Nuanced. - 253. Joseph Steinberg: U.S. vs. Canada — Economist Explains the Trade War

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Economist Joseph Steinberg explains the U.S.–Canada trade war, Trump’s tariffs, Mark Carney’s strategy, CUSMA, Canadian jobs, the auto sector, China, and why Canada’s domestic economic policies may be the bigger threat with host Aaron Pete.Send us Fan MailSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Has Canada already lost this trade war? Or certainly behind, or on the back foot. There's no denying that. Did Canada blink first? When it comes to the DST, I would say that Canada probably blinked first. Are the challenges Canadians experiencing more domestic policy, like our own policy around how we're managing our own economy? Or is it the United States?

It's definitely the domestic policy factors. It's not the trade policy. policy stuff. There's a fear by many Canadians that Mark Carney is still technically invested in Brookfield and that that puts him in many people's eyes in a conflict of interest. When you take a person with the level of wealth that the Prime Minister has, what does it mean? I would ask you, what does it mean to divest? Penn Canada realistically keep its auto sector. I think that we can keep an auto sector. I think that we can keep an auto sector. I think

The question is what the auto sector will look like in the future. What leverage does Canada actually have from your perspective? Joseph, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a privilege to have you on the show. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me, by the way, Aaron. It's a pleasure for me as well.

So I'm a professor of economics at the University of Toronto. I've been doing that for almost 15 years at this point. I study and teach about macroeconomics and international trade and issues kind of at the intersection of those two big topics. To start off, I'm just curious. Has Canada already lost this trade war? I think we're certainly behind or on the back foot. There's no denying that. I don't think we've lost it quite yet. although I think one thing I think that's really important to keep in mind here as we go forward and talk about these issues is that I don't really look at international trade as a zero-sum game. And I think that's really one of the big mistakes that people are making and thinking about

these issues in that way. And that includes both President Donald Trump, but also I think many people here in Canada as well. You know, international trade is a positive some thing. It's good for both parties. And so with a... all the things that are going on on both sides of the border, my view is that it's mostly just losers all the way around. Fascinating. There's been much made about what Mark Carney said before the election and his decision since then. Supporters will say he looked at the changing circumstances. He got more into the books and said, we've got a pivot. I don't think he's, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think he's formally said that. And then critics will say he lied to us during the election.

and he completely is pandering to him now. Did Mark Carney change his strategy to the United States? I mean, I think if you look at what he said, you know, during the election campaign last year and in the weeks, you know, thereafter, there was a lot of messaging about getting, you know, a good deal with the United States for Canadians. And I think people maybe read more into that. then perhaps they should have.

I mean, I think a lot of people are still of the mind that we're going back to, and we should be able to go back to where things were, you know, at the end of 2024, before Donald Trump's second presidency began, go back to completely zero tariffs with the United States. And I think many people are judging, you know, the prime minister's, you know, successes or failures or whatever you want to call them up to this point. based on that benchmark that we haven't gone back to, you know, 2024 completely free trade. From everybody that I've talked to,

uh, both, you know, in the Canadian policy space, but also policymakers in the U.S. Um, I think that that's just unrealistic, to be honest.

We're not going back to zero tariffs in 2024, like we had in 20204 anytime soon. The U.S. is not going to give up on its, um, sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, anytime soon. Realistically, the best that we could ever have hoped for is some partial relief on that front. And yet we haven't gotten it yet. That's true. And so maybe you could judge that as a

failure, I guess. But at the same time, I think the people that are saying, you know, Carney should have been able to, you know, get a deal that just reverts everything back to the way it was. I just don't think that that was ever in, you know, on the table. You raised this. There were retaliatory tariffs. There was the digital services tax that was going to come into fruition. And it didn't. Did Canada blink first?

When it comes to the DST, I would say that Canada probably blink first. That said, I never thought the DST was a particularly good idea. one of the themes that maybe will, you know, will return to, but that I probably hinted at, and my response to your first question is that in general, I don't think tariffs are all that great. In most cases, they just make, you know, consumers worse off in the country that is levying those tariffs.

And the digital services to access to tariff. That's what it is. That's what we should call it. And so I thought that it was good that they, you know, that they went back on that. But I do think, you know, from the political perspective, you could probably read that as maybe giving in to U.S. demands on that. When it comes to the broader slate of retaliatory tariffs that were put in place in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.

implementing tariffs at the beginning of 2025. So the first U.S. tariffs on Canada went into force on March 4th, 2025. we put in place a pretty broad slate of retaliatory tariffs in response almost immediately thereafter. We did end up reversing the vast majority of those retaliatory tariffs. But I don't necessarily view that as, you know, the primary reason for that as giving into the U.S. I view that and, you know, that was a reasonable, rational thing to do in two ways. Number one, those retaliatory tariffs, as I wrote about last year in a couple different spaces, I mean, the main effect of that was just to make things even worse for us here at home.

They're going to make things even more expensive. They're not going to help our economy out. They're going to make our economy struggle even harder than it was struggling in the face of those kind of initial Trump tariffs. But then on top of that, it's important to recognize that the vast majority of U.S. tariffs on Canadian products ended only a couple of days after they began. when the U.S. granted an exemption March 9th, 2025, I believe, for all Canadian exports to the United States that complied with all the different rules of our free trade agreement, Kusma, which still exists. And so it was in the aftermath of that, that we ended up, I think, reversing most of our retaliatory tariffs in recognition of the fact that that retaliation was, you know, now like quite asymmetric. We still haven't placed some retaliatory, if

you want to call them retaliatory tariffs on steel, on cars. But, you know, you can think about those as symmetric responses to protect our own industries in, you know, there in the face of the fact that the U.S. and other countries around the world are also now kind of moving forward with protecting their own industries in that area. I'm wondering if we can first just put our shoes in, like, understand the United States perspective. from what I can see as a layman who doesn't have a deep understanding the way you do, I look at what the frustrations of the U.S. were. And it's basically, and I know a lot of people aren't going to love hearing this,

but it was basically that Canada got a very good deal historically through having our auto sector and having this free trade agreement. It allowed us to participate in the largest market in the world with very limited restrictions on that. And so Canada enjoyed that for a very large trade agreement. long time. And then you have this US president come in and go, what are we, what are the Americans benefiting from this? Like, what is the value add for the auto sector, which saw jobs go to China and other countries? What's the benefit for our industry? How is this all benefiting us? And basically

made the calculation, it's beneficial to put these tariffs in place. And now you're seeing companies like Stalantis and others kind of going, okay, we need to have a foothold in the US. This going through Canada and flowing through the U.S. is disappearing and so we need to move money and move money quickly. I think the Japanese ambassador just came forward and said they're expanding their operations in the United States because there's not a lot of benefit to investing in the Canadian market because they need that American market, which is much larger. That's my very low level understanding of this. Can you also help steal many argument? What is the United States thinking with these tariffs? Okay. So I'm going to I'm going to start for.

from kind of the beginning of that, there's a number of different kind of threads there to kind of untangle. So I'll kind of give you my own big picture perspective on these issues. So please feel free to jump in and stop me and redirect me because I, you know, I got a lot of different things that I could say. I'm going to try to get to all of them here. I think it's first and foremost really important to distinguish between the different goals, at least as they have been articulated, by the Trump administration in imposing tariffs. And in doing that, I think it's also really important to recognize that Canada is not the primary target of the Trump tariff agenda.

