10: Canada’s Future in the Age of American Isolationism

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsh and I’m here with my friend Alan Gregg. And we’re back with the Red Tory podcast. And the automated audience has left us for anyone paying attention.

But Che Guevara is still here, ready to hit the links.

Now we’re in this, I think, really precarious political situation in North America where, as I keep lovingly saying, I shouldn’t say lovingly, although I am kind of loving it, that we are in the busiest news cycle ever. But I am shocked by how many people still think that this is all just a distraction, that this is all just a joke.

And I suspect we’re gonna talk about that today. But, Alan, I love starting off by saying, what are you paying attention to? What have you got your eyes on?

Well, funny you say that because what I’ve been watching and with increasingly coming to the conclusion that more and more and more leaders aren’t taking this is a joke.

I mean, Frederick Mertz yesterday, who looks like he’s going to be able to pull together a coalition in Germany, said that his whole mission is to strengthen Europe in order to be independent of America.

I mean, we had Yasmine on, on the other week and she talked about the summit meeting that was held in Toronto and how powerful, in fact, Justin Trudeau was and how serious he was about this.

And I’m getting the sense that for the first time, the Western world and Central America, including Mexico, are taking these threats very, very seriously. And they’re starting to develop plans to deal with a non ally going forward. And that has the prospect of a seismic change.

You wrote about that today in a whole other iteration of change going forward. And we should talk about that, too.

But before we go there, I kind of wouldn’t mind starting with the kind of case example here, which is Ukraine, because this is a situation where I think the United States and Europe appear to clearly be at odds in that Europe is very adamant, very supporting Ukraine to the best of its ability and may radically increase that depending on how this shakes out versus it seems like the US Is like, enough is enough, let’s have this stop.

And it’s thrown the entire Ukraine, Russia, I mean, diplomatic process, what little there was of it, but at least it was there in terms of the allies supporting Ukraine.

I don’t know what to think in terms of how this is playing out and whether the US Is all of a sudden telling Ukraine, we’re not going to back you anymore, and whether Europe can step back.

Well, I don’t know if you saw it. I Don’t know if you saw it today, but in the United nations that America voted against a retribution of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And again, I think just everyone was completely, completely stunned. But I also, in terms of the news cycle, missed. I mean, it looked like on the weekend that Zelensky was ready to capitulate and sign the mineral deal.

Today, it looked like he was saying, fuck you. I’m not doing that. That’s being held up for ransom. Did you follow that? I missed that.

I did and I saw both.

And this is why I find through the entirety of the Ukraine conflict, both in the last few years, but going back to when Russia initially invaded Donetsk, I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. Right.

The level of, certainly on the Russian side, but even within the Western press, it is difficult to tell what’s going on until there’s a few days after. Right. Once you’ve had time to look back and try to get a sense. But I’m not sure within Ukraine whether they have their own consensus.

I think that they are having, just like we are here in Canada, a political crisis in response to the changing U.S. policy.

And there is again, uncertain a hope that Europe steps up, in no small part because Europe does not want to see Russia have time to rearm, have time to reconsolidate their position, especially given that Ukraine has been very effective at stopping the Russian military machine up until this point. But this is why it is so interesting and to your point, whether we may be seeing a real divide between Europe and the United States.

Well, we should watch that a little closer because the extent to which Zelenskyy does reject the mineral deal, it would suggest to me at least, that he’s getting some assurances from Europe that, you know, we’re gonna stand up to this guy and not, you know, pick a fight, but just an operating assumption that these guys are not our friend. And that’s, I think, what you’re seeing in Canada, too, in Mexico, in Central. In Central America.

And the thing that, for me is really interesting there is, you know, and I want to talk about your thesis more because I think it’s certainly worthy of a conversation, is the notion of a really isolated America economically. There’s a reason that it has a terrible trade deficit, is that it does not produce enough junk internally to meet demand.

If they are truly isolated, you will have more demand than there is supply being generated out of the United States. You want to talk about a prescription for inflation? That is insane.

And, you know, I don’t think having gone through what people have gone through over the last three years, they are going to tolerate another wave of inflation if that should happen in, in the United States. And I think that would be politically toxic for Donald Trump.

I through the through line, I think of our Red Tory podcast up till now has been your cautious optimism, which I love to hear because it is reassuring.

And I’m going to draw another parallel, which is what’s happening now in the UK because the Starmer government is kind of leaning hard, not hard right, but is leaning to the right, even though they’re a Labor government, because they are in a similar situation where London, not London, Britain, does not produce enough to be self sufficient. They are a trading economy. Right. The City of London fundamentally supports the social programs of the larger country.

And they are in a bit of a pickle where on the one hand they are still trying to renegotiate a relationship with Europe and it’s not going well because Europe’s having their own concerns vis a vis the United States. They’ve historically been lockstep with the US and now they’re starting to doubt that.

They’re starting to wonder, hey, maybe our biggest trading partner’s no longer that reliable. And fundamentally this is a world where I think they are still trying to figure out their place and the voters there are really upset and going nuts.

That’s where I think in the United States there isn’t the same power that voters have.

But to your point, business has a lot of power and they’re the ones who could leverage that pain into possible policy change or at least a focus, a refocus of what this regime is doing.

Well, and in that regard, I think Britain is facing double jeopardy because, I mean, first they have Brexit remorse, they know that it’s a massive mistake decoupling themselves from the EU and making that market that much more difficult to penetrate. And now you add to that the prospect of the United States and you can see simply how exposed Britain is.

