Western Standard - September 01, 2026


Why Canada’s counter-tariffs are HORRIBLE news for Canadians


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

172.81

Word count

1,270

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I would describe the mood in B.C. as fairly anti-Trump, probably similar to what the mood is in eastern Canada.
00:00:07.760 B.C. is set to be struck the hardest by these tariffs, by all metrics, especially our softwood lumber industry.
00:00:16.700 Our forestry industry is already taking a beating.
00:00:20.760 And, yeah, so people are pretty anti-Trump, generally speaking.
00:00:25.040 so there isn't really a downside for mr carney in this at the moment because the demand is going to
00:00:32.480 be for support people whose incomes are threatened by the tariffs they're going to say well what are
00:00:38.640 you going to do for us so he really has license now to borrow and borrow and borrow and present
00:00:45.680 himself and his government as the savior of people which is i guess why i'm really concerned about
00:00:52.240 Well, he's putting money on my credit cards to get me through this situation, but I can't go much longer here.
00:00:57.900 My grandchildren's grandchildren won't be paying this.
00:01:01.240 I mean, the standard, that story out, I believe, with Dominic LeBlanc saying it was $7.5 billion.
00:01:06.280 They're estimating for these aid packages for the trade war, but they won't tell us how much their counter tariffs are going to cost.
00:01:12.640 That's the frustrating thing. He's being kept in the dark.
00:01:15.220 Well, it is a frustrating thing because when we place a tariff on American imports, who is it who's paying it?
00:01:20.880 Canadians who want to buy American product now I mean if it's if it's
00:01:26.340 American wine and liquor I I guess you can switch to something else if you
00:01:30.880 don't like that but if it is something that you've got to have apparently
00:01:34.800 toilet papers top of the list of toilet paper very expensive it's you know next
00:01:40.260 time you go to Costco it's gonna be there's gonna be $30 instead of 25 you
00:01:44.940 So that kind of stuff, it really works against Canadian citizens, so it's not a retaliation.
00:01:52.940 You're punching yourself and telling yourself you're punching Trump.
00:01:57.940 That's not working.
00:01:58.940 It's interesting to see the two sides in terms of talking about Alberta oil
00:02:04.940 and whether or not to put tariffs on it.
00:02:07.940 You've got Jason Kenney, you've got Naheed Nenshi, you've got Alison Redford,
00:02:11.940 You've got Doug Ford all saying that it should be on the table.
00:02:17.320 And you've got Danielle Smith, and you've got Scott Moe saying no.
00:02:21.980 And Danielle Smith on this one seems to be the only adult in the room
00:02:25.480 where she's saying these terrorists will do no good whatsoever.
00:02:30.160 Trump's going to hammer us.
00:02:32.140 Come September, he's going to hammer us.
00:02:34.720 And let's get back to the negotiating table.
00:02:36.960 Mark Carney, pick up the phone.
00:02:38.120 And to that point, Dave, in Mr. Carney's statement on Saturday morning where he was explaining why things had fallen apart as he would have us believe, he specifically referenced cultural issues, Quebec, and farm management.
00:02:55.420 So you can't put butter and eggs and cheese into the negotiating pot, but they would all have you believe that Alberta oil, well, yeah, of course, cut that off.
00:03:08.120 By the way, that's not a terribly useful tool in the bargaining kit 0.96
00:03:13.480 because the angsts are actually exporting oil. 1.00
00:03:17.500 So it's threatening to cut ours off. 1.00
00:03:20.660 The thing is, we only have one bloody customer.
00:03:24.000 If we'd have diversified our markets, maybe we could say,
00:03:27.580 well, fine, we're going to increase our exports to India or China or Europe
00:03:32.040 if we had pipelines, but guess who shut those down?
00:03:35.340 But I guess getting on to the other things,
00:03:37.580 we talked about toilet paper we talked about softwood uh why is bc so uh awkwardly positioned
00:03:42.860 Alex in that i mean that i know that the united states is right next door but you've got a huge
00:03:48.700 port and an export market for a lot of goods all around the world besides just the united
00:03:53.260 states you think that would shield bc a little bit well i think you hit the nail on the head
00:03:57.740 with the pipeline comment we this is really bc's decades of failure to create an east to west
00:04:05.100 pipeline coming to fruition we don't have many trading partners other than the united states
00:04:11.980 and so bc is also very reliant on its forestry industry and sending its product to the u.s we
00:04:20.380 don't have any refineries even though they're refining the oil right across the border and so
00:04:25.820 we're kind of beholden to the united states and that wasn't an issue until trump came along
00:04:30.220 I do want to take aim at Trump a little bit here and I and I just want to preface that by saying
00:04:38.540 that just because I criticize Trump doesn't mean that I love Carney but I do sympathize with
00:04:44.580 Carney slightly because if you take Trump at his word and the reasoning behind his tariffs at his
00:04:50.380 word there is no way for Carney to satisfy him because what Trump wants is a zero-sum trading
00:04:56.680 relationship and that will never happen there's about a 200 billion dollar trade surplus that
00:05:02.040 canada has with the united states because of all the energy that we send there in order to make up
00:05:06.840 the difference even if we flooded the canadian market with american dairy it would require every
00:05:12.120 man woman and child to eat a 25 pound industrial bucket of wisconsin cheddar every week in order
00:05:19.480 to make up the trade difference so you can't reason somebody out of something that they didn't reason
00:05:25.640 themselves into to begin with and what trump wants which is a balanced trade relationship
00:05:30.280 is almost technically impossible yeah no it's difficult all around and i i know i viewers get
00:05:37.040 upset with me when i put it out but again i've never been a big fan of trump the man's full of 0.94
00:05:41.420 crap often how do you negotiate with a man who with such a propensity to lie without hesitation 0.96
00:05:47.380 and i know carney lied about the gordie howe bridge as well so now we've got two people 0.99
00:05:52.260 who are prone to fabricating things
00:05:55.080 won't share information with the public
00:05:56.980 on what the deal is,
00:05:57.920 and I'm presuming probably aren't sharing
00:05:59.380 good information with each other.
00:06:01.140 This is just a recipe for a bad deal.
00:06:03.160 Well, it is, but it's one of the reasons
00:06:05.160 why I'm able to keep my hair on
00:06:07.280 through the whole thing.
00:06:09.020 Because what we forget,
00:06:12.760 we think that the tariffs are on everything,
00:06:15.380 but the actual amount of trade
00:06:18.120 that is affected by this tariff dispute
00:06:21.360 was relatively small i think it was something like four percent or maybe five percent of our exports
00:06:28.800 are affected by the tariffs that mr trump has put on 80 of our uh of our goods continue to
00:06:37.040 cross the border duty-free can't speak to the other 15 in this in this equation but um you
00:06:45.440 you know everybody needs to take a valium on this and just see how this is going to work out
00:06:50.400 i don't think the last uh the last word has been had on this whatsoever but certainly it's a there
00:06:56.820 is a general misconception that everything is tariffed yeah no you're right it's not you know
00:07:03.780 bc is going to be the hardest hit alberta gets off quite easy when you look at you look at the 0.99
00:07:08.640 facts and fairies oh yeah we're laughing uh we're laughing uh quebec and ontario they're going to 1.00
00:07:13.520 get hit you're going to get hit hard the ontario auto industry to be an auto worker oh if you're 0.96
00:07:18.440 an auto worker, you might want to start looking for another career.