PJ The Belt - August 30, 2025


Trump Just BLOCKED Canada & China From Trade! – Crown Joins USA!

Alberta & Saskatchewan STATEHOOD Deal With TRUMP - On The Negotiating Table？! Alberta & Saskatchewan STATEHOOD - TRUMP Negotiations EXPOSED!

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

153.03

Word count

1,339

Sentence count

106

People

Also mentioned:
Adrienne Gobriel Diageo Donald Trump Timu Kamal Karamali Trevor Toome

Harmful content

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Crown Royal Wholesale Bottling Plant in Amherstburg, Ontario, is closing and shifting work south of the border. The plant is the largest employer in the area and employs about 160 people. Mayor Sandy Greenberg is angry.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 some of these particularly Chinese e-commerce discounters that were taking advantage of the
00:00:05.480 loophole. This would be the Timu and Xi'ans of the world that were effectively under the 1.00
00:00:11.600 de minimis exemption and were able to sort of zone skip across the border and not be subject
00:00:17.520 to tariffs. Well, another blow to a region near the Canada-U.S. border. Windsor is already on
00:00:24.060 tender hooks with the auto industry and Donald Trump's tariff crosshairs. Now, the plant in
00:00:29.700 nearby Amherstburg that bottles Crown Royal, an iconic Canadian whiskey with a storied history,
00:00:35.880 is closing and shifting work to south of the border. Economic force. The only people who thought
00:00:42.820 Canada could stand a chance going toe-to-toe with an economy over 10 times its size were the willfully 0.67
00:00:48.880 blind or the poor souls watching government paid media and believe in them. The truth is, 0.63
00:00:56.080 the United States doesn't even want to cause damage to Canada. They just want a fair trade deal and for
00:01:02.060 Ottawa to finally control its leaky northern border and drug pipelines. Here's the kicker though. Even
00:01:09.080 the government-funded media, you know, the same folks who usually gaslight the public to protect their
00:01:14.100 liberal buddies, they're now forced to admit the truth. And watching them eat crow on live television
00:01:20.840 is priceless. If you support these videos, please like and subscribe. I appreciate it.
00:01:28.840 CTV's Adrienne Gobriel now with the job losses and the heart-wrenching effect on a community. Adrienne.
00:01:35.580 Yes, Sandy, that Crown Royal bottling facility you mentioned near the Detroit-Windsor border in
00:01:40.220 Amherstburg, Ontario, is that community's largest employer. And some are pointing towards
00:01:45.760 the Trump trade war as a motive for the move. We need to maintain the jobs. Without the jobs,
00:01:54.480 we become a bedroom community. And I, as mayor, do not want that. We have to, we're trying to
00:01:59.960 increase our commercial industrial base. We've been very successful in the last year. This is a major
00:02:06.220 blow. In a statement, the parent company of Crown Royal says this decision reflects Diageo's efforts
00:02:10.960 to continuously improve its North American supply chain and ensure the company is best positioned
00:02:15.740 for long-term sustainable growth. Through this process, the company will unlock additional
00:02:21.000 productivity and increase resiliency and capacity to scale, effectively meeting demand across its
00:02:27.300 markets and shifting some bottling volume to be closer to its many U.S. Crown Royal consumers.
00:02:33.440 To be quite frank with you, I was pissed off. So I made it clear to the company that they have a fight
00:02:42.580 on their hands because it was basically reading me a letter with no details, just saying it was a
00:02:49.600 business decision. You have generations of families that have worked there.
00:02:55.300 Now, the plant, which employs about 160 people, will be closing this coming February. Diageo says
00:03:01.920 that Crown Royal products destined for the domestic market and non-U.S. marketplaces will continue to
00:03:08.700 be bottled in Quebec. Sandy. All right, Adrienne, thanks so much for this.
00:03:13.720 Canada's best and brightest are all leaving. It's called a brain drain and it's really hitting hard
00:03:19.940 in Canada. Skilled professionals, entrepreneurs, and even doctors, who we need the most, are packing it
00:03:28.140 up for places with better opportunities and less government chaos. Investors, they're bailing too.
00:03:36.040 Billions and billions of dollars are being moved to the United States where the economic climate
00:03:41.700 actually rewards growth instead of punishing it. In fact, foreign investment in Canada has dropped
00:03:49.420 dramatically while American markets keep pulling Canadian capital south.
