Liberals⧸NDP are incapable of working with Trump on border security
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
185.36766
Summary
Trump announces a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico. Canada has been free trading with the U.S. for a long time, but now Trump wants to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican products. I discuss why this is a bad idea and why we should fix it.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. It seems like the Liberals, the NDP, and the legacy media in Canada
00:00:07.060
is out to convince me that we must have banned common sense recently and I didn't hear about it
00:00:12.980
because they are acting so irrational and unhinged in response to President-elect Donald Trump
00:00:18.960
announcing a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. You know, that sounds terrible on the surface,
00:00:25.120
a 25% tariff. That's irrational. Trump only wants to put a 10% tariff on Chinese products. Well,
00:00:31.660
if you actually see what Donald Trump said, it's not just a blanket 25% tariff that he's going to
00:00:37.460
put in place on January 20th when he takes office. It's a 25% tariff if we don't do the most obvious
00:00:44.400
thing on the planet and help secure the border with the U.S. in cooperation with the U.S. By the way,
00:00:52.040
Donald Trump doesn't think that Joe Biden's been doing a good job in the border. So it's not like
00:00:56.620
he's going to enter office, do nothing to secure the border from the U.S. side, and then just blame
00:01:01.080
Canada and Mexico for not doing it all for them and then placing a 25% tariff on us. That's not
00:01:07.000
what happened. But if you look at whatever the Liberals are saying and the NDP are saying and
00:01:13.000
then the legacy media, you would think that Trump is just going to start swinging. He's just going to
00:01:17.620
start putting in place tariffs all over the place. And it's strange to see so many people on the left
00:01:22.660
and actually the right too now using this as a moment to say, you know, John Turner was right.
00:01:28.300
We shouldn't be trading freely with the U.S. This is bad for Canada, even though it's been a massive
00:01:34.960
boon for Canada to have free trade with the U.S. The only reason free trade has been technically bad
00:01:41.460
for Canada has been on a domestic level that we are a bad country to invest in right now,
00:01:47.120
which means we end up siphoning a lot of jobs down to the United States, who then sends them
00:01:52.080
back to Canada to be sold rather than being made in Canada, sold in Canada, as well as shipped into
00:01:57.480
the United States. This is an issue that is driving me up the wall because it seems like everyone is
00:02:02.620
pretending to not know what they know in order to score political points for whatever agenda they
00:02:07.800
currently have. But this is what the media headlines look right now on this issue. CBC says rattled by
00:02:15.000
Trump's tariff threats, Canada's leaders point fingers at each other. CTV News. Looney tanks after
00:02:20.620
Trump threatens tariffs on Canadian goods. The Guardian. Trudeau calls emergency meeting over
00:02:26.160
Trump's Canada tariff threat. Global News. After Trump vows 25% tariff, here's what Trudeau,
00:02:32.080
Polyev, and Premier say. Financial Post Goldman predicts significant hits to U.S. from Trump's
00:02:38.960
Canadian tariffs or Canada tariffs. Okay. Did anyone read what Donald Trump actually said? It was about
00:02:47.300
securing the border, something that we can easily do before January 20th. I don't expect that Trump
00:02:53.440
thinks that if there's a single, you know, migrant who walks over the southern or northern border that
00:02:58.240
he's going to implement the 25% tariff, if we just act serious about this serious issue that we haven't
00:03:04.340
been taking seriously and the U.S. hasn't been taking seriously over the past several years, we can
00:03:09.140
easily avoid the tariffs. And this is not like, oh, well, Trump's trying to lump us in with Mexico.
