Juno News - October 02, 2026


Professor blames Canada’s economic woes on ‘Laurentian elites’ who ‘restricted’ growth

Mentioned
Donald Trump Barry O'Biden Mark Carney Marc Lalonde Justin Trudeau Brian Mulroney Mario Draghi Ian Lee Christine Lagarde Ronald Reagan Guibo Tsar Tom Homan John Ibbotson Barack Obama Stretien Kretchen Clinton
The Court Fight Over Canada’s Trans Inmate Policy

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Length

21 minutes

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Word count

3,564

Sentence count

224

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3

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3

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 U.S. Border Tsar Tom Homan says it's time for America to shift its border security focus north
00:00:11.880 to Canada. Now that America's southern border is secure, Homan describes Canada as a huge
00:00:18.220 national security vulnerability. It's another sign of just how far Canada's relationship with
00:00:24.080 the United States has fallen. Ian Lee is an associate professor at the Sprott Business School
00:00:30.600 at Carleton University. He has co-authored a book, a new one, with Larry O'Brien. It's called
00:00:37.060 Trapped in the Shadow of Trump's America and How We Escape. The book doesn't just diagnose the
00:00:44.860 problem. It offers some solutions, five of them. Professor Lee joins us now from Ottawa. Welcome,
00:00:51.960 sir. Thanks very much, Mark. Thanks for inviting me. Let's talk a little bit about the book and
00:00:57.880 what brought you to writing it. I think it's a very timely one, obviously, and you've
00:01:03.080 written it along with Larry O'Brien at a time when a lot of Canadians are concerned about our
00:01:09.320 relationship with the Americans. Maybe you could talk about how that came to be, the book.
00:01:14.760 Sure. I mean, I've known Larry for quite some time. Full disclosure, I supported him when he
00:01:19.400 he ran for mayor in 2000. Larry is a technology entrepreneur. He's lived in Ottawa all his
00:01:25.460 life like I have. And he started, he was the founder of Callion Technology, which is a
00:01:31.900 very well-known and successful Canadian startup. It's now listed and has been for years on
00:01:36.500 the Toronto Stock Exchange. He ran for mayor, sold out all his shares, so he wasn't in a
00:01:40.500 conflict of interest. And he ran on a, you know, a campaign at the time of bringing taxes
00:01:46.820 under control, you know, a prudent, small c, fiscal conservative government. And that's when
00:01:53.840 I first really got to know him. Over the years, we've stayed in touch. We've talked. And it became
00:01:59.240 increasingly clear that our views were very, very similar, and especially on the whole question of
00:02:05.900 the Trump government. We don't agree with Donald Trump on terrorists. We don't agree with just
00:02:11.000 about anything he's doing. But we didn't agree with people who, many Canadians, who are saying
00:02:16.140 that Trump had caused our problems. And because we just knew that wasn't true. Trump did not cause
00:02:24.620 the $200 billion of interprovincial trade barriers, which have emerged over very long decades
00:02:32.320 by premiers of Canada's provinces. Trump didn't create the dependency that Canada created for
00:02:40.940 itself in betting everything on the U.S. and not diversifying its economy by developing
00:02:48.100 resources and exporting them to other countries around the world.
00:02:51.820 In fact, successive governments expressly tried to restrict the resource development.
00:02:59.260 Mr. Guibo, the former environment minister, said resources should be left in the ground.
00:03:02.800 And so it was this, and I think it was the high watermark was the last 10 years of the Justin Trudeau administration.
00:03:12.560 And so this book is not partisan. It is not about Justin Trudeau. It's not about Donald Trump.
00:03:17.740 What we do is we look at the mistakes of the last 60 years in Canada, at the various mistakes we made that did things like develop the provincial tariff barriers and protectionism that kept out foreign competition and so forth.
00:03:36.160 And we documented these in the first half of the book.
00:03:39.440 So that was the diagnostics.
00:03:41.640 That's like going to the doctor and the doctor says, well, I've got to diagnose the patient to see what's wrong.
00:03:46.260 And we produced lots of data, by the way, lots of data sourced from Stats Canada, trend data, showing our productivity going down very dramatically over many years.
00:03:58.140 So it's much lower today relative to the United States.
00:04:01.000 So then we said, OK, what Trump, we didn't deny what Trump is doing.
