PJ The Belt - July 12, 2026


Things Just Got MUCH WORSE for Canada..

Mentioned
Trump Greer Mark Carney Rob Buffum Jameson LeBlanc
Alberta Separation SURGES!! — The Federalists are PANICKING Trump just WENT NUCLEAR on Mark Carney

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

176.19

Word count

1,447

Sentence count

99

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the latest in the ongoing trade war between the United States and Canada, including the President's withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement (Kuzma) and Canada's retaliatory tariffs.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 I think Canada should continue to be worried.
00:00:02.000 I think the question is, does it stay the same or could it get worse?
00:00:05.480 And it could get worse at any moment.
00:00:07.400 Just because the president has not pulled that six-month withdrawal notification, who's
00:00:11.880 to say that he won't find a reason to do so?
00:00:15.800 That could be a road he goes down.
00:00:17.860 It also concerns me that Mexico is willing to provide the sorts of concessions and offers
00:00:23.440 that Canada can't.
00:00:24.960 And the president would say, well, these guys are our partners, fine.
00:00:27.600 I'm good with the bilateral with them.
00:00:29.680 forget about it imagine a man whose portfolio is invested 92 percent in a country he pretends to
00:00:37.600 hate and then he wins an election on attacking that very same country doing everything in his
00:00:43.600 power to keep the country he was actually elected to run in a state of managed decline as he lines
00:00:49.920 his pockets his popularity stays high as he and the media manipulate the population into hating
00:00:55.800 their neighbor and blaming 11 years of failure and decay on their liberal rule on a foreign
00:01:01.900 president. If you guessed Canada's Mark Carney, congratulations. You're one of the few not
00:01:08.320 affected by the anti-American delusion that has taken over Canada. It's a very petty argument that
00:01:14.380 the Canadians are making. We have huge trade with Canada, whether it's fabricated copper, aluminum,
00:01:20.060 steel, energy, all these things are a very important partner. They're a five eyes partner.
00:01:23.600 I serve on the House Intelligence Committee. And yet to be so petty, to have their government-run alcoholic beverage operations say no more American distillery and winery items should be on the shelves, this is petty. You're talking about pennies versus hundreds and hundreds of dollars, or maybe we could call it millions versus billions. And why they're doing this is, look, Canada, we're just asking for them to investigate. But what is Canada doing?
00:01:52.300 They're undermining the United States. And it's important, you know, Ed, when I was in Jameson Greer, our U.S. trade representative, in front of our Ways and Means Committee, you know, once those tariffs were implicated, I asked Jameson, has anyone retaliated against us other than Canada?
00:02:06.380 And you know what? Only two countries in the entire world have retaliated against the United States based on tariffs, and that is China and Canada.
00:02:16.380 How can that be? How can our very best ally and closest friend to the North, you know, reflect so much, used to actually reflect so many of our values?
00:02:24.620 How could this be happening?
00:02:25.780 And the Canadian government pretends everything is fine.
00:02:28.920 But the Trump administration has been very clear.
00:02:31.760 They would rather walk away entirely.
00:02:33.820 So here's the truth. 0.83
00:02:35.040 Canada spent years causing up to China, ignoring the writing on the wall.
00:02:39.700 And now as the deadline hits, they shrug while the economy is falling apart and industries suffer the consequences.
00:02:47.620 How worried do you think Canadians should be at this point in the Kuzma process now that the Americans have decided not to renew it?
00:02:53.520 They haven't pulled out of it, but it's kind of in this 10-year zombie state right now.
00:02:58.340 How worried should we be?
00:02:59.660 I think Canada should continue to be worried.
00:03:02.500 There has not been a huge cataclysmic change over the last two weeks, but it's just increasing weight.
00:03:08.800 We're having like the straw that broke the camel's back.
00:03:12.500 It's one thing after the other.
00:03:14.340 Uncertainty is continuing, and it would be really irresponsible to just assume
00:03:18.640 if they haven't pulled the plug now, they're not going to pull the plug.
00:03:21.480 We should just continue business as usual, and eventually it'll be fine.
00:03:25.500 I think that would be a bad idea.
00:03:27.680 The next president decides they want to, I don't know, leave Kuzma or roll it over and renew it.
00:03:31.940 But if we go into this decade process lasts a full decade, it's going to be every year this.