00:03:14.560
It's not like we're sending over millions of people over our border into the U.S. Yes, granted,
00:03:20.360
but we also send in 10 times as many terrorists. Terrorists see Canada as a very easy place to operate
00:03:27.000
from, a very comfortable place to operate from. So people who are on terrorist watch lists to sneak
00:03:32.640
into the United States, they go through Canada, not Mexico, and they only know of the people that
00:03:37.860
they actually catch. Catching people sneaking over the Canadian border is obviously significantly more
00:03:43.960
difficult than the Mexican border since there is just natural barriers along the Mexican border that
00:03:49.280
allows for border patrol to actually see people coming over and catch them more easily. Canada is just
00:03:54.800
like a wide open border with very few patrols going through to make sure that people aren't trying
00:03:59.740
to cross over. We have a massive drug problem in this country, one that we should be domestically
00:04:05.000
solving, and then also making sure that it doesn't start to infect the U.S. as well. This is mostly a
00:04:11.060
British Columbia issue because David Eby thinks drugs are cool and doesn't actually crack down on the
00:04:17.000
illegal distribution of drugs in that province, which makes it a massive hub for fentanyl sales and
00:04:24.080
shipping it over the border. We just had two major drug busts nearby the U.S. border in small towns and
00:04:32.260
farms in British Columbia that were manufacturing massive amounts of narcotics, and do you think that
00:04:38.900
they were just nice enough not to try and ship into the U.S.? They probably were. So do I want a 25%
00:04:45.140
tariff to hit Canada? No. But I've had this happen all day to me, where you're accused of not being
00:04:51.660
patriotic enough if you think that we shouldn't just be saying, oh, the U.S. is wrong and evil and
00:04:56.760
terrible for even threatening this. We should resist them and fight back like Jagmeet Sing Sing.
00:05:02.040
It's irrational. No. We should be doing what we should have already been doing and be thankful for
00:05:08.120
the fact that, guess what? If we do this, we don't have a tariff hit us. So if anything, it's actually
00:05:13.040
kind of good that Trump is forcing our politicians to actually do the right thing. And I will give
00:05:18.760
credit to Danielle Smith here and Doug Ford, even though I do have criticisms for them quite
00:05:25.340
often. They are actually saying, yes, let's cooperate with the U.S. and figure out how we
00:05:29.760
can secure the border to avoid any sort of trade crisis, because that would be an economic crisis
00:05:35.220
for Canada if we had a 25% tariff. So I just want to go through some of the stuff that people have
00:05:41.300
been saying, here's Jagmeet Sing Sing, Trump's proposed tariff will hurt Canadian workers,
00:05:46.160
but I won't stop fighting to protect jobs in this country. Today and every day, I stand with
00:05:52.080
Canadian labor, which represents over 3 million workers throughout Canada. This is my promise.
00:05:57.400
And then he goes on to say, the NDP will always have their backs and let them negotiate and
00:06:02.220
whatever, collective agreement, collective agreement, something, something, something.
00:06:05.140
This has nothing to do with the trade issue. How about we have, yeah, you know what? Jagmeet
00:06:11.780
Sing really likes unions. How about you get more people hired into border services, which I believe
00:06:17.480
are unionized. And then we have them patrol the border, we get drones, and we make sure that we
00:06:23.300
actually keep tabs on who may or may not be going over the border. Sounds good to me. And I've had
00:06:29.380
people saying, well, you know that they're like, the amount of drugs that come over the southern
00:06:33.400
border is way more than the Canadian border. The problem with that is it's seized drugs. The thing
00:06:39.580
is that we don't have good monitoring on the Canadian border. So we're only, we only seize a small
00:06:44.840
minority of the drugs or the US only seizes a small minority of drugs coming over the border from Canada
00:06:49.860
compared to Mexico. But the Mexican border is like lined with agents, even under Biden. Anyways,
00:06:55.980
but Jagmeet's so performative. So many of these politicians are trying to be performatively
00:07:01.040
patriotic over this issue when they've done nothing to make Canada a more prosperous country and make
00:07:07.040
us better on trade with the United States. If Canada lowered taxes right now, we would be doing
00:07:13.260
way better on trade with the United States. I've had people again on the right say that free trade is
00:07:18.680
bad because it sent you a Canadian jobs down into the US. No, Canada's crappy economy,
00:07:25.240
bad tax codes and regulations sent jobs into the US. Guess what? Even if we want full art autarky,
00:07:32.160
and you can only make and manufacture everything and get the raw materials from within Canada,
00:07:36.860
we would still chase, we would still chase jobs and people over the border into the US
00:07:41.460
because no one wants to live where the economy sucks when there is a country very similar to Canada
00:07:46.660
right over the border. So how about we actually fixed our economic situation domestically,
00:07:52.140
rather than saying free trade was a mistake because now Trump wants us to implement border
00:07:57.200
controls. My goodness. And again, Trump wants to partner with us on this. He's not saying do my job
00:08:02.940
for me. He's wanting to increase the US's border protections and have us do the same. It's so obvious
00:08:10.000
we should be doing this. But here's Justin Trudeau reacting to all this on CTV News.