00:04:05.200 What we said is in the book is Trump exploited our weaknesses.
00:04:09.960 He saw our weaknesses and he mercilessly exploited the weaknesses that we had done to ourselves and that gave him the opportunity to go after us.
00:04:23.260 And so that's the framework of the book.
00:04:27.440 We document our structural problems, our structural weaknesses, declining productivity, protectionism, excessive regulation.
00:04:36.160 The OECD ranks us with a very, very poor record compared to other countries with excessive regulation.
00:04:43.900 We used these various statistics from OECD or from StatsCan showing these problems that exist in Canada.
00:04:53.400 And then in the final third of the book, we've got our solutions, which is to address and eliminate these weaknesses to make us independent and able to resist the demands and the pressures from the Trump administration.
00:05:10.320 If you're going back 60 years, then obviously there were agreements made.
00:05:14.700 I mean, I can go back to the free trade agreement that was negotiated between Brian Mulroney and Reagan.
00:05:21.600 And at the time, you'll recall the election that really set the stage for that.
00:05:28.680 Mulroney said, you know, this is going to be great for Canada.
00:05:31.080 We're going to be able to deal with the Americans at a level that will enrich our country.
00:05:37.700 And we should definitely move forward.
00:05:39.980 I can remember the debate, the hot debate over sovereignty in Canada.
00:05:45.020 Would there be a problem in terms of losing our independence if we aligned ourselves too closely with the administration of the day?
00:05:54.700 And then, of course, there was NAFTA that was negotiated with Stretien and Clinton.
00:05:59.700 Were those mistakes in your view?
00:06:02.600 No, no, we didn't.
00:06:03.980 We're not anti-free traders, by the way.
00:06:05.780 I don't want to leave you with the idea or your viewers with the idea that we're saying rip up the free trade agreement.
00:06:11.060 The mistake was not the free trade agreement.
00:06:14.020 The mistake was the Laurentian elites.
00:06:17.800 John Ibbotson, the former Globe and Mail journalist, uses this phrase, the Laurentian elites.
00:06:21.780 These are the political people in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal.
00:06:26.060 They're, I mean, quite, I'll be very frank.
00:06:28.180 We're not going to, you know, mislead or deceive.
00:06:31.100 They're largely progressive liberals, small-l liberals.
00:06:35.180 I'm not this isn't a partisan book where we're saying those people that believe that, you know, we should be closing down the economy and restricting it and we shouldn't develop our resources with the mistake we made was in saying we're going to put lots of restrictions around resources.
00:06:51.940 We're going to have the no pipeline bill, the tanker ban bill, and said, even though
00:06:56.920 we've got trillions, literally trillions of dollars of resources, not just oil and
00:07:02.020 gas, we have trees like no tomorrow, timber, we have potash.
00:07:07.000 I think we're number one in the world.
00:07:08.800 We have uranium for the nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors.
00:07:13.640 We have fish, we have seafood, we have canola, we have the resources that the world wants.
00:07:18.860 The Germans have said they want it, the Europeans, the Japanese, the South Korean country, Prime Minister, excuse me.
00:07:26.460 And so what we did, the mistake was not in doing the free trade agreement.
00:07:30.960 It was embedding the farm and saying we will basically only deal with the United States when we should have been simultaneously expanding and diversifying, yes, the United States,
00:07:43.440 but we should never have done what we did, which made us so overly dependent on one country.
00:07:49.520 We did look at the data.
00:07:51.200 All the other major countries of the world are nowhere near 70% of exports going to one country.
00:07:55.960 The only other country that has such a high dependency on one country is Mexico.
00:08:01.760 The G7, Germany, France, Italy, Japan are nowhere near 70% of all their exports going to one country called the U.S.
00:08:10.240 That was the mistake.
00:08:11.380 The mistake was closing down our resource sector by people like Mr. Guibo, who said that this was a terrible thing to develop our resources.
00:08:20.420 And so we're criticizing these kinds of decisions over the last 60 years that trapped us and then drove us into the arms of the United States when we should have been diversifying at the same time we did these trade agreements with the U.S.
