Mark Slapinski


U.S Ambassador To Canada Outlines Position On CTV Atlantic

Topics
critical minerals
Hosted by
Mark Slapinski
Guests
Pete Hoekstra
Mentioned
Mark Carney Polyev Donald Trump

Episode Stats


Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Ambassador Pete Hoekstra is in the Maritime getting to know the people and businesses in the region. He talks about the current trade situation between the United States and Canada, the importance of preclearance at the border, and the status of trade negotiations.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The U.S. Ambassador to Canada just murdered Mark Carney's political career on live television.
00:00:05.960 Let's watch that together and don't forget to stick around till the end for some analysis.
00:00:10.260 Welcome back on this Thursday evening.
00:00:11.800 As you saw earlier in the newscast, the American Ambassador to Canada is in the Maritime spending a few days here getting to know us.
00:00:20.060 And we are pleased to be joined by Ambassador Pete Hoekstra this evening.
00:00:23.800 Thank you for your time and offering us a few minutes.
00:00:26.080 You've got a busy schedule.
00:00:26.900 Appreciate you coming in.
00:00:27.720 Thanks for the invite.
00:00:28.540 It's great to be here.
00:00:29.220 At least I think it's great to be here.
00:00:30.680 We'll find out.
00:00:31.200 Oh, I'm sure.
00:00:32.300 Why wouldn't it be?
00:00:34.040 You've been here for a couple of days in the Maritime.
00:00:36.760 You've had a chance to meet with a number of people.
00:00:39.180 What are you hoping to get out of this trip?
00:00:42.040 My fill of lobster.
00:00:44.700 We had one last night.
00:00:45.820 No, I mean, my job is to present America's agenda to the Canadian people, to the Canadian government, to represent America.
00:00:53.860 This is just one more opportunity to do that.
00:00:56.240 We're trying to get to, obviously, to all the provinces, the territories, to communicate that.
00:01:01.840 And to just have a dialogue with the Canadian people, with the Canadian businesses.
00:01:06.720 We've got such a strong and positive relationship to build and foster that for the future.
00:01:13.740 You met with some folks at Halifax International Airport.
00:01:18.460 Yep.
00:01:19.080 Travel, of course, is down in the air to the U.S. and across the border, the land borders as well.
00:01:25.120 There is a U.S. Customs Preclearance Center at Halifax Airport.
00:01:29.120 If that trend continues, of fewer people flying to your country, is there a risk that we could lose that?
00:01:35.900 Not any time soon.
00:01:37.920 And we'd have to change dramatically.
00:01:40.080 All right.
00:01:40.460 Preclearance is a huge benefit to the U.S. government, to America, to Americans, Canadian citizens as well.
00:01:49.140 Well, you know, unless the Canadians kick preclearance out of Halifax, it's here to stay.
00:01:57.860 All right.
00:01:58.480 Yeah.
00:01:59.540 You commented today about, you know, people deciding, Canadians deciding not to travel to the States.
00:02:05.420 You say Americans aren't doing the same thing here.
00:02:07.260 And, you know, you've been very frank about it that, you know, this is a bit of a, you don't quite, it's hard to get your head around.
00:02:13.420 Yeah, I mean, you know, the America, you know, I mean, you have politicians who are advocating, don't travel to America.
00:02:22.680 There's nobody on the American border who sees, you know, who's saying, don't travel to Canada, don't buy American products.
00:02:30.660 Matter of fact, ban them from, you know, ban Canadian products from our shelves.
00:02:37.540 It's kind of like, I don't know, we're not there, we're not anywhere close to that.
00:02:41.820 I mean, Canada right now has what?
00:02:44.060 The best trade deal of any country in the world.
00:02:47.680 When President Donald Trump came into office, he said, hey, we're going to change our trading regimen.
00:02:53.260 You know, there are things that we need to do to make America strong, to make America prosperous and those types of things.
00:02:59.600 So we're changing and we're changing it for everybody in the whole world.
00:03:03.620 And as a result, the UK came and said, hey, we want to negotiate a new deal with you, okay, a new framework.
00:03:12.280 Check, done.
00:03:13.560 The UK's done it.
00:03:14.540 They've all, a whole bunch of countries and disappointingly, we haven't been able to get to that final point with Canada at this time.
00:03:21.040 Well, let me ask you about that, because we haven't heard much from our federal government in the last little while.
00:03:25.060 I think the last comment that was made on discussions is that there were some technical things that were being talked about, and that's really been about it.
00:03:32.800 Is there anything you can tell us about where the state of negotiations lie?
00:03:36.840 Well, you know, we opened the comment period for USMCA, or, you know, as we know it, KUSMA, as you know it, you know, American businesses have the opportunity now for the 90, 120 days to submit their comments in terms of how is it working, what are the problems, what are the issues, as we go through the negotiation process, which hopefully will be complete by July of 2026.