00:08:16.840
I had a good call with Donald Trump last night. Again, we obviously talked about
00:08:22.260
laying out the facts talking about how how the intense and effective connections between our two
00:08:29.620
countries flow back and forth. We talked about some of the challenges that we can work on together.
00:08:35.100
It was a good call. It's it's this is something that why can't he just commit to the border
00:08:42.320
protections? This is something Polyev did. Polyev came out and said, hey, I'm not even wanting to
00:08:47.720
please Donald Trump. That's not my job. I want to please Canadians. And we should be securing the
00:08:53.120
border and making sure that drugs and guns aren't coming over it because that's the US side of the
00:08:57.680
problem. We have a lot of illegal guns from the United States that then get sold into Canada and
00:09:02.980
just smuggled over the border and sold to gangs. It is not it's not normal law abiding gun owners who
00:09:08.460
are the problem. Surprise, surprise, it's gang members. But Trudeau can't do it because his
00:09:13.780
progressive base doesn't want him say anything too cooperative about Donald Trump. We can do
00:09:19.380
laying out the facts, moving forward in constructive ways. This is a relationship that we know takes a
00:09:27.460
certain amount of working on. And that's what we'll do. Is the working on going to include border
00:09:31.440
security? That's all we need to say. And it would cost us a drop in the bucket in terms of the budget.
00:09:36.100
We could probably do this for like less than a couple hundred million just to have more border
00:09:41.500
protections, drones, whatnot. We could cancel a lot of really stupid foreign aid to easily pay for
00:09:46.840
this, if not a lot of stupid domestic programs. Like Polyev did the right thing in calling out Trudeau
00:09:51.820
wanting to put on energy caps on Canada's energy industry and like raising the carbon tax and
00:09:58.100
raising like all these all sorts of different taxes at the same time that America actually wants
00:10:03.140
more of our oil and gas than ever before. And he now wants to literally kneecap us in trade
00:10:08.360
negotiations by saying we can't trade oil and gas to you because we've hit our cap. My goodness.
00:10:15.880
One of the really important things is that we'd be all pulling together on this. The Team Canada
00:10:19.980
approach is what works. That's where putting aside partisanship, that's where I reached out
00:10:26.000
immediately to Doug Ford to agree with him that we would have a First Minister's meeting this week to talk
00:10:32.260
about the United States. Talked with Francois Legault and some other premiers as well.
00:10:44.000
Why doesn't he just say that? Oh yeah, we're just going to increase border protections. We're
00:10:48.580
going to work with the US to secure the border. Yeah, there are probably some issues and we're
00:10:51.940
totally okay with cooperating over that. You don't have to be like, you don't have to like bend the
00:10:56.620
knee or anything. Nobody's asking for that. I want Canada's leadership to be strong. I don't want them
00:11:01.940
to, you know, prostrate themselves for any world leader. What they should be doing is just agreeing
00:11:08.040
to do the common sense thing and saying, yes, it's good that Donald Trump's also going to increase
00:11:11.780
border protections. We will too in cooperation with them. And guess what? No 25% tariff. It's
00:11:18.700
so easy. But let's move on to some more clips of Canadian politicians trying to score points. Or here's
00:11:25.500
Polyev. And he was obviously Polyev's also trying to score points. All politicians are.
