At Issue - Canada’s response to Trump’s threats

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

At Issue this week: With federal politics in turmoil, who’s going to manage U.S. president-elect Donald intensifying threats against Canada? Liberals jockey to take Justin Trudeau’s spot as leader. And growing concerns about foreign interference. Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Struggling with debt? Help is available. Discover reliable solutions to help you get back on track. Visit Canada.ca slash debt dash solutions for support you can trust. A message from the Government of Canada. This is a CBC podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition, the second time this week, for Thursday, January 9th.

Responding to Trump's threats after the president threatened to take over Canada by economic force. They should be a state. That's what I told Trudeau when he came down. The prime minister made his case directly to Americans. Anything an American president does to hurt the Canadian economy will also hurt American consumers. And Pierre Poirlier laid out his response.

We will state clearly that Canada is a sovereign and independent country. This week we're asking how are party leaders responding to Trump's threats and his concern around Trump's comments growing. Chantelle Ebert, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj join me to talk about that. Plus, who are the Liberals preparing to run for leadership? I'm gonna start with you Andrew on this. I wonder how you think Canada is managing so far in its response to these comments that seem to have escalated or intensified. Well, it's difficult to say. It's so flummoxing.

It's so off the charts. It's so, for want of a better word, insane that it's really not easy to see how you respond to that or who you're responding to. It's one thing, I mean, the conventional wisdom would say, oh, look, emphasize to American consumers the cost. This, you saw the prime minister doing that. You know, find allies at the state level,

you know, in Congress, etc. All those usual remedies presume some rationality in the White House. They presume that there's a president there who's actually responsive to a public opinionist or conventional wisdom on this. It presumes that public opinion will follow the usual courses.

And the state is in a very strange place right now. The president-elect Trump has had, I would say, a disastrous few weeks and months with some of the craziest cabinet appointments since Caligula, and he's gone up in the polls. He's in the positive approvals, you know, net approval rating for the first time in his career. So things are not going according to the usual thing. And that also applies to how you deal with Trump. People are always talking about this as if there's some kind of grand negotiating strategy

going on here, that he's some kind of master negotiator. And he's not. He's a terrible negotiator. He was a terrible businessman. He was a terrible negotiator as a president. He gave Kim Jong-un, the president of North Korea, a one-on-one with the president of the United States. This is a country with the GDP of Regina. He gave it all the credibility and prestige and got nothing in return. His negotiating strategy with Putin is basically to give

him half of Ukraine. So there's no great strategy. He just likes to break things. He likes to blow things up and that presents a real difficulty for anybody trying to negotiate an eyesight as to how to figure out what makes them tick and what can possibly dissuade them from this crazy courses on whether it is literally about trying to annex Canada or not. It's clearly not based on any kind of usual rational discourse. And yet there are things being done, right? There was the prime minister for the first time on CNN talking to

Americans there's this retaliatory tariff list that they've drawn up they're going to meet with the premiers Chantal because they have to do something in spite of the fact that this is you know unlike anything we've seen before. Yes and there was also a premier ford going on Fox News, I believe is useful to this case. But bottom line, Andrew is right. This isn't, in the first Trump, for people who are confused, because this is the second time around, and the first Trump administration, there were a lot of adults in the room that Canada could deal with that could influence the president. This is not at all. that Canada could deal with that could influence the president.

This is not at all, all those adults, by the way, suggested to Americans that they should not vote for Donald Trump. So many of the relationships that were built have disappeared for lack of someone to speak to. But what strikes me is that there are some few ways to deal with this, that for the first time in two years, three years, Pierre Poiliev and Justin Trudeau are on the same basic page on most of this. They're pushing back in the same way. I believe that the CNN interview that Justin Trudeau gave would not have been different if we'd send someone else his successor or Pia Playa to do the interview and you didn't hear this week Donald Trump's response to Pia Playa saying we're not going to be the 51st state. What was the response? I don't care what this guy is saying

