At Issue - Canada scrambles to bridge U.S. trade divide

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Canada grapples with more Trump threats to free trade and a delay in opening the new Gordie Howe bridge. The Liberals move against social media but not everyone's on board. And Pierre Poilievre pitches Albertans on staying in Canada.Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Let's see if Toronto advisors know their group insurance providers. Who has extensive expertise in both traditional group benefits and special risk solutions? Beneva. Beneva. Looks like people are starting to know Beneva pretty well. You're stronger with the right partner, Beneva. This is a CBC podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton this week on at issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, June 11th.

I don't know that I'm going to redo it because, to be honest with you, the United States, does much better. We don't need anything that Canada has. At the request of the United States, we agreed to delay the opening and take the necessary time to resolve outstanding issues. There's not great drama here.

We're going to work through some issues that have come up. This week we're asking, what did Trump's comments mean for the Kusma review? Plus, what will this new legislation mean for young Canadians online. So what's been made of Trump's commitments to Kusma? What could it mean for the long-awaited review deadline? That's July 1st. And what about that bridge? I'm Rosemary Barton here to break

it all down tonight. Chantelle Iber, Ander Coim, Altheir Raj. Lots of interesting threads on this file over the course of the week. The bridge being one of them, and maybe we'll come back to that. But Chantel, I'll start with you just on the comments directly from the president, saying he's not sure he wants to renew. Just usual bluster? Is it a sign that maybe there are some things getting done at the table, as Dominic Blas seems to be suggesting. How do you take those comments? I take them with the same grain of salt as the announcement that the U.S. is going to bomb Iran out of existence, and then the U.S. has a deal that it's about to sign with Iran. Even on serious things, you can't take any statement that's at face value. We should be

careful not to present July 1st. The day when Kuzma turns into a pumpkin, Even in the worst case scenario, that does require a six-month notice with reaction, which would not be positive in the U.S., if the U.S. wants to go there, the Trump administration. But what it does tell you is that over a year and some months now, nothing has moved in a positive sense. And Canada has made moves on the digital tax, more recently on the CRTC, on some of the counter tariffs. and none of those moves has been followed by some change in the we don't need anything from you. Worse, if you listen to the U.S. ambassador to Canada, he's actually today saying the opposite that this statement has meant as an overture to deal. So go figure.

Well, Dominic LeBlanc, to be fair, Andrew, did say that when he was down there last week, that there were about 12 issues where, I don't know if they had resolved them, but there was some progress, and his impression from Ambassador Greer was, oh, okay, you're actually dealing with some of the things. I don't know what to make of that, because as we've talked about, we don't know what's going on behind closed doors. But if you take that with what Trump said, what do you understand of it? Very little.

But look, there's so many complicated factors more so than in any previous administration. When we ask, is Trump bluffing, for example, it's a bit like asking, is Trump lying? And the answer is, it's hard to tell with him because he doesn't know the difference himself, I don't think, oftentimes, between truth and falsehood. So, yeah, it would be certainly within his playbook to be bluffing. We've seen that before. He's not a particularly good bluffer, as Iran has shown us. But it's also entirely possible that when he says we don't need anything from Canada, which is a ridiculous statement.

Of course, you don't need things. He can be completely a tarquick if you want to be, but it's just not really smart economics. But when he says it, he could entirely believe it. So that bedevils everybody. It bedevils the people around him who are trying to interpret what he means. It bedevils anybody trying to deal with the people around him because no one is sure at any given moment who speaks for the president, who has his ear, who's likely to have his ear down the road.

Then you add in all the many different issues that are on the table with differing statements coming from different people in the administration. So anybody trying to negotiate with this administration at this point would be tearing their hair out, on top of which, as we've said many times in this forum, if you do negotiate, you do make concessions, the United States nominally makes concessions in return, what guarantee do you have that anything that they say will actually be upheld? So when you're dealing with somebody as unpredictable as a kind word as Trump, it's like no negotiation that any of us have seen before. And it does seem, Althea, as though the government understands that. I mean, there was nobody

freaking out when Donald Trump said those things yesterday because they've sort of, they've seen these kinds of things before. Oh, sorry, is that a question? Yes, I agree with you. I actually think, I mean, I disagree with the prime minister's categorization as like no great drama. I think this is a great drama. I think we would all love to be a fly on the wall and know what's going on. I, to Shantai's point, I'm not sure that there haven't been concessions. I mean, a month and a half ago. No, no, no, they have been. But there were no, they opened no door.

Right. Well, I don't know that they didn't open any doors. Sorry, that's where I was going with that. Because we had the prime minister a month and a half ago suggest that he was not going to concede anything to get to the negotiating table because he wanted, you know, the Americans were not abiding by the agreement themselves because of all these Section 32 tariffs. And now we have a very different tone.