Whereas EU at least has the 27 member nations that are in there with a comparable economic power together combined with America. So we shouldn’t kind of underestimate that at all. And their resolve to isolate America as they’ve been requesting.

And the stupid thing which I want to iterate before we move on is the Starmers in a weird way are thinking, hey, this Dodge thing is a good idea.

Like in the last few weeks they’ve really leaned hard into the AI rhetoric that the AI is going to save the nhs, that the AI is going to save the British Civil Service. And they’re putting this very labor feel of it’ll be good AI, it’ll be responsible AI, it’ll be fair AI, but it’s still the Doge playbook.

And I’m just shaking my head because to your point, it seems like they’re kind of stuck in the middle and they’re going to be screwed no matter what.

There’s a very, very good prospect that whoever’s going to win this AI race doesn’t even exist yet. So it might be all academic.

But above and beyond the reliance on AI, I think the other thing that’s happening, you don’t see hardly any politicians talk about it in this precise way, is that there’s, you know, growing concern about the national and international debt right now that it’s just not sustainable for. I mean, look at America debt, even Canadian debt, European debt.

And I think, you know, the more responsible political leaders are saying, and I don’t want to nail my colors to this particular mass because it’s, you know, whoever said, you know, cutting back on program spending is going to be popular. But. But I think they know that belt tightening is something that they have to start looking at very, very seriously.

Not in the Doge kind of form, but in terms of battening down the hatches a little bit. And that’s why I think you’re seeing a Labor government which normally is very proactive.

We’ll talk about Canada later on because it’s very interesting what Mark Carney has done where he’s now separated the notion that we should have a spending budget where in an investment budget too. Very different. We’ll talk about that later on.

But let me ask you a quick procedural follow up to that, because I’ve. My entire lifetime, I’ve heard politicians talk about waste, politicians talk about government overspending.

And it really feels like a straw man to me because to your point about the professional nature of the civil service, let alone the motivational politicians, if there was waste, wouldn’t they have found it?

Like, it does feel a little bit like this game, this rhetorical game they can play, but once they’re there, I mean, you know, they’re just as happy as everyone else. To promote the programs that they’ve enabled.

Well, it’s complicated. We’ll talk a little bit more about this when we get into some of the things that’s happening in the military. But there is waste in government.

You can’t have an entity that is that large, that employs that many people, that has that many programs, that runs like a top. I mean, there’s an argument that no organization even close to that, you know, is, is efficient.

So what you see, and it’s very interesting, even Democrats who strike to go after Elon Musk and Doge, it’s always premise saying, I’m sure there is some waste and inefficiency we can get rid of there. To your question though, if there is, why isn’t it dealt with in a more kind of direct and functional way?

Is that the bureaucracy has a life of its own and it has an ability to do these things.

And again, I remember a friend of mine in Parliament Hill, when I was just starting in my career was the, was the executive assistant to the Ministry of Fisheries in Newfoundland and he put forward an edict that they would cut 10% of their budget. And the deputy minister came to him and said, okay, Minister, we figured out how to start this.

The dock that’s in your constituency doesn’t work very well, so we’ll tear it down and that’ll save $10 million. And the minister just went, holy shit, you can’t tear down the dock in my constituency. And that was the end of the cuts.

But bureaucracy does have a life of its own. It does have a survival mode because their ethos is ministers come and go, presidents come and go, and we’re here forever.

And so all we have to do is just wait these motherfuckers out and kind of stall them and figure out how to, how to deal with them.

And I want to talk to that in terms of how the leadership is changing in a lot of the, the agencies and organizations in the, in the United States and what that might mean for the function of government as well. But we’re jumping all over the place a little bit here.

But, but one last thing on this point, I mean it strikes me that the rhetoric around this, however kernel of truth is there, to your point, hasn’t resulted in any leaner, more efficient government. But it certainly changed the culture.

And I certainly know this as a small time consultant, that the only times everyday government get, the only times I did get government contracts were in February or January at end of fiscal, when they had to use it or lose it.

But it Strikes me that we are creating a really perverse government culture if instead of focusing on positive government services, we’re instead trying to play whack a mole with this waste hunters that come and go.

Yeah, no, I mean, if you don’t have meaningful change to deficits and debt, I mean, you have to have structural cuts. I mean, you can’t be, let’s fire these 10 people here and these hundred people there.

You have to say, look, we don’t need $70 billion of subsidies to corporations anymore there to save $70 billion more than our, our health expenditures in Canada, because there’s no evidence they do anything at all. Global mail red and editorial fact probably works negatively to the economy, but there are, there have to be major substantive things there.

I want to talk though, because I think we’ve talked about in terms of Europe and Britain and American isolation is very interesting.

But you put something forward today that is really intriguing and really very scary that for all of our diminishing Donald Trump as a lunatic and, you know, narcissist and a guy who just talks off the top of his head, that there is a larger plan here and the larger plan is to be more isolationist and to offer some accommodation to what used to be enemies in order to allow that to happen. Expand on that for people listening.

And the way in which Trump speaks almost lovingly of Premier Xi and President Putin kind of gave me the inspiration to try to apply it. And to your point, I do think that Musk and Trump are largely motivated by vanity, by personal issues.

But there are really, really smart people around them and there are really ambitious people around them.

