00:00:00.000Well, Prime Minister Carney is denying reports it was Ontario Premier Doug Ford who vetoed
00:00:12.000a proposed trade deal between the United States and Canada last month.
00:00:16.000The decisions on trade are the decisions of the Government of Canada. I'm the Prime Minister.
00:00:23.000Ultimately, I am responsible with the Cabinet for those decisions. We take those decisions in the round.
00:00:29.000We took those decisions. I enumerated. I enumerated on Saturday and can repeat.
00:00:36.100And the chief negotiator gave interviews. Monsieur Leblanc, others have given interviews.
00:00:41.860Those of us who are at the table or next to the table, if you will, know exactly why an accumulation of issues, each of them serious enough, okay?
00:00:53.060The issues with respect to language and culture, enough to not have a deal.
00:00:58.160The issues Mr. Gray just asked about with respect to restrictions on future trade deals.
00:01:03.780Restrictions on our sovereignty enough not to have a deal.
00:01:07.100Not according to the National Post's John Iveson, who says the official reasons given that you just heard there,
00:01:14.620like last minute changes by the Americans were intended to hide the real reason that Ford strongly objected to the deal.
00:01:22.740This headline in the National Post, Doug Ford's veto of a U.S. trade deal cannot stand.
00:01:30.220Ford privately refused to meet a key U.S. demand to restore the wine and spirit sales to provincial store shelves.
00:01:40.600The premier refused to accept any deal that allowed tariffs on Canadian auto exports to the United States.
00:01:46.760Carney insists he made the decision to walk away from the deal, not Ford.
00:01:53.500Meantime, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson rejected the idea that two countries are at war, laughing off the idea Canada could stand up to the United States militarily.
00:02:03.880Mark, it's wondering if we're now in a tit-for-tat trade war with Canada.
00:02:06.720Well, I don't think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who's 13 times larger than you are.
00:06:55.980And Doug Ford does have the ability to, whatever political pressure the prime minister tries to exert, if Doug Ford doesn't want to end that embargo, as far as I know, that's a decision that he can make.
00:07:07.900but the reasons that the prime minister gave run counter to the suggestions that it was for that
00:07:16.140did it which kind of feeds into the whole narrative growing narrative that the prime
00:07:21.100minister has not been entirely honest whether it's about the bridge or whether it's about the
00:07:26.280condo bailout and now the trade deals it's like a nagging things that have come up time and time
00:07:32.260again that the Prime Minister is not being honest about this sort of thing, having given a bunch of
00:07:38.340different reasons, like it was the Americans who made last-minute changes, it was a cultural and
00:07:43.860linguistic issue relative to Quebec, that it was a sovereignty issue relative to Canada's power to
00:07:50.860negotiate other free trade deals. Is that something that you consider important here?
00:07:58.640Look, I think it's important for the Prime Minister to be transparent with the Canadian
00:08:03.840public about what's going on. I don't think I have enough information to say whether he's
00:08:09.040being dishonest. Again, I don't know for sure whether Doug Ford did ultimately scuttle the
00:08:14.640deal or not. We don't know exactly what the US demands around digital culture, if you will,
00:08:21.680were. We don't even really know for sure to what extent Howard Letnick came in at the last minute
00:08:27.840and really did kind of change the terms of the agreement around tariffs on autos.
00:08:33.060Whether trucks were always excluded, whether they were actually explicitly included
00:08:39.240and then that was taken away, or whether there just was kind of a big misunderstanding
00:08:42.100and the two sides were never actually aligned on that at all.
00:09:24.100I'll remind you that back in the fall, we almost had a deal that I think in broad strokes looked quite similar to the one that ultimately just fell through.
00:09:32.640But that deal back in the fall was, you know, completely sidelined by the premier's intervention with the, you know, the advertisements with Reagan's anti-tariff words that were played at the World Series.
00:09:47.580Right after that, you know, all of our negotiations with the United States completely stopped.
00:09:51.960So I don't know enough to say whether the prime minister is being dishonest.
00:09:56.940But what I do know is that the premier, Doug Ford, does have a history of intervening in our negotiations with the United States to the detriment of the country.
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00:11:17.100Yeah, that seems to be the issue of U.S. produced spirits and wine seems to be the one thing that
00:11:23.580he's got for leverage. And I guess he seems to be in no big hurry to give that up. Problem being
00:11:30.640that if that really was the reason that it potentially makes him, meaning the prime minister,
00:11:36.560look weak because it means that he can't agree to a deal that he otherwise would have okayed,
00:11:43.260if you know what I mean. I think that that's right. I mean, I do think that it does make
00:11:49.600the prime minister look weak to his counterparts in the United States that he's trying to work
00:11:54.720with and negotiate with. I think he makes him look weak domestically as well. It makes it look
00:12:01.060like the premier is really the one who's in the driver's seat in all of this. And in that,
00:12:06.320I think it's really unfortunate. And you've also written about the wine and spirit issue
00:12:12.840in, I believe it was an op-ed in the Toronto Star. I take it you're not a big fan of using that as
00:12:21.620leverage against the Americans? Well, I'm not a big fan of the alcohol embargo. And I would also
00:12:27.640say that I don't really believe that it does contain any meaningful leverage for us.