Yeah, so the the illusion that we will change prime minister and it's going to change everything, forget that. We are not in that environment at all. Yeah. I mean, Pierre Poliev says he'll talk tough, but you're right. The strategy in terms of talking to businesses and regular Americans is almost the same. Althea, what did you make of it? Well, I just want to say, I think the interview on CNN would have been different with Pierre Poilé because he wouldn't have been talking about carbon pricing or $10 a day childcare. But I get the general point. I do think that part of the challenge is that the Canadian

leaders are treating this in the same way that they treated the threat in the first mandate from Donald Trump. The list of tariffs. Like we are assuming to Andrew's point that there are rational actors who will think rationally when the debate is framed in a completely irrational matter. But one thing the Prime Minister said on CNN that I thought was interesting was that Donald Trump is talking about the 51st state so that he's not talking about the impacts of tariffs. What I thought was a missed opportunity

is that on the one hand, you can't have the president say, we don't need Canada for anything. We don't need their lumber, we don't need their steel, we don't need their aluminum. And then not also say what he's actually after, which is actually you do need their energy, you actually do need the rare earth minerals because otherwise you'll be getting them from China. And so that argument hasn't really kicked up a notch.

I do think that this is an interesting and valuable opportunity for the Prime Minister and the Liberals because they have been given a chance and the Prime Minister has been given a chance to reframe the last few weeks of his mandate. That does mean that he needs to actually do the job and the premiers and people on the calls, anybody you'll ask will complain that the liberals, the federal government has been missing in action. But if they do step up, nothing will bring the country together more than this nationalism, we have a common enemy now, its name is Donald Trump.

So this is a remarkable opportunity that the prime minister and the Liberal Party have been given. Whether or not we're going to use it, I don't know. Yeah, except that, and we're going to talk about this in the next block, it's happening at the time of the leadership race where other liberals will be saying, well, I'm going to do this and I would do this differently. So it's just the timing of all of it just makes it so much more complicated to deal with Donald Trump, even if we had some perfect strategy, Andrew. Well, that's right. Now, two things worth saying about that. One is I do think it was

interesting to notice how quickly a lot of figures on the right, including even Maxime Bernier in his own particular way, moved to distance themselves from Donald Trump after that press conference. That clearly something broke in Canadian politics after that thing. People really woke up and I think it was very clear that if you were on the right side of the spectrum, you want to make sure you were not associated with that. And obviously the liberals would be trying to tie them to it. But Trump had a target put on him after that in Canadian politics. But secondly, if there's not much we can do to dissuade Trump from his course. We're going to do something on immigration or on controlling fentanyl.

Whatever you're doing, it's not going to move him off the tariffs. He's going to put the tariffs on. So we've got to be focusing more on adapting to the new reality of that this is who he is, this is what he does. That's going to require a lot of difficult measures to be done in Canada, which means we've got to have consensus, we've got to have leadership, we've got to have followership, we've got to have people willing to go where their political leaders are taking them. That's very hard to do when you've got a government that's as unpopular as this one, you've got a prime

minister that's on his last legs, to summon that kind of national will. And that feeds into our negotiating strategy ultimately, which is, you know, whatever measures we do, they have to be credible to the opposing side. They have to believe we'll actually do the things and we can sustain the political support to do them. So we're in a very weak position until and unless we have an election and clear the air about, you know, who governs Canada and who has the popular support. Okay, 30 seconds to Chantal, then I got to go. And that's not going to happen for a number of months, probably between now and July 1st, but certainly not this month.

I think that the Liberals need to think long and hard about the combination of the leadership campaign and this event. In the sense that I watched the finance minister, Dominique LeBlanc, say I'm not running. I think they would do well for themselves if ministers in critical positions decided not to run on that basis, because Canadians need to know that they are taking care of business.

And the worst signal to send is we're all going to go chase butterflies in the leadership campaign while this is happening. At issue, the Liberal leadership race with potential candidates becoming more clear, other contenders are waiting to see how things unfold. People want to see obviously what the rules are, including how much money needs to be raised. Well others have already bowed out. I will be solely focused on the real economic threat that American tariffs represent. What can we expect from the liberal leadership race? Will the rules narrow

the field? Let's bring everybody back Chantal, Andrew and Althea. Althea we didn't get a chance to talk to you on Monday unfortunately so I'll go to you first just to get a sense of where you think the race is going, given that we're dealing with very short timelines here in the end, probably. Well the main candidates seem to be Kristi Freeland and Mark Carney with Kristi Clark, the former BC Premier as a dark horse. There is a lot of apprehension about both Carney and Freeland within the Liberal caucus, but I think caucus endorsements are a lot less important than they would have been if this was a very long race where MPs who don't actually have their own organizational network

or fundraising network could develop it in time to bring in new supporters for a candidate. Then there's like this whole bunch of would-be potential like C-list candidates who are making their names or floating their names and there is some concern within the party as there always is I should add that they will be swamped with people who are not like true, that they will be swamped with people who are not true liberals, that there will be either this whole group of ethnic voters that will be mobilized. But this has always been the case.