And that’s where United States being the global officer of trade, the global provider of security, is not something that a lot of these haw that a lot of these industrialists, that a lot of these billionaires desire, when instead they could divvy the world up into three authoritarian spheres, one controlled by America, one controlled by China, one controlled by Russia.

And it would be a lot cheaper than, say, going to war over Taiwan or continuing to fight a war in Ukraine that is just going to be based on attrition. So it was just a logical experiment, a kind of game theory. But it started really back on how does Canada Become absorbed to the United States.

Well, China, rather.

Trump says to China, hey, you can have Taiwan, as long as we get the semiconductor chips, you can still have the maple syrup and the forestry and the potash.

And how this plays out to your point about Europe, to your point about other nations who would very much be pissed off and do whatever they could in a diplomatic sense, but it only works if Russia and China are on side, if we go from a diplomatic order to an order based on force, based on the. Those who are the mightiest. And unfortunately, history suggests it’s possible.

Yeah, but you’re suggesting in the piece, which I found very, very interesting, is that Trump would happily give up Taiwan to China and Ukraine to Russia in exchange for what would be a functional hegemonic truce, saying, that’s your territory. This is your territory. This is my territory. Let’s not bug each other and let’s just go about our business. And that’s scary.

And that fundamentally speaks to his psychology of the deal, right.

That he would, to your earlier point, if he aspires to a Nobel Peace Prize, he probably thinks that this is sufficient, that this would be the kind of global order. And the scary part about this is, unlike Orwell’s vision, which was based on perpetual war, this one isn’t. Like these trading blocks could get along.

This is my point of as long as we get the semiconductor chips from Taiwan, China, you’re good. As long as we still get our cheap electronics, you’re good. And that’s what concerns me.

Because on the other side, being the peacenik that I am, militaries need to fight, right? Like the US Military, especially, they always get itching to spend their money and shoot their bombs.

And a war with China is unwinnable the same way a war with Russia’s unwinnable. There’s no incentive for them to do that. But a war with the Mexican cartel.

Yeah. But it’s interesting. As you know, I spent a lot of time in.

In Mexico, and the support for President Sheinbaum is just going through the roof in Mexico. I mean, they love her. And part of what they love is how firm she has been with Trump. Not in a.

Not in an Elmo kind of way, but very reasonable as she is as a scientist, you know, in dealing with this.

And you wonder, in terms of what you’re hypothesizing on, it’s certainly worthy of a discussion and certainly worthy of watching and setting up some red flags to understand what could be going on, is that the flaw in Trump’s strategy Thus far is that he’s alienating all of these jurisdictions that’s supposed to be part of his western hemisphere. He’s offering to say, brick, I’ll give you 150% terrorists, because you’re trying to deep six the. The. The US Dollar.

Canada has never been more anti American than. Than. Than. Than it is right now.

So Canada’s never been more anti Gretzky than it ever has until now.

A Canadian icon, a Canadian hero.

Yeah.

Looks like he’s siding with America. It’s. Fuck you, Wayne. Yeah, you’re in big trouble now, buddy.

But again, if you look at the big picture, and I hope that it is hubris, I hope that the competence to go back to our point about government waste, I hope that the incompetence of the people that he’s appointing to senior positions will undo this fantasy for an imperial order, that will undo this fantasy for turning America into an empire.

But if you look at what they tried to do in Germany, if you look at what they’re currently doing in the uk, they’re picking their favorites on the far right, and they’re doing everything they can to get those people elected.

So the same way that Pierre Poliev, while now plummeting in the polls, is clearly a useful stooge to a lot of these guys, I’d be looking in Mexico at who potentially would be the kind of people they would back. And this is assuming that a. Their methodology continues to be what it is, which is induce chaos by any means necessary, induce crisis.

And I still think that their appetite for crisis and chaos is just at the appetizer level that they would love to escalate that.

I don’t spend a lot of time on this, but in terms of the useful idiots, one question again, another really interesting observation is that Elon Musk sends out 2.2 million federal workers saying, here’s a questionnaire you’ve got to fill out. What are the top five things you did last week?

And here we find Pentagon, that Department of State, intelligent agencies, FBI, all send notes to their employees saying, don’t bother responding to this. What’s going on there?

Well, here’s the scary part. If you are an aspiring immoral junior staffer at any of those agencies and you send in your report, well, that’s identifying the Keeners.

That tells them right away, oh, look, we got a new acting head here. We got a new department head here.

No, but what I’m interested in is Tulsi, Gabber and Patel and Hegges have. I’ve at least acquiesced to someone saying, don’t bother answering what Elon Musk wants, you know, but that’s deal with this issue ourselves.

But again, the frame here is not compliance. The frame here is trial balloon in the sense that they’re constantly floating stuff out there.

But I think as part of this coup, I think what they’re trying to do right now is not identify enemies, they’re trying to identify loyalists. Like, that is the key questions that they’re asking in the FBI. That’s the key questions that they’re asking in the military.

Again, if we look at Twitter and what Musk did to Twitter as the kind of blueprint for how he’s handling the staffing at the US Government, he hired back a lot of people. He slashed and burned just to get them out the door. But then he figured, oh, I need you, and I need you.

And then he hired lots of other strangers, lots of other people who would be loyal to him. So I think we are currently witnessing a loyalty exercise, and it’s right across the government. And to use Musk’s own language, he’s a meme.

He’s trying to be that meme. He’s trying to provoke people. He’s trying to get attention.