Now we have Dominic Label telling the Eurasia group today, for example, that he's had, you know, two, one-hour conversations with Ambassador Greer. And again, you know, obviously there's not going to be an announcement on July 1st about renegotiation. We should not panic. In fact, Mexico has scheduled negotiations for after July 1st. So there should not be an announcement on July 1st. But there seems to be more traction that it goes against perhaps the partisan dialogue that we heard earlier in the fall, earlier in the year, that is about, to use Doug Ford's words,

building fortress North America. And so on the one hand, of course, the ambassador is wrong and Donald Trump is wrong when he says that the U.S. doesn't need anything. It obviously does. Potash, for example. Ambassador Huxra has talked about Canadian tourists. Please come back. And also, please include our alcohol on your shelves.

But I do think that there is a change in tone. And I don't know if the concession on the online news act, for example, led to that change in tone or helped kind of show some goodwill. All the things that Althea lists are demands for more concessions, please organize group tourists so they are forced to come to the U.S., put booze on the shelves. I'm not hearing anything that talks about the U.S. openness. But can we remind ourselves? because at some point one needs to keep score, that at this point last year, the Prime Minister believed that he would have resolved some of the main issues on the trade front.

And then when that didn't happen, I was supposed to happen on July 21st, and then I was going to happen on August 1st. So can we keep track of reality a year ago? Optimism had deadlines. Today, it's got, wow, it's going well. We spoke for an hour. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and a bridge that we have paid for that is ready to go,

that we are not allowed to open, apparently, because of whatever's going on behind the scenes, because nobody will explain how those two things are related either, Andrew. Yeah, and whether it's related in some broad sense that Trump wants to use this as a negotiating time to, or whether it's just to do with the individual owner of the other bridge and all the local politics, I do think we should avoid looking for a foolish consistency, if I can put it that way. And we should look at positions in the round over time. What I mean by that is the sum total of the Canadian negotiation,

negotiating position, like the sum total of the Mexican position, is going to be a mixture of different messages at different times. That's how you try to, you know, find the right balance, the right fix. Any negotiation is going to be a mixture of hard lines and then concessions, etc. So people jumped up and down because previously the prime minister was saying, you know, elbows up. we're going to diversify to other countries. And now he's saying, oh, on some things we can have Fortress North America,

I think it's probably prudent that you'd have some combination of the two. You're trying to diversify as much as you can, as fast as you can, but you're faced with the reality that you're not going to be able to just, you know, leap at one go from American trade to other countries. So you're forced to have a kind of a nuanced position. And similarly with Mexico, we were hearing all about how Mexico had a very conciliatory position earlier on and maybe they were stealing a margin on us. now you hear Mexico taking a rather tougher stand.

I think both countries are trying to sort of, as I say, find the right mix that can turn the key in the lock of these negotiations. Last thought to you, Altheo. How to survive under the weight of the enormous American giant. Yes, I do think that there's been somewhat of a tone shift in our coverage of the discussions with Mexico, but I'm not sure in the kind of American and Mexican coverage of what's actually going there,

because we've been really focused on the enormous pressure that she's been under from a national security perspective with Americans wanting to, like, root out gangs on their own without talking to the government or warning them. And we, thankfully, don't have that problem on the side of the border. I hope for an agreement. I do think there is a tonal shift. I do wonder what other concessions we're going to see. It's interesting to me, and I know we'll talk about this, but the social – media ban includes a lot of the previous kind of ideology of the Trudeau era that has been

conceded to the Donald Trump administration. So it's interesting to me that they're still kind of going down one road yet they've conceded on these others so they clearly don't think there are problems or maybe they've gotten okay or they're just hoping. I don't know. I feel like there's so many more questions about what's going on. So I would love it to be a drama so we could know what's going on behind the scenes. Okay, well, we're going to leave this part there. Thank you all for that. When we come back, we'll take a look at, as Althea suggested there. Is the government's plan to ban social media for kids under 16 the right move? Does it do enough to protect children?

How does it balance protection with freedom? All of that next. The Act will establish a minimum age of 16 to have a social media account. The Act will require social media platforms and AI chat port services to do more to protect children and make their platforms safe. by design. So what will this legislation mean for Canadians? Does it do enough to address concerns around safety online? Let's bring everyone back. Chatelle, Andrew, and Althea. Andrew, why don't you start us off on this? This is the third attempt to try and make this legislation make sense. It is very complicated to try and

regulate tech giants, to try and enforce rules and to try and find a way to control what kids are seeing online. What did you make of this attempt this time? Well, let's talk, first of all, about what's not in it, which was in previous attempts, which were, you know, criminal code provisions, life sentences for certain types of behavior. People could take each other at the Human Rights Commission for speech that they didn't like. It was, a lot of that stuff was quite extraneous and over the top, and mercifully they do seem to do with anything, really. And they do seem to have pared this down to what I think most people are actually concerned about, which is online harms. That said, as you say, there are so many moving pieces to this, whether you're talking about the under 16 social media

ban, whether you're talking about the duty of responsibility for AI, chats where you're talking about the many powers of this digital safety commission. Making sense of this would be hard enough, except that also so much of it has been pushed off into regulations. I think Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa professor, said there's 51 different provisions that have been left to the regulations. So it'll be very hard at this point to know exactly what to make of it. There'll have to be a lot of searching scrutiny of this. I will say make one prediction that a lot of the people who have been squawking the most about the courts overriding parliament and messing with.