It's just not. You know, as the prime minister has said a number of times, Canada still enjoys far in the way the best tariff deal with the United States, all things considered of any country around the world. And that's true. We still face the lowest effective tariff rate of any country. So what were the main reasons that the U.S. wanted to put tariffs in place? There's a couple different ones. And to some degree, these different reasons, by the way,

are kind of internally contradictory in that you can't have all of them simultaneously. One reason was, of course, the U.S. wanted to raise revenue. The U.S. has been struggling with large government deficits for, you know, decades at this point. and, you know, President Trump had some other policies in mind that we're only going to exacerbate that issue. His big tax reform, signature tax reform in his first administration, the follow-up to that, the one big beautiful bill act, you know, that was putting a great deal of strain on the U.S. government's fiscal position. And so extra revenues are something that it kind of needs to find somewhere. And tariffs are one way to do that. The second thing is national security.

So the U.S. has been, I think, and many other countries, by the way, as well, have grown increasingly concerned about the fragility of, you know, the global economy and their own positions in that global economy in the aftermath of, you know, the supply chain disruptions during the COVID pandemic, right? A lot of different, you know, supply chains got disrupted, struggled to get access to certain, you know, goods. that we thought about as being, you know, pretty important for our everyday lives, at least for a little while. And things got better. But I think the U.S. government is worried that it is, you know, the U.S. economy is overly reliant on imports in certain products that it views as, you know, being potentially important if it ever got into a big, you know, military conflagration, right? So China is the big player here, by the way. You know, cars and, you know, heavy manufacturing more broadly are one of the sectors that the U.S. is concerned about. steel aluminum, you know, it has raised big concerns about its ability to produce those things, critical minerals, semiconductors, you know, these are all things that the U.S., the Trump administration

at least has been arguing that the U.S. needs to be more self-sufficient at producing in case something bad happens. So that's the second reason. Now, the third big reason that President Trump wanted to put tariffs in place was due to trade deficits. Okay. And I think that's kind of the one that you may have been alluding to when we're talking about Canada specifically. So President Trump says trade deficits are bad. The U.S. has been running a big trade deficit for a long time.

Putting tariffs in place is going to correct that trade deficit. I think that that's misguided for a number of reasons. But, you know, that's something that President Trump sincerely believes and some of his advisors sincerely believe as well. They're wrong. But, you know, it's pretty hard to shake them of that. belief of trial. And so they look at the U.S. trade deficits and they say we can use tariffs to correct that. That trade deficit is mostly with China. It's the one that they're primarily worried about. The trade deficits with Canada and also with Mexico have been raised repeatedly. But I'll say,

I don't think that those are anything, those are really not when you actually look at the facts, something that the U.S. has a valid concern about. When you look at the Canadian, the deficit with Canada specifically, historically, what has been the way that trade? with Canada and the U.S. has been balanced or close to balanced. And I'll say, by the way, relative to the gross flows going back and forth across the border, the net imbalance is very, very small. And it actually fluctuates from year to year, primarily as a result of oil prices. But when you actually dig a little bit deeper, what you find is that the U.S. has most of the time actually run a surplus, a trade surplus with Canada when it comes to goods.

right? That's essentially everything other than oil. And so the U.S. does not have a trade deficit with Canada when it comes to all these products that President Trump is worried about for, you know, national security reasons or what have you. The deficit is really just made up of the fact that Canada exports a lot of oil to the United States. But as you may know, Canada sells its oil to the United States. That kind of a discount, historically speaking, at least. And part of the reason for that is that we've really not had any other options for places to sell our oil because of the nature of the infrastructure that we've gotten place in North America.

And so while it's true that Canada has run a large trade surplus in oil with the United States, I don't think that there's any way that you can look at that and say that the U.S. has lost out as a result of that. This is, in a way, the U.S. being able to buy this oil more cheaply than it otherwise would have because of the, I would say, the technological and infrastructure nature. of kind of the prevailing paradigm in North America. On everything else, the U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Canada. So there's really not much to complain about there from their perspective.

Fascinating. Can you walk me through? What is Mark Carney's strategy with the U.S. currently? Well, I, you know, I am not in, I'm not privy to any of the ongoing, you know, behind closed doors discussions. that the government is having either, you know, with itself or, you know, that Carney and his ministers are having with the Trump administration. So I guess I can't really say for sure. My sense is that the prime minister is trying to walk a very, very fine line.

He faces kind of a – the big challenge that I think the prime minister faces, in my view. And, you know, he's not – we're not going to hear him say this again because I think it's, you know, politically. contentious issue. But my belief is that the prime minister recognizes quite rightly that U.S. trade is really important for the Canadian economy. And that while diversification of our trade with other countries, you know, it's certainly a good thing that we should be pursuing. The reality is it's not going to move the needle quantitatively very much. You know, we talk about doubling trade with, you know, the Philippines or Indonesia. I mean, that's great. But the reality is that our trade with countries like that is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to,

when it compares to the trade that we do with the United States. And so, you know, on the margin diversification is good. But the reality is we have to fix and improve our relationship with the U.S. I mean, that's the primary goal. That's the, you know, the prime minister's single biggest challenge at this point when it comes to trade policy anyway. But I think my, perspective on the domestic politics angle is that, you know, Canadians are really riled up. And, you know, they're riled up for, you know, a number of very valid reasons about what the U.S. has done over the past couple of years. Well, I think it's true that we shouldn't look at the president's tariff policy as something

that is, you know, directed primarily at Canada as much as we do. I think many Canadians believe that, you know, the president initiated a trade war specifically with Canada. I don't think that that's the right perspective to have. I don't think that the president is thinking about Canada most of the time, to be quite honest. But at the same time, there have been lots of other things, you know, the 51st state stuff. You know, the ambassador, I think Pete Hoekstra has, you know, said a number of things that have gotten people pretty mad. you know, the Gordy Howe bridge debacle. You know, we could come up with a whole wide range of things that Canadians are right to be pissed off about.