00:08:35.440 Now, since Prime Minister Carney came into office and he has moved, I would suggest tentatively towards opening up the resource sector more with an MOU, I know you're very well aware of, is this enough?
00:08:55.420 Is he moving fast enough in your view, considering all of our issues with the United States?
00:09:01.240 I mean, you know, it's still going to, even with the MOU, it's still going to take a long
00:09:06.560 time to develop these resources and to build out the kind of infrastructure which you're
00:09:12.340 referring to, which is pipelines, right?
00:09:14.720 We had at one point an agreement to build a pipeline, west and east.
00:09:21.080 This is Energy East, Northern Gateway.
00:09:24.540 They did not have-
00:09:25.160 Which we need, by the way.
00:09:26.400 Sorry?
00:09:26.780 Which we need.
00:09:27.760 Which we need.
00:09:28.820 You're talking about reversing the policies of the last 10 years, I take it, 11 years, moving towards.
00:09:35.720 Yes, especially so.
00:09:37.360 Yes.
00:09:38.280 And I'm not, again, we're not being part of it.
00:09:40.140 We're just looking at the policies.
00:09:41.420 And the policies of the last 10 years, we're using data throughout.
00:09:46.960 We lost a trillion dollars of capital, capital flight, because the policies were so negative to the economy.
00:09:52.920 and the C.D. Howell Research Centre, which is staffed by a ton of former retired Bank of Canada
00:09:58.640 economists, okay, in Toronto, documented this. We're using stat scan data showing the productivity
00:10:05.420 was going down, down, down. And so we're showing that these policies of the past government were
00:10:10.660 very harmful to the Canadian economy. Mr. Carney and our ultimate evidence for our statements about
00:10:17.100 those policies is Mr. Carney is reversing a lot of them. We applaud him. We don't think he's doing
00:10:22.360 enough, although he's going in the right direction. So let's give him kudos for going in the right
00:10:27.200 direction. I mean, he's got to clean up the port of Vancouver. It's a mess. By the way, comes 398
00:10:33.120 out of 400 ports in the world by an independent nonpartisan organization that ranks the efficiencies
00:10:38.880 of ports in the world. We're terrible. The development, we have one of the worst records.
00:10:44.160 In fact, we have the slowest record in the world to open a new mine. 21 years from the time you
00:10:50.540 start to develop to the time you finish it. There is no country in the world with such a
00:10:54.600 bad record. We've been talking for 35 years about building a road, just a road up to the ring of
00:11:01.160 fire in Northern Ontario. 35 years later, we still haven't built the road. So there's a lot
00:11:07.740 of problems. And we talk about this in the book, you know, the red tape and the bureaucracy and
00:11:13.280 how the climate agenda was used not to address the climate. Actually, we argued it was used
00:11:20.300 to stop economic development of resources and i know we're going to get criticized on this mark
00:11:25.820 but i want to bring this up because people say canada is dirty and we're you know damaging
00:11:31.420 the environment natural resources canada which is part of our government table report on parliament
00:11:37.500 every year about energy metrics they have in there a very famous graph at least it's famous to me
00:11:43.340 that shows emissions, greenhouse gas emissions
00:11:47.900 per person per year have gone down
00:11:51.860 every last year from 1990 to today
00:11:56.220 under every government,
00:11:57.940 liberal governments and conservative governments,
00:11:59.720 under Kretchen's government,
00:12:01.140 under Mulroney's government,
00:12:03.060 under Trudeau's government.
00:12:04.800 And yet they say, oh my God,
00:12:06.480 you know, Canada's getting worse and worse.
00:12:08.120 That is just not true.
00:12:09.920 What they're doing is they're playing games
00:12:11.780 with absolute emissions which go up every year for a very obvious reason yes the population is
00:12:17.060 growing that's right and no i'm not blaming and before someone goes and throws a cheap shot at me
00:12:21.480 that i'm blaming immigrants no everybody uses energy everybody and because 70 of the energy
00:12:28.040 in canada is natural gas and oil which does have carbon the absolute emissions go up because
00:12:34.260 there's more people every year every year every year that's not the issue it's like saying it is
00:12:39.320 The real issue is just like we talk about GDP per person, you have to talk about emissions per person, and we have an absolutely strong record.
00:12:49.420 We have some of the cleanest and highest and most stringent standards in the world for mining and oil and gas and so forth.
