The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What Does 'Made in Canada' Mean?

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

With the erratic threats of Trump's tariffs, many Canadians are switching to "Made in Canada" products. But in today's market, what does "Made in Canada" mean? How much of anything we buy is made right here in our country? Despite the highly integrated economy that Canada and the U.S. share, can we become more self-reliant by shifting all production to our home and native land? Jim Stanford, economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work; Vass Bednar, executive director of the Master of Public Policy Program at McMaster University and host of the "Lately" podcast; and Jim Hinton, owner and founder of Own Innovation and a Senior Fellow at CIGI, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, join Steve Paikin to discuss what it takes to make more in Canada.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Despite the highly integrated economy that Canada and the U.S. share, can we become more self-reliant by shifting all production to our home and native land? Let's find out. Here to discuss this and more in Vancouver, British Columbia, Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Center for Future Work.

And joining us here in studio, Vasaliki Bednar, executive director of the Master of Public Policy program at McMaster University and the host of a great podcast called Lately. And Jim Hinton, he is owner and founder of Own Innovation and is a senior fellow at CIGI, the Center for International Governance Innovation. And it's a delight to have you two here in our studio.

And Jim Stanford, great to have you from the left coast on our program. Jim Hinton, you're the new guy here, so I'm going to put you to work right away. We want a better sense of how intertwined our economies are. So describe, if you would, when we think about a car or when we think about peanut butter, how dependent are we on other countries?

Yeah, in the automotive sector, this is near and dear to my heart. In southwestern Ontario, I worked as an engineer in heavy trucks, part manufacturing, and one component can come from a steel component, and steel can come from Hamilton in Ontario or Pittsburgh in the US, and then it crosses the border at least once, maybe refined here, goes back, turns into a bracket, and then maybe the final assembly happens in a factory here. And so there's always this cross-border activity happening, and ultimately it's the brand owners that get a lot of that value.

And so is it a Volkswagen electric vehicle that's being made, or is it going to be a Ford or a GM? And so the ultimate value of those electric vehicles or the gas vehicles are going to accrue to those brand owners and then who really owns the technology behind that. I think we're all trying to, well, we're getting a crash course in how tariffs work. So Jim Stanford, come on in here and explain to us, if you tariff that process that Jim Hinton just described,

how does that complicate things? It depends, Steve, on how the tariff is applied. And part of the chaos from Mr. Trump's announcements is that he just blurts these things out in the morning and says it's gonna happen tomorrow. And even the US government administration has no idea how they're going to enact this. So in a worst case scenario,

his 25% tariff would apply every time one of those parts or at different stages of the supply chain crossed the border. And this is where you get a, you know, basically a catastrophic situation. You're not just paying 25% extra for something you buy from Canada. You could be paying 25% extra on 25% extra on 25% extra and so on and so on. And that is an exponential effect that clearly wouldn't be economically feasible. The companies involved just couldn't afford it on both

sides of the border. So a 25% tariff in an old fashioned world, you know, where you just imported a finished product from somewhere far away, you know, you can make an argument about whether it made sense and that would create more space for your domestic production. That's kind of what Mr. Trump is thinking about. But in a modern world where supply chains are long reaching, they go around the world and they're intertwined. It's gonna create enormous disruption and enormous extra costs and it's gonna damage the companies in the US, frankly, as much as it's gonna damage us. Vast, we've all seen the polls which show that Canadians want to, by big numbers, they want a bi-Canadian right now

to kind of punish Donald Trump and what he's trying to do to us. But given what we've just heard about how products are made, what does bi-Canadian right now to kind of punish Donald Trump and what he's trying to do to us. But given what we've just heard about how products are made, what does bi-Canadian mean? I mean, it can mean so much. And I think we've started by just using a very traditional definition. We look to the Competition Act.

We look at false and misleading advertising, right? So the Holy Grail is to be a product of Canada. And that threshold is 98.1% right of the direct cost of the product which include labor are Canadian. A second kind of tier from there is made in Canada and that threshold is 51%. Now outside of food there's no obligation for companies to disclose this right so it is voluntary but there's a lot of vulnerability there, right? One, we see that there could be kind of seller's inflation 2.0, where firms become opportunistic and sort of claim

either take advantage of their Canadian-ness by artificially inflating their prices higher than they need to, or other companies kind of slapping maple leaves on things, maple washing, right? Not a maple glaze. That's the delicious part. But sort of claiming a Canadian-ness that isn't really there. But I like your question in terms of what it means, because I hope it means more than that, right? Not just manufacturing.