When you combine that anger with, I think, this, the sluggishness of, I think, the Canadian body politic to come to the realization that we're not going back to the 2024 status quo on trade. And that, you know, I think many people still believe, again, that that's where we should be able to get back to. and that's, you know, where we're ultimately going to go back to. And that we shouldn't accept anything better, anything less than that is, I think, the perspective that a lot of Canadians have. And so when you kind of combine that anger and this strong feeling that we ought to be able to make things, you know, go back to the way that they were, I think the prime minister faces a real challenge, right?

He knows that he needs to, there has to be some give and take in the relationship with the U.S. and the negotiations around Kusma, trying to get some tariff relief, you know, on steel, aluminum in autos is going to require us to, you know, make some concessions. And we're not going to get full tariff relief on those sectors. We're going to go down, we're going to get the tariffs cut in half, or we're going to get a quota, you know, for some limited quantities of tariff-free exports to the United States of these types of goods. We're not going back to zero tariffs, you know, on an unlimited quantity.

It's just not going to happen. What makes you so sure of that, just out of curiosity? That's a fair question. What makes me so sure of that is that this is what I've heard from everybody that I've talked to in the, you know, that have, you know, that are connected to the Trump administration in some way from people in the State Department, to people that I know who have, you know, at some points in time been involved directly in the Trump administration. and to being, you know, just kind of privy to some of the ongoing conversations here. You know, I'm not necessarily hearing things directly, but, you know, hearing maybe what you could describe as, you know, secondhand. But not, you know, second hand is still pretty close. You know, we're not playing.

This is just, you know, one degree of separation away from some of these conversations. just everything that I've heard suggests that the U.S. is not going back to zero tariffs on any of these goods. I also think it's really important to go back and look at what happened with the first Biden administration, right? And I actually wrote a research paper about this. So during the first Trump administration, this huge slate of tariffs went in on China. Many people viewed this as largely as a surprise, at least in terms of the magnitude of these new tariffs. you know, my research shows that it was a surprise. But what my research mainly shows is that when these tariffs initially went on China, most people thought that they were going to go away pretty

quickly. Nobody viewed this as a permanent policy at the time that it, you know, actually went on. But those tariffs remained throughout the Trump administration. And then when President Biden came in and replaced him, what did he do? He didn't get rid of any of the tariffs on China. They're all still enforced today. All the new tariffs that, that the president has put in place, President Trump has put in place on China and his second administration have been stacked on top of the tariffs that he put in place during his first administration. And so the precedent is, and I think this is just very much where U.S. politics seems to be going. This is true both for Democrats and Republicans. I think there's kind of an

increasing economic nationalism, you know, increasing resurgence of populism. These forces are going to make it even more difficult this time around after, say, President Trump second term ends, if all these tariffs are still in place then, which I think many of them will be. These things are going to make it even more difficult than it was during the Biden administration to kind of get things back to the pre-Trump 1.0 status quo of, you know, more or less free trade everywhere, if you will. I just don't think that there's any evidence that these tariffs aren't largely going to stick around. Where does Canada-US trade talk stand right now as we record this?

And again, I'm not privy to anything, you know, that's directly going on on the ground. But my sense is that there are some, you know, there are conversations going on. We've not entered formal negotiations around Kusma modification renewal like the United States has with Mexico. I think there are conversations about starting those kinds of. formal negotiations. But at this point, I think where we're at is the U.S. has put out a list of things that it would like us to concede. We have stated that we have received that list of things and that we've not yet decided what to do with that. And that we've not decided. What is on the list, broadly speaking? Yeah. So that list consists of things like, you know,

ensuring that something like the DST doesn't come back in. It consists of things like requesting modifications to the way that dairy trade happens. You know, many people think that the U.S. wants us to just completely dismantle the supply management system. And I think it would. They would like us to do that if they could get us to do that. But the ask has actually been, I think at this point much more modest. The ask around supply management is really to modify the way that we allocate import quotas in a way that they view is a little bit more fair. Personally, I think that that's a pretty reasonable request, by the way.

They are asking us to, and this is something that the ambassador has raised repeatedly, they are asking us to put American alcohol back on the shelves in the LCBO and in other provincial liquor stores. Those are all kind of the things that get a lot of attention. I think in the background, though, probably the biggest issue is our stance towards China, particularly when it comes to EVs and import in Chinese EVs. I think the U.S. is worried. The U.S. perspective is that that is a signaling a worrying shift in our openness towards, you know, importing Chinese EVs and cars in general.

that will kind of undermine what they're trying to go for, with their vision of what the North American auto supply chain ought to look like. What they're asking for in their negotiations with Mexico, we've already seen this. The more formal negotiations that they've kickstarted with Mexico, the primary thing that they're talking about is actually strengthening these, what are called rules of origin in the auto sector. Basically, the things that these rules say,

if you want to get free trade treatment on a shipment of car, say, from Mexico to the United States, those cars need to consist of a certain fraction of parts made within North America. And so those rules of origin are already pretty strong under Kusma. The U.S. is asking to make them substantially stronger so that there really can be very little to know Chinese content. Do you support that? I'm really conflicted on this one, to be honest. And so I would look at my perspective on this is that if we weren't under the gun with negotiating with the president on trying to, you know, get a better deal for, say, steel aluminum and our own auto sector, if I was just looking at

this in isolation, I would say, you know what, I'm all for importing more chiming ZVs. You know, my perspective is, my default perspective when I think about these issues is mostly to look at this from the perspective of the Canadian consumer, who I think, gets short shrift in a lot of these, you know, the, you know, policy debates in this country, and, you know, in the U.S. as well, and maybe, you know, in the world more broadly. Canadian consumers would benefit greatly from having access to Chinese EVs, which relatively cheap, you know, I've not driven one myself, but I've ridden in one. There, you know, many of them appear to be pretty high quality. There's certainly a great deal of innovation that has gone

into these things. I think consumers would benefit a lot. I think, you know, increasing, trying to force the North American auto industry to get off the back foot when it comes to innovation and, you know, try to force it to become more innovative and competitive, I think would be a good thing as well. But of course, I also look at this as a, you know, there's a cost to be paid and that cost is, you know, potentially sacrificing, you know, maybe tariff reductions that we could get from the U.S., you know, maybe even just a renewal, you know, if we could get an outright renewal of Kusma, you know, I'll be more, let me make that even more concrete. If you were to give me two options, if you could say, you know, ban the imports of Chinese EVs in exchange for just an

outright renewal of Kusma as it stands right now. We could go back to July 1st. And the U.S. would say, you know what, guys, I know we have our issues, but we're happy to renew things for another 16 years. As long as you just ban the Chinese EVs, I think on balance, that probably would be a good decision. But I'm completely. Are you able, like, do you factor in? Like, I've had Sam Cooper, who's an investigative journalist for the Bureau, and he talks about how China's influencing First Nation communities and encouraging them to stop mining and stop these projects. because it slows our economy. He's shared how China is starting to infiltrate.