And if you look at the folks who they are promoting, these are folks who just happened to wear a MAGA hat at the right place and time or happen to be posting stuff in favor of these people. And that’s what kind of attracts them. So I like you.

So to counter my argument, there was a big incident today in a number of Washington buildings where I think these were employees, disgruntled employees. Some of the press are reporting that it was hackers, but I don’t think it was hackers.

They were playing a video on loop of Donald Trump kissing Musk’s naked feet. It’s an AI generated video.

I was expecting a meme of something even much more aggressive than that.

Well, they deliberately did this one as kind of safe because they wanted to leave it going. And this is why I say it was disgruntled employees. So I think we are gonna see growing resistance. I think we are gonna see growing dissent.

There are certainly lots of ex FBI, ex CIA, ex military who with their expertise are sounding the alarm and are saying, look, we gotta stop these guys. This is terrible. America’s not safe.

But at the same time, these guys are doing what they’re doing, and as of yet, no one’s stopping them successfully.

Well, let’s shift the conversation there, because I think we’re also witnessing. And you’ve written about. It’s part of the larger piece you wrote today is the cuts in the military, you know, unprecedented.

I mean, it’s not just saying we’re gonna cut that 10%. It said, okay, head of Navy, head of Air Force, head of Joint Chiefs of Staff, you’re all gone. And now moving in to the FBI as, as well.

And I mean, I view this and says, you know, these guys. And also the appointment of, of who, who’s this guy? Bongino.

Yeah.

As the deputy director out of a guy against. From outside the agency. I mean, this alienates.

He’s got a podcast.

He does.

But people who have dedicated their lives to, you know, security and military agencies, the notion that, you know, the normal hierarchy of promotion is no longer available. These sort of things, you run alienating those kind of agencies and you got a pot that’s starting to boil on.

And this is where. That’s partly where I came up with my hemispheric hegemony hypothesis. Because there’s two constituents that the new regime has to cater to.

To our first point, really ambitious young people who see this as an opportunity to get up the ladder fast. Right. And they tend to be those who are most willing to do A, whatever the leader says and B, the law doesn’t matter. This is a bullet.

So these are Elon Musk’s muskrats.

Yes, but. And within this is, you know, the deputy director you mentioned as well. Right. These are people who.

Loyalty is their motivation and they see this 100% as a career opportunity. But the other is the hawks. Right.

If they can get enough of the seasoned institutional guys, and I don’t know what they’d have to offer them, but they got to offer them something big, something that they believe in. Because I consume a lot of American national security and intelligence community podcasts because they’re very transparent.

And to your point, they’re really smart people who talk about the world, talk about Ukraine, talk about China in a way that makes me feel smarter.

And there’s a history in the US Military going right back to George Washington of recruiting only the best and the brightest.

And then if you are among the best and the brightest, going into the military, going to West Point is not like going and to the Canadian Air Force or something. This is not kind of a second degree route to academic excellence. You go from there to Princeton, you go from there to Yale.

Yeah.

And you said it in the past, these are not only best and brightest, they have a pride in Public service, they fundamentally believe, often generationally right for family reasons. And so that’s where I’m here to tell you there’s a real split in the rhetoric there.

There are what I would call the sensible people who understand history, who are like, holy fuck, what’s going A podcast called Spy Talk that they skew old. They’re all retired folks, but they share your general concern.

But then there’s another podcast called Intelligence Matters, and that is now run by a biosecurity company. It used to be run by cbs. There’s a lot of people there who like this, who are saying, this is good. This is good for America. Yeah, yeah.

And that’s where I think, while there is a division, I think it wouldn’t take much for the regime to get a lot of these guys on side. And that’s why I use the cartels as an example.

Like, if you’re a smart American who genuinely believes that the Mexican border is a source of crime, is a source of drugs, then you’re smart enough to recognize that it’s the cartels, not the Mexican government, who’s going to stop it, and that the cartels are at a level of a paramilitary, if not a small nation military force. So this is where, as I was alluding to in the piece, I could see them going, yeah, we gotta do the cartels. Trump is right.

He’s gonna give us the opportunity. His other stuff’s batshit, but whatever, we’re gonna go after the cartels. That’s what we want.

These are the Faustian bargains that I’m worried some of these people would be satisfied enough with to not rebel.

Well, let’s watch that as well, because Sheinbaum has kind of said, you can do that if you tell us first and share intelligence, while at the same time saying, sovereignty is paramount. So that’s not out of out of the realm, because you’re right. I mean, it’s a very easy target, to pardon the pun, of saying.

You know, if you’re worried about border security, if you’re worried about fentanyl, then the real enemy is the drug cartels. In fact, that’s far easier to sell politically than it is Canada and the United States.

Whereas most reasonable Americans just scratch their heads and just say, what are you talking about?

And this is where Taylor Sheridan may have had a little bit of sense as to what the narrative would be, because so much of his work focuses on that and anticipates that. Now, one last thing I do want to say in America, because I think we’re about ready to shift to Canada.

The most difficult problem I have with these clowns is trying to decide what I should pay attention to and what I should, shouldn’t. Because they say this is the Steve Bannon methodology, Right? Just complete shock and awe. Just say 10 crazy things, hope you.

Trigger people, they won’t even know what to look at.

So I was ignoring the Fort Knox rhetoric until today, and I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but Trump and Musk.

Trump wants to go and look to see if. How much gold is there?

Yeah, yeah. They’re headed to Fort Knox to do an audit.