I think there's a Canadian kind of values element here to how we make decisions in the economy that we might be missing out on. Well, OK, Jim Hinton, tell us about that car. That car that crosses the border two, three, four, five times as new parts get added to it on both sides of the border. Is that a product of Canada? Is that made in Canada?

How would you describe it? Yeah, and so there's the physical aspects, the transformation of the steel into the camshaft or whatever it is. But a lot of times, even whether the manufacturing is happening here and that transformation is happening here, it's being not done by Canadians or people working on the shop floor, but it's being done by machines.

And it's the people that own those machines, the German or the South Korean automation technology company, the robotics company, those are the ones that ultimately get the value. So if you replace 10,000 workers with 100 workers, most of the replacement goes to the owners of that technology. And so even if it is physically happening here, a lot of the economic value may be flowing back to Germany or South Korea or other spots or even the US. And so just because it's happening here doesn't mean the economic value is happening. So, Jim Stanford, if I want to buy a Canadian Canadian made car, how do I do that given that much

of it is going to be assembled in the United States? Oh, sure. And this is a longstanding complication, Steve. We've had an integrated North American auto industry going back 60 years, long before the free trade agreement. We signed the Auto Pact back in 1965 1965 which was a wonderful deal that said both countries will produce some of the parts and some of the vehicles they'll go back and forth tariff-free and then there were safeguards in place to make sure that both sides got a fair share of the

resulting production and Jim's point about you know we have to follow the money in a way to see where it's ending up how much of the money is ending up in overseas original equipment makers the brand of the money is ending up in overseas original equipment makers, the brand names, how much is ending up in overseas tech firms, et cetera. That's all fine. But for the average Canadian, what really matters is the job here, is the job here and can people make a living that way. We've benefited from that, first from the AutoPak and then we maintained it through

the various free trade agreements. You can find a car that through the various free trade agreements. So you can find a car that has the final assembly in Canada. There's, you know, numerous auto assembly plants that produce probably about 20 to 25 vehicles in total. But you can also find Canadian content and, in essence, Canadian jobs in any other vehicle that's made in North America, even ones that are assembled in Mexico, have still got significant Canadian content in the parts that go into it. So I think the key issue is not so much, you know, where was the final assembly occurred and where were the tires put on and everything else?

The key issue is, are you buying a car from a company that is producing in Canada, roughly, a fair amount of value added compared to what they're selling in Canada. And in that regard, it's hard to put a Made in Canada sticker on a car, but you can certainly be aware that the Canadian auto industry has to have a fair share of what happens in the end of this whole chaos. And Jim, a fast follow-up fact check here. You said 20 to 25 cars. I assume you meant 20 to 25,000 cars. No, no, I meant 20 to 25 different vehicles, 20 to 25 different. I assume you meant 20 to 25,000 cars. No, no, I meant 20 to 25 different vehicles. 20 to 25 different models, if you like. We produce something like a million and a half vehicles

a year in Canada in the final assembly stage, but 20 to 25 different versions of cars and trucks and SUVs and so on. So, you know, you can certainly go and buy a good Canadian made vehicle, or you can also buy Canadian content in a vehicle that's assembled in the United States or in Mexico as long as it's from a company. The traditional ones were the Detroit 3, Ford, GM and Chrysler, but there are other companies now that operate

in Canada and you want to buy a vehicle that's got good Canadian content in it. And ideally, of course, we would continue to have a situation where we're sharing the value added across this continental industry. And that has worked very well over the last 60 years. But Mr. Trump's thrown a grenade into the middle of that historical success story. Yeah, you say ideally, we do not live

in ideal circumstances right now. I want to follow up, Vess, on this issue of maple washing, I think you called it. We all want to do our patriotic circumstances right now. I want to follow up on this issue of maple washing, I think you called it. We all want to do our patriotic duty right now and stick it to Trump by buying Canadian. As you look around, how much maple washing or how many manufacturers here or retailers here do you think are taking advantage of our patriotism

by putting maple leafs on stuff that really isn't all that Canadian? You know, it's hard to put as precise a number as Jim Stanford just offered us But when I look around I do look to the kind of put constant policing of the economy that we see people doing on Reddit Right. Reddit has become a very patriotic place where people are sharing information. Hey watch out for this I noticed this does anyone know about this and I do think it's starting to occur I do think we's starting to occur. I do think we're seeing, you know, claims,

Canadian claims or Canadian associations that are there. But let's take a step back for a minute because what does it really mean, right? If you are choosing between saving some money by going to Walmart or saving some money by going to Costco, neither one of those are Canadian companies. But Costco just fought back against shareholder pressure to eliminate DEI initiatives. They just raised wages some more for their workers.