I'm sure you've heard about the concerns around Chinese EVs and their ability to do mass surveillance potentially. And from Sam Cooper and his sources, he says, the U.S. is very concerned about our relationship with China. Sam Cooper's talked a bit about the Michael Maw floor crossing and the questions surrounding that. There's a lot of tension in the air, and I don't think that's surprising when you have

a global superpower and potentially the next global superpower or the equivalent global superpower, just in different ways, both looking to get footholds in different regions. And there's a broader concern around China in their United Front Work Department and how they're operating in our real estate industry and all of these things. And then in speaking with him, I just start to look at like, okay, like China's billionaires and very wealthy have pushed up the value of homes in British Columbia, according to Sam Cooper in his reporting. And then now we can't go back because people's homes have gone up in value,

so they don't want to lose the value. So we're almost like making these deals like not with the devil, but like with these superpowers. And everyday Canadians don't realize how much we're influenced by that and how much the US influences us. And so we're being, we're almost just caught in the middle of two superpowers kind of battling it out. How much do the security risk?

of China way into your perspective on the EVs. Yeah. I mean, I'm, you know, I am much less informed about this stuff as I think even you are. You know, I'm aware of, you know, Sam Cooper's reporting on some of these things, you know, but I'm not, I'm not at all an expert on this stuff. I'm just as much of a layman as anybody else when it comes to a lot of that. That's the non-economic stuff that's related to these security issues. But I do think, I mean, I think there's a lot of validity to the point that you just made,

which is that we're kind of caught in between these two superpowers, right? I mean, the world at this point is, you know, becoming multipolar. This is something that we're not going to be able to change. And those two poles are right now China and the United States, right? And I think that's that multipolarity is probably going to continue to get stronger, at least in the near term. And I think you really have to ask yourself, you know, my preference would be that we don't have to choose.

You know, if you were to kind of just be a geopolitical naive and just say we can be kind of the happy free trading Canadians and derive a benefit from, you know, open trade with both, you know, of the world's great powers, you know, I'm all for that. But I understand that the reality is that that's probably not the way things are going to work. both of these great powers are undeniably meddling with our own domestic politics. I mean, you, you know, you allude to China meddling with our politics. I have no doubt that they do. At the same time, the U.S., of course, has also been, you know, has been meddling in Canadian

politics for pretty much our entire existence. Nothing we can really do about that. They do it pretty openly most of the time. But I think if you are, if you force me to say Canada really has to make a choice, in allegiance between one great power or the other, I think you'd be hard pressed to explain why picking the U.S. is not the right decision there from my perspective.

And a lot of that comes down to just the, you know, for me, a lot of that comes down to the economic angle. And it's, you know, there's only so much trade that we're going to be able to do with China for the following reason. You know, this is something I like to, I like to mention. by the way, and whenever I do this kind of thing, that I think doesn't come up enough, which is the tariffs are really only part of the story in terms of, you know, the trade costs that influence, you know, where we source our goods from and who we get to export to.

Canada and the United States have, I think, what is really kind of a unique non-tariff trade barrier situation, which is, and I'd like to call it the technological trade barriers or even the topographical trade barriers, right? It's the shape of that border. There's no other two countries that really share a border that looks like the one that we do where it's a hell of a lot cheaper leaving tariffs aside for us over here in Toronto and people in Quebec to trade with the east coast of the United States than it is for us to trade, you know, with you guys over in BC It's a lot more expensive if you just set tariffs aside and all those non-tariff, you know, interprovincial barriers that we have in this country as well, throw those aside as well.

But if you just think about the cost of shipping stuff, right, it's much more expensive for me to trade with you than it is for me to trade with somebody who lives in New York City. And that's true, by the way, for the U.S. as well, right? For the U.S. economy, the east coast of Canada, you know, Toronto, Quebec, that is a much more logical technological trade part for the east coast of the U.S. than, say, California is. Right. And so both countries have this kind of unique, you know, non-tariff trade relationship,

where we're just made for each other in that sense. And there's nothing we can really do about that, right? You know, this is just geographic fair. And that geographic fate is just inevitably going to play a huge role in what our economies look like. We're never going to be able to disentangle ourselves from the U.S. We're always going to be trading a ton with them just because of that. And so I think that we have to recognize that that is, that that relationship, especially for a country like Canada that's small, that is, you know, one of the biggest, you know,

I think, you know, economic endowments that we have. We're lucky in a purely economic sense to be, to be right, you know, right to the north of the United States. We'd be worse off if we were kind of floating in, you know, floating in the middle of the ocean like Australian. Now, by the way, when you look at how the Australian economy has done over the last couple of decades in comparison to Canada, it's done quite a bit better. It should make you quite angry that somehow we haven't managed.

Despite this kind of natural endowment that we have, we still have somehow managed to find ourselves growing more and more slowly every year. But that's, you know, I think that's largely a different issue. But in any event, I'm rambling a little bit, but, you know, if you were to come back to where I was starting, if you were to force me to make a choice between China and the United States, the choice is clear. Interesting. as an economist whose leading work is on the economy and more reaching towards international trade, I'm curious, are the challenges Canadians experiencing more domestic policy, like our own policy around how we're managing our own economy, or is it the United States?

That is a great question. and I think you've hit, you've kind of gotten right to the heart of one of, you know, one of the big issues that we're facing right now. And I think one of the big issues that Canadians haven't yet come to grapple with, and I think are kind of in a way distracted by the trade stuff going on, right? If you, you know, the Canada has a number of longstanding issues that have, again, as I was alluding to a moment ago, just, made us grow, you know, more and more slowly every year, it seems like. These are issues that

go back at least a decade. You talk to, you know, my colleague McCall Scudorud about some of these immigration-related issues a little while ago. Some of those issues, I think, are, you know, play a part of this, as he was talking about. But now we're faced with this kind of what many of us perceive as this kind of existential threat coming from the South on the trade file. And I think that has sucked up a lot of the air in the room around economic policy reform. You know, we've seen some discussion at the federal and, you know, interprovincial level about how we need to do the things that we can control. You know, there was some discussion a year ago about eliminating all interprovincial trade barriers. This is not something that has really come to fruition whatsoever.