00:04:02.860 It's a review process. So that's happening right now. So rather than coming up with a, you know, a major rewrite, it looks like we're going to slog through going through the technicalities, and we'll see what this agreement looks like between US and Canada next summer.
00:04:21.840 So there's always a possibility it'll change, you know, or that we'll get to an agreement sooner than that. But other than that, that's the process that we will go through.
00:04:29.320 You don't see any major announcement about some of these things like steel and aluminum and lumber perhaps before then?
00:04:36.920 Oh, there may be. Okay, but in terms of a, you know, as a president would probably say one big, beautiful deal, an agreement. Right now, it looks like that's not on the table.
00:04:49.300 Does your administration want to see a bigger KUSMA or USMCA more included in it? What do you think that will look like?
00:04:58.400 Well, I mean, I think when after the president and the prime minister met, you know, for the first time and talked about the trade, you know, trade opportunities and those types of things in the Oval Office and then spent an hour, hour and a half together in the lunch.
00:05:13.200 You know, there was significant talk about getting to a big deal that would, you know, cover all the products covered under USMCA, but also energy, you know, autos, steel, aluminum, you know,
00:05:28.160 and you go right through the list. All the things that we have strong ecosystems with today, you know, as a partnership today, and as well as, you know, covering some of the new opportunity areas, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, data, digital, all of those kinds of things potentially could have been in that kind of a deal.
00:05:47.620 Well, let me ask you about critical minerals. What would your administration like to see the relationship be between the US and Canada on critical minerals?
00:05:56.520 Do you see the US buying more from Canada? Do you want more involvement? You've signed a deal with Ukraine. Is that something that is a model for more deals?
00:06:07.620 I mean, we're critical. They're called critical minerals for a reason. They're critical. We need them. We need access to them. I think both Canada and the US recognize we're not going to get them from China.
00:06:20.100 So the US is, you know, we're scouring the globe as to where we can get them. I think we'd love to have an agreement with Canada. We were already invested, I think, close to $100 million with various Canadian companies to do mining operations.
00:06:34.740 We've invested through our Department of Defense to, you know, to address the economic uncertainties and the high risks that come with some of these projects.
00:06:45.620 And so we're supporting Canadian industry to develop. So obviously, we see Canada as a real strong potential to be a partner in critical minerals.
00:06:55.960 You're from Michigan. Yep. The auto PAC, you know it very well.
00:06:58.820 Is that a framework, perhaps, critical minerals with the supply chain like that?
00:07:07.520 All of those are possibilities. We just got, you know, our folks have spent a tremendous amount of time talking with the Canadians.
00:07:15.120 We haven't reached that framework, but, you know, hopefully they will go through that, you know, through all of those issues.
00:07:20.340 And they'll go through it one way or another. I mean, we got to like a seven or eight page deal framework with the UK that outlines a lot of the, you know, the top line goals and objectives.
00:07:31.900 And now, you know, a bunch of people are working through and implementing the details of that.
00:07:36.360 It looks like we're starting the other way. We're taking a massive existing agreement.
00:07:41.440 We're going through the process to review that and then we'll see what changes come out of it.
00:07:45.780 So there's a whole bunch of ways to skin this cat. All right. Ambassador, thank you for your time.
00:07:50.400 We appreciate you coming in tonight. Enjoy the rest of your visit to Maritimes.
00:07:53.640 I understand you're off to New Brunswick. You'll be treated well there as well, of course.
00:07:56.620 Yeah, we are. We're passionate about this relationship.
00:07:59.500 It is a great relationship that we believe can get to be much bigger and much better.
00:08:04.200 Thank you for your time. Thank you. We will take a break.
00:08:06.600 That's Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, and we'll be back with much more of your news after this.
00:08:11.340 All right. So what I'm getting from this interview is that Mark Carney is dragging his feet
00:08:15.060 and not doing what is required to make a deal with the United States.
00:08:19.180 He promised us he'd get a deal with America. Instead, he got us crippling tariffs,
00:08:23.600 and this is while our economy collapses. And don't get me started on crime and immigration. 0.95
00:08:28.980 You'll have to watch my other videos to see how I feel about that.
00:08:31.800 This is yet another reminder of why we need Polyev in office and why we need to send Carney back to
00:08:37.160 Europe. The good news is there is a possibility of a no confidence vote, and I'll cover this at length
00:08:42.680 in a video tomorrow. Just be patient and have a little bit of faith.
00:08:47.900 Sooner rather than later, the Conservatives will be in control and Polyev will be in power. 1.00
00:08:52.940 Talk to you tomorrow, Patriots.