In this episode, Finance Minister Bill Morneau talks about the impact of the Trump administration's new trade policies and what Canada can do to counter them. He also talks with his counterpart, Honourable Chrystia Freeland, about what Canada should be focusing on in order to be a good partner for the United States.
00:00:00.000He put some specifics on the table about how he was, for example, going to protect the American economy and American jobs.
00:00:05.240And chief among that is this across the board 10 percent tariff on imports, all imports.
00:00:11.940I was told by someone in the prime minister's office this week, Canada has received no assurances that we would be exempt from the application of those tariffs.
00:00:19.100If you were still finance minister, how much would that worry you?
00:00:23.040Well, obviously, it's worrying everyone a lot around the world, not just in Canada.
00:00:28.220So I expect that what we need to do now is to think about how we can, you know, communicate, as we did last time, the importance of the Canada-U.S. trade relationship.
00:00:38.260But we're going to need to go further.
00:00:39.600We're going to need to think about what policy initiatives, what substance can we actually think about that will align with the kinds of things that the new president is going to want to focus on.
00:00:50.060So we'd be worried, and we should be worried, and we need to be on the top of our game and think about what we can do to improve our outcomes.
00:00:57.240I'm going to quickly follow up with you before I go back to Ms. Ambrose and ask, when you think about what those kinds of policies might be, what are they?
00:01:05.340What are a couple of things that you think the federal government should pursue that would be in line with the type of things that you think would resonate in the White House now?
00:01:14.860Well, the world's changed a lot since the last negotiation.
00:01:18.180The geopolitics have changed dramatically, so with that you need to think about defense.
00:01:24.420Obviously, technology has risen as a critical determinant of the status of the U.S. versus China,
00:01:32.420so we need to think about how we align with the U.S. in the technology sector.
00:01:37.560And obviously, we're going to need to think about some of the economic issues that we're going to face.
00:01:42.480So energy security is going to be critical.
00:01:45.760We're going to be forced to think about the dairy sector.
00:01:48.320So as I go through those one by one, we will need to think about how we get to our defense spending targets more rapidly than the government has currently laid out.
00:01:57.240We're going to need to think about whether we focus on energy security in a way that makes us clearly an important part of the U.S. sector that way.
00:02:08.080And that means we have to ask ourselves, is it really the right time for caps on emissions?
00:02:14.860Is it that we need to be moving really fast on carbon capture and sequestration at the same time?