We're 19 days into a 35 day election campaign, and we're joined by Catherine Swift, President of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada, to talk about the impact of the latest round of tariffs on Canadian manufacturers.
00:05:01.880And consumer spending is about two-thirds of our economy. It's a big chunk of the economy. And consumers are probably scaling back their consumption expectations for large purchases, a car, an appliance perhaps, or a house maybe even. And all of these things point to recession.
00:05:19.920but again i think i think you have to you have to look at duration how long are these things going
00:05:26.880to be in place and that is a total toss-up we have no idea especially with with trump
00:05:33.600changing his mind so frequently changing his mind or changing his um narrative it's uh some of us
00:05:42.640think that there's a method in his madness that's got to do with isolating china and uh and
00:05:49.920possibly affecting the renegotiation of American debt later this year,
00:05:57.060although what you said about the bond market would tend to militate against that.
00:06:01.380But look, does Canada really have any leverage at all with the U.S.?
00:06:06.800Well, we do, but relatively speaking, because we are, you look at individual states,
00:06:14.160and we are a number of states' largest trading partner.
00:06:17.720So when you look at those particular states, you sort of take it down to certain product lines and certain geography, we do have leverage.
00:06:25.640And there's an awful lot of Americans that are sending messages to Trump, a lot of Republicans that are sending messages to Trump that they're not very entertained by this strategy related to Canada.
00:06:38.380So there is leverage, but we are always, I mean, just given the relationship between the two countries, one 10 times larger than we are.
00:06:46.900we are far more dependent on them for our exports and we're a much more of an exporting nation the
00:06:52.860u.s because of its size and the huge consumer base they they are not anywhere near as much
00:06:58.140of a trading nation as canada is so we're therefore much more reliant upon that trading
00:07:03.520relationship so we we have some leverage but in in the big picture it's relatively minimal
00:07:09.620and i've i've termed it as this the cutting off our nose despite our face strategy what we're
00:07:15.120doing now. Well, okay, let's talk about that. Your members have a very particular window through
00:07:21.840which they look at this, and they must be looking at the Team Canada approach with Mr. Carney,
00:07:26.920Mr. Ford, and some of the other premiers, not all of them. How are they feeling about the way
00:07:34.660things are being handled? They don't like it. The vast majority of our members
00:07:41.080not like what's going on. They see these politicians inflicting damage on their
00:07:48.460businesses. No skin off the politicians knows, right? They're okay. They're spending other
00:07:52.640people's money after all, and that's great fun from what I can tell. But they see them inflicting
00:07:59.040negative impacts on their businesses while they could be entering into a more constructive
00:08:05.420negotiation. Most of our members would actually prefer the Danielle Smith approach, to be honest.
00:08:11.440I mean, she's worked very hard, I believe, meeting with officials, and she's had some success.
00:08:17.360I believe she's had some success, and yet she's been vilified by other premiers, and even recently
00:08:23.960Carney. I thought it was disgraceful what he said about Danielle Smith the other day,
00:08:27.780trying to make a bad joke about, oh, we won't get Danielle Smith to, you know, go on the media in1.00
00:08:32.840the U.S. So our business members do not have much time for this strategy. They'd much prefer a
00:08:40.700constructive one. I understand people always want to blame somebody, and Trump is the classic
00:08:48.420culprit here to be blamed. And Canadians in general, the majority of Canadians don't like
00:08:54.580Trump. So from a political standpoint, it has a certain appeal because they can look like they're
00:09:01.920the big guys pounding their chest and standing up to the big American bully. But I would love to
00:09:08.520see the same situation when we weren't in the middle of a federal election period, because
00:09:14.540I believe damage is going to be inflicted on Canadian businesses and Canadians in general and1.00
00:09:20.960the Canadian economy because we're in a federal election. And it seems in a perverse way that
00:09:28.000people, an awful lot of people, are supporting this chest-thumping approach instead of something
00:09:34.700that would not harm the country anywhere near as much economically, which would be not to capitulate.