Even though the government audits it every year, they’re going to Fort Knox to do a personal audit to see if the gold is there. At first I ignored this. I thought it was just, you know, stupid bullshit. But then it came back to this bitcoin conspiracy.

Because if they can engineer a crisis, if they. All they have to do is say some gold is missing.

This shows that fiat currencies, at the gold standard, we need digital, we need blockchain, we need bitcoin, because that way it’ll never be stolen. We’ll always know where it is. Again, I’m floating it as a crazy idea, but that’s another thing I got my eye on.

Hey, listen, crypto is no more of a construct than gold is. I mean, there’s no inherent value in gold. There’s no inherent value in a dollar bill. I mean, the inherent value is in trust.

And you’re absolutely right to the extent that you can break down trust in what is the currency of the time, that the usefulness of that currency will diminish very, very, very quickly. You take your dollar bill into the circle C to buy a pack of gum, and they say, we don’t take that anymore.

You’re going to really start worrying about a paycheck that’s made of Canadian dollars.

And that’s where your legitimate analysis around inflation, around the economic crisis that they’re inducing.

This is what makes me worried that they not only understand that’s going to happen, they want that to happen, happen, because it then allows them within. Again, this is Steve Bannon, Shock and all this is shock doctrine.

Naomi Klein to introduce the policy changes they want, Bitcoin being potentially one of them.

Okay, we’ll give you a little latitude to spew that one out for a while. But I. I don’t know.

I hope I’m wrong, but it’s one of those. I want to be able to say.

I said it one of the things we’re trying to do here is go beyond normal orthodoxy, go beyond normal ideology. Try to explore a world that you know, is decidedly different than the one we grew up in.

And everything that we know suggests that it’s going to be way different going forward. So we’ll open those cans of worms.

Canada we didn’t want to talk about to be de minimis here, but there’s lots of interesting going on in Canada right now.

Well and I kind of want to use as the news hook the cross country CheckUp and the CBC’s I think rather poor decision to have Kevin O’Leary on propositioning Canada as to why we should become the 51st state. And 24 hours, 36 hours before cross country checkup there was this huge uproar of people saying no, no, don’t do it, don’t deaf.

And after the fact there’s more people saying that was so fucking dumb. And the CBC just making an ass of itself.

Oh completely. Because the guy’s a complete fraud. I mean he, he acts as a billionaire. That’s his job, not to be a billionaire.

I mean I knew people who worked on his leadership campaign when he ran in the last federal leadership campaign and they just said he is a certifiable nut job.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing but he’s just, you know, a great self promoter much like Donald, Donald Trump, but does clearly doesn’t have the political moxie or acumen to find his way other than on cross candidate checkup and the 42 people that listen to it these days.

But what do you think of this emotional response? Because you’ve talked all along about how the one thing Canadians love is that we’re not American, that that is the core essence of our identity.

And where to our earlier remarks about Wayne Gretzky ain’t shit anymore. There is a huge resurgence of emotion of interest. I would even argue civic participation in a way that we haven’t seen.

But A, do you think it’s going to impact voter turnout in the Ontario election? And B, I personally don’t feel just disclosing my bias ahead of time. Do you think this sentiment is going to go anywhere useful?

Is anything going to happen with it other than just emotional outlet?

Well, good question because I mean to the specific question you ask, I don’t think it’s going to have any impact on, on turnout, but it’s probably going to have some impact on what kind of apples people buy when they go into the grocery store because you Hear that?

Anecdotally, I haven’t done any research on that, but there is a strong emotional kind of sense right now, like, you know, these guys, and it is like a little bit like a jilted lover. You know, we do define ourselves in terms of what we are, not vis a vis America.

But that said, until very recently, if you asked, you know, which country in the world is Canada’s best friend, overwhelmingly the answer is America. We love our differences, but also the notion that we are part of a North American supply chain, that, you know, all of this.

And I was involved in the very first NAFTA negotiations in polling, where there was tremendous hesitation, but that is virtually gone away. And so now people are just saying, you know, you mother. I mean, you know, we’ve been working like this.

What that might mean substantively, hard to tell. Although our speculation that we were talking earlier, I mean, if you had the BRIC countries, if you.

If you had Mexico, if you had Europe, if you had Canada, and say, we can’t count on these guys anymore, so we’re gonna have a brand new free trade agreement that we’re gonna have, and guess what, Europe, you don’t have to worry about your LNG anymore, because we’ve got pipelines gonna go right across Canada and we’re gonna start exporting to you. And Mexico says, you know what?

We’re gonna be the world’s superpower in solar energy and that we’re gonna start exporting that on your electrical grid too. And that could be, I mean, again, a whole different world order in a whole different way that everything is. Is that.

And, you know, American isolationism. I mean, I’m not so sure that’s good for America. You know, we know it’s not good for.

For the world, but there’s a very strong argument that says perhaps who could be hurt most by, you know, between the unilateralism of pulling back and then the loss of soft power in the developing world, where they don’t have any other relations than soft power could leave them very, very alone on this planet.

I mean, to that point, I think what we’re seeing is the consequence of the underfunding the American public education system, because had they bothered to learn anything about the world, they would recognize the extent to which isolationism will literally kill them at. Kill their Quality of life. And I would love, here’s the paradox. I would love for Canada to be a bastion of free trade with everyone but America.

Right.

