Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland are locked in a war of words, and it's pretty obvious that the Prime Minister is trying to get rid of his own finance minister to blame her for all of Canada's problems, and then replace her with Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney.
00:00:00.000Hello everyone, welcome back to the Wyatt Claypool Show, and today we're going to discuss the Cold War that you may not have known was even going on between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his own Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland.
00:00:17.580Obviously, both of these people are bad actors. They're terrible politicians, terrible people, and their policy is awful. But it's still interesting to watch the way that Justin Trudeau just abuses his subordinates, some of the most loyal people in his government to him.
00:00:34.400You could argue that Chrystia Freeland is the most loyal person to Trudeau, maybe after Jagmeet Singh. And now Trudeau is basically trying to force her out, set her up for failure, so that he can throw her under the bus, blame her for all the problems with the country's finances, and then maybe slot in Mark Carney.
00:00:54.840Obviously, this has been going on for quite a while now, of Mark Carney moving from just a background advisor to someone more forward in front of the cameras, talking about Canada's financial policy and wanting to help advise the Prime Minister.
00:01:10.040I think what's going on here is that, fast-forwarding three months from now, I think we might see Freeland move back to a different role, or say that she has decided that she's not going to be running again.
00:01:22.520She has a lot of Disney Plus to catch up on ever since she cancelled that subscription for her family, so she's going to be going and doing something else now.
00:01:31.540And then Mark Carney has the opportunity to jump in and become the Finance Minister.
00:01:36.020The interesting part of all this is going to be seeing whether or not Freeland is going to have enough of a backbone to actually go after Trudeau and start leaking information on him.
00:01:46.080Because that's kind of gone on so far, because the rumor mill in Ottawa has been that Trudeau is trying to force, effectively, the deficit hire for this vanity project with $250 checks and the GST holiday to make himself temporarily look good, while also jamming up the deficit.
00:02:04.460He has basically thrown Chrystia Freeland a hot potato she can't get rid of, and then it gives him a great opportunity to blame her for the deficit, like, while sailing past the $40 billion limit they set, and then being able to move Mark Carney in after.
00:02:21.900But let's take this from the top and look at how this has all started with the original promise for the $40 billion deficit.
00:02:28.220So this clip is in French, but it has Chrystia Freeland being translated into English, making the commitment that Canada is going to be on track to staying below a $40 billion deficit in 2025 for the next budget.
00:02:45.220I don't know why this is even considered a good thing.
00:02:47.260Wow, look, we stayed below $40 billion.
00:02:49.580It'd be great if we were in a surplus, but this is at least what Chrystia Freeland had committed to.
00:03:19.700So here is one of our, here is one of the conservative MPs calling out Chrystia Freeland for this flip-flop and basically throwing her under the bus, or the prime minister throwing Freeland under the bus.
00:03:32.880He lost control of spending in his cabinet.
00:03:34.880He sent this spending spat spiraling out of control, forcing his finance minister to smash through her $40 billion deficit guardrail promise.
00:03:42.680He then solidified his fake feminist credentials by appointing Carbon Tax Carney as a de facto finance minister after using her.
00:03:49.900Even the PBO confirmed they smashed through their $40 billion deficit guardrail by at least $6 billion.
00:03:55.800Will the prime minister confirm the deficit is not a penny over $46 billion?
00:04:00.520If the conservatives are really interested in asking questions of the economy, I do have answers for them.
00:04:07.020Yesterday, the Bank of Canada lowered interest rates yet again.
00:04:13.400Lowering interest rates is like the smallest drop the bucket of our financial problems.
00:04:19.420Oh, well, we just lower the interest rates, everything will get better.
00:04:22.260Like, you have to have an economy in good financial health to lower interest rates.
00:04:26.580What we're doing is we're just pumping money into the economy and we're going to be increasing inflation.
00:04:31.740Interest rates can go down when there's a lot of real productive investment taking place, not when there's nobody really wants to spend money.
00:04:39.960So maybe we can, like, lower interest rates, make people a little bit more likely to borrow.
00:04:45.440Well, last time the bank dropped 50 basis points on the interest rate was 9-11, the global financial crisis, and COVID.
00:04:52.300And carbon tax Carney's comeback fueled his fiscal feud further.
00:04:55.700The weak prime minister used the finance minister to rack up debt, and now he's going to replace another female minister, but this time with Davos' elite carbon tax Carney.
00:05:05.400All of this just to smash through his $40 billion deficit card rail and drive Canada's finances off a fiscal cliff.
00:05:13.180Once again, will the prime minister confirm the deficit won't be a penny past $46 billion?
00:05:23.420And so what's going on now, I'll remove that for a second, is that now Freeland is now having to look like a moron, not being able to argue or articulate why exactly she can't balance the budget.
00:05:36.060Because what she should be able to say is that the prime minister forced this stupid $250 check handout and GST holiday on me, and now I have to make everything balanced, and it's just not going to happen because of all this stupid late-minute, like, massive spending things we're doing.