Are these Canadian values that we want to reward with our consumerism? Maybe, right? Like I worry about shame. I worry about people feeling that if they don't make the right choice with every single purchase they have, that they're not patriotic or they're not part of this fight because it's such a confusing and noisy space. So again what does it mean for a firm to be Canadian? Jim brought up IP and who actually gets those rewards and those productions and you know that's part of it too and there's a lot of invisibility there's a

lot of digital infrastructure that we are dependent on that is sure as heck not Canadian. Well, this is tricky, Jim Hinn, because on the one hand, you know, Walmart is a very well-known American company from the deep south of the United States. But they employ a lot of Canadians in their stores here. So if I want to stick it to Trump, do I avoid Walmart or do I go to Walmart anyway because they're employing my neighbors? Yeah, I think the thing is there's a job strategy approach. And there's a certain amount that the consumers and individuals can do and take to sort of push back some of this stuff. But I think at the government and the policy level,

there needs to be a shift. The Americans favor American firms. Canadians are the same. Canadian government favors American firms. We need to switch that and Canadian government needs to start favouring and prioritising Canadian domestic firms and technology firms that commercialise and scale globally. How do we do that? Yeah, and so it really comes down to our innovation policies. They've all been focused on domestic

oligopolies, the banks, the telcos, the grocers, and whatever benefits them. She knows about this. She wrote a book on it. Yeah, exactly, extracting this value, but not creating global value. And then the other people that set policy in Canada are the branch plants of foreign multinational companies. And whether it's pharmaceuticals or automotive, or consumer and retail, we're not the ones

that are able to capture that lion's share of economic value. And we want to have globally relevant Canadian headquartered firms here that are capturing value globally and then bringing it back and our policies need to reflect that instead of the opposite where we preferentially treat US firms and domestic oligopolies. So Vash, should we be prepared to or even want to spend more to purchase goods and services that we know are truly Canadian here if it means sticking it to the United States? We could purchase things more cheaply in some cases from the United States, but should we want to pay more now to keep things truly Canadian?

It's an important question because we kind of have this idea that we can save the economy and save a few dollars at the same time. And I don't know if those things go together. You're right. It may be that Canadian products are more expensive for good reasons, right? Not necessarily the nefarious ones I was mentioning. But an extension of what Jim says is sort of kind of brings back the 80s, right? Like sovereignty is back. Sovereignty is very hot right now. But so we're kind of returning to a national champions bit.

So when you invert that conversation about competition and choice, the Globe and Mail has a wonderful feature. You know, here are the top things we import from the US. Here are some Canadian alternatives. And you can go through that index. And most of the time you have one, two, or maybe if you're really lucky, three Canadian alternatives. Like, I don't know that that's the universe we want to trap ourselves in Okay, Jim help me out here. Yeah, go ahead. Come on in

We'd we'd be better off for sure if we could continue to Benefit from the variety the broader variety of goods that is produced globally as long as we get a fair share of the final Production that's involved and I don't think anyone's advocating that we should go to a world of autarky, which means a country produces everything for itself and buys nothing from the rest of the world. That's not going to work. What we want is a fair trading arrangement where we do that two-way flow and we get a fair share of the end jobs. And that's better for consumers. It's also better for the workers. The other thing to keep in mind, I think, is there are limits to what individual consumer choices can do to affect this situation. Like I'm all in favor of getting my elbows up like everyone else in Canada, and I'm buying

Canadian as much as I can, and I'm definitely not traveling to the US. But there are limits to how those individual choices can affect an economy-wide supply chain that is completely integrated across the two borders. Most of what we sell to America, this is a point we've been trying to make to Mr. Trump, is not finished products branded Made in Canada that show up on the shelves at Costco or wherever. It's inputs that are used by U.S. businesses in producing their own stuff. And by the same token, most of what we buy from America is not finished products that are on the shelf at Canadian Tire.

