Western Standard - September 03, 2026


Doug Ford Tells Trump to ＂Kiss My Ass＂—Bad Strategy？

Mentioned
Doug Ford Donald Trump
Are Canada’s Conservatives collapsing？ Are activists trying to scare Canadians away from LNG？

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

154.01

Word count

361

Sentence count

23

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Doug Ford has decided that apparently the trade war isn't escalating quickly enough.
00:00:04.800 Ford says that Canada can put quote-unquote massive pain on the United States.
00:00:09.980 He says Donald Trump is making a mistake by underestimating Canadians.
00:00:14.080 He says everything is on the table.
00:00:16.180 Electricity, critical minerals, oil, uranium, potash, fuel.
00:00:20.460 He says the premiers should get together and throw everything and the kitchen sink at the Americans.
00:00:25.980 And that brings us to perhaps my favorite line. 1.00
00:00:29.400 Donald Trump can kiss Ford's ass. 1.00
00:00:31.800 That's the Premier of Ontario, 1.00
00:00:33.880 the province with the largest manufacturing sector in Canada,
00:00:37.520 the centre of the Canadian automotive industry,
00:00:40.460 the province whose economic fortunes are perhaps more closely connected
00:00:43.860 to the American economy than anywhere else in the country.
00:00:48.300 And Doug Ford is standing there essentially saying,
00:00:50.600 economic war? Bring it on.
00:00:52.920 What could possibly go wrong?
00:00:55.640 Well, Doug, quite a lot.
00:00:57.380 take electricity ford says ontario could cut off electricity exports to the united states
00:01:03.220 sounds tough until you ask the obvious question then what canada exported about 3.3 billion worth
00:01:11.360 of electricity to the united states last year more than 20 states import some canadian electricity
00:01:16.540 and new york and michigan are the major customers for ontario power so yes ontario can hurt them
00:01:22.600 Of course it can. Prices would increase in some markets. Utilities would have to adjust.
00:01:27.080 Alternative generation would have to come online. There would be disruption, but they're not going
00:01:32.180 to turn Manhattan off. They're not going to shut Detroit down. The United States produces vastly
00:01:37.240 more electricity than the Canada exports to it. The Americans adjust. Eventually they replace what
00:01:42.760 we sell them. And then congratulations, Premier Ford, you have transformed a reliable Canadian
00:01:47.520 export market into an american national security vulnerability what do you think washington does
00:01:53.360 next do you think they say boy those canadians sure showed us we'd better become even more
00:02:00.400 dependent on ontario electricity of course not they build around us they develop alternatives
00:02:06.160 they change regulations they increase domestic production they build generation they build
00:02:11.040 transmission they find another supplier wherever possible and the temporary leverage you had
00:02:18.640 becomes permanently less valuable.