There's some nice talk about it, but we've not seen any meaningful, any meaningful. meaningful come about as a result of those discussions. But I think what we're seeing is that people are distracted by this trade issue. And I don't see that as actually as much as trade is the focus of much of my research is something that I think about every day. And I've written a lot about it over the last year or so in response to all the different things that have been happening. But if you were to ask me, do I think the Trump tariffs or our domestic policies are you know, the primary drivers of the poor performance of the Canadian economy over the last decade, it's definitely the domestic policy factors. It's not the trade policy stuff. There are

a number, you know, there are so many different things that we could be doing better that we should have, you know, fixed a long time ago. And I was hopeful at the outset of the current trade tensions that we're living through that this moment would give politicians like, you know, like Prime Minister Carney, kind of some ammunition, some breathing room to say, you know what, there are these hard choices that we have to make. You know, they're going to piss some people off who have been kind of benefiting from some of these status quo policies for the last decade or so. But these are things that are in the long term best interest of our economy and we need to do them now. otherwise we're never going to get out from under this hole.

I was kind of hopeful that this moment would be the moment where, you know, people would have the guts and maybe even just kind of the political breathing room to do what needed to be done on other files. I've not really seen that happen yet. I've not really seen any meaningful action on things like corporate income taxes, on, you know, even on immigration, as you guys as we were talking about, and you talked about a couple of weeks ago, on, you know, policies to stimulate innovation. I've not seen anything that I look at as, you know, the serious reform that we need on those fronts. And, you know,

we still have a while to go. We certainly could see those things happen. But I've not yet really seen the kind of, you know, policy reform that I think this, these trade tensions opened up, opened up some room four in a sense, if that makes sense. Joseph, there's been a criticism. I would be surprised if you hadn't heard it. There's a fear by many Canadians that Mark Carney is still technically invested in Brookfield and that that puts him in many people's eyes in a conflict of interest. because his business is based in the United States,

because the growth that the United States is seeing benefits Brookfield. And that that factors in. Pierre Pahliav has posted the comparison of Canada's growth and Brookfield's growth. And you see immense growth amongst Brookfield. And I've spoken to Trevor Toome, who's another economist who talked about how he was expecting Mark Carney said he was going to look at tax reform and changing some of our tax policies. to make us more competitive, and he has not seen that action yet. You're talking about the inaction. And there's this looming fear about what his priorities as a prime minister are

and whether or not he would go all in for Canada when he has investment in a company that is not solely based in Canada. How do you digest that? Is that just noise? Is that just internet trolls from your perspective? How do you digest that fear and that criticism? I know people talk a lot about this issue. I personally view it largely as noise, if only because I try to put myself in his shoes when I think about this thing.

I try to put myself in his shoes. And I say, look, if I was a super rich guy, I'd made more than enough of a fortune, you know, for myself and my family to, you know, enjoy, you know, extremely great living standards for a very long time. And moreover, I'm a guy like the prime minister, you know, the prime minister, has a PhD in economics like I do. So I have to imagine that his, you know, he has some of the same kind of predilections, you know, that I do in terms of enjoying, you know, making good policy and getting a great deal of satisfaction out of that and out of, you know, non-monetary accomplishments. You know, I have to imagine that this, his primary, I really do like to think that his, you know,

primary motivation is not just improving Brookfield's rate of return. I could be wrong. I obviously have no evidence to support that. But I really would personally be surprised if that's his angle here. I think the prime minister saw, you know, he saw an opening. And you have to go back and look as well. I mean, he has not worked in the private sector for his entire life. Right.

I mean, he has, I think his overall career record aligns with what I was just saying a moment. go, which is that a lot of his career has, you know, working not in the private sector, but in central banking, right? And we're in the policy, in the policy arena. When he was working at the Bank of England, I actually remember that time because I was researching Brexit, you know, and this is, you know, at the time that the Brexit vote happened, and we were going forward towards, you know, a Brexit that nobody had any really clear picture of what it was going to look like, you know, the Prime Minister was running the Bank of England. And he was really doing, I think, quite a good job of, you know, communicating and being to the public and being very clear about,

you know, what this would mean for the UK economy. And, you know, despite, I'll think a lot of the political backlash that he was receiving for that, it was a pretty thankless job at the time. And I, you know, I look at that record as a whole and I do see a person who is, personally, I see a person who is motivated, you know, not primarily. by money, who is motivated by the, you know, academic and, maybe not academic, but I would say, you know, motivated by the goal of, you know, doing right by, you know, by people in terms of making good policy and someone who derives a great deal of satisfaction from doing that, like I do. But I could be wrong.

I have no evidence to support that, you know, I don't know exactly what Mark Carney's, you know, personal financial situation looks like in the degree to which, you know, the degree to which he truly has separated from the decision-making at Brookfield. But personally, I don't look at this as something that Canadians ought to be too concerned about. Certainly, we're in great, you know, I think much better hands when it comes to issues like that than our neighbors are to the South. You know, President Trump is openly benefiting financially from his presidency, and he He has no problem admitting that, to be honest. And his family really has no real issue being quite upfront about that.

I don't think you have anything that looks like that. Maybe I'll just say, I don't think that we have anything that looks like that situation here in Canada, maybe, if that makes sense. That does make sense. I guess, and I'm lingering on this a little bit because it's a portion of our society. And I think Mark Carney made the decision not to divest. and so it leaves the question on the table. Had he completely divested, we wouldn't have an opportunity to discuss this because there would be no controversy. But I guess I, to push back of it, I would say, who's he in a room with on a regular basis? Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, maybe not as much Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump. When you describe the idea that he's sitting across from Donald Trump, if I put myself in Mark Carney's shoes, it's like, yeah, I am not being anywhere near as bad as Donald Trump, but maybe I'm benefiting a little bit. But he's benefiting a lot.

