The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 02, 2025


Carney Lied - Zero clue how to deal with Trump on trade!


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

186.83017

Word Count

2,981

Sentence Count

182

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In this episode, Wyatt talks about the failure of the Canadian government to reach a trade deal with the US, and how it's a good thing Donald Trump doesn't like Canada. Also, he talks about why Canada should have been able to get a deal in place by July 21st.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. So it is now a verifiable fact that Liberal Prime Minister
00:00:06.600 Mark Carney does not know how to deal with men like Donald Trump. He claimed it during
00:00:12.380 the Liberal Party leadership race. He said it over and over again during the federal
00:00:16.200 election. But as I sit here now, it is August 2nd, and we were supposed to have a trade
00:00:22.740 deal by actually Mark Carney's own deadline of July 21st. But we were really supposed
00:00:27.960 to have it by Donald Trump's deadline of August 1st. And it is the day after August 1st,
00:00:33.240 and we do not have a trade deal. And yes, the legacy media in Canada and the Liberal government
00:00:39.340 will say that, well, acting like there was ever going to be a possibility of a trade deal
00:00:44.340 is laughable because Donald Trump can't be trusted and he, you know, doesn't like Canada
00:00:49.760 and he wants to tariff us and that was his end goal. Okay, maybe that's true. But the
00:00:55.240 Liberal scuffed the negotiation so bad, you can never prove that because we did every
00:01:00.020 single thing wrong. I'm really tired of constantly hearing that whenever we do stuff wrong, well,
00:01:05.580 they would have done it anyways. You know, the Americans would have just rejected anything
00:01:10.640 we said anyways. So what's the point? Okay, well, that's a great attitude to have when you
00:01:16.640 keep screwing things up. I screwed things up, but the other guy would have also screwed it
00:01:21.080 up. So it was actually okay for me to screw it up. We tried to implement the digital services tax
00:01:26.180 during the negotiations. Negotiations where presumably our goal is to actually get to
00:01:32.240 basically near or zero tariffs. And we put in place what is effectively a 3% higher corporate tax rate
00:01:40.780 on American tech firms operating within Canada. Yes, it also applies to Canadian firms, but other than
00:01:46.520 Shopify, there's not many big Canadian tech firms that this new tax applies to. It mostly is applying
00:01:52.560 to Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, stuff like that, Uber, and these are American firms. So naturally,
00:02:01.380 the American government protested. And by the way, do you know which American government protested?
00:02:07.360 Both Joe Biden's Democratic administration, as well as now Donald Trump's Republican
00:02:12.740 administration. This is bipartisan in the US. You had people like Hakeem Jeffries coming out to go
00:02:21.100 after the digital services tax. It was a really stupid thing for us to do in the middle of negotiations.
00:02:26.940 You can pretend. You can sit there and say, that's a Canadian domestic matter. Why does the US care?
00:02:31.860 Well, it affects their companies. And by the way, the world is not a vacuum where we can go out there and
00:02:38.240 we can interact with the world. But as soon as we do things, people aren't supposed to mention it
00:02:41.980 because we constantly critique other countries. We constantly criticize the United States. We
00:02:47.320 criticize Israel. We criticize, like, Hungary. We do that constantly as a country with a liberal
00:02:53.900 government. But as soon as the US has an opinion about one of our policies, something that actually
00:02:59.400 affects them, not like the Canadian government giving travel advisory warnings to gay Canadians,
00:03:05.320 telling them not to go to the US because something bad might happen. They can never define because
00:03:09.980 nothing's going to happen to you. We keep doing stuff with that. But when they weighed in on our
00:03:14.960 digital services tax, what's with the US trying to interfere in our domestic policy? It's not. It
00:03:20.900 affects them too. So they're going to have an opinion about it, especially when you're trying to sign a
00:03:25.000 trade deal with them. And then Parks Canada and municipalities all around Canada started pulling
00:03:30.900 permits for Sean Foyt, that US musician trying to do a tour. Yeah, that was a good look. And then instead of
00:03:37.480 actually, you know, taking the trade negotiation seriously, putting things on the table to trade for
