00:02:38.900But in this case, with retaliatory tariffs as Canadians, this is like someone who's bigger and stronger than you challenging you to the fight.
00:02:48.180And you say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
00:02:50.100And you tie your own shoelaces together and then punch yourself in the face first.
00:02:54.500That's what we're doing, unfortunately, with these retaliatory tariffs.
00:03:03.860I mean, tariffs at the end of the day is a policy that is going to increase inflation.
00:03:08.640It's going to lower your productivity.
00:03:10.700And overall, it's going to lower your GDP.
00:03:12.780And that is going to happen in Canada and the United States.
00:03:16.180You know, the tariffs aren't going to have necessarily an extraordinary effect on the American economy.
00:03:22.260But they're also imposing tariffs on China and they're imposing tariffs on Mexico and they're imposing tariffs on the EU.
00:03:29.000So that cumulative effect is going to have a quite substantial effect on the American economy.
00:03:34.740But here in Canada, we have to ensure that we do everything we can in our power to ensure that our productivity is not negatively affected.
00:03:44.880Our inflation doesn't rise and our GDP, you know, has been going down on a per capita basis lately.
00:03:50.820But, you know, make sure it doesn't decline even further.
00:03:54.380And imposing counter tariffs are going to exacerbate that effect.
00:03:58.140And the United States seems to have imposed a policy whereby if you impose tariffs on them, they automatically increase tariffs.
00:04:06.120So that could increase the already 25 percent tariffs that the United States has imposed on us and, you know, 10 percent on energy products.
00:04:14.820And so when these tariffs are just mounting and mounting, how are Canadian workers going to be able to feel secure that they're going to have a job in the next week, the next month, the next year?
00:04:25.860How are Canadians going to be able to go to the grocery store and be able to, you know, buy some oranges from Florida or be able to buy some wheat products that was potentially, you know, taking some wheat from Canada and some oats from the States?
00:04:40.920It really does not help anyone on either side of the border, especially Canadians.
00:04:46.020And that's who the Canadian government really should be looking out for.
00:04:48.960And if they want to help Canadians, they should instead find ways to boost productivity and boost our capacity to withstand these tariffs by making our economy more competitive and not actually less competitive.
00:05:02.400Isaac, I know we were looking at some stats together before we hit record on the show.
00:05:07.720What's your thoughts on this when you're looking at some of these charts?
00:05:10.620Yeah, this doesn't make any sense to me.
00:05:14.220Obviously, with that one study, Chris, we saw that the tariffs from the United States would increase our inflation by about 1.5 percent.
00:05:21.880But then with our counter tariffs, it would double to 3 percent.
00:05:25.040So as your analogy alluded to, why are you self-inflicting harm upon your citizens to retaliate to the United States?
00:05:33.960And I mean, there's so many questions that come to mind.
00:05:36.980Firstly, we've obviously focused on the Canadian response to these tariffs.
00:05:41.220I'm curious because obviously Trump is trying to alleviate the issues he feels are so problematic, that being the border and the fentanyl and the drug crisis over the borders.
00:05:54.680But I'm wondering, Chris, do you have any insights onto how Americans are reacting to these tariffs?
00:06:00.040Because as you said, this is going to increase the cost for Americans.
00:06:03.180So is Trump losing support in the states because of these tariffs or what's the deal there?
00:06:12.520So just taking off my Taxpayers Federation hat off for a minute, I've been in the game for a bit and I've talked to people from all walks of life, including people who are really mad.
00:06:23.860And I've had to de-escalate them and get them talking about their feelings and especially as a talk radio host.
00:06:30.040I don't think the Canadians went about this the right way for the most part, trying to have an air war in the media where you're getting into kind of war of words and insulting each other and stuff and trying to, you know, Trump, you know, pardon the term, Trump up kind of Canadian patriotism.
00:06:48.140But on the surface level of like, we're going to take American booze off the shelf that we've already paid for, which doesn't really make sense.