And then you have MPs sitting on the fence, like Anita Anon and François-Philippe Champagne and Melanie Jolie, and maybe for good reasons, as Chantat pointed out, that their cabinet portfolios are such that they don't want to be seen to jeopardize that relationship or their work. But I also think what's really going on in the minds of a lot of liberals is, is this the leader that you're going to pick not just for this election, but for the next election?

Or is this the leader that's going to take the fall, the party will get rid of that leader, and then there will be a proper leadership race, a chance to rebuild, and then you move forward with another leader for one or two terms. A lot of liberals keep saying that the party only gives leaders one chance, but that's not actually true.

And I think that changes the calculation, but both for the leadership candidates and for people who would support them. Okay, Chantal? As someone who covered the last one who got a second chance called John Turner, I spent a number of years watching how many knives the Liberals could drive into his back before he finally quit. So good luck to whoever wants to attempt it. It was not a pleasant spectacle.

That being said, the Liberals are going to have to decide. If they want to go in the next election and try to be competitive, then they need to accept that the ballot box issue is going to be, who can best manage Donald Trump? If they think that they're going to lose the next election in any event, then they can go to all these people who may be able to rebuild over the next decade the party. But it's one or the other. And not all candidates. So there is a decision to be made here. I also believe that Dominique LeBlanc threw a wrench into François-Philippe Champagne and Mélanie Jolie's rationale for running by saying, I'm staying because the emergency here requires my full attention.

The first question if they run is going to be how in the world are you going to justify leaving the battlefield to go fight this rather minor battle of the leadership? I hadn't thought of that. That's pretty interesting. Andrew? You know, the first question that comes to a lot of people's minds is why would you want to run in the face of the presumed oblivion the party's facing in this election? And there's a couple reasons.

One is, if you are the winner out of the blocks, fortune favors the brave. In politics, if you have the initiative, maybe it doesn't work out for you, but more often than not, having the initiative beats waiting for the better opportunity. The person who goes first more often than not will do better. Secondly, expectations are so low for them that if you can do anything better than that, if you stave off utter disaster, you're going to look pretty good. So there's a reason why people might want to be running this time rather than waiting. The problem they've got for the party is, you know, you look at the recognition numbers on these people who've been cabinet ministers for several years.

Abacus, I think it was, did this survey on this, and it's just dismal. The prime minister's at 98 percent. I think the next one is Freeland at 17, something like that, maybe 20 percent in terms of recognition. This is after you show them photos. And then it drops off below that. Carney is sort of in there as well because he used to be a governor. So that's a problem for them. And then lastly, you know, to be close to or seem to be close to the Prime Minister is not going to be a real advantage in this. Pretty clearly, if the party is trying to save the furniture, they're going to want somebody who's not terribly close to them. Freeland, I guess, got a bit of a leg up on that by the explosive way in which she part

of company with them, but she's not loved within the party. She's not viewed as being a great communicator. I do think there's going to be a kind of a primary amongst the current cabinet ministers to see who ultimately faces off against Carney. I think that's what it's going to come down to. Yeah. That's Chantelle you wanted in there? I spent time once in a while over the past few years with Christian Freeland in Montreal, and I can testify that we were not noticed, or at least she was. I'm just saying there are too many pictures of Christian Freeland standing next to Justin

Trudeau for her to, just on the basis of that resignation letter have built a lot of distance from him, frankly. Beyond that, I'm curious to see because I believe by next week we should have a good sense of the lay of the land. Yeah. I'm betting you were noticed, Chantal. I'm just going to put that out there. Last word to you, Althea.