00:03:42.060 a better deal, or even trying to play hardball, making some economic threats, we instead recognize
00:03:47.920 the terror state of Palestine. And yeah, it's a terror state. When Palestine is being run in the Gaza
00:03:54.540 Strip by Hamas, and in the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority, whose military arm is a terrorist
00:04:00.400 group known as FATA, yeah, it's a terrorist state. So we wasted our resources, our political capital
00:04:07.200 on that, rather than trying to sign a trade deal. And again, you constantly have people saying,
00:04:12.640 well, why? It's a domestic matter. It's Canada's foreign policy. Why can the US say something about
00:04:18.680 that? Well, we're trying to try and sign a trade deal with them, idiot. Obviously, they're going to
00:04:23.140 have some issues with things that we do, because we're now in a relationship. We are in a trade
00:04:28.240 relationship, which means that you may have a little bit of something to say about how the
00:04:32.420 other country is conducting itself, especially when the US pays for the vast majority of Canada's
00:04:37.740 security costs as a country, in terms of like military spending. Yeah, they are going to have
00:04:42.980 a problem with Canada waiting in on a topic of interest where the US and Israel are doing all the
00:04:48.660 heavy lifting. We constantly as allies, frag the US and frag Israel rhetorically over the dumbest stuff
00:04:56.200 that's not even true. And then they have to just deal with it, I guess. I'm actually very happy with
00:05:02.760 the Conservative Party right now, because I got the impression over time that they were not going to
00:05:08.380 attack Carney for being incompetent on the trade negotiations, that they were going to sit back
00:05:13.800 and say nothing because people are going to think you're like a mega Republican if you criticize them.
00:05:19.080 But it's totally fair to say that the guy lied. He doesn't know how to deal with Trump.
00:05:23.580 They posted this clip a couple hours ago with a quizzical emoji above it.
00:05:28.780 You can handle him. We can handle him. We are going to handle him. We are going to handle him.
00:05:34.900 We can handle him. We can handle Donald Trump. That's what he misses. And I'm going to go into that.
00:05:40.740 Can they handle them, though? That's kind of the problem. And I want to go into the polling with you guys.
00:05:46.960 I know there's a lot of people saying that or there's a lot of polls out there showing that Canadians
00:05:52.060 are actually totally fine with the way that Mark Carney dealt with this. Are they? Are they, though?
00:05:57.760 Yeah, you're going to have a lot of liberals who are going to default to just blaming Donald Trump
00:06:01.080 for anything that happens. And yeah, in the short run, you're going to have a lot of people have a bit
00:06:05.140 of a rally around the flag moment that, oh, my goodness, Trump implemented tariffs on us. We love Carney now.
00:06:12.320 But in the long run, as the economic pain settles in, people are going to stop liking it so much.
00:06:18.140 They're not going to be as cool with the idea that we're elbows up when we're all paying higher prices
00:06:23.560 for things that verifiably the Mark Carney government messed up on, like not putting supply management
00:06:29.400 on the table one bit when it came to trade negotiations, a policy that isn't even good
00:06:34.400 for our own economy. We were defending to the hilt rather than trying to get a trade deal sign that
00:06:39.200 would save the country on a macro scale way more money than defending supply management, which in
00:06:46.080 fact hampers the agricultural industries of many provinces. This is from a CBC article that was
00:06:52.600 entitled, Trump didn't chicken out, so what's Canada's next move? And it's not an awful article for
00:06:59.180 the CBC, but I think there is one thing in here that just gets under my skin because it is basically
00:07:06.200 repeating an untruth, pretending like it actually doesn't matter too much that tariffs were implemented
00:07:10.480 on us. But check this out. While there's no way that Canada can characterize what happened as a win,
00:07:17.580 there's plenty of evidence that it's not a reason for Prime Minister Mark Carney's government to panic
00:07:21.960 and do something that jeopardizes what really matters for Canadian economy, tariff-free access to the
00:07:27.100 U.S. for the vast majority of exports. And then they basically go on to basically say it doesn't
00:07:32.080 really matter that we're being tariff, saying different economists have slightly different
00:07:35.480 estimates, but even with the increase Trump announced Thursday night, there is a consensus