00:11:30.020
But he actually had a good statement. He actually knows what he's doing on this issue and knows not
00:11:36.100
to make this about how pro-Canadian patriotic he is. He is patriotic, but he's not patriotic to the
00:11:42.400
stupid extent that he won't even agree to do common sense things in partnership with the US because he
00:11:47.280
can't agree with the US. My goodness. President Trump has the right to put his workers and his
00:11:54.560
nation's security first. I will put Canada's workers and Canada's security first. We need a
00:12:03.660
prime minister with the strength and the smarts, the brains and the backbone to stand up for this
00:12:09.980
country, to rebuild our security, our military and our economy. That is what I will do.
00:12:16.180
So let's bring it home. See, perfect, perfect statement. I'm not requiring anything more than
00:12:22.500
that, that yes, Trump wants us to put, you know, increased security. Yes, we will do it for ourselves
00:12:28.320
because that's a good thing for us to be doing anyways. And again, and the problem again is Trudeau
00:12:34.420
has been caught out because so much of this has to do with the fact that he's failed in government.
00:12:39.600
Here's a great clip. I always want to plug the people who do the clipping because it is very helpful
00:12:44.200
when you're making videos that people have a lot of stuff pre-clipped on their own Twitter feeds.
00:12:48.900
Government.exe is corrupt is a really good account if you're ever looking for clips from,
00:12:54.040
you know, question period and other sort of like press conferences and whatnot. But here's Jagmeet Singh
00:12:59.660
flexing his muscles and puffing out his chest. Donald Trump's threats of tariffs could threaten
00:13:05.280
hundreds of thousands of Canadian mortgage paying jobs. The only thing a bully responds to
00:13:12.080
is strength. So where's our plan to fight back? Where is the war room? Where is a concrete plan
00:13:19.020
to bring our issue before Kuzma? Why isn't the prime minister fighting like hell for Canadian jobs?
00:13:24.860
The speaker, rather than panicking, we're engaging in constructive ways to protect
00:13:31.620
Canadian jobs like we have before. I don't think the idea of going to war with the United States is
00:13:39.060
what anyone wants. Why am I having to agree with Justin Trudeau here? Justin Trudeau isn't even
00:13:45.060
performing well on this issue at all. Pure Poly is doing a way better job than him. But even here,
00:13:52.260
even Trudeau's very weaselly non-answers about what he's willing to do in order to avoid the 25%
00:13:59.020
tariffs, even he has to like mock Jagmeet Singh there because Jagmeet Singh is like, we need a war
00:14:04.020
room. We need to fight back. It's like, why? We don't. And some people have been saying that,
00:14:11.100
well, this is the US bullying Canada. We shouldn't do it just because they put a gun to our head.
00:14:16.540
I've had multiple people literally say this whole gun to our headline, including people on the right.
00:14:22.840
Well, you know, we shouldn't just have to jump because the US says so. Guys, it's a trade agreement.
00:14:27.400
Even a free trade agreement will have stipulations like stop letting terrorists walk into our country.
00:14:33.460
Stop letting fentanyl flood into our country. That sounds reasonable to me, just as we should have
00:14:39.720
been saying for the past forever, although our border security sucks too, so we don't really,
00:14:43.800
it's hard to point fingers. We should have been telling the US, hey, you guys should be cracking
00:14:48.400
down on gun smuggling into Canada or we might have to implement tariff. That is playing hardball.
00:14:55.000
That is how you actually negotiate. You have an achievable goal and you have something that you
00:15:00.460
will do if the achievable goal is not met. And it's a reasonable and moral goal as well.
00:15:05.100
Not just like we want what we want and we'll hurt you if you don't give it to us.
00:15:08.720
Here's something reasonable that we would launch. And here's something that we might have to do if
00:15:12.300
you don't give it to us because you are negatively affecting us through lack of security. It's so simple
00:15:18.440
people, but instead, so many people instead want to set our hair on fire instead of getting anything
00:15:23.900
done. Here's a, yeah, here's a, here's a great comment by Anthony Koch. He's also very much
00:15:29.080
worth a follow and X. He says in quoting people, like, you know, he's doing a fake quote about all
00:15:35.640
the people complaining about what Trump had said. He says, why are the Americans concerned about illegal
00:15:40.840
immigration from Canada? This is why. And then Anthony quote, quotes the article, feds expect 4.9
00:15:46.880
million with expiring visas to voluntary leave Canada next year. Yet you think the US isn't a little
00:15:53.120
bit concerned, even in a just slight minor hypothetical way that those 4.9 million people
00:15:59.260
might just leave the country through the Southern, our Southern border into the US and then disappear.