Maybe all the energy and all the focus is so on Trump and his misattributions of wealth, some of the corrupt things he's done around crypto, all of these things. The idea that he just didn't divest is such a small point. And the way that I don't know if you saw the Rosemary Barton clip where she had asked him, like, why not just give Canadians the reassurance they're looking for? And he goes, well, like, look, I'm like, I'm a good guy. you know me, I'm Mr. Good Guy. Like, this is not convincing to a portion, and I'm a firm believer that we should not trust

our politicians, that we should be very skeptical when money and power mix, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. So I'm always skeptical of people in positions of power. When you're at the central bank, you're influencing how global economies move, right? Like very much away from the public eye. He's in the public eye now, but he chose not to divest. and it's left so many questions for people. I just, I wonder if the juice was worth to squeeze if he really is only acting in Canada's interest. Look, I see what you're, I see totally where

you're coming from. I guess what I would say is when you take a person with the level of wealth that the prime minister has, what does it mean? I would ask you, what does it mean to divest in the sense that the prime minister could sell all of his shares in Brookfield and just go off and have, you know, a normally diversified stock portfolio like I have. But the reality is then he's still, you know, his portfolio is sizable enough that whatever policy decisions Canada makes, they're going to affect his fortunes one way or the other. There's no way that he can really like completely insulate himself financially from the fortunes of the country. If he were to sell everything off and just put all of his money in Canadian bonds, then he would be heavily

financially interested in the decisions of the Bank of Canada. If he were to sell off everything and only buy Canadian stocks, right, then he would be, again, heavily, you know, kind of implicated in a way, maybe that's not the right word, but heavily invested or, you know, affected by, again, you know, the Bank of Canada decisions with interest rates, which affect equities just as much as they do bond markets. You know, if he goes all in on the American stock market, well, then, of course, he's, again, he can't. cares a lot about the Canadian exchange rate, right? That's going to make the U.S. stock market performance look better or worse in terms of Canadian dollars. I don't really know that there's

anything that he could have done to kind of completely hedge himself against the effects of all of the political decisions, the economic decisions that he is faced with making. Maybe, you know, it probably would have looked better if he had just said, I'm going to divest from Brookfield. and put everything in just kind of a blind trust. Although at the same time, you know, a blind trust, they're not blind. And again, in the sense that if you're just going to invest in, say, you know, shares of S&P 500 index fund in the TSX and what typical people do, there's nothing blind about that.

You know exactly what's in there. You know how your fortunes are going to be tied to the decisions that you're making. I think when it comes to rich people being involved in politics, I'm not sure that that's the best idea in general. But if we're going to have really rich people running our countries and running our economies, if these are the people that we're going to vote for as voters, I think we have to recognize that their fortunes are going to be affected by the decisions that they're making. And there's really no way to undo that.

That was well said. I appreciate that. I lean towards everyday people being in these slots because that's who they're supposed to be representing. How many jobs do you think have been lost as a consequence of this trade war? So that's a really good question. You know, we were, people have been talking just this week about, you know, the latest jobs report showing actually a little bit of, you know, a little bit more job growth than we were expecting. I think on the whole, if you look at the overall economy, things have done, you know, the employment numbers look pretty okay. Employment is actually up, not down, since Donald Trump took over the presidency and, you know, a little bit more than a year ago, year and a half ago.

I know many people in, you know, kind of liberal circles like to tout the fact that per capita, we've seen more job growth here in Canada than we've seen in the United States. over that same time period. That said, if you look at the manufacturing sector, which has been, I think, the most heavily affected by the tariffs, we have seen steady job growth declines. I think we're down roughly around 3% in terms of manufacturing employment since Trump took office. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's about the way the numbers stand.

That said, I think it's also really important to, Ask yourself how much of that is due to Trump's tariffs on us versus, you know, just kind of what's other factors that contribute there. If you look at the U.S., manufacturing employment is also down. Manufacturing employment is down across all, you know, pretty much all sectors. It's down in many sectors that have received some of the most, the heaviest tariff protection, if you will. there doesn't really look to be any relationship in U.S. labor markets between President Trump's tariffs and job gains. You know, job losses in manufacturing there as well.

And so it's really tough when you look at the data to try to attribute the job losses that we have had in the tariff-affected sectors to tariffs on their own. It may be that the biggest effect of tariffs is actually just not the direct effect on our own sectors, but actually the indirect effect that they're having on the U.S. manufacturing sector, raising costs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, shrinking the U.S. manufacturing sector in many industries. And that may be the primary reason that orders for our products, our own manufactured products are falling, rather than, you know, just the tariffs that have been levied on these products themselves. Undeniably, the tariffs have played a role, especially when it comes

to the auto sector, you know, we see plants shutting down and moving across the border. That's obviously about tariffs. But I think when you look at kind of the big picture at the macroeconomic level, I don't think it's so obvious that we can attribute a large number of job losses to the Trump tariffs. On the whole, again, we've seen job gains in the aggregate, although many of those gains have been in the, you know, part-time work in the public sector. So, you know, there's some intention there to ward off the, you know, the public sector's public sector employment is a lever that we can pull to perhaps, you know, fight against tariff caused declines in the private sector. But even in the private sector, I don't see

there being huge numbers of job losses outside of the sectors that have been the hardest hit. Penn Canada realistically keep its auto sector? This is a tough one. And I, you know, I think that we, can keep an auto sector. I think the question is what the auto sector will look like in the future. I think you need to draw a distinction between parts and finished vehicles. I think you also need to look back over the last couple of decades and ask yourself, to what extent is the current state of the Canadian car industry a result of the tariffs that the President Trump has put on that industry over the past year and a half, versus other factors that have been contributing

to a much longer term decline. If you go back a couple of decades, you'll see that the number of vehicles that we produce today, especially when it comes to passenger vehicles, it's less than half of what our economy used to produce at its peak. And almost all of that decline happened before the beginning of 2025. And so there are a lot of other headwinds that. And so there are a lot of other headwinds that our auto industry has been facing over the last couple of decades that are largely unrelated to the tariff situation. Yes, the tariffs are a big problem. I think U.S. protectionism in autos and U.S. industrial policy more broadly to try to encourage plants to set up shop in the U.S. instead. This is what looks to be an existential problem at the moment,

especially when it comes to finished vehicles. But my own personal perspective is that there's absolutely a future, at least for producing car parts. When it comes to finish vehicles, the Canadian market is just simply not large enough to sustain itself on its own. We can't just produce vehicles for the Canadian market and only the Canadian market at a cost that Canadian consumers are going to tolerate or be able to live with. That's just not going to happen.

The auto industry is one where there are very large economies of scale and very large fixed costs of production, which means that the costs of production declines with the scale of the industry. It's just simply too costly for us to have our own kind of domestic auto sector just for us. That's not going to happen. But we can contribute, you know, I still absolutely see a future for the Canadian auto sector more broadly when you at least include car. parts. What the future looks like for assembly, it is more uncertain. I don't know the answers there. I do think, though, again, you have to ask the question, to what extent has the decline in auto assembly in Canada been driven by tariffs versus other policies? I think you also need to look at

what's been going on in the U.S. itself. The U.S. itself over the last few decades, at the same time, we've seen a decline in Canadian vehicle assembly. We've seen a big decline in auto assembly in the Great Lakes region in the U.S. U.S. auto production has shifted to the south and the southeast, right, for a variety of reasons. Part of it is the entry of foreign multinationals, you know, the Japanese brands, the Korean brands, and the German brands are, you know, largely setting up shop outside of the Great Lakes region. And so that's kind of a reallocation away from the big five towards, you know, foreign multinationals, even within the United States, taking greater and greater market shares.