Like if we had free trade with Europe, if we had free trade with India, if we had free trade with China, we would be such an economic powerhouse in no small part because of all the diasporas that exist in Canada that could act as bridges to all these different economies.

Ambassadors, literally.

Yeah, yeah. As well as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, right. You know, making those links. And I should also again disclose my personal self interest here.

I’m in love with the Chinese automotive company BYD Build you’d dreams. And I want their truck, their shark so badly. So I would love for them to set up a plant here in eastern Ontario.

Well, they’re building sedans for $16,000 now.

Right. Which I should mention, you know, they do sell the shark in Mexico.

So if there was a legal way for me to go down there, buy it and drive it back, I’d be coming to hang out. Alan.

Well, it’s part of the legitimate concern that America has had about what’s happening in Mexico. And Doug Ford in Ontario kind of raised the same prospect, is that China is using Mexico as a backdoor to access the North American free trade route.

No, but that’s why I put that forward out there. Cuz I can’t imagine unless this was genuinely the stupidest regime we could ever imagine.

I can’t imagine the US ever tolerating Canada opening its doors that way. Because we would be a gateway back into the United States. Right.

All these countries would use Canada and Mexico as a big warehouse to then funnel stuff into the States.

It would be very, very short sighted and stupid. That said, you back someone into against a corner and all of a sudden their behavior is very, very different than when they’re not in that corner.

I mean the supply chains are so well established. You know, he introduced 25 tariffs on automobiles coming from Canada and Mexico. And the North American automobile industry is dead.

It is dead as a doorbell.

And I think they’re gonna do that.

Consciously and then see how many, how many, how many votes you win in Michigan.

But what if again, what if votes don’t matter? Like what if we take our rhetoric seriously, right? And acknowledge the politics, the ambition.

Like these guys aren’t even joking about being king anymore. Right? And there was at cpac and granted, CPAC is full of. I hate, I have to.

Yeah, I got, I gotta find a better word than nut job because when you called Kevin O’Leary a nut job, I wanted to say that’s not fair to nut jobs, but there were people, the third term coalition, right, who are championing for Trump to get a third term. And this is where, until these guys are gone, until this regime has changed, I don’t think we can make any assumptions.

And that’s where I want to come back to this Canadian sentiment, because I agree, I think the bi Canadian thing is politically activating people.

It’s mobilizing people, it’s getting people to have a literacy that we wish they would have had for climate change change, but are only now starting to have with politics. But the paradox is if you’re buying Canadian at Walmart, if you’re buying Canadian at Costco, are you really buying Canadian? Right.

And this is where certainly where I live, it’s all American box stores, right. There aren’t really local places to buy.

Your stuff, but they all have very strong buy local policies because again, of the supply chain.

But my point is, why would you.

Bring berries from Lake Chapala in Mexico up to the Costco in Toronto if you can get them from Lindsay?

But you know why? It’s winter. Lindsay can’t support the entire demand.

And that’s where the branch plant economy strikes me as this has been going for a very long time and we can’t, while we could, yes, set up free trade with all these other countries, we can’t disentangle ourselves from the United States States. That’s the point of the auto industry.

It’s not just the United States, it’s global supply chains. I mean, globalization and global free trade has been the part of the status quo for now, almost 50, 50 years.

I mean, that is, and with an underlying assumption that that was good, it was not only good for trade and commerce, but that, you know, if you could, if you could conquer other countries through commerce rather than warfare, that was just way smarter way to, way to, way to do things. And it’s only now that that whole. Well, no, that’s not, that’s not true.

I mean, Covid, you know, got this whole notion of shortening supply chains, fringe shorting and, and this sort of stuff.

And, and you can see why that would strike a response of court, not just in terms of COVID but much better to buy closer to home and further than home or more to the point, much better not to leave ourselves so vulnerable to a supply chain that is that complicated and that long and that international in scope.

And that’s what I think is in the logic of the U.S. hawks, that that’s why they’re on scope with this, even though they know the short term economic pain is going to be tremendous.

But I’m curious, if you were advising a Canadian prime minister, would you be counseling the tariff response or are there more radical policies, are there better policies that a federal government should be contemplating? Because it does feel like it’s a little bit of tit for tat. Right. That we don’t have a lot of options.

So we’re just going to do to you what you’re doing to us. Why not let the Americans suffer and pay more on tariffs, but make it easier on Canadians?

Well, no, I think, you know, politically you almost have to go for tit for tat. Dollar for dollar, for $60 of everything we export to America are raw goods that are made into something else by American companies.

So there’s no question, even though we’ve got a 1 to 10 scale in the size of the economies, that if we did that it would hurt American industry and it would hurt American industry, especially in the Midwest and in mid, middle, middle America.

But I, I think, and again, you’re seeing this more and more people are saying, you know, that is hitting a, you know, a fly with a hammer kind of thing. Is that. Or an elephant with a fly swatter is the, the, you know, they’d feel it, but it really wouldn’t do much.

At the, at the end of the day, we have to look at a lot of other alternatives and those other alternatives are to make ourselves, you know, more insular from America and from these kind of behaviors.

And so you have, we’ve talked about this before, you know, that all of a sudden there’s a discussion again about, you know, pipeline going all the way to, you know, through Quebec, which has resisted and rejected it. Now, now they’re saying, well, maybe we should look at this.

And then you get a smart guy like Abby Lewis who had on the show saying, you shouldn’t be doing the pipeline. We don’t need to be exporting fossil fuel.