00:09:40.120I'm not saying capitulate, but we're renegotiating a trade agreement anyway. That's already on the
00:09:45.880agenda. So why don't we just move that up some, renegotiate terms of it now. We're going to have
00:09:50.760to do it in less than a year anyway, and find a preferential solution for Canada without the
00:09:57.620damage in the interim because this has the potential to tip us and we're close to recession
00:10:03.280now where our economic situation is weak and it's weak because we've had a very bad government
00:10:10.280federal government policy and some provincial government policies too for the last decade
00:10:14.540and that has weakened us so that we are not as if we were a stronger economy we would be in much
00:10:19.740better shape to stand up against the u.s but unfortunately we're not we're weak this of course
00:10:26.240is the substance of what Mr. Harper said in Edmonton a few years ago. He was introducing
00:10:31.320Pierre Poilier, who had a large rally there. And I say a large rally, I'm talking about 16,000
00:10:37.980hand-clapping, foot-stomping, chanting, enthusiastic conservatives who come in to hear what he had to
00:10:45.160say. It quite diminishes any kind of a gathering that Mr. Carney has ever put together, and that's
00:10:52.060fairly typical for Mr. Paulyev. So Mr. Harper introduced the whole thing by saying, look,
00:10:58.840Trump's obviously a problem, but the real problem in Canada today is the past 10 years
00:11:06.420of poor liberal administration. I think he maybe was a little stronger than that.
00:11:12.380But at any rate, and now you remind me of this sort of rally around the flag approach that so
00:11:19.040many people have unwittingly taken, and it seems surprising to me, and I want you to comment on
00:11:23.780this, after 10 years during which the former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, did everything he could
00:11:33.320to diminish the idea of Canada as a country at all. You know, the famous interview with the New
00:11:38.480York Times, which he said it was a post-national state, had no core identity, and then the various
00:11:45.300legislation and comments that he's made that just kind of diminished Canadian nationality,
00:11:50.660and then suddenly we have this come up and everybody wants to be a Canadian patriot.
00:11:54.820I mean, where do we go wrong as a country?
00:12:01.380Well, long discussion, but well, if I had to choose one thing, and there's lots I could choose from,
00:12:10.500I would say it was the way the Trudeau Liberal government treated our energy sector in Canada and our resource sector writ large, so not just energy, but mining and so on.
00:12:23.440That sector, which is the largest individual single sector in the economy that impacts positively or negatively our gross domestic product, our growth as a country, and of course our standard of living as Canadians, that was so diminished and so just constrained during the Trudeau years that we suffered greatly from that.
00:12:49.340We've seen the international data that show that Canada grew virtually not at all as an economy in the last decade, whereas other countries were head and shoulders above us.
00:12:58.680There's no doubt we are in a weakened condition because of the Trudeau government's policies in many different areas.
00:13:05.800But I'd say the single one most important is what they did to our resource sector in not taking advantage of it.
00:13:12.320And perversely, they did it supposedly in the name of climate. And yet, as we all know,
00:13:17.560if we exported our liquid natural gas to countries that currently use coal and dirtier sources of
00:13:23.540energy, we would improve the climate globally. So this is the perversity of that policy that I think
00:13:29.580has a lot more to do with the fact that Liberals don't like Alberta very much, actually,
00:13:34.180as it does with the energy sector itself. So that has to be a big factor.
00:13:39.580One other thing I find really aggravating about this, the approach that Carney and Doug Ford and, you know, some other premiers have sort of halfheartedly gotten into here is they're saying, oh, we're going to don't don't worry businesses.
00:13:53.700Don't worry consumers. We're going to spend billions of dollars of your money to shore up your business, to help your business.
00:14:01.900Ford just announced $11 billion recently to go toward businesses and whatnot that were damaged by Trump's policies.
00:14:08.800We don't have that money. We're in debt up to our eyeballs in this country. So we're going to not only take a confrontational approach, which is damaging to our businesses and every one of us, but we're also going to spend a pot full of money we don't have. In other words, we're borrowing it to try to mitigate these policies. I mean, it's just stupid in every way.
00:14:31.540Now, we often think that people who talk a good line get real when they actually have the job.
00:14:41.000So Mr. Carney has for the past, let's just sort of assume that it's Mr. Carney for the purposes of this discussion.
00:14:49.940I still think it's going to be Mr. Poliev, but, you know, Mr. Carney is the one who has the intimate Chinese connections and the history of doing business there and Brookfield and so forth and so on.
00:15:05.480And all this time, he has been very strong on the green file.
00:15:12.040He presents himself, and in his book, Values, he goes into some detail about how we're all going to die if we don't reduce carbon levels.
00:15:23.120On the other hand, as reported in the Western Standard last week, Mr. Carney's company, Brookfield, also recently bought a large pipeline network in the eastern United States, colonial pipelines.