with the democratic will of people, are going to be the people most relieved to see the courts giving searching scrutiny to this one on charter grounds. That there's real potential here. I'm not saying it's reality, but there's real potential for overkill on free expression. And I am personally thankful that somebody will be looking at that from our charter grounds. Althea, what did you make of this attempt to try and regulate this piece of the Internet, particularly in relation to kids? Yeah, I mean, Andrew's right that the person.

basically the parts that were gutted from the old version of the bill, where the parts that the liberals put in, frankly, for partisan reasons, that had nothing to do with kids or social media or online media. And most of the good part, actually, the stuff that had been heavily consulted with, that is in this bill. The new parts of this bill, though, I think, deserves some scrutiny. The social media ban and Andrew mentioned Michael Geis at the University of Ottawa, you know, he makes a really good point, and others have made this point.

as well. But so much is undefined. And it's not, like, it's not just the details it's undefined. It's like, who will this apply? How do you, what tools will you use to test or to prove somebody's age? What privacy safeguards do have in mind? All of this, basically, the government is asking parliamentarians, you know, this is no longer your responsibility. Give it to us. We are going, so like, tell us that you agree with the ambitious scope, but then we will define what the this legislation actually ends up looking like, because so much has not been colored in. It's not even sure that we know what the actual picture looks like. So it will be hopefully Parliament and the House MPs will have a chance to ask some really pointed questions.

I also am troubled by the charter implications. Like 16, whose voices are you trying to mute as well from the public space? When you think about Greta Thunberg, for example, she was 15 years old when she was 15 years old when she started using social media for her kind of global populist outcry on climate change and the school protests. I think there are some really valid questions about privacy and speech rights that the government has yet to talk about. I'll leave there because I feel like it's on your mouth open. Yeah, I wonder though if like it starts as a ban, but there is the possibility, right, for the, for the social media companies to put measures in place to protect children.

We don't know what those are. No, we don't. But there is a way for them to still be in this space, is my point. Which is, I think it is a big leap to ask parliamentarians to pass a lot like this. Right. Right. Chantal, let's hear from you. Well, if you look at the timeline of previous bills that addressed issues that were related to social media or platforms,

I think most 14-year-olds can expect to be able to be on social media because It'll be over 16 by the time this ever becomes legislation. First point. Second, I'm curious about some of, I'm a practical person who was carded until she was 25 whenever I wanted to buy some alcohol. So how are we going? What mechanism is going to verify age? I'm curious about that.

Face recognition, sure, can you tell the difference between a 16 and a 17-year-old? But beyond that, the track record of this government. on anything related to framing the digital world is frankly not particularly convincing. It either died on the order paper or they backed off over the past two years because of pressures from the U.S. This bill literally asked the same companies to be responsible and accept guidelines that they would put in place so that there is no ban on people using the platforms. I don't believe that the government has demonstrated that it has the stomach to follow through on its own legislation when it comes to those issues. I take that point, Andrew, but there is a political appetite, like a public appetite for some sort of action from the government.

You know, whether or not it happens, I don't know, but there is some leeway there, I would think. The difference between this bill and the other fumbled bills is that there's an actual legitimate concern that needs to be addressed here. You know, the Online News Act was based on the idea that Facebook and Google were stealing newspapers content by linking to it, which was ridiculous. You know, the Online Streaming Act is based on this outmoded idea that we still need to cross-subsidize CanCon out of broadcast. So that stuff really didn't make any sense. But here there's real concerns, legitimate concerns, new concerns around what social media and now what AI can do, particularly to children, but also to adults in some cases as well. So you're dealing with expression, so you've got to tread really lightly and really carefully. But for once, there's really a serious concern here that can't be left unaddressed.