00:12:57.140 So my point is that this was used. We have a chapter on this, how the environmental regulations and restrictions were used to stymie and block the development of our resources, which then ironically drove us into the arms of Donald Trump.
00:13:13.680 I mean, does everybody listening understand what I just said?
00:13:17.060 These policies made us more dependent on the United States.
00:13:21.520 Instead of saying, no, no, no, we've got to diversify and send our potash abroad,
00:13:25.140 our nuclear energy, our uranium abroad.
00:13:28.680 We've got to send our oil and gas.
00:13:30.080 We've got to send our timber abroad.
00:13:31.500 Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
00:13:32.740 We want to bet the farm and be completely dependent on the United States.
00:13:36.240 So along came this guy, Trump, and he thought, hey,
00:13:40.320 these guys have just shot themselves in the foot like multiple times. 1.00
00:13:43.680 And I am going to take advantage of the fact that they were so foolish with themselves. 0.99
00:13:48.460 And he exploited mercilessly our foolishness. 0.98
00:13:53.060 Is he trying to take us over, in your view?
00:13:55.300 I mean, there's different arguments about whether that is the case or maybe he wants Alberta.
00:14:00.660 He says he doesn't one day and then kind of hedges a little bit.
00:14:05.460 What is, in your view, his endgame as far as Canada goes?
00:14:11.260 Believe me, we've thought about this.
00:14:12.640 we've debated it endlessly, I mean, Larry and I and others, and I don't believe he wants to take
00:14:18.160 us over. I know people say he wants our resources, and I keep reminding everybody the Americans have
00:14:22.780 been buying our resources for 250 years. This idea that they can only get our resources if
00:14:28.260 they invade us is simply denied and contradicted by the factual, factual, factual reality. They've
00:14:35.740 been buying our oil forever. They've been buying our LNG forever. They've been buying our potash
00:14:41.040 forever. So it is just factually false to say that they want our resources. No, I think what
00:14:47.140 he, he, there's a list. The US trade rep has an annual report to the Congress. It's not a secret
00:14:53.260 document. Anybody can download it. And it's been tabled by every president since I believe I've
00:14:58.880 looked at it all the way back to Ronald Reagan. That's half a century ago. And they list all the
00:15:04.240 irritants by country. It's alphabetical. So you go down to the Canada part of the chapter of this
00:15:08.380 report. And they have a long list of irritants there. Supply management, protection of telecom,
00:15:14.920 not allowing foreign telecom like AT&T and Verizon to come into Canada. That list has been the same
00:15:21.000 for 50 years. But the issue was past presidents said, we don't like what you're doing to us,
00:15:26.620 Canada. We think you're being unfair to us. But, and it was always the but, and Barack Obama said
00:15:31.540 this to the Canadian parliament, we're not going to make a big deal out of it because we like you.
00:15:36.740 We've had this long relationship with you, so we're not going to, you know, blow the place up.
00:15:43.000 Along came Trump, and the difference between Trump and past presidents, he agreed with the
00:15:48.000 same list that all the other presidents had of all the things that we were doing that they didn't
00:15:52.900 like. Trump didn't create that list. There's all kinds of Canadians who think that he invented
00:15:57.420 this out of thin air. It's in the U.S. Trade Rep report tabled in the Congress that anybody with
00:16:02.480 the computer can download anybody just google USTR annual list of trade irritants and kaboom
00:16:08.840 it's in your computer what he did was he said unlike all the past presidents I don't accept
00:16:15.660 what you're doing I am going to punish you I'm going to penalize you until you change those
00:16:21.180 things that we don't like now we can say you shouldn't have done that but that's what he's
00:16:25.940 doing he's trying to get us to change those things that they it drives them crazy one of them is
00:16:31.840 supply management. It's right at the top of that list. So we're going to have to make a choice.
00:16:35.960 Do we want to have an agreement with the largest economy on planet Earth or do we want to compromise
00:16:42.000 on these things? We argue that the things we're fighting so hard are hurting us. Supply management
00:16:48.220 exploits low-income Canadians by doubling the price of milk and dairy and poultry. And I did
00:16:54.900 a paper on supply management. Many papers have been done. OECD show it exploits low-income and
00:17:01.380 modest income Canadians. We should be cheering at the top of our lungs to get rid of that 0.80