We should be talking about a Canadian wide electrical grid, you know, where we could use nuclear power in Ontario and Hydro in Quebec and Hydro in British Columbia to generate a power grid that is unbelievable that, you know, emits zero carbon.

The interesting part about whether one or the other is better than the other, let’s leave that aside right now, is that they’re having, that discussion is starting to take place.

Whereas these were, these were more or less put on the back burner in the past, but now they’re deemed serious discussions that are not only worthy of discussion, but necessary to discuss right now.

And to your point about discussions, if CBC didn’t have its head up its ass, instead of that cross country checkup with O’Leary, they would have consulted first nations across the country. They would have had a panel or a selection of leaders, young and old, saying, hey, what do you think of all this Canada, America crap?

You’ve been here all along. Doesn’t feel like anyone’s bringing you into this debate. The reason I asked the policy piece, though, is I am a little frustrated with.

I mean, the Democrats are finally starting to mobilize.

Bernie, for example, is doing a nationwide town hall tour where he’s really connecting with Trump voters and sort of asking, hey, is this who you voted for? But here in Canada, I’m not really seeing anything interesting or creative.

And I’m actually kind of dismayed that we’re gonna have it looks like a central banker as our next prime minister, because while I understand the emotional certainty, comfort that he gives people, especially because his name isn’t Justin Trudeau, I really don’t think it’s gonna help us counter the rhetoric or the culture of the far right, which is based on conspiracy. And having a central banker as the next prime minister is just going to fuel their conspiracies. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, it’s not over till it’s over is the shortest answer.

But there’s no question that first, Canadians who identify themselves as being in the middle, whose ideological outlook is middle of the road, who value compromise, who value consensus, are the most likely in this nation to feel underrepresented in politics. People are on the stream. See, they got lots of choice. People in the middle for the last 10 years feel they’ve got virtually no choice at all.

The attractive thing about Mark Carney is that he is in the middle.

I mean, he is a blue Liberal or a Red Tory, which, you know, we used to see all the time, we haven’t seen in federal politics at all for the last 10 days.

So he’s got some pretty solid credentials that said, you want to win any election in Canada, you better be able to appeal to blue collar workers, new Canadians living in the suburbs and increasingly and interestingly the most violent, volatile constituency that exists out there, young people, people under the age of 30. Does a central banker appeal to those three constituencies? Not much. Not much. I mean a Doug Ford actually appeals to those constituencies.

To your earlier point, he gets to be time for a change guy. Right? He gets to be the anti status quo. And your point about Carney’s bona fides or his credentials? I don’t think those things matter anymore.

I think they matter to people whose votes aren’t going to change. Right. Whose minds are already made up.

But to your point about young people, to your point about working class people, maybe less so, new Canadians, I would see new Canadians far more motivated to inform themselves because they’re excited about this new society they’re part of of. But honestly, the extent to which the electorate is uninformed plays into the conspiracy theory.

It plays into the misinformation and it is remarkable how pervasive that stuff is when you get into the average discourse. And that’s where I agree with your historical analysis of Carney. But I actually don’t see him as a centrist.

To me, he’s right wing and that’s because I’m a raving left wing guy.

No.

So there’s some relativity there.

But my right now look what Doug Ford did. I mean, incredibly opportunistic and cynical.

But you know, the old maxim, one of the most successful political strategies ever is find someone as an opponent who’s less popular than you and isn’t on the ballot. And you know, for Doug Ford, that was Donald Trump. Trump, and it wasn’t even a race once he was able to focus the ballot question on that.

And the talk is, you know, the leadership convention is going to decide a new leader federally for the Liberals on March 9.

But also they don’t want this threat of Donald Trump to diminish in, in any way because while he might appear right wing and again, polls that show show this head to head against Poliev, Carney wins.

Who’s best able to deal with Trump because at least he looks like someone who’s authoritative, where you can say this guy’s never had another job in his life. You know, he doesn’t know anything. He’s never earned dollar of living that wasn’t coming from the House of Commons clerk.

But all of that appeals to people who are never going to vote for Poliev anyway.

And the people who up until this point were voting for Polievre were people who wanted a change, people who thought that Trudeau was this Nepo baby part of this corrupt all the conspiracy theories. And to tie this back into our talk of America, I actually feel to your point about trade is the best way to conquer a country.

I think media is even better and social media in particular, and that is the Elon Musk methodology.

And I still think that we should not underestimate the Canadian right and the extent to which the Canadian right, especially as the election gets underway because most people don’t pay attention until there’s an election actually underway. I really would not underestimate the right wing support for Poliev. I think Carney is going to consolidate the NDP vote.

I think the NDP in Ontario and federally are, to use a technical term.

Fucked because they’re completely poor. There’s not a Liberal in Canada who wouldn’t vote NDP and not a New Democrat who wouldn’t vote Liberal.

And that was my point about Carney being right wing.

But I think if we had a left wing populist ala Bernie Sanders, who on the one hand championed the underdogs, championed the people, the working class, the new immigrant, the trans folks, the women, but at the same time had to your point, the, the gravitas, the strength, the courage that we’re starting to see within some of these politicians, I think that would neutralize the right far easier than the center. I think our best case scenario is a minority government. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing because minority governments do tend to be.

More accountable, they can work in.