00:07:39.620 that the effective tariff rate for Canada is down to the single digits, noticeably lower than the
00:07:44.400 tariff rate for any other major trading partner. That's because despite Trump bluster, he's allowing
00:07:49.100 the vast majority of Canadian exports into the country with zero tariff under the terms of the
00:07:54.100 Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement. I always just call it USMCA because it's easier to say than
00:07:58.740 KUSMA or whatever there. But it's not true that this is like a zero-cost proposition for Canada
00:08:06.180 because in order to fall in line with USMCA regulations so that no tariff is applied to you,
00:08:13.300 there is a higher burden of cost in order to follow those regulations. You have to source all your
00:08:19.100 materials within Canada, the US or Mexico for what you're shipping into the United States. Most of
00:08:25.260 the labor has to be done within North America in order to actually pass. And then there is way more
00:08:31.420 documentation, way more paperwork that needs to be done. For large companies even, this is actually
00:08:37.100 costing them probably millions more dollars a year to be able to actually ship things into the United
00:08:42.140 States tariff-free. And so, yes, are they avoiding the tariff? Sure, but they're also having to pay
00:08:49.180 more in order to make these goods following the regulations in order to avoid the tariff. So even
00:08:55.580 when companies are avoiding the tariff, they're running into higher regulatory costs because you can
00:09:01.020 no longer ship in the cotton or wool to make something from New Zealand or from Egypt or from Vietnam.
00:09:09.020 You now have to be getting it from Canada and manufacturing it in Canada to send a t-shirt
00:09:14.380 into the United States without having a tariff applied to it. Now, we don't do the most t-shirt
00:09:19.100 manufacturing in Canada. It's just an example. Way more stuff has to be done in Canada. So the cost
00:09:24.300 goes up in order just to avoid the tariffs. Is it worthwhile? Well, definitely because back in 2024,
00:09:30.940 only about 35% of companies even bothered trying to be USMCA compliant because the tariff rate on,
00:09:37.740 if you weren't, was like 3% to 4%. It wasn't too bad. So basically, we already know that following
00:09:44.860 the regulations was not worth avoiding a 3%, 5% tariff. But now that it's 35%, it is worth it.
00:09:52.780 So we know at the very least the cost of following these regulations are more than 5% on the cost of
00:09:59.580 these goods. So yes, we aren't being hit by a 35% tariff on 100% of our goods. Nobody assumed that
00:10:05.900 was going to happen, but it is going to hurt. And things hurting around the margins in Canada
00:10:12.140 is devastating at this point because our economy wasn't good to begin with. We have more than 10% of
00:10:17.820 the population of the United States, but our economy has less than 10% of the power of the US's economy.
00:10:25.180 So yeah, it's not great for us to even be experiencing 3%, 4%, 5% higher costs. This
00:10:31.020 already wipes out the middle class tax savings that Mark Carney handed out, which was reducing
00:10:37.020 the tax rate under $50,000 by a single percentage, which is not great considering within the $50,000
00:10:44.620 tax bracket, you're already not paying any tax on the first $18,000. So the average person is only
00:10:50.780 saving like as little as $200 a year with that tax cut. It's really, really pathetic.
00:10:57.660 But anyways, now I just want to talk a little bit about the stats on what Canadians are thinking
00:11:02.700 about this. It's all rather silly in the sense that, again, there's this rally around the flag
00:11:08.140 thing that's happening right now that we will talk about, and I think it's a bit delusional.
00:11:13.260 So this first question I want to talk about is, would you prefer to see Canada take a hard or soft
00:11:18.620 approach to trade negotiations with the US? Hard is refuse concessions, even if it makes the
00:11:25.580 relationship worse. Refuse concessions is such a stupid thing. Really, we're going to refuse
00:11:32.540 concessions. That's not how a negotiation works. Sometimes you have to concede, and then you gain
00:11:38.140 a little bit by conceding this thing, and they concede that thing. But right now, 69% of people say
00:11:43.420 that we should take the hard approach and refuse concessions. Only 31% say, make concessions to
00:11:48.300 keep a good relationship. Although I can see in a month's time, if costs are going up, if people
00:11:54.460 realize their grocery bill, rather than let's just say, $200 has now gone up to $208 or $210,
00:12:03.020 you are going to start to get people saying like, oh, maybe we should concede because that's only $10 at