00:17:05.640 awful legislation, which I've characterized as the most immoral law of the Parliament of Canada
00:17:11.920 in the last 50 years, because it screws, milks, plucks, and shafts millions of Canadians.
00:17:17.720 Why do we want to hurt ourselves? I don't understand that. For 8,000 dairy farmers.
00:17:23.160 Obviously, there are political reasons why all the major companies support supply management.
00:17:27.980 But do you see the EU pivot as a possible way to begin the process of diversifying or not?
00:17:36.920 You know, I'm giving a presentation tomorrow afternoon on this very subject.
00:17:41.920 And I've read all of the major reports in the last two years called China Shock 2.0.
00:17:47.900 And first off, I agree we want to diversify.
00:17:50.200 I've said that over and over.
00:17:51.200 We must diversify.
00:17:52.500 And secondly, yeah, I mean, I'm not against diversifying to Europe.
00:17:56.020 I mean, 500 million people, roughly 450, 500 million people.
00:17:59.960 But what my point that I want to make, Mark, is Europe is in deep trouble, not because
00:18:06.180 Ian Lee said so.
00:18:08.220 Christine Lagarde, a very great, famous liberal in Europe, head of the European Central Bank
00:18:14.180 in January of this year in Reuters magazine said, and I quote Christine Lagarde, Europe
00:18:22.360 is in a profound existential crisis. It's economy. The Draghi report, which is on the European
00:18:30.280 Commission website, documents all of their problems. Actually, a lot of their problems
00:18:34.520 are a lot of Canada's problems, you know, declining innovativeness, declining competitiveness,
00:18:39.700 declining productivity. And they have, they're about to get annihilated in their high,
00:18:45.340 their most prestigious sectors, automotive manufacturing, high-end autos, electronics,
00:18:51.680 sophisticated machine tools. And China is targeting Europe. And the elites behind the
00:18:58.360 scenes are just terrified of China Shock 2.0. So what I'm trying to say is this,
00:19:04.040 any form of diversification is good. But if any Canadian thinks that we can pivot and basically
00:19:09.340 take all or most of our trade with the US and send it over to Europe, they have not studied
00:19:14.600 Europe. Europe is putting up all kinds of protectionism right now because they're trying
00:19:18.800 desperately to save the place, desperately to save Europe from being hollowed out like the U.S. was
00:19:26.860 under China Shock 1.0 that killed all those jobs in Ohio and in the Rust Belt that led to, oh my
00:19:34.000 goodness, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 because of China Shock 1.0. Now China Shock's
00:19:40.060 2.0 is coming, and it's going to hit Europe right between the eyeballs. And this is what 0.96
00:19:45.860 Mario Draghi is saying, for those who say that Ian Lee doesn't know what he's talking about,
00:19:48.840 go read the Mario Draghi report, former premier of Italy. And he is a friend of Mark Lalonde,
00:19:54.860 Mark Lalonde, I'm sorry, Mark Carney. You're getting old here. Mark Carney. In fact,
00:20:00.900 they both have PhDs in economics. Mario Draghi did his PhD in economics at MIT. And he was the
00:20:07.660 head of the European Central Bank. And that report he did is just filled with chock-a-block 1.00
00:20:12.500 with graphs and charts and data showing the decline of europe so sure let's diversify to europe but
00:20:19.620 they're not going to save us that's my that's my closing point they're not going to save us
00:20:25.940 we've got to save ourselves right the book is called trapped in the shadow of trump's america
00:20:32.660 and how we escape where do people find your book it's amazon um and by the way we don't get any
00:20:39.140 royalties so anybody who says i'm trying to make money here that we're getting no royalties well
00:20:43.220 this was a labor of love it's at amazon publishing so it's already got an isbn number and all that
00:20:48.020 good stuff and uh there's an eco uh uh what do you call it an electronic copy and a and a paperback
00:20:53.540 copy and they're not right they're priced very cheaply professor lee thank you lots of
00:20:57.300 running on the show lots of graphs and charts in this book so anybody who likes data it i've got
00:21:01.860 we've got the data there fantastic stuff thank you so much for coming on the show
00:21:05.380 thanks very much mark thank you if you enjoyed the show and appreciate independent journalism
00:21:10.900 please consider becoming a premier member of juno news by going to junonews.com
00:21:16.020 backslash straight up it helps us do what we do thank you so much for tuning in we'll see you next