came to alcohol.
00:04:56.400 Franker, you mentioned that Canadians pay ridiculous taxes already when it comes to alcohol.
00:05:01.940 We had Manitoba, Yukon, Nunavut, all, all in variations, pulling American alcohol from their shelves only to, you know, go and restock it again yesterday afternoon.
00:05:14.760 I know out in British Columbia, Premier Ebby said that they were going to ban alcohol from red states.
00:05:19.900 So, you know, don't, don't punish California for the ills of Donald Trump, I guess.
00:05:26.280 What's your take on all this?
00:05:27.560 Well, my take is that I really am worried that the response to these potential tariffs might do even more damage to Canadians.
00:05:36.360 And like, just ask yourself, do you think that Trudeau's response or maybe one of the other premiers, right, if they retaliate, do you think that's going to make things better?
00:05:47.420 Or do you think that's going to make things worse?
00:05:50.120 What do you think the governments or governments in the United States are going to do in response?
00:05:54.880 Right? Like, ask yourself that question.
00:05:58.300 Now, we've mentioned many different times, I'm seeing it in the chat, that people understand that tariffs are just taxes,
00:06:03.760 and they especially harm the poorest and middle class Canadians by making things more expensive.
00:06:10.380 So, I think the question is, and to Chris's point, like, I understand that when somebody takes action against you, you want to fight back.
00:06:18.580 But again, the best way for Canada to actually fight back is to make Canada's economy the most competitive ever.
00:06:28.000 Now, I read Daniel Smith's post in the National Post that I think was published on Sunday or Monday,
00:06:33.680 and she mentioned that, like, hey, folks, if we want to actually push back, then we should make Canada's economy more competitive.
00:06:41.860 And all that starts with doing away with the massive regulatory burden that makes it nearly impossible to build anything in Canada, right?
00:06:50.660 Since 2015, folks, $670 billion of natural resource projects have been stalled or cancelled.
00:07:00.220 We know about the carbon tax, the second carbon tax buried in fuel regulations that will also harm our economy to the tune of billions of dollars.
00:07:08.620 The rejection of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, moving the regulatory goalposts on the Energy East Pipeline, right?
00:07:16.880 The unconstitutional Bill C-69, the No More Pipelines Act, the discriminatory tanker ban on Canada's West Coast.
00:07:24.860 The story goes on and on and on.
00:07:28.760 And look, I don't know if tariffs are going to come back in a month, but regardless, we have to take this serious.
00:07:34.680 And that means unshackling us from the control of our government in Ottawa and the massive overstepping governments in all the provinces.
00:07:44.580 There's just so much irony.
00:07:46.380 There's, like, layer and layer and layer of irony upon the situation because Justin Trudeau got us into this mess in so many different meanings of the word, right?
00:07:53.840 He neglected the border.
00:07:55.200 He allowed drugs.
00:07:56.480 I mean, he legalized drugs and, like, paid fentanyl dens, essentially drug dens, to give Canadians deadly drugs.
00:08:03.840 He, you know, opened up the border, never took seriously the holes in the border, places like Roxham Road, basically said to the world's migrants and refugees, come to Canada, we'll welcome you.
00:08:16.300 So the borders on Justin Trudeau.
00:08:18.600 His adversarial relationship with Donald Trump and just, like, painting himself in the public mind as, like, the anti-Trump and taking every opportunity, him and his cabinet, to undermine and slap Trump around.
00:08:30.520 I mean, that's all coming back to us.
00:08:32.480 But then even when it came to the idea that we might not be able to trade with the United States in the same way that we used to, and to your point, Chris, we don't even have a pipeline, thanks to Justin Trudeau's anti-development and anti-energy policy.
00:08:45.840 So one of the good things that Pierre Polyev did was put out the call for interprovincial trade.
00:08:51.400 He put out a very snazzy mini-documentary yesterday.
00:08:54.720 Polyev's team does video so, so well, so effective.
00:08:59.120 And so I'll play just a clip.
00:09:00.740 This is Pierre Polyev's video highlighting the need to truly liberate trade within our own country.
00:09:07.960 It is reckless to remain so helplessly dependent on just one export market, the United States.
00:09:16.220 Canada must also look to sell to other countries.
00:09:19.320 And I found just the one.
00:09:22.160 There's only one problem.
00:09:23.120 This country imposes massive trade barriers on us that cost about $5,100 per person.
00:09:31.840 So which country is it that we should be pursuing as our new top trading partner?
00:09:37.280 Switzerland?
00:09:38.780 France?
00:09:39.980 No.
00:09:41.080 Our new top trading partner will be Canada.
00:09:46.740 Very, very effective.
00:09:48.220 Very funny.
00:09:49.180 Pierre doing what he does best there.
00:09:51.360 Well, it's almost interesting because when it came to the tariffs, there was a weird consensus where everybody, even reluctantly Danielle Smith at the end, said we have to go with the retaliatory tariffs.
00:10:01.820 And then now when it comes to the idea of opening up interprovincial trade, there also seems to be a bit of a consensus.
00:10:07.820 We had Anita Anand also advocating for removing interprovincial barriers, saying it's fundamentally important.
00:10:15.900 Let's play that clip.
00:10:17.240 The issue relating to internal trade, reducing barriers inside our own country to trade and commerce is fundamentally important, especially at this time.
00:10:29.560 And the prime minister has charged me with that responsibility as minister of internal trade.
00:10:33.460 And so that's what I'm focusing on.
00:10:37.060 What she's focusing on, I don't know that she's made any inroads there.
00:10:40.560 Chris, what do you think of all this?
00:10:42.740 It just goes back to, okay, so interprovincial trade barriers.
00:10:46.560 This has been going on for so long, like before Franco was born, before most of us, I bet you, were born.
00:10:57.100 This has been an issue.
00:10:59.020 Perrin Beattie, okay, who worked with the Mulroney government, has been talking about this literally for decades.
00:11:06.600 The idea that now at like 11.59, 30 seconds before we're supposed to get a trade tariff over our heads, that now all of a sudden we should fix this.
00:11:18.340 Yeah, you guys all across governments, all parties, pox on all their houses, they should have done this decades ago.
00:11:25.920 So if we're going to do it now, okay.
00:11:28.160 But I really am asking, pleading with the governments to focus, don't have attention deficit on this.