00:06:56.040We're going to boo the American anthem, which at the time makes you feel viscerally good if that's the type of person you are, but doesn't look great on American TV.
00:07:05.000My assessment of this is that the smarter way to go about this, and this is exactly to your point, Isaac, is similar to the way that Premier Smith was trying.
00:07:15.600So get down there, put a smile on your face, here to help, want to make a deal and really appeal to the governors of states where this is going to hit them the most and show them with like math and graphs of,
00:07:32.060hey, your gasoline is going to cost you like 25 cents more per gallon, like today, because you're not getting it at the same discount from Alberta that you used to be because you're hitting it with a 10% tariff.
00:07:49.260And to that point, I think that's why the Premier was able to get just the 10% tariff punishment from Trump instead of 25% because she was down there doing the diplomacy thing, but politics gets in the way, right?
00:08:05.340So you see what's happening in Ottawa, and if you're just a cold, hard calculator, and you're looking at political expediency, what's easier?
00:08:15.620Getting down there and actually doing the, I'm going to, how do I put this nicely, grin and bear it and get through some of these difficult conversations with somebody who wants to dominate my country
00:08:27.060and work out a deal or just bloviate from Toronto or Ottawa about how bad things are, and then your, your politics will get a rise in the polls.
00:08:41.280Yeah, you bring up a great point that a lot of the politics of Canada right now are being dictated by emotion.
00:08:48.680You know, it feels really good to, you know, hit the Americans back with tariffs when they impose tariffs against you.
00:08:54.980It feels really good to, you know, espouse, you know, like venomous rhetoric against Donald Trump because, you know, he is legitimately attacking our economy.
00:09:04.940And Canadians should, you know, feel some level of, you know, anger about it.
00:09:08.720But, you know, the reasonable thing to do is to outline what your goals are and to achieve those through reasonable policies.
00:09:15.780If your goals are to mitigate the effect that this has for Canadians, then you should be deregulating your economy.
00:13:32.040Like have you heard any of those concrete things happening?
00:13:36.940All right, Chris, so many things I want to cover that have been discussed.
00:13:41.080But just starting with what Noah said about it feeling good, I just wanted to say quickly that it would only feel good if you're ruled by emotion,
00:13:49.740not logic, facts, and data, as we've discussed, because how could it feel good to essentially be doing more harm than good to yourself through these tariffs?
00:13:57.800And we've seen, for example, the anthem booing quickly.
00:14:00.400We've seen Canadians booing children singing the American anthem.
00:14:08.180In no way are these people singing the anthem to blame for the tariffs or American people as a general populace either, right?
00:14:16.920So I really hated seeing that stuff at sports games.
00:14:20.020And let's move into Trudeau's response now, calling President Trump Donald by his first name and then dumb, not calling Trump dumb, but his tactics dumb.
00:14:32.000I mean, this is not how you negotiate against the most powerful leader in the world, certainly not.
00:14:40.540And bringing it back to emotion, we might think that based on Trudeau's response, he is being ruled by emotion, as so many politicians have been throughout this process.
00:14:50.960But you've discussed some of the things that should be being tabled, that being pro-energy policies and things that will appease Trump.
00:14:59.600We've seen Pierre Polyèvre, the conservative leader, suggest that he might implement some of those things.
00:15:04.580What have you guys thought of his response to the tariffs?
00:15:07.280My estimation, and I watched his speech, but I haven't read his background or on it yet, looks like Polyèvre wants retaliatory tariffs, but not across the board.
00:15:17.840He said it was for items that we can easily make ourselves and or that we don't need.
00:15:24.040So, for example, I'm just guessing, maybe that means that he wouldn't put a tariff on, say, peanut butter imports, because we don't generally produce peanut butter on this side of the border.
00:15:35.540That's largely a Southern thing in the Southern states, the United States.
