The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Canada's Geopolitical Role is Changing

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

The Agenda's week in review features an interview with Canada's ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae, on Canada's place in an unpredictable world, a debate on whether the province should be building a spa at Ontario Place, and whether tariffs are causing grocery store prices to go up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Your job, I gather, is to go to work every day and to try to push that boulder for peace up the mountain just a little more, a little more, a little more. So let's start with a simple question. How's that going these days? It's very tough right now. We're in a tough space in the world. The thing I think it's important for us as Canadians to remember is that however tough we think it is for us, it's a lot tougher for a great many other people around the world.

Can you compare and contrast? Because I, you know, 40 years ago during the height of the Cold War, we had, you know, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at each other's heads. And yet for some reason, it felt safer then than it does today. Is that weird of me to think that? No, I think I mean I don't think it's first of all Steve there's nothing weird about you whatever some people may say I've never It's not an adjective I've ever used to describe you. There are others but that's not one. I would say that there was an awful I I mean awful, awesome stability in the nuclear era.

And by the way, we're still living in the nuclear era. And the more countries that have the potential for becoming active in the nuclear field, the more unstable it will become. But because of the sense that the countries involved all had an understanding of what the rules would be and how things would work, and there were lots of conversations behind the scenes, and there were lots of discussions.

We had a couple of major confrontations, such as in Cuba in 1962. But I think that the challenge now is that there are no guardrails. We're not living in a world where any rules are being followed. Humanitarian law is not being followed. International law is being abused every day in conflicts all around the world and in the conduct of a great many countries.

And it is a much, much less stable time for most people outside a frame of countries that are relatively doing well economically compared to the rest. But for a great many people, the world is really tough. And I think we need to understand that as Canadians, the risk that I see is that we become, as a country and we become, as a world, too preoccupied with number one, too preoccupied with ourselves, and still not sufficiently thinking about what's happening out there. And the thing of my job, the most important part of my job, I think, is to, twofold. One is to tell the world about what we think and what Canadians are about. But secondly is to tell Canadians

and to tell our government what the rest of the world is about. Adam, essentially, what do you like about the Therma plan? Well, lots to like about it. First and foremost, Ontario Place is coming back online. All of it, not just the West West Island where our facility will be placed. There's 56 acres of new parkland across the space, 16 acres on our particular island, including rooftop parks. But I think what I really like about it is Therma. Therma builds really

phenomenal facilities that are accessible, they're inexpensive. There are premium services if you want them, but when Ontario Place closed it charged about 32 bucks to get in, extra if you wanted to go to the water park. That's roughly the price you'll pay to get to Therma, but more importantly some of the biggest concerns I had was whether or not the waterfront parks would be lost behind an admission gate the way it was when it was originally opened. One of the first things to come down were the admission gates, and so people trying to get to the water's edge, going for a swim or a stroll or walking a dog or kayaking,

will have access to 56 acres of new parkland, over 4,000 trees, all on the water's edge, with more places to swim and facilities and maintain trails. It's a great project and a good way to move forward on Ontario Place. Okay. And Elizabeth, what don't you like about the sound of that? Quite a few things. First of all, I think that there are a number of things Adam has just said that I would disagree with.

But in general, I don't like the cost of this project is enormous. And I'm not just talking about the billions of dollars the Auditor General has said that our taxpayer, our tax dollars will go towards the project, but it's incredibly expensive. It's expensive in that the project has been shepherded through by our Ontario government to the point where they've passed their very own law to eliminate all scrutiny and accountability around the project. We've also, there are a number of unknown costs that we haven't even heard about.

And thanks to this protection by the government, there's very little we actually know is being built. So there's the issue of it's expensive, it's dollars expensive. I think many folks across Ontario, even if they never visit, they're paying for it. The other thing is that I find it incredibly short-sighted. I've looked at waterfronts in great cities around the world.