00:12:33.660You know, I think some of the important context here is that we put this alcohol embargo in place on the same day that U.S. tariffs initially went on Canada all the way back in March of 2025.
00:12:47.640And that alcohol embargo has been maintained ever since then, even when, you know, just a week later, the vast majority of our exports were actually exempted from those tariffs.
00:12:58.460You know, the USMCA or KUSMA exemption was granted, and only a small chunk of our exports
00:13:04.880ended up getting hit with tariffs, but didn't change the calculus there, even though that
00:13:08.640changed the federal government's calculus around retaliating with tariffs.
00:13:12.940You know, the federal government ultimately lifted its retaliatory tariffs in recognition
00:13:15.880of the fact that Canada was, you know, in large part being spared at the time from President
00:13:22.000Trump's, you know, global trade war, if you will.
00:13:24.380um you know i will also say that in terms of leverage i i don't buy it you know uh the premier
00:13:33.620likes to say that the lcbo is the single biggest alcohol purchaser in north america maybe the world
00:13:38.700and maybe that's true but being a single biggest purchaser does not mean that you have a big share
00:13:44.140of the market right uh you know being the biggest single biggest buyer is not ultimately does not
00:13:51.240mean much in the grand scheme of things when you look at the numbers. So if you look at the numbers
00:13:54.980in 2024, the U.S. spirits industry sold $37 billion at home, exported $2.5 billion about
00:14:03.000worldwide. Canada in total accounted for just a little bit over $200 million worth of those sales.
00:14:10.280So roughly one half of 1%. I don't see that as being meaningful leverage, to be quite honest.
00:14:16.380But regardless of whether it contains any leverage or not, we've had this embargo in place
00:14:21.100for a year and a half. And what has it gotten us? Just more tariffs on us. That's it, right?
00:14:26.420I predicted that this would happen several months ago, that the alcohol embargo would be used as
00:14:30.920pretext under the U.S. law, whether it's justified or not economically. It does help the president
00:14:38.480craft a legal pretext for levying additional tariffs on us. And that's exactly what happened.
00:14:43.400So just in short, I don't buy that this embargo really does create any meaningful economic
00:14:48.200leverage for us. And the only thing that it seems to have gotten for us is more pain rather than
00:14:55.040putting us on better footing in our dealings with the US. Well, how do you feel about the
00:14:59.940strategy of trying to wait Trump out past the midterms? He's going to be president for a couple
00:15:06.220more years, maybe basically rag the puck for a while until he's gone. I think in large part,
00:15:13.200that is what we have to do. I will also say that it's not just about waiting out the president
00:15:19.120himself, but it is also about waiting out the court process. There are already lawsuits ongoing
00:15:25.640about the president's new global tariff scheme, the one that he instituted to resurrect the global
00:15:32.800tariffs that were knocked down by the Supreme Court. I have to imagine that there will very soon
00:15:38.060be lawsuits about the new 50% tariffs on Canada.
00:16:54.500All I was going to say is that that's kind of the best case for us.
00:16:57.920And even if a Democrat-led Congress passed some legislation to repeal all of Trump's tariffs and revoke all of his legal authorities to impose tariffs to begin with, which is, in fact, precisely what a bill that Chuck Schumer introduced, I think, this morning is going to do exactly that.
00:17:16.000But even if something like that does pass, you know, the reality is that the president is just going to veto it.
00:17:21.040The Democrats are never going to have a big enough majority in the Senate to override a presidential veto.
00:17:25.380And so the tariffs are going to be with us, you know, for the remainder of the Trump administration is the reality in some way or another.
00:17:32.580The best thing that we can do is put ourselves on the best legal and diplomatic footing for getting those tariffs, you know, lowered as much as possible once he's out of office.
00:17:43.380Last question about the use of energy as a bargaining chip, the threats of cutting off oil to the Americans and electricity for that matter.
00:17:53.400and the rift that it's created, at least as far as oil goes with the Western provinces in the East,
00:18:00.140because this is one of the things that has become aggravated or illuminated
00:18:04.260by this whole trade dispute with the Americans is that we don't see eye to eye,
00:18:09.840whether you're from Western Canada or Eastern Canada,
00:18:12.200on the issue of using energy as a club to beat the Americans over the head with.
00:18:19.000Well, let me just first say something brief about cutting off electricity, because I think that's a quite separate issue from cutting off oil exports or tariffing oil exports or what have you.
00:18:30.460The electricity thing that Ford is advocating for is just incredibly dumb in that, yes, we export energy to the United States, but we also import a lot of energy from the United States.
00:18:43.680Ontario imports quite a bit of energy at different times of the year.0.91
00:18:46.820We also import a lot of natural gas, a lot of the natural gas that Ontario uses.
00:18:52.420Some of it does originate in Canada, but guess what?