00:15:38.920Hard to say, because he's in a tough position right now where he's trying to show patriotism, where it is like, yeah, you get punched, you want to punch back, but you also have to be smart.
00:15:48.940So don't tie your own shoelaces together and don't punch yourselves in the face.
00:15:52.720I think he is smart to focus more on making ourselves as lean and mean as competitive as we possibly can.
00:15:59.660So this is like where, you know, a marathon's coming, you know, you have to run it in six months.
00:16:21.160And so my concern here is that we're going to have all of this pain inflicted both by the United States tariffs and our own tariffs.
00:16:30.360And we're not going to have the actual solutions that would help Canadians in this situation, which would be dropping all of our carbon taxes and building pipelines.
00:16:40.640Yeah, I really think it's important that Pierre Poliev proposes a plan that Canadians feel is an appropriate response to the United States' imposition of tariffs while also, you know, making sure that is reasonable policy.
00:16:57.840And I think, you know, in the lead up to January and the inauguration of Donald Trump, Pierre Poliev has done a good job building out a message that has responded to the concerns of everyday Canadians.
00:17:10.100And building out policy responses that, you know, are, you know, not to be partisan because I'm not trying to be, but are quite reasonable.
00:17:17.980You know, axing the carpet tax when people are suffering from inflation is a common sense, you know, reasonable policy.
00:17:26.440You know, trying to increase or make it easier for developers to build housing and, you know, getting rid of development charges is, you know, reasonable policy.
00:17:36.080But when it comes to these tariffs, Canadians seem to want, you know, to punch back.
00:17:44.560So he has to find a balance between, you know, imposing tariffs on things that are, say, inelastic goods as, you know, economic jargon goes.
00:17:53.320He has to probably try and impose tariffs on things that, you know, can easily be substituted by goods from Canadians or from across the pond in Asia or in Europe.
00:18:05.300Perhaps a lot of services that American companies provide that can be provided, say, you know, online could be contracted from, you know, companies in Canada or from countries abroad.
00:18:18.080So there are a lot of ways you can sort of impose sort of some, you know, pain in their in your own way on the Americans to help the American people come to the conclusion that these tariffs are bad and to pressure the president to reverse course.
00:18:35.780And I think that Pierre Polyev has to toe that line.
00:18:38.740I think he's been doing an OK job, but he ought not stray into into into dogmatism and into demagoguery with these tariffs like Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau and especially Jagmeet Singh has engaged in.
00:18:56.900I just wanted to touch on two things there before we move on, Isaac, to to Mark Carney, one, the inflation issue.
00:19:06.260We're hearing some pretty alarming language coming out from the last I saw and I didn't hear his whole clip.
00:19:12.840The last I saw was from newly reelected Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, basically saying that we'll just hand out government money in response to this and Trudeau saying very similar things.
00:19:25.140I'm having harsh flashbacks to the government lockdowns and what happened then, because even just take away all the social stuff and the fact that bank accounts are frozen and stuff.
00:19:36.340But just financially, financially, that was a disaster because the government turned on the printing press for money just and then handed out, sprayed all of this inflationary cash everywhere.
00:19:48.940And we had the worst inflation in 40 years.
00:19:54.640So folks are wondering, holy cow, why is everything so bloody unaffordable and expensive?
00:20:01.040It's because of inflation, because of money printing and stupid government decisions and the carbon taxes.
00:20:07.480And if we have two of the biggest political leaders in Canada in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, both going to just say, let's hand out government money, that would be a disaster.
00:20:21.680It is much smarter to get in there as hard as we can and get a deal so that this punishment stops.
00:20:59.540He is just going to take the consumer tax, which us unwashed masses can see and get mad about, which bothers him, and he's going to hide it in a massive national industrial carbon tax.
00:21:31.220He's wheeling and dealing at his desk.
00:21:32.920He's calling up fertilizer plants and fuel refineries and manufacturers and steel manufacturers from all over the world.