00:16:05.400
That is a risk. Also a big risk for Canada is once all these visas, these temporary foreign worker and
00:16:11.680
student visas expire, how are we getting rid of them? How are we getting rid of anyone who shouldn't be
00:16:16.620
here? Who's no longer taking education, whose work visa has expired and they, we don't have any room for
00:16:22.660
them in our labor force anymore because we just don't. Oh, oh, but why? They're working jobs.
00:16:27.940
Canadians won't work. Guess what? If Canadians don't want to work them, then they will just raise
00:16:32.920
the wage for that job. And then that person will then take the job. I say, I grant the fact that we
00:16:39.140
also like companies are on a budget crunch in terms of how high their taxes are. So I'd want to severely
00:16:45.800
limit the amount of temporary foreign workers as well as new permanent residents on top of lowering taxes
00:16:51.680
so that Canadians might work those jobs that Canadians won't work because you can pay them more
00:16:56.880
because companies have more money left over at the end of the day. What a concept. What a concept
00:17:02.080
that if people have more money in their pockets, they're able to do more stuff and they are not
00:17:06.780
restricted on their options. But yeah, I totally agree with Anthony Koch there. It's a great point to be
00:17:12.940
making. Here's Kevin Vong, the best MP in parliament by my measure. He's currently the independent MP for
00:17:19.680
Spadina, Fort York. And he said this just now. In 2023, the U.S. Border Patrol stopped 484 suspects
00:17:27.680
on the U.S. terror watch list from entering the U.S. from Canada, six times more than Mexico. How did
00:17:34.380
people on the U.S. terror watch list enter Canada in the first place? Canada must not be a safe harbor
00:17:39.500
and forwarding operating base, a forward operating base for terrorism. Absolutely correct. And good
00:17:45.280
thing we have MPs like Kevin Vong and conservative MPs who have been pointing this stuff out. Now, I just
00:17:52.260
want to take a second to talk about free trade a little bit. I hate the stupid talking point that if Canada
00:17:58.400
is currently not benefiting as much as the U.S. on trade, that this means free trade is poisoned. Guys, if we
00:18:05.100
stopped having free trade with the U.S., we would be poorer. Yes, we are lagging behind the U.S. severely,
00:18:12.040
but it has nothing to do with free trade. It has to do with our own economic weakness. Guess what?
00:18:19.140
North Korea doesn't trade with a lot of people. It's extremely poor. I know that's a hyperbolic
00:18:24.200
example, but just grant it to me for a second here. When you don't trade with countries who can
00:18:30.080
do certain things cheaper than you could ever do, that is a good net benefit to the country. Canada could
00:18:36.700
do a lot of stuff way cheaper than the U.S. if we lower taxes and regulations. We refuse to do it,
00:18:43.240
and then we blame the U.S. for out-competing us. There's a difference between legitimately being
00:18:48.880
out-competed and illegitimate. Yes, I don't want free trade with China because China is, one, a hostile
00:18:55.460
foreign country, and two, it's not a legitimate actor in the economy, in the international economy.
