00:01:01.420Donald Trump also factoring into a second hot mic incident,
00:01:05.960this one involving Mark Carney on what has been a thorny political issue
00:01:09.720between our two countries, Chinese EVs.
00:01:14.020Yeah, this is something that's happened in the past hour, David.
00:01:16.520There was a lunch session to deal with the Iran war issue.
00:01:20.800And in the bit where the camera is allowed in,
00:01:22.880as they're all getting in before the formal conversation starts,
00:01:25.080you can see an image of Donald Trump sitting down,
00:01:27.480Mark Carney leaning in to sort of talk into his ear. And he seems to be trying to reassure the
00:01:33.900president on the deal that he struck with China to allow Chinese vehicles into the Canadian market
00:01:39.700in return for tariffs being lifted on agricultural products and seafood. We can hear him saying that
00:01:45.880the president is less than 3% of our cars, 49,000 cars. We put a cap, a hard cap. I thought you
00:01:52.520would like that. And Trump says, that's good. I like that. But this is a real difficult issue
00:01:58.160for the Americans. They do not want China getting entry into the car market at all in North America.
00:02:04.500Carney's reassurance there that they've done what a quota system, a hard cap of 49,000 vehicles,
00:02:08.400which is about 3% of the Canadian annual auto sales market. He makes the point that the cap
00:02:14.920is effective. Europe and others tried to deal with China with tariffs, and China just ate the
00:02:20.620It's a non-market economy. It's state driven. They'll pay a price to get market dominance and market saturation. And now you have your partnering directly with China to build cars here. And they've taken a massive share of the market. So the way this is structured, you can see Mark Carney trying to reassure Donald Trump that the same thing won't happen in Canada. And that's key, obviously, with the Kuzma negotiations and with talks suspected to happen later today between Dominic LeBlanc, the Canada U.S. Trade Minister, and Jameson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, who are also here in Evian for conversations on content.
00:02:50.620threat. Forget the politics for a moment. Just look at this picture. If somebody had shown
00:02:57.280Canadians this image six months ago or a year ago during the election campaign, they probably would
00:03:03.240have called it fake. The guy who spent an entire election campaign talking tough against Trump is
00:03:08.820now literally bent over, bowing down, whispering in Trump's ear at the G7. And what makes it even
00:03:15.080better is that this wasn't some carefully staged photo op or something like that. They thought the
00:03:20.600cameras were off they thought the microphones were off too but there was a hot mic moment here
00:03:25.960obviously you can actually hear carney explaining himself to trump explaining the whole canada china
00:03:32.800deal explaining why the deal was structured in a way that wouldn't affect the u.s canada relationship
00:03:39.100and basically trying to tell trump that canada wasn't trying to undermine the united states
00:03:45.400now i want you to think about that for a second this is the same guy who spent months telling
00:03:49.960canadians that we needed to reduce our dependence on america and now he's standing there bent over
00:03:56.360trying to convince the president of the united states that canada still wants to work with
00:04:00.600america that picture tells you everything you need to know about what's actually happening
00:04:06.680behind closed doors let's bring in our glenn mcgregor from ottawa and glenn you are listening
00:04:12.180very closely to that exchange and it sure seems to be a significant one yeah every once in a while
00:04:18.480Cynthia, we get to peek beneath the veil and hear what world leaders at these big international
00:04:23.560summits actually say when they think that the microphones are off. And today, right before a
00:04:28.880roundtable session of G7 leaders, Mark Carney in that video, and it's hard to hear, but he was
00:04:33.580seen sort of leaning over a seated Donald Trump and chatting about what sounded like were Trump's
00:04:39.740concerns over a Canadian agreement with China. Now, Carney was heard on the live mic saying,
00:04:45.480and I quote, less than 3% of our market, 49,000 cars, it's a cap, a hard line.
00:04:52.500That is clearly a reference to the number of electric vehicles that Canada will allow China
00:04:56.880to sell into our market in exchange for China reducing tariffs on canola and other Canadian
00:05:02.660agricultural and seafood products. Now Trump sounded actually pleased telling the Prime
00:05:07.620Minister, that's good, I like it. Now that China deal had become something of an irritant in the
00:05:13.720larger discussion about Trump's tariffs on Canada and his desire to see auto factories in Canada
00:05:19.360and Mexico move to the U.S., taking all those jobs with them. Now, the minister responsible
00:05:24.880for Canada U.S. trade, as Dominic LeBlanc, he was sent out to speak to reporters in France
00:05:29.280right after and said, hey, these hot mic comments are not a big deal. The Trump administration knew
00:05:35.580about the EV quotas when Carney announced them after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping
00:05:40.340in Beijing earlier this year, but there was no other formal meeting between Carney and Trump
00:05:46.320while they were in France. However, LeBlanc did talk with his U.S. counterpart in the KUSMA
00:05:51.880U.S. MCA negotiations, that's trade ambassador Jameson Greer, and LeBlanc said they continue to
00:05:57.660make progress and we'll speak again next week as that KUSMA review deadline of July 1st approaches.
00:06:04.000So maybe a little cause for optimism, maybe a smidge, we'll see.
00:06:08.940You know, one thing I've noticed about politics is that reality always wins. Eventually. You can run ads, you can make speeches, you can come up with slogans, you can spend months telling people that Canada is going to pivot away from America, but eventually you run into reality.
00:06:25.400And reality is that nearly every major sector of the Canadian economy depends on access to the United States.
00:06:33.780Reality is that Canadian investors do care what Washington thinks.
00:06:38.420Reality is that trade between the two matters. Tariffs matter.
00:06:43.020And that's why moments like this are so revealing, because when the campaigning is over and the cameras aren't supposed to catch everything, all that bravado and the whole elbows up thing disappears.
00:06:54.080years what's left is the actual relationship what's left is what politicians do when they think
00:07:00.720nobody's paying attention and judging by what we saw at the g7 carney seems a lot more interested
00:07:06.700in making donald trump happy than he is in making the elbows up crowd happy