There's your Canadian option, Steve, on the retail front. Rather, they're inputs and parts and machinery and technology that's used by Canadian businesses to produce other stuff. And those individual consumer choices, while I'm all in favor of the patriotic sentiment that they show, are only going to go so far. And this is where I think the most important thing Canadians can do is support a unified Canadian response to Trump that shows that we're united as a country and we're going to stand up for ourselves, even if that imposes some costs on us in the process.

That ultimately will be what changes Trump's mind rather than those individual consumer choices. But Jim Hinton, this is difficult because I mean if you ask people to finish this sentence, as Canadian as, some people might say Tim Hortons, right? It doesn't get more Canadian than that. Except they're a Brazilian company. That's right. Okay. So if we want to do quote-unquote the right thing by buying Canadian and sticking it to Trump How do we do that now when we really don't have any sense about what's made in Canada product of Canada? Or anything else for that matter? Yeah The big challenge is we don't retain a lot of the things that we've created

And so even with something like Tim Hortons the brand has tremendous amount of value in Canada But again all the economic values going back to the Brazilians and the shareholders of the company that are not necessarily Canadian. And so what we really need to do is start owning and controlling more of those ideas. Insulin as we know, great Canadian technology story. Over a hundred years ago here and in London, Banting and Best and others invented this. But today, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, all these global companies, US, Denmark, and France

are the ones that are capturing that economic value. And so even though we may have manufacturing facilities here and we invented it, we're missing out on that commercialized piece. And so we need to really start from the ground up. We're starting from really nothing. We have very little global IP of relevance and we need to capture what we create and retain it so we can capture that economic value. And then there are options.

And so there's the reason there are no options is because we've designed those Canadian options out of the system. And so we have to really start from the ground up and prioritize capturing, generating, owning intangible assets. Are we going to get tired of buying Canadian? I mean the fact of the matter is we only make a certain number of things here and we kind of do like to buy stuff that's made elsewhere in the world. What do we do about that? You know the switching costs may have been initially higher than we thought right? Buying Canadian is something that takes work, that takes time and vigilance, but maybe these new habits will stick. But we're fundamentally asking questions about what kind of economy do we want, right? What do we value? Do we care that the coffee shop we like now is owned

by a private equity firm that isn't Canadian, right? That's a whole other layer of knowability of the economy that takes some time to kind of kick the tires, whether they're Canadian tires or not. So I always feel a little bit of resentment when we ask everyday people to take on the work of fixing or changing the economy, right? Because of that guilt, because of the weight. But who else can do it fast? I mean, the individual decisions we make every day is how you change an economy. Exactly, it's part of it, but it's about the role of the state in these markets too and helping us whether it's with innovation policy, whether it's understanding

where and when things are coming from, whether it's the new found pride in the raw materials that we produce and that we export. I think all of that goes into our patriotism too. Okay, Jim Stanford, in that case, you look at what quote unquote the state is doing nowadays. We call it Team Canada, the feds and the provinces and the territories all acting together. How are we doing at using this moment in our history to transform our economy? I think we're making some right steps, but this is such an enormous and existential challenge to Canada's economy. We're going to have to do much, much more.

I kind of see maybe three different levels, Steve, of where the government response can be. The most obvious one is obviously in the trade policy realm. OK, so we've seen the government announce counter tariffs, and we don't want the counter tariffs. They're going to hurt. They're're gonna make stuff more expensive here, but it's the only way that we can get some leverage to negotiate, hopefully, an end to this madness with the Americans at some point. So that makes sense. I think there's a lot of other things

in the trade policy realm that we could be doing other than tariffs. We export all this stuff that they desperately need, not just our oil, but our other energy, our critical minerals, our forestry products, they desperately need those things. So if we want to impose harm on the other side, which unfortunately the logic of deterrence requires, we should make those things more expensive for them. This is where the export tax idea makes a lot of sense. And Mr. Ford's

attempt to start that with the electricity, I think, certainly got some attention. There's other things we could do other than tariffs. We could unlock the IP in pharmaceutical patents or technologies to give our Canadian generic drug makers or our Canadian app programmers free reign at those things. That would get some attention. We could put a digital services tax on all the digital services we buy from American companies. That would get some attention.