We've seen the consequences. We've seen both for individuals and in some ways for society at large of what social media has done to our brains, if nothing else. And so, you know, they're right to be getting into it. The question is, are they doing it in the right way? Quickly last word to you there, Chantel. Yes, except it's a new area, and the only country that has tried it, Australia, is so far not come up with convincing results. We have all been teenagers, and most teenagers are liable to rise to the challenge of getting around forbidden fruit legislation. So I'm curious to see where that takes us.

but I have to say, as a parent and as someone who covers this parliament, I'm dubious about this being more than sending a message that makes people feel better because we're talking about an issue that is real and of concern. I am forever grateful to have lived with a rotary phone growing up. Thank you all for that. We're going to take a short break here when we come back. We'll look at Pierre Puehliev's message to Alberta and how he's been making the case for the Federation. The problem lately,

has been that the federal government has been terrible at the things that are its job while sticking its nose in things that are not its job. Locking arms with other provinces is a practical, realistic path to a stronger Alberta within a United Canada. We don't need a different country in Alberta. We need different government policies in Ottawa. So what's been made of Pierre Pauliev's message of unity to Alberta? What could the Alberta MP bring to the debate?

Let's bring everyone back, Chantal, Andrew Althea. Althea, I'll start with you. I thought parts of the speech were good, made sense. I thought parts of the speech were quite partisan, and I wondered if blaming the government would contribute to some of the frustrations that he was trying to address. But give me your sense whether you think he hit the mark there or not. Well, if he was trying to do a national unity speech,

I don't think he succeeded. He delivered a partisan speech. perhaps I heard it as you did, Rosie. This was basically almost an electoral speech. Some of the wording actually harkened back to his conservative leadership days where he talked about the government being big and bossy. And his vision of the Canadian Federation is interesting. I mean, we are a very decentralized federation

when looking at other federal states, for example. But actually, when it was struck, the federal government was quite powerful when you look at powers of disallowance, for example, powers of reservation. and I don't think that perhaps some of the things he said were historically sound, but they represented a vision that he has tried to sell ever since he has been in politics, and especially since he has been the leader.

And some of the things that he has said have not turned out to be true. You know, for example, the Trudeau government did buy a pipeline. It certainly did nothing to calm separatism. Separatism also did not start with the Trudeau government. So I'm not sure that it won over any person that was sitting on the fence. And frankly, I'm not sure if Pierre Puelev, if he was trying to, pitched himself as the great voice of unity for the referendum in the fall. Yeah, I mean, Shantel, he wasn't talking to me, obviously. He wasn't talking to any of us.

He was talking to people in Alberta. And so I don't know how that message resonated in Alberta. but as a federal leader trying to start this campaign over the course of the summer, what did you make of the way he addressed these issues? I thought he avoided the, of course, the underlining team was, if only we could change governments, all these problems would go away. But once you move beyond that, I don't think it works, and that's been my experience in Quebec, to come to a conversation like that

by telling people who don't think the way you think that they're just stupid or wrong and they need to get their heads looked at. And it totally avoided that. I also thought that there is a danger in the calendar and in the way that this is happening, that the Alberta talk, the rhetoric, starts resonating negatively in Quebec,

that the opposition between the two because when you go to Alberta, You hear it a lot. We're doing this to get all the things that Quebec got by doing this. I thought it was a smart move to talk about actually making an alliance with other provinces, including Quebec, rather than focusing on, yeah, you didn't get what they got. As for the decentralized vision of Canada, I don't think Piapliev is inventing it. it is the vision that the Conservative Party, from Joe Clark on his being pushing forward, Joe Clark used to call it a community of communities.

And you could hear Stephen Harper in some of the lines that you played on there. It is just a speech which avoided having Mr. Puehliev having to sit through the installation of the new Governor General, by the way. but I did not find it off base. Right. Okay. Last word to you, Andrew, your take on it. Well, I'll just pause on the concept of Pierre Pauier,

asking for people not to be so demonizing of each other and softer language, et cetera. Look, I share some of his critiques of federal policy over the years, including current federal policy, and certainly many Albertans do. But where I think it goes astray is connecting that to the, the unity question. It's one thing to be discontented with federal policy. It's another to say, I want to separate and have my own country. And I don't think he established the link between the two. And supposing that we're a link, the implication of his comments is, if the answer to separatism is to change policies and to adopt conservative policies, then what happens if

those policies aren't adopted? Does that mean, therefore, separation is justified? I think he's playing with fire by making those kinds of connections. He's also, So this is often the case in these kinds of discussions, painting everybody in Alberta with the same brush, as if everybody in Alberta was a small sea or a large sea conservative. Now, a lot of them are, but right now the polls are showing 40 to 45 percent of Albertans supporting either the liberals, the NDP, or the Greens. So where are they in this discussion? So it was needlessly narrow, somewhat self-serving and not terribly helpful. Okay, we're going to leave it there. Thank you all very much. That's at issue for this week. What do you think about Canada banning social media for people under 16? Are you a parent, a little confused about what it might mean for your kids?

Let us know what you think. You can send us an email. We're at Ask.com. Remember, you can catch me on Rosemaybarten Live. That's Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern. We will be back here in your podcast feeds next week. Thanks so much for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.C.com.

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