I’m writing an article for the Toronto Star this weekend that it talks exactly about, about that is not just the left’s failure, you know, is, but, but how much room there is on the left because the, you know, we, we focus on the crazy people who are in the end zones and we forget that most people are between the 55 yard lines, the 50 yard line. Most people, they’re, they’re, they’re in the Middle, and that includes people who say nurses should be paid more.

No one should be working 40 hours a week who can’t, you know, can’t get a living wage to, to rent a home in the community they, they live in. You know, corporate power has to be pulled back.

The, the things that Bernie, Bernie Sanders is saying and you don’t, do not hear that at all from, from the left in, in Canada say way more room there than they, than they, they anticipate. And by, by moving only to the center, you know, then they actually leave some room for the New Democrats there.

And that’s where this coming election in Ontario and the federal election, my eyes are on voter turnout. And I say this because I’m not expecting voter turnout to radically reverse from its downward trend.

But if there isn’t a blip, right, if there isn’t, because I could never imagine Canadians being more passionate about a political issue than they are now.

And if this doesn’t motivate them to vote for whoever, then that strikes me as your part, a larger symptom that there are a lot of people like myself, our ideas are just not represented in the system at all. And maybe we’re voting NDP or maybe we’re voting strategically, as all these websites are encouraging us to do.

But I think the more the center keeps reacting to the far right, the more the far right wins. And the only way to change this is for a new narrative to emerge. And we’re still waiting.

Well, right of center always has a turnout advantage simply by. Because the skew’s older. But to change behavior, you have to have not just an opportunity, you have to have a threat.

If one, if Poliev was saying I believe that we should become the future 51st state and mark Carney was saying I will fight Donald Trump tooth and nail, you would see a spike in internal.

I don’t know whether like in Ontario, my guess is the internal is going to be very, very low because people say, well, for both, the result is a foregone conclusion. And there’s, I mean you don’t have to be a constitutional scholar, know that a Premier cannot have a fight with President United States.

I mean, it’s kind of a complete full foyance smokescreen of nothing.

But anyway, although the, the freedom of information request around travel budgets for all their premieres right now would be an interesting article because like they’re all flying daily to D.C. like Premier Mo is flying daily. Ford’s going every chance you get.

Why would you not? Why would you not?

Well, an argument to not is you look like. Like there’s only one guy in power, maybe two. You could talk to their vassals, but you’re not impacting policy. They’re just fucking you around.

They’re just saying, do this, do that.

And apparently the caliber of individuals that they’re meeting with is quite sad.

So one last thing I wanted to say, and we don’t have to talk about this today, because I think this is going to come back up. But as all of this circles back to the free trade debate, you know, I keep thinking about your point about attacking Turner’s bridge, right?

And, you know, feeling that you couldn’t win the argument based on the policy. So go after his credibility. And I say that symbolically because it feels like that is where we are politically today.

And I wrote a few pieces about the mainstream media, and I did that for my own personal catharsis of kind of remembering my own traumatic experiences. But I have never had a debate with people who weren’t friends where I wasn’t attacked. Like, I’ve never.

And I’ve like had professional debates, right, where as a public speaker, I’m paid to be there.

And I cannot think of an instance where people actually engaged me in my radical ideas without attacking me as being like a socialist or an anarchist or something or other. And I find I mentioned this to you as an aside the other day, that we’re getting two types of comments on our Internet content.

Content, either sensible stuff, shout out to Russell McCormick who wants us to talk about political parties and corporate control and total ad hominem attacks and not personal attacks. But Canada needs more Doge or Trump will have you all on your knees. Just crazy shit.

Yeah, but you mentioned that before. The right is way more organized in terms of responding to those sorts of things.

But to what extent has politics shifted from a debate on policy to now an attack on character? And it’s more a matter of you hate the like, Carney’s gaining popularity, Ford is gaining support because people hate Trump, right?

They’re voting against the other guy rather than for that guy. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this andor pick this up as a through line in future episodes.

Let’s talk about this more. And you say so I’ll just finish.

And you’re going to think I’m Pollyanna here, but I actually believe the opposite, that if politicians showed they’re willing to compromise, showed they’re willing to cooperate, the faith in the Total system would go up significantly. And as the faith in the total system went up.

So would be the sense of alienation and all the other things that we’re seeing go down right now and voter turnout would, would go go up before. Most normal people, most rational people don’t like fights. They don’t like ad hominem attacks. They don’t like, you know, just.

And Canadians especially.

Anyway, yeah, no later, I, I hope that’s right. I think it’s just a matter of we need that politician to cross the Rubicon on. Right. We, we need one person to kind of show that leadership.

And I agree with you. I think they’d be ludicrously popular and.

We’D make it, we’d made it doubly hard because, you know, if the, if the focus is, as you see so often on character and the assault on character, those people who care the most about their character and value their character most, the least likely to enter the political arena.

Yeah.

So we get those who don’t give a shit about such matters, like Donald Trump. He doesn’t care what we say about him.

Well, and, and I mean, a, we definitely need to talk about generational difference more in the future, but I think that is a subject we should talk about, which is how do we incentivize it? Right?

What, what are the cultural changes that we need to advocate for that make it easier for, for those people to go into politics because we desperately need them. We’ve come to an end. Thanks again, everyone, for listening. Thanks, Alan.

We’re on all the podcast platforms, which we’ve noticed a bunch of you are connecting us to. Alan’s publishing is substack now. So Alan, greg.substack.com and we’re on all the social platforms, at least in terms of clips.

So thanks again and we’ll see everybody soon.

Good conversation, Jesse. Talk soon.