00:15:40.220So there seems to be some reason to think that he could be realistic about the energy industry when it's his job to do it.
00:15:49.980Do you see any hope that a man like Mr. Carney, who is as Bank of England governor, was trying to get people not to invest in energy, and the same in Canada, will, when he is prime minister, change his tune and become a supporter of energy, as he promised to do in his speeches in Calvary yesterday?
00:16:18.340i i am very doubtful uh carney has devoted i met with carney when he was bank of canada governor
00:16:25.460on a number of occasions so i i have had um meetings with him back in the day but i i would
00:16:32.980greatly doubt it he has spent about the last two decades of his career pushing this green agenda
00:16:38.260the net zero so-called net zero he still is pushing net zero from everything i've seen i
00:16:44.020I haven't seen him come off it at all, but I find the fact that he's not talking about it.
00:16:49.560When it was such an obsession of his for so long, he's not talking about it anymore,
00:16:54.240which I find worrisome because suddenly it's not important to him. I don't believe that for a
00:16:59.200minute. I think he's just suppressing it so that people don't get alarmed as to what he's going to
00:17:05.680do. Also, I've noticed in his speeches, he talks a lot about Canada being an energy superpower.
00:17:11.820He doesn't say pipeline. He doesn't say that magic word pipelines very much. And his company,
00:17:18.220Brookfield, when he was there, for years invested in pipelines elsewhere while he was publicly
00:17:24.880opposing pipelines in Canada and advising Trudeau, of course. So I don't, I'm sorry. I mean,
00:17:32.600I guess I'd be delighted to be proven wrong should he win the election, but I don't believe he will
00:17:37.900be pushing the oil and gas sector. He's already said he wants it to largely remain in the ground.
00:17:44.780And I just don't think he's going to abandon what he's become over the last couple of decades. I
00:17:49.340really don't. I also notice he uses his words carefully. He points to he's going to really
00:17:55.920develop energy infrastructure. Well, you know what? This could be a whole whack of wind turbines.
00:18:02.280That could be a whole pile of heat pumps.0.85
00:18:05.880He's talked about wanting to subsidize heat pumps.
00:18:08.400And in other jurisdictions, I think it was the UK, they recently backed off their heat pump push because it was too expensive for people to install in their homes.
00:18:18.440So, you know, all of these failed technologies that do not replace our fossil fuel sources of heat and electricity and all the essentials that we need for life and certainly for business.
00:18:49.820The polling, I should say, indicates that it's pretty much of a toss-up.
00:18:55.320Do you have any theory on how it is that the conservative leader, Pierre Poirier, can have thousands of people coming to his rallies when Mr. Carney barely gets a corporal's guard, and yet Mr. Carney can be so far elevated in the polls?
00:19:41.200I've done a lot of mathematical stuff in my days.
00:19:43.420So I find them very interesting to look at.
00:19:46.820But on the actual voting day itself, things like voter turnout are huge.
00:19:52.580And Poiliev seems to have quite a bit of support among the younger age cohorts, which is interesting because that's not usually the case.
00:20:00.520But these are the people, of course, that are saying, gee, I don't think I'll ever own a house.
00:20:06.300You know, I think a lot of my life goals are not going to happen.
00:20:09.660So they're very dissatisfied with the status quo.
00:20:12.760So, you know, we're seeing some very unusual phenomena in this election.
00:20:16.620But on the other hand, typically younger groups don't tend to vote in the same proportions.
00:20:25.980But what if they showed up this year because they were so concerned?
00:20:29.300Well, that would put a very different complexion on what we're seeing in the polls.
00:20:34.100So anything can happen, as we know, when we look at the last U.S. election, of course,
00:20:38.060you know, the polls had Kamala as a slam dunk and we all know what happened there.
00:20:42.640so uh i think i think it's very i think it's going to be a very interesting election day
00:20:48.280it'll be a nail-biter for sure yes well we'll just uh may as well take a moment to mention
00:20:54.400that the western standard will be uh hosting an election panel on the on the night we'll be
00:21:00.660live streaming and have a number of people who know what they're talking about discussing what
00:21:05.980they're looking at as the results unfold so we're just about out of time miss swift but um
00:21:12.640I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that after the election is over, if it is Mr. Carney that leads us, he will fold like a cheap suit on the day after the election, and this terror thing will go away, but it will go away on the terms dictated by the President of the United States.