00:05:55.020But because the Liberal Party is such a cult, Freeland doesn't even have the capacity at this point to even recognize that she's being used and forced to be the fall guy for the $46 billion deficit, or whatever it ends up being.
00:06:10.240So, since you've been minister, you've delivered a number of budgets.
00:06:16.340Have any of those budgets that you delivered, has the deficit come in as projected?
00:06:21.000Has any one of them come in as projected?
00:06:25.020Actually, Mr. Perkins, we are delivering a far stronger and faster rate of fiscal consolidation.
00:06:50.620Well, fiscal consolidation is happening faster than you think.
00:06:55.960This is just stupid corporate speak that people are done with in Canadian politics.
00:07:00.260Than anyone predicted, including our budget documents, when COVID first hit and when Canada experienced the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
00:07:10.640The recovery led by our government's economic plan has been significantly stronger and faster than the recovery which Canada saw when the Conservatives were in office after the financial crisis.
00:07:41.980And then over a couple of years, we recovered and we shot past that point.
00:07:45.800So yeah, oh my goodness, but it took us two years compared to just a year to recover.
00:07:50.120It's like, well, yeah, because we're having to recover from artificial problems in 2020, whereas in 2008, it was an actual international financial issue.
00:08:01.200Canada's financial issues right now, our economic issues are all policy made.
00:08:05.760It's all government created problems, pretty much.
00:08:08.880Which was a shock, but a much milder shock than the COVID recession.
00:08:15.140And I'm very pleased that Canada is on track for a soft landing.
00:08:21.140Inflation has been in Bank of Canada's target range for 10 months for all of this year.
00:09:12.000That is really good news for Canadians, and that did not happen by accident.
00:09:15.440I spent most of my life before being elected in 2021 in the private sector as an executive of a number of corporations as well as on boards.
00:09:23.840And if the CFO for my company missed its financial projections every single year, they wouldn't be the CFO for very long, neither would the public markets.
00:09:33.980So, why should you remain a CFO of Canada since you can't seem to hit a single target you set?
00:09:45.700She's not going to be able to answer the question.
00:09:47.080But what I want to do now is move on to this very interesting answer that she gave to a question about whether or not the prime minister is undermining her at a press conference she was holding.
00:09:58.420Because you can tell, and everyone's been commenting on it, she looks visually upset being asked this question.
00:10:05.460Like, she knows she's basically been dragged through the mud through the incompetence of the prime minister.
00:10:11.060Oh, let's make sure I actually have this queued up to the right spot.
00:10:16.840The Liberal Party is basically acting like a cult at this point.
00:10:22.660If he's messing something up, you just have to pretend like he was right in order to, you know, blow through the deficit.
00:10:30.320It's an absolute clown show right now.
00:10:32.840And you can even see it on her face here, just the frustration of having to deal with the jumping around of Trudeau and all these issues.
00:10:40.640Hi there, it's Laura Stone, Globe and Mail.
00:10:54.280We've all agreed to do one question so everyone can get in.
00:10:57.340Minister Freeland, we've been reporting all week about tension between your office and the prime minister's office over the fiscal policy in this country.
00:11:05.580We've said that the prime minister is again in talks with Mark Carney to join the government.
00:11:11.600And the prime minister appears unwilling to personally.
00:11:14.620I'm going to go back a little bit here.
00:11:16.160I'm actually going to take this out of full screen because I just want to zoom in on her and go back a little bit here.
00:11:22.240You can just tell how just visually upset she looks from all these questions and, like, the implications of what's been going on behind this.
00:11:28.560I've been reporting all week about tension between your office and the prime minister's office over the fiscal policy in this country.
00:11:35.300We've said that the prime minister is again in talks with Mark Carney to join the government.
00:11:41.060And the prime minister appears unwilling to personally defend you in public.
00:11:45.900How can you stay in the government when the prime minister continually tries to cut you off at the knees like that?
00:13:00.900Or, you know, I've been wanting to step back and Mark Carney's taking up a little bit more of the load.
00:13:05.860We have a lot of problems, you know, we have to deal with.
00:13:08.580And so it's always better to have two sets of hands rather than one.
00:13:13.000She can't say it because you know the fact that basically Trudeau is torturing her, saying, get the deficit down to $40 billion.
00:13:19.760And then two, like three weeks ago, says, you know, also, by the way, you're going to have to spend like $4 billion or something like that.
00:13:59.620Why would you even acknowledge that there is this gossip and it's not just like a false rumor or something like that?
00:14:05.280The whole point is, guys, by the way, gossip is not good oftentimes, but oftentimes it's because it's gossip because there's something true about it.
00:14:14.580And there is something true about this.
00:14:16.320And again, as the thing goes on, you can even just look at the contortions of her face.
00:14:20.180She is deeply uncomfortable with this question.
00:14:22.860Again, if this was a nonsense point that only conservatives were trying to spread rumors about,
00:14:28.700she could even, like, just come out and just say, no, nonsense, we're working fine together.