But, you know, whatever the reason, I kind of just view it as like, for me, the best way to look at this, at least when it comes to the non-tariff stuff, is to kind of think about the Great Lakes auto industry, both U.S. and Canada together as one, and to recognize that we have seen a big reallocation away from that broader Great Lakes auto industry towards other regions in the United States. And I think we need to ask ourselves, what are the main reasons for that? And I don't think the main reason, at least going back a couple of decades, is tariffs, personally. Tariffs, you know, big issue now. Undeniably, they're making things even worse. But I don't, I think we would still be asking ourselves if those tariffs had never come in.

I think we'd still be kind of asking ourselves, you know, a decade from now what the future of the Canadian auto industry, at least when it comes to assembly looks like. I have a few more questions. Thank you so much for giving so much of your time. Absolutely. What leverage does Canada actually have from your perspective? So what leverage does Canada have when it comes to negotiations with the United States? I think it is important, number one, to recognize, and this is something that I've, you know,

this is kind of the opposite of leverage, but I still think it's important to say, which is really important to recognize for us that, uh, For us, trade with the United States is far more important than trade with Canada is for them. It just is what it is. You know, we do about the same amount of trade with each other in aggregate. You know, I said earlier at the beginning of this conversation that our trade is roughly balanced. Right. We do have this trade deficit that the President Trump likes to talk about, but the reality is trade

is roughly balanced. But then when you recognize that the U.S. economy is more than ten times larger than ours, it becomes immediately clear that that trade, you know, is much more important as a percentage of our economy than it is as a percentage of theirs. And so the macroeconomic picture doesn't really look good for us in terms of leverage. That's the reality, right? Whatever damage the president does to our economy with tariffs, we can't possibly do the same kind of damage to the U.S. economy with tariffs in the same way. It's just impossible. And so we have to look elsewhere. So we have a couple of points of leverage.

So number one, I look at the energy sector broadly as a point of leverage. Right? I mean, right now, the U.S. benefits tremendously from the discount that it gets in purchasing our oil and the access that it has to our oil, right? The U.S. produces a ton of oil itself. We produce, you know, quite different, you know, variety of oil, if you will, much heavier than the U.S. oil fields produce. and so U.S. refineries really do rely a lot on our oil to make a variety of products.

And I think we have some leverage. And we're, you know, one of the things, if you were to look at, you know, the most, if you were to ask me what's the most promising thing that I've seen out of the, you know, the Carney administration so far in terms of economic policy, it would be the efforts that they are making on the infrastructure front. I know, we haven't seen any, you know, any actual, you know, construction start, you know, in a physical sense, but the signals at least look reasonably promising to me. The more oil, the more capacity we have to export our oil to the rest of the world

outside of the United States and oil, not just oil, but also natural gas and things like that, I do view that as a point of leverage. You know, we can say, look, we can continue to offer you preferential access to our own oil. But that's something that, that's a choice that we're making, rather than something that we're just kind of forced to do by virtue of, you know, historical infrastructure. So that's but potential point of leverage. Critical minerals, another big one. Canada has an absolutely vast endowment of critical minerals that the U.S. economy needs for military applications. It's worried about national security. We've got a lot of what the U.S. military industry needs when it comes to the critical minerals there. And lots of critical minerals

are super important for the AI build-out. I look at those critical minerals as another potential point of leverage. Of course, we haven't exploited them nearly to the degree that we have historically. I've seen some of the signals there as well that look promising. Maybe we're not quite as far along

in making it clear that we're going to do a better job of exploiting those in the future. But it's something that we can certainly offer the U.S. preferential access to. Right? We're going to build these things out. We're going to offer you some preferential access and maybe first, you know, first bidder access to these minerals.

I look at our electricity sector, our electricity generation as another obvious leverage point. Historically, that has been something that has worked on our favor in terms of producing aluminum. It's why the U.S. buys so much of its aluminum from Canada. We're good at producing aluminum because of our cheap, the fact that we produce a ton of cheap electricity. But increasingly I'm looking at, and we're seeing now just this week with the announcement of META's data center in Alberta, I'm looking at that, you know, our grid, our electrical system as a leverage point and a point of comparative advantage that can help serve U.S. interests in at least the interests of U.S. firms in their AI buildup. They're increasingly facing pushback and building data centers in the United States. we are innately good.

I think we ought to be innately good at doing those exact types of things at, you know, building data centers, processing data. This is something I think we're going to see more and more of. Those are big investments. These are big investments that U.S. firms are going to want to make. These are things that they're going to want, you know, that they're going to want to lobby, I think,

the Trump administration to be able to try to, you know, let us let them do. And so, you know, that's another leverage. point that we have. At the same time, I would caution you to, I think we should be cautious and look at all these things as largely economic opportunities for us, first and foremost. Again, just to come back, kind of full circle to the point I made at the very beginning of the conversation that all of this stuff, we are making all of this stuff way more zero sum than it ought to be. And that is in large part Donald Trump's fault, but we play right into that here in Canada, I believe.

we're making all of these issues far more zero-sum than they have to be. All of these things in reality are positive some. The more critical minerals we produce, the more data centers we build. The better that is for us, the better it is for the U.S. Right? I mean, that's the way that I view things. I really think more than anything, that is the perspective that I think we need to try to inculcate, you know, in our media ecosystem, if you will, I think,

and push back against this pervasive, and I think even going even more pervasive view, that economic policy, especially when it comes to trade policy, but economic policy more broadly, is all just zero-sum stuff and reshuffle. And punishing people and retaliating, that's just not what economic policy is about. It's not what trade is about.

It is really all about positive some interactions. And I think that's where the attention needs to go. My final question is just around the impact for everyday Canadians, As I'm sure you're well aware, they are up against it. We have a cost of living, crisis in our country, young people can't buy homes. The future does not look bright for a lot of Canadians right now. And this trade war is, as you described, is kind of a flashpoint for that feeling, that everything is working against us right now.