They tend to be open access, really visionary, and really planned, co-created with community, which this one is not, and also iconic. I think you were talking about the original vision for Ontario Place. And I think that one of the really exciting things about it back then is that it was built for Ontarians by Ontarians with this Ontario kind of heritage idea of what

did it mean to be Ontarian. This project is kind of a cookie cutter attraction that's being plopped down on Ontario Place. And as far as I understand, the company hopes to build them across North America. Okay, let's hold there. Adam, you've heard some of the criticisms. Come on back. Well, I mean, I think the notion of co-creation is important. It's one of the reasons we have a strong partnership with the Mississaugas of the Credit. The indigenous footprint of Ontario Place was never pronounced, even by Bill Davis

and the original architects. That's changing and it's gonna be revealed shortly is just how deep that partnership is. And it's a good thing. It's one of the things Ontario Place for All is called for and we've built that partnership. I think the other side of it is is that one of the more important things

that Ontario Place has become since it was closed down is a park that to success, a trillion park, shows us that free access to the waterfront is a value that needs to be sustained. That's happening. It's with a massive new park down there the size of Trinity Bellwoods. Can I ask about that? Free access to the waterfront. Yeah, I mean they're replacing the gates which have been open for years since the closing of Ontario Place with an admission building that you'll have to walk around to get across. That's actually not true. Well I would love to see the actual plans that are coming forward. Even the last iteration of the plan showed that there was access to the lake and the protected access that the community has called for.

We have responded and we've actually shrunk the size of the building and grown the size of the green space. But what's more important is that you won't have to pay an admission price like you used to have to, to get down to see the water, you know, the sunset over the lake, or to go for a swim. Is that a victory for your side? It's really hard to take.

I mean, I think the other thing. The other thing Adam just said is the size of Trinity Bellwoods. And this one is really one that's been fascinating to me. Trinity Bellwoods is 36 acres. Currently the plan that I've last seen is 16 acres. That's on the West Island. That's right. If you want to put Trinity Bellwoods on the West Island, I would be thrilled. No, it's when you quote the price of the Auditor General's report sites, it's for the redevelopment of all of Ontario Place. And while I'm not here to explain the provincial government's plan for the rest of it,

but there's the new Budweiser Theatre is being expanded to a year-round facility. That project, which the NDP opened in the 90s, is being built upon. The elimination of parking lots, or five parking lots, those parking lots are disappearing. And 56 acres of new open green space, a public park, will be built at the water's edge, free and accessible. built at the water's edge free and accessible. What kinds of things are going up in price at the grocery store? Well, Canada has put retaliatory tariffs on a lot of food items coming from the US. That's 25% on everything from dairy to meat and seafood and whatnot. So those are items where we have seen being impacted by tariffs.

Now the Canadian government has actually dropped a lot of the tariffs, specifically on food that is manufactured or packaged in Canada. So I think the biggest impact we will see is from perishables that are brought directly from the US and not being repackaged and further processed here. Mike, I am curious, you know, it seems kind of hard to think about what it was like before January but before all the tariff related back and forth, what was the situation with

grocery prices here in Canada? Well, we've seen the grocery prices go up over the last three or four years for a variety of reasons. We know, you know, we talk about extreme weather and the war in Ukraine and a lower Canadian dollar and, you know, it adds up. We sort of had a perfect storm of impacts, if you will, that led to these price increases. So we'd seen some of those begin to moderate a little bit. We hadn't seen prices come down a lot, but the rate of increase had slowed dramatically.

And before January, we were saying that food was actually lagging behind the general rate of inflation. Alright, I'm curious, as Mike had mentioned, there's a number of factors that kind of go into the prices that we see. Can we identify which factors are driving prices up, in particular if we're talking about climate disasters, if we're talking about war? Are we able to kind of get behind those numbers? Well, it really varies on a case-by-case basis. For example, if it's climate disasters,

we know that it's going to be crops that are specifically impacted by those disasters, right? Wildfires, drought, extreme temperatures. If it's the war in Ukraine, it's going to be wheat, a lot of grains, cooking oils. So it really depends. With tariffs, we do have a list of what is being impacted posted on the government website. So there is much easier to identify.

Is it possible to determine though how much tariffs play in a role when we talk about, if we're talking about cents and dollars for sort of down the line to a consumer, how much that, you know, a terrible impact versus something like a climate disaster? Well, that is a lot murkier to determine because, as you might know, the price of something is determined by not only the cost of production but also the prices you have to pay to the workers, transportation costs, so gasoline price fluctuations also impact prices and then the cost of storage, warehousing to a number of other factors. So while we can see that okay there are certain drivers driving up prices of certain goods, how

much of that ends up being in the price increase is much harder to determine.