Last word to you. I was going to say, I think the Prime Minister also threw like a wrench in Miss Freeland's plans this week when he said in his press conference that he and Kristi Freeland had been tied at the hip basically for the past nine years. I'm sure she was not happy to have him say that. You may see that clip repeated. Yeah no doubt about it. The question of who can best represent change is an active one for a lot of liberals, but I also think something worth noting and worth like a flagging going in is what and how will the party leadership position themselves on carbon pricing? I think

we're going to see a lot of reversal on this front, a lot of asterisks and some messaging that perhaps we wouldn't expect from liberals during this leadership race on something that has been the flagship policy of this government. At issue, election interference. With an unexpected leadership race on the horizon, concerns around interference are growing. The membership and how the membership would be dealt with, the timing associated with it, the threshold in terms of money that would need to be raised as an entry fee, all of

those things were on the table. So what needs to be done here to protect leadership contestants and the contest itself from foreign interference? Let's bring everybody back. Chantel, Andrew and Althea. This is a real concern because of this supporter category within the Liberal Party, Chantal, and we know that previous leadership races with other parties have had a certain level of foreign interference. We know nomination processes have had that problem. So is there

a way to make sure that the Liberal Party can protect itself from outside influences here? It's a lot harder to pack a national leadership campaign than it is to pack a nomination meeting. The two bear no relationship whatsoever. Second, yes, the Liberal rules are really loose in the sense that just about anyone can register, but you do need to do so 41 days before the vote. So if you are trying to do that to the liberals, you need to be doing it now. Because it's hard to see how they could stretch that beyond 45 or 48 days. And you need 41 days to have a right to vote. And then the other thing that people forget

is that these leadership campaigns, this one like the conservatives, every riding is worth the same number of votes. What I'm basically saying is if you're gonna organize, you need to be really sturdy because Nunavut and Mississauga South are worth the exact same number of points and I'm not too sure that there are organizations in this country that have both the muscle to organize at that level and the time we're talking about a

week here to sign up people to have a major influence on the outcome. Well, certainly when you talk to people in the party, Andrew, they believe that the short period of time of the leadership race in some ways protects them a little bit from some of the things we're talking about here. I think it cuts both ways. So Chantel's right. You know, the 41-day thing in a six-month race is a lot looser than in a two-month race But also the level of desperation and franticness and cutting of corners

It seems to me will also amp up if it's a closely fought race And so everyone talks about we've got all these safeguards. Well, we've seen what the safeguards were worth in the in the past We have uniquely lax system in Canada I mean all of the parties the liberals have the loosest system, quite apart from even the supporter category. You don't even have to be a permanent resident to vote in the Liberal race. You don't have to be an adult. You don't have to be a Canadian citizen.

These are common sense things, surely, that the people who participate in choosing the leader should also be eligible to vote in Canadian elections. And yet we don't even enforce that. The 41-day rule, you know, in most countries, I've actually looked at this recently, most comparable G7 countries, it's six months to a year that you have to have been a member of the party before you can vote in either nomination races

or leadership races. So there's a lot of tightening up that needs to be done. The Foreign Interference Commission's report on this was quite alarming. None of the parties has shown any sign of being willing to clean up their act on this. And I do think it starts to raise the question of whether it should, in fact, be legislated. Of course, the cash 22 is to legislate, you have to get some of the parties to actually agree to it.

But at some point, we're going to have some kind of massive scandal that will make it unavoidable. Well, and it is all the more important this time because it's not just the leader of a party. It's the prime minister for whether it be for two minutes or two weeks. Last word to you, Althea. Okay, well, I disagree with Andrew. I don't think there's a problem with having 14, 15, 16, 17-year-olds vote in a leadership race. In fact, I think it's a great thing to get them engaged in politics and hopefully get them voting in the future.

I do think that there is a problem with the way the rules in the Liberal Party's constitution are currently written. I know a lot of Liberal MPs have mentioned this, even mentioned it at the caucus meeting this week. It should at the very least be restricted to permanent residents or Canadian citizens, if the party is willing to go there.

This idea that you can just have an address in Canada and vote, that doesn't make sense to me. Whether or not you need paid membership or not paid memberships, I don't think that that's necessarily a deal breaker because you know these rules can always be, somebody will go and pay for somebody to sign up so as we have seen in The conservative leadership race for example, so there's always concerns I think what you want is to make sure that the people who are voting are legitimately engaged and living here Or Canadians who have a connection to the country who want to be able to pick who the next prime minister could be who is the

Next of our leader could be and they're not just swaying in the race and coming out of the race. I'll leave it there. Yeah, I gotta leave it there too. Thank you. Thank you all very much. That is at issue for this week. What do you think about Trump's calls for Canada to become the 51st state? Have they grown from just a joke to really concerning? Let us know. You can send us an email at ask at cbc.ca. And remember, you can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern, back here in your podcast feeds next week. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.