Based on your understanding, because I want to bring this back for people to actually be able to make more informed decisions, what do you think everyday Canadians should be doing if we're not going to see the tariffs go back to zero from your perspective? What does that actually mean? Should people be rethinking the jobs they're looking for? How do they actually take real action based on your insights? How do they actually apply that to their own lives in a useful way? So I think the first thing that I would say is that I think Canadians need to push their policy makers. to make better decisions on the things that we can control. That's what I think.

And I think, again, this zero sum versus positive sum idea is a big, is really important when it comes to all of our domestic political decision. I also think at the same time, there's another kind of angle to that. It's similar, but also quite different in a way, which is that we view a lot of political, you know, economic decisions, economic policy decisions through this lens of folks. focusing on the loudest people that are the most affected. But the reality is that everybody else, the vast majority of costs and benefits of economic policies are born by everyday consumers that are being kind of a little bit hurt by this policy, a little bit hurt by that policy,

maybe a little bit benefited by this other policy individually. But when you aggregate up those gains and losses, they're far larger than the effects on kind of the loudest, parties that are the most invested in our decisions. So, you know, supply management is a great example, right? What is, what does supply management do? Right? It makes dairy products a little bit more expensive for everyday consumers, although there's some research that says that this is, you know, particularly painful for low-income Canadians, that low-income Canadians are actually really burdened by this system. And it benefits, it confers great benefits on a very narrow trench of Canadian dairy farmers, right? In the aggregate, Canadians are losing out as a result of this.

And I think they're not, you know, they're not persuaded of this by our media ecosystem. You know, that's another discussion that we shouldn't get into today. But it's an example of a policy. I like it because it's an example, to me, a very clear example of a policy where we have these kind of narrow, very concentrated benefits that accrue to a small portion of people. And very broad but shallow losses. that are hitting everybody else. But in the aggregate, those losses are huge. And so I look at economic policy as, you know, the goal of economic policy to me in most

cases, you know, kind of the first order goal that we should be working towards is eliminating things like that, working to eliminate things like that where we push, we, you know, make some headway on supply management. Yes, that's going to benefit you a little bit. But it's going to benefit everybody in the aggregate a lot. And then we work on this next policy, right? and it's going to be exactly the same thing. And the critical point that I want to mention is that when it comes to each of these policies

that maybe confer very small, very concentrated benefits or losses on certain individuals and very broad effects on everybody else, the individual affected parties that are getting those narrow concentrated benefits and losses are different each time, right? But everyday Canadians benefit from every single one of those policy changes that we could make. stack, right? And so that's really, you know, it's not sexy. It's not the, you know, there's not just one lever to pull and that's going to fix everything. The reality is that it's just kind of this everyday work of making policy a little bit better everywhere, but in a way that is oriented towards making individual consumers lives better and trying to ignore.

ignore the loud voices in the room that are, you know, the ones who are the most invested, we've got to find a way to ignore them and drown out their voices a little bit and let the, you know, the voices of kind of everyday Canadian consumers be heard a little bit more. And I think we need to find a way to get individuals, get Canadians invested as a group in that, in that paradigm, if you will. And I think that's going to be at the end of the day, the thing that is going to move the needle the most. That's going to be the thing that's going to make individual Canadians lives better.

You know, it's going to make our economy grow faster. It's going to make us more competitive and more innovative. You know, it's hard. It's not easy. There's not one single, you know, golden, one single silver bullet that's going to fix everything. But that's, for me, that's, I think, like, the most important work that policymakers should be focusing on. I couldn't agree more with that. I think the only change in you're an economist.

So instead of saying consumers, I would say citizens. And the reason I would say citizens is purely because there's a lot of people who want to be a part of solutions right now. There's a lot of people who I'm sure reach out to you and are following this, who are not economists. We're very passionate about what does this all mean? What do we do? And it kind of feels like mum and dad are in the other room and we're waiting for the decision to be made on where we're going next. rather than like what I would do in that situation is sit down with people like you. Come up with a list of the top 100 things we could start working on today.

Do public consultation. Have you speaking on these issues breaking them down. If people want to attend, they can attend. If they don't want to attend, they don't have to attend. But then you start having these conversations and it reaches the grassroots. It allows people at the very front end who are being impacted to have a voice. And I feel like there's just such a pent-up frustration with where we are. and nobody in Ottawa is really listening to people like yourself from what I see, broadly speaking, from the experts.

Like, I hear from Trevor Toome, I hear from you, I hear from Mikkel, who wrote a report, who submitted it, who did not have that read by the people making the decisions. We have these people here ready to help inform tax reform policy, helping understand the productivity issue. And they're all just like coming to me, offering me tremendous insights on what's going on. And I just want them to go speak to the people in control and who are in power and at least signal to us. Like you've described, like Trevor Toom's described, like we just need to know something's coming. Like if they said we're going to do tax reform in year three, that would make everybody a lot more sympathetic to the situation we're in. But it's the fact that they said they were going to do it and we have no results on that that just leaves us kind of stressed out, like concerned, fearful of where we're going. Are we going to get out of these problems?

and so I'm so grateful to have you on because you just lay it out. It's like everything you said at the end of there was like, that's just good governance. Yes, it's not sexy. Yes, it's not dramatic. Yes, it's not shocking. But it's you look at the problem. You go, how do we make sure these tradeoffs benefit the most with harming the least amount of people?

How do we do a transition that doesn't hurt? As you've described, some of those people who've been benefiting for a long time, we don't want to ruin their lives, take all their wealth. We don't want to do something. So we'll transition away from supply management in a thoughtful way. way that makes sure that we maintain support for our farmers while also making sure that low-income Canadians succeed. Like, this all just seems so possible. And I think Canadians want exactly that. They don't want the dramatic. They'd really appreciate just some good governance and

good policy led by people like yourself. Would you mind telling people how they can follow your work? You can follow my work, my academic work on my website, joe steinberg.com. I post on Twitter, or as it's called X now at J.B. Steinberg. You can see me there. I write occasionally for the hub and some other outlets. But I think the easiest way is to probably find me on Twitter and go from there. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your thoughtful breakdown on this. As issues continue arise, as I'm sure they will as we go through this. I hope to have you back on so we can dive into more of the specifics and who's hearing what. And I just appreciate your honesty about kind of the things. things you're hearing secondhand because I do think that helps just people know where the wind

is blowing and it's not rock solid. None of this is financial advice, but it helps us kind of understand where the winds are blowing on these issues. Yeah, absolutely. You're very welcome. I thought it was, I had a great time talking with you. I'm happy to come back and chat about anything else. If we ever get any kind of more concrete outcomes on the trade file or any other kind of big policy files. But yeah, it's a lot of fun.