00:19:01.360
It lowers the value of the yuan just to be able to undermine, just be able to outbid people on
00:19:07.720
manufacturing. It basically will suffer losses just to try and take over your industry. That's
00:19:14.680
the problem with China, is that it's basically making power moves, not economic moves, and we
00:19:19.660
should be trying to prevent them from gaining more power on the global stage. With the U.S.,
00:19:25.320
it's not our, it's not, what are we trying to do, prevent the U.S. from being powerful? That seems
00:19:31.000
like a stupid thing to do in a world where the U.S. is, like, the most natural, like, good hegemonic
00:19:38.020
force on the planet. Oh, I don't like hegemony. It means the U.S. technically controls a lot of what
00:19:43.340
goes on in the world and gets a lot of say. Better than Iran, better than China, better than a lot of
00:19:48.880
countries from having a lot of say about what goes on. So, when it comes to the U.S. and Canada, it has nothing
00:19:54.860
to do with free trade stealing our jobs. No, it has to do with Trudeau stealing our jobs through taxes
00:20:01.140
and regulations and those jobs moving down to the United States where it's actually cheaper to
00:20:05.840
operate. It's only our fault for not lowering taxes. And, again, it's concerning to me when I
00:20:13.380
see people on the right, like Harrison Faulkner at True North, saying that free trade is bad and John
00:20:19.280
Turner was right and we should go back to when John A. MacDonald and Robert Borden were the prime
00:20:24.260
ministers and we didn't have barely, you know, we didn't have much trade with the U.S. at all.
00:20:28.160
That's foolish in my mind. And it is finding, it's taking a symptom of a problem and blaming it on
00:20:33.960
free trade. This would be like blaming free markets on the Great Depression because we had
00:20:39.040
relatively free markets before the Great Depression hit in 1929 when it was really the Federal Reserve
00:20:45.420
of the United States that kicked off the whole problem, which was running as a bloated government
00:20:50.660
institution that was tinkering in the economy. Even if overall tax and regulations were low,
00:20:55.860
the Federal Reserve was meddling through too much money printing as well as not actually kicking in
00:21:01.260
the reserve money when the crash happened like they were supposed to. But you will now have people
00:21:06.880
say, you know, free trade is bad because the U.S. might put a tariff on us.
00:21:10.520
OK, well, that one, we can easily avoid the tariff. And two, is it good that we then go look inwardly
00:21:20.340
and then we have even higher costs and less wealth because we now have to manufacture everything in
00:21:27.480
Canada? I know they're not advocating that zero trade with the U.S., obviously, although maybe some
00:21:32.300
of them are crazy enough to say that on the left and the right. But if we only are doing piecemeal
00:21:37.260
trade agreements, everything is still going to get much more expensive because we become a country
00:21:42.100
that is very difficult to deal with. I don't mind if we don't technically have one big free trade
00:21:47.280
agreement, but we have free trade agreements on different industries. That's fine with me.
00:21:51.600
Well, let's have an agreement. Let's use the fact that and like we could easily get to a better
00:21:57.220
situation where we can start selling like our products into the U.S. and like dairy and soft lumber
00:22:02.620
and whatnot. But we just need to be able to play ball and not feel like our protectionism is OK,
00:22:09.600
but not the U.S.'s. We don't even have free trade within Canada. I don't want to have to be locked
00:22:15.060
into only being able to trade within Canada because trading within Canada already sucks because of the
00:22:19.980
hyper protectionism between provinces and their industries. My goodness, can people be rational?
00:22:26.520
I hate this idea that because free trade was what came right before we started losing jobs,
00:22:33.700
that it was free trade's fault, not our bad policy's fault, not our bad tax code's fault,
00:22:38.800
not our bad corporate tax and personal income taxes' fault, not our regulations' fault. It's the
00:22:43.600
fact free trade existed. Oh my goodness. Anyways, so and actually there was some really stupid points
00:22:50.780
somebody made yesterday where they told me that, well, free trade forces us to be binded to the
00:22:56.580
United States. We're binded to the United States in the same way I am binded to eat vegetables because
00:23:03.280
I want to get more nutrients. Yeah, we could technically be not binded to the U.S. and not get
00:23:08.380
any of the benefits of trading with them, but it's a mutualistic relationship. We trade with them
00:23:14.040
because we get more benefits than we lose by doing so. That's it for me today, guys. That's my rant.
00:23:21.260
Subscribe to the channel, like this video, donate to the Give, Send, Go link in the description below
00:23:25.360
and pinned at the top of the comments. I'll see you guys all later.