00:03:38.040 And the uncertainty, does it go away or does business just move to the U.S.?
00:03:43.400 Well, I think the question is, does it stay the same or could it get worse?
00:03:47.200 And it could get worse at any moment.
00:03:49.060 Just because the president has not pulled that six-month withdrawal notification,
00:03:53.500 who's to say that he won't find a reason to do so?
00:03:57.260 And because there are very few constraints on him,
00:04:00.340 whether from Congress or the bureaucracy, that could be a road he goes down.
00:04:05.520 That concerns me.
00:04:06.600 also concerns me that Mexico is willing to provide the sorts of concessions and offers that Canada
00:04:12.660 can't. And the president would say, well, these guys are our partners. Fine. I'm good with the
00:04:16.860 bilateral with them. Canada, forget about it. So here we are, no deal, no plan, just excuses.
00:04:24.620 While Ottawa chases trade with Beijing, they forgot our biggest and most important partnership.
00:04:30.120 And Trump said no more one-sided deals, no more backroom games.
00:04:35.720 Canada had every chance to secure stability, and instead they gambled it away.
00:04:40.680 Canada put a charge on some of our companies,
00:04:44.720 and Canada's been a very difficult country to deal with over the years.
00:04:49.280 You know, we hear Canada, we have a great relationship with the people of Canada,
00:04:52.900 but it's been very difficult, and they put a charge, and they were a little bit early,
00:04:57.080 we found out about it so and we have all the cards we will every single one we don't want to
00:05:02.400 do anything bad but uh they have uh economically we have such power over canada and it's not going
00:05:10.160 to work out well for canada and so i said we're going to stop all negotiations with canada right
00:05:15.480 now until they straighten out their act is there anything canada can change your mind about the
00:05:20.940 situation well no they put a tax on uh companies that were american companies that they shouldn't
00:05:25.920 very severe tax. And yeah, I guess they could remove it. They will. But I don't really I mean,
00:05:33.620 it doesn't matter to me. We have all the cards. We have all the cards. You know, we do a lot of
00:05:39.280 business with Canada, but relatively little. They do most of their businesses with us.
00:05:44.520 And when you have that circumstance, you treat people better. They've had farmers that are
00:05:50.700 getting like 300, 400, 200 percent in tariffs. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. We have
00:05:56.220 cases, you don't read this and the people don't report, but they charge us 400 percent on some
00:06:03.520 dairy products. 400 percent. Nobody writes that. And it's not fair to our farmers and we've got
00:06:11.440 to protect our farmers. Hi, my name is Rob Buffum. I work at CTV and my questions for the Prime
00:06:15.540 Minister. So on behalf of a colleague and it relates to Kuzma, President Trump as
00:06:20.400 you'll know has made a range of comments on how he feels about Kuzma
00:06:23.220 including yesterday talking about his preference for it terminating
00:06:26.460 immediately. I guess they want to know you've obviously been in frequent
00:06:30.720 conversation with the president. What are your thoughts as to whether he
00:06:33.240 actually wants to see it extended for 16 years, keep it for 10 or get rid of it
00:06:37.380 right away? Does Trump want to get rid of it right away?
00:06:41.660 I know. No, look, I think, as you say, I had a number of conversations with the President in parallel in the last few days of the G7 on a range of issues, including some of the commercial aspects.
00:06:54.520 But there were very detailed, a series of technical conversations. That slightly diminishes them, I just call it that way.
00:07:03.720 but Minister LeBlanc, who's responsible for this, our chief negotiator, Ambassador Greer,
00:07:08.840 who is the U.S. trade representative.
00:07:11.180 We continue to work through a number of issues, which are all related, and all related.
00:07:16.540 And what I'll refer to is, let me take Ambassador Greer's testimony to Congress on a variety of occasions.
00:07:23.700 In effect, the underlying structure of KUSMA has been preserved.
00:07:32.040 It continues to operate for 85% of our exports.
00:07:38.000 Without any action, it will remain in place for the next decade.
00:07:43.960 There's an opportunity to extend it.
00:07:46.060 There's always been the opportunity for any of the parties to cancel it with six months' notice.
00:07:51.580 It's no secret.
00:07:52.800 The president, in recent years, has not been the biggest fan of Kuzma or other trade deals.
00:07:59.200 But there are specific things that we can work together on, and including, I'll just put on the table, since we're in British Columbia and we're talking housing, on forest products, which we continue to press with the Americans. Thank you.