00:21:40.360Hey, come back to the United States, make the Rust Belt, Chrome Belt again, set up in Pennsylvania, set up in Michigan.
00:21:46.700And then he sees an announcement that Canada is imposing massive industrial carbon taxes on fertilizer plants, steel manufacturers, all of these industrialists.
00:21:59.640Like, Trump will phone the moving truck company himself to have them go down there.
00:22:06.000So this is an example of why it is not smart for us to be strangling our own resource sector and hammering our own people with carbon taxes, especially while we have this threat to the South.
00:22:25.080But yeah, no, just firstly, starting with what we were talking about with Ford and Trudeau and suggesting that they would print money.
00:22:32.380I mean, this is insane to me that any Canadian would be in favor of printing money after we saw the colossal failure that the pandemic policies of printing money were,
00:22:42.060not only for inflation, but for CERB, for example, and for the small business loans.
00:22:47.680We've seen reports saying that X percentage, I don't have the data off the top of my mind,
00:22:52.640but there are companies who weren't eligible getting paid millions, billions of dollars.
00:22:57.160I mean, how can we possibly advocate for this knowing this?
00:23:00.840And another thing I wanted to say, Chris, was so much talk of the tariffs, which, of course, tariff is synonymous with tax.
00:23:08.040Why is the federal government then trying to act as if they're anti-tariff, but then on April 1st, they're going to be hiking the carbon tax,
00:23:19.580which from every poll we've seen recently, Canadians are vehemently against the carbon tax.
00:23:25.940So if you want to have an answer to counteract the tariffs, I mean, hiking or halting that 20% carbon tax,
00:23:32.840that's a 20% savings right there, I mean, that's going to be better than implementing counter tariffs
00:23:38.840that are actually hurting your own people, as we've seen through the inflationary data.
00:23:42.600So this is, I mean, yeah, getting through all that, do we want to hop into the leadership race now?
00:23:48.420Yeah, let's move to Carney, because I'll finish off with another carbon tax rant.
00:25:42.640So Mark Carney basically claimed that he – okay, so there was a story that broke that Brookfield Asset Management
00:25:53.500was moving its headquarters to New York.
00:25:56.100And Mark Carney claimed that he had nothing to do with it.
00:25:58.800He was completely fine with, you know, Canadians, you know, setting up a shop in Canada and keeping their business there.
00:26:06.720So, you know, time passes, and it was revealed that Mark Carney, in his role as Chairman of the Board at Brookfield Asset Management,
00:26:16.640had actually written a letter recommending that Brookfield Asset Management move its headquarters from Canada to New York.
00:26:25.780So Mark Carney, when questioned on this issue, he basically said that, well, there's nothing that I could have done.
00:26:34.380This was a decision that was already in motion.
00:26:37.540Maybe I should have gotten better at politics, at, you know, concealing my true intentions.
00:26:43.480Like, it was really weird stuff that – and really weird things to say, you know, admitting that he's not good enough at being a politician,
00:26:51.340you know, just flatly saying, like, I'll get better at lying next time.
00:26:56.400I'll hide this – I'll hide my next scandal better.
00:26:59.800But, you know, really appealing to the members of the Liberal Party, you know.
00:27:04.320How good is your Prime Minister at wiggling through scandals?
00:27:07.080But it really seems as if Mark Carney has been trying to walk back a lot of the things that he has committed to in his private life,
00:27:15.500like carbon taxes, like moving Canadian business to the United States,
00:27:20.480because he believes that setting up shop in the United States is the best thing for business,
00:27:25.580which, you know, quite frankly, is not exactly wrong per se.
00:27:31.160But you're running to be the Prime Minister of Canada.
00:27:33.700You have to, you know, set a standard for yourself, and you have to, you know, actually, like, invest in Canada
00:27:39.620and, you know, commit to making Canada better.
00:27:42.840But Carney really seems to be having to walk back on his commitment on carbon taxes too.