00:12:08.300 the grocery store now. But it's also a little bit more on this product and that product. And
00:12:12.540 I already only had a little bit of money left at the end of the year. And now I basically have
00:12:16.700 nothing. Let's get to a different question here. Canada should respond to American tariffs with
00:12:22.220 counter tariffs equal to whatever the US imposes, 59%. Counter tariffs less than what the US imposes,
00:12:27.660 8%. No counter tariffs, 18%. Unsure, 16%. This one, when it comes to trade deal with the United States,
00:12:36.380 how should Canada approach negotiations? Focus on the best deal available regardless of whether
00:12:40.700 there are tariffs or not, 68%. Accept only agreement with no tariffs, 20%. Unsure, 12%. I would actually
00:12:48.620 agree with saying we should accept an agreement with no tariffs. But in order to get there, you have to
00:12:54.060 be willing to take things like supply management away. Because this is the problem with how people
00:12:59.900 are thinking right now. And this is right now the party breakdown on the Palestine issue. Should we
00:13:05.660 basically stop recognizing Palestine because it annoys Donald Trump? Right now with conservatives,
00:13:10.700 45%, we say we should reverse decision. And then 32% say we should stick to it, 22% being unsure.
00:13:17.180 With liberals, 85% thinks we should stick to it. Only 4% thinks we should back off of it. That is
00:13:24.940 delusional. We are going to stick to recognizing a terrorist state because it annoys Donald Trump.
00:13:30.700 Apparently, stupid decisions are okay if it annoys Donald Trump. But here's another thing. I just
00:13:35.260 want to get back to that other question I was looking at before. I actually favor getting to
00:13:42.220 no tariffs. But to do that, you have to get rid of supply management. Because guess what? Supply
00:13:46.060 management comes with massive tariffs on the US dairy and poultry industry. So we can't act
00:13:50.860 self-righteous and be like, why is the US putting tariffs on us? We've had tariffs on them since the
00:13:55.100 70s. What are you talking about? We've always had tariffs on them. This isn't something new. We
00:14:01.340 didn't do this in response. They responded to us. Disproportionately? Maybe. But that's how you get
00:14:06.860 people discussing things at the table. And even then, Trump still has the USMCA agreement in place,
00:14:12.220 allowing us to escape a lot of them. You could always soften on that. You could always just take
00:14:17.020 away a lot of the exemptions and then make it so that even USMCA products are paying 5% or 10%.
00:14:21.820 You could easily do that. Oh, that would be violating a trade agreement. Well, they're more
00:14:26.220 powerful than us. So what are you talking about? It's just reality. I love Canada. I want Canada to
00:14:31.900 succeed. But I'm not going to pretend that we can just like elbows up them to death. We're just going
00:14:37.420 to stick our elbows in the air. And that's how we're going to win. There's so many people right
00:14:40.940 now, including the Liberal Party, just trying to have to talk their way through this, because it's
00:14:44.780 not a good luck. Mark Carney and the Liberals have not put a statement out about it. And all the
00:14:49.100 Liberal orbiters online of Mark Carney just talking about how great he is, how amazing of a leader
00:14:54.300 he is. He's so intelligent. Would an intelligent guy have gotten us into this position? Or would
00:14:59.580 if he have leveraged his actual meetings with Donald Trump in person to basically on camera say, I think
00:15:05.180 in the next month, we should be getting to zero tariffs because we're the best of allies. He really
00:15:09.900 wasted his time with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. He kind of let just Donald Trump talk and just
00:15:15.180 said a few mild things about the relationship between Canada and the US being important. And
00:15:20.780 that was it. I would have used the moment, if you're going to play hardball, use the moment right
00:15:24.860 there in front of the press to start talking about Trump about how we need to get rid of tariffs,
00:15:29.020 because this shouldn't really be a midterm election issue. So let's get to zero tariffs,
00:15:34.540 100%. Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys. Anyways, make sure to like the video,
00:15:42.460 subscribe to the channel, do all that great stuff. Sorry that I'm not in my usual setup. If I had it,
00:15:47.420 I would definitely be talking about the stats on the whiteboard. But alas, I am not in Canada at
00:15:52.300 the moment, but I will be back soon. But other than that, I will see you guys later.