00:03:54.760 The de minimis exemption, it is no more as of a Friday. Tell us what the impact that you're
00:04:01.740 expecting to see across this, not just the shipping sector, but across the supply chains. What's it going
00:04:08.920 to do? Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty significant development that of all the trade policies that
00:04:15.200 the Trump administration has tried to push for. This one, I think, makes complete sense for them
00:04:19.680 to eliminate the de minimis exemption. Effectively, this was a way for companies to bypass tariffs that
00:04:27.820 are put on U.S. retailers and U.S. wholesalers. And so it makes complete sense for the administration
00:04:34.800 to basically eliminate that. It will mean, in some cases, higher prices for consumers on some of these,
00:04:40.840 particularly Chinese e-commerce discounters that were taking advantage of the loophole. This would
00:04:46.040 be the Timu and Xi'ens of the world that were effectively under the de minimis exemption and were
00:04:53.080 able to sort of zone skip across the border and not be subject to tariffs. But for U.S. retailers,
00:04:59.720 it's been an enormous drag on their operations because it has enabled Chinese companies and companies not
00:05:07.640 based in the United States to offer significantly discounted items, almost direct to factory kind
00:05:12.920 of pricing that undercuts the entire U.S. merchant system. Big changes in the Canadian business world.
00:05:21.000 First, businesses sending small packages to the U.S. will have to pay duties starting today. And a major
00:05:28.120 booze bottling plant is shutting down in Amherstburg. For more on this, let's go to CTV's Kamal Karamali.
00:05:34.760 What can you tell us about the major decline in real gross domestic products released by
00:05:40.040 Statistics Canada this morning? Yeah, so the quarterly drop,
00:05:45.080 really annualized to show a minus 1.6 percent drop in the GDP. And this is annualized and it really shows
00:05:55.960 a real life effect of the tariffs because overall stats can say the U.S. tariffs causing a drop off
00:06:05.560 in exports and business investment. And we're seeing examples of companies being impacted by
00:06:11.320 this trade war this week. Tell us more about the closure of the Crown Royal packaging plant in
00:06:17.160 Amherstburg and the Montreal based fashion company that's feeling the pinch. Yeah, Amherstburg,
00:06:23.000 just south of Windsor, close to the U.S. border. And what we learned yesterday was that
00:06:28.840 the Crown Royal bottling plant will close down in February of next year. Diageo, the company that
00:06:34.920 owns the plant says after nearly a century of bottling the iconic Canadian whiskey brand,
00:06:39.720 it is and being the town's largest employer, it is closing its doors as a result of the tariffs.
00:06:46.120 And here's the part that bothers me the most. The ones paying the price for all this incompetence
00:06:51.560 aren't the well-connected or the elites. It's Canada's youth. Right now, young Canadians can't
00:06:56.920 even land a basic entry-level job in their own country, while cheap foreign workers keep coming in 1.00
00:07:03.160 thanks to disastrous immigration policies. But don't expect the liberal crowd to care. Their kids are 0.56
00:07:11.560 already set up for life. It's regular folks like you and I that get stuck holding the bag. And that's
00:07:18.120 the ugly reality. If you look at GDP, the Canadian economy doesn't appear to be doing all that bad.
00:07:24.360 Heck, we're not even in a recession. As of last count, Canadian GDP growth was just keeping its head
00:07:29.240 above water. So the economy is technically still growing. But the numbers change considerably when you
00:07:34.760 look at measures of worker productivity. They keep dropping. And they're projected to keep dropping
00:07:42.200 for the next 40 years. Canadians are going to work, they're clocking in their eight hours, 1.00
00:07:46.200 but on average, they're producing less than they used to. It's gotten to the point where Ontario,
00:07:51.960 Canada's largest province, now has a per capita GDP roughly on par with Alabama, one of the poorest
00:07:57.320 states in the US. And this is affecting our standard of living. University of Calgary economist
00:08:02.600 Trevor Toome crunched the numbers and figured out that if Canadian labor productivity had instead
00:08:07.080 spent the last six years keeping pace with the US, you know, instead of remaining stagnant,
00:08:11.960 we'd all be making an extra $5500. Hey, if you've made it this far, thank you so much for watching.
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00:08:28.680 to all our channel members. I really appreciate your support. See you all in the next one. Peace.