00:27:48.180You know, carbon taxes were a big thing that Carney advocated for in his book Values
00:27:54.420and, you know, just in his role as an ambassador in the United Nations at COP26.
00:28:00.860And Carney, he has also had to walk back his claim that he has helped past Prime Ministers.
00:28:09.240He had to walk back the claim that in 2008, he basically managed Canada's economic crisis and managed Canada's recovery.
00:28:19.180And he said that he helped Paul Martin balance the budget.
00:28:22.560Both claims were disputed by people who worked in both governments.
00:28:27.040So Mark Carney is really having a hard time adapting to, you know, being truthful and honest in front of media and Canadians.
00:28:37.140But the Liberals do seem poised to pick Mark Carney.
00:28:41.600Isaac, if you could just elaborate, what seems to be likely to happen on March 9th when the Liberals pick a new leader?
00:28:50.740Yeah, just before getting into that, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to True North's Cosmin Georgia,
00:28:56.300because obviously he has started an investigative series on the book Values,
00:29:00.520going into what Carney has said and what he's actually doing and what he says he believes now versus what he's said in the past.
00:29:06.780But yeah, no, hopping into the leadership electoral race, which of course concludes on Sunday, as you said,
00:29:12.620we've seen, we've covered this extensively at True North, specifically in the past when the party disqualified Chandra Aria and Ruby Dalla separately
00:29:23.760for questionable reasons on the candidates' opinion.
00:29:32.340But certainly we saw that happen when they were clearly picking up steam in the public's eye
00:29:37.440and looked like they could actually be real contenders for Mark Carney.
00:29:41.020Ruby Dalla perhaps came out with some of the strongest language against the party's decision,
00:29:46.080saying that they were essentially just doing whatever they could in their power to coronate Mark Carney
00:35:17.120Start a book club and read this thing, because even just the stuff that he has in here on the carbon tax is essential for us to understand,
00:35:27.160because this person is going to be prime minister, at least for a period of time.
00:35:32.180And so I just wanted to quickly read one chunk here to show how important carbon taxes are to him.
00:35:39.800So carbon taxes are all through this book.
00:35:41.440It's essential, but so much so that he sees individuals, you, me, all of us listening, as personal carbon emissions budgets.
00:35:53.540Okay, like walking, talking carbon emissions budgets.
00:35:56.560So I want to read from this book, page 233.
00:36:01.240To limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the average global citizen born today will have a personal carbon emissions budget over their lifetime equivalent to one-eighth of their grandparents.
00:36:17.000Okay, that means all of us that are living today will have to reduce our use of things like oil and gas, our carbon emissions budget, to one-eighth of our grandparents.
00:36:34.980It's all through this, it is all through this book.
00:36:38.520So this is not like one of those things where you're like, oh, I used to really like lasagna, but I'm on a no-carb diet now and I've seen the light.
00:39:36.220I've followed Telefrancais with the singing pineapple.
00:39:38.420Like, you know, at least most of us know jamais means never, which is the word he used when he talked about never putting a pipeline through Quebec.
00:39:48.060So how about just we duck all over come off?
00:40:20.660On April 1st, not only are we getting a huge carbon tax hike, which will make it more expensive for you to buy gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and propane.
00:40:30.660So basically it becomes a tax on everything because trucking and we live in a cold country.
00:44:03.340They used to have balanced budget legislation in British Columbia where if a minister delivered a deficit in their department, they got a pay cut.
00:44:42.900Chris, I'm thinking you at the CTF maybe should start a petition to advocate for a performance-based pay for parliamentarians.
00:44:50.220I mean, imagine how much we could improve our country if parliamentarians had to improve it to improve their pay scale.
00:44:57.440We, you know, the, the similarities I'm drawing right now are, of course, to the CBC, who, despite their declining numbers, continue to give themselves raises.
00:45:06.400And we've covered this extensively at True North.