The ultimate level though is to be a bigger challenge. I think we're going to need to, whatever Trump does now, we're going to need to reconceptualize what is the value proposition for Canada's economy. And it is no longer come to Canada because we're polite and we're next door to America and you can sell your stuff there. Okay. That argument isn't worth it anymore. Cause even if Trump doesn't do the tariff, you know, next month, nobody believes or

has any certainty what he's going to do the month after that. So we are going to have to go back to something like a more self-directed and self-sufficient economic strategy, something like a national policy. Steve, I know you know a lot about Canadian economic history. What we did in the end of the 19th century to try and build a viable economy. It didn't mean autarky. We were still trading, but we were arranging the incentives, whether it was tariffs on manufactured inputs or subsidies for investment or cross-Canada infrastructure, making the incentives there to build really strong Canadian industries and

strong Canadian businesses. And that will include some of the things that Jim Hinton is talking about in terms of building Canadian companies or national champions, but it's also going to include on the ground investment and capital and jobs to make sure that we've got a piece of that action. This is a huge challenge that will require, I think, a rethinking. For 40 years, we've been saying, well, we don't need to do that anymore because we're integrated with the US. And we've just realized how dangerous that strategy was.

We had too many eggs in that basket. And now we're going to have to find other ways to stand on our own two feet. Well, Vass, let me put the question to you that Jim raises. Is it time to get a 21st century version of Sir Johnnie MacDonald's national policy enacted here? I mean, I think people are very open

to how we're gonna recalibrate. Jim said, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Maybe we shouldn't undo supply management, where we see pressure from American monopolists who want to come and be here. We also need to remember we don't just pay for things with our money, we pay for things with our attention and our time, and there are huge ad tech markets that are very beneficial to the US economy.

We put our businesses kind of in a catch-22 where for us to learn about them, maybe they're also putting that advertising spend on Google, on Amazon, on Facebook, Meta, et cetera. We need to think about where else and how else we can find these companies. I think, you know, everything's on the table in this kind of frightening, very intimidating moment. Well, can I put some of those ideas that Jim Stanford just put on the table a second ago? Unlock IP with Big Pharma. Don't give them the monopoly to have the market to themselves for as long as has been the case. Or a digital services tax? We're all watching Netflix and Amazon and whatever, whatever. What do you think of those ideas?

Yeah, they're good ideas. What Canada needs to do is grow up. We've been reliant on the Americans and say, okay, they've given us this preferential access to their market in some ways and we've just relied on that and we've been low performing because of it. We need to grow up, become a country, become sovereign, have sovereign data capacity, and manage our marketplace frameworks productively. I know the idea sounds nice, we can invalidate patents in Canada,

but that's not going to go far enough. That's not ambitious enough. We need to be able to have Canadian firms with USIP rights in America that we can leverage and go toe to toe with American firms in their market in China, in Europe. And so just simply invalidating a patent in Canada is not going to go far enough.

We need to go, we need to get into their kitchen, we need to be in their house starting eating their lunch instead of having them sort of take a little bit off of our plate. Jim, I know the other Jim now, Jim Stanford back out west. You and I are old enough to remember when the first Prime Minister Trudeau came along and started about the need to not be so reliant

on the United States and to find other markets in places like Europe and Asia. And here we are, you know, 45 years later, and we're still talking about the same stuff because we haven't done it. How do we actually make that happen? Well, that's a great question, Stephen. Important to point out the history there.

We've been saying that for ages, that we should develop stronger ties with Europe and Asia and the rest of the world. And we've done some things in that regard, but there's a powerful sucking sound from the United States. It's called geography. We're right next to them.

And obviously they're a big market, a rich market and a close market. So that overwhelmed all of our other efforts to try to diversify. So just signing free trade agreements alone isn't going to do it. We have free trade agreements with Europe and many other countries, but that doesn't mean that we're really capturing the benefits of full two-way trade, especially where we want to do more than just, you know, sell resources to them. We want to have, as Jim Hinton's saying, high value, high productivity, high tech industries that sell to Europe, not just our resources.

And I do think it's going to probably take more dramatic action. You know, we've seen proposals Canada should approach the EU to join it or find some other kind of partnership That's deeper than just a free trade agreement Which on itself doesn't accomplish anything are our other dramatic measures to show that Canada's thinking we want to be part of a reciprocal rules based peaceful International order and we're gonna have to build some really strong new partnerships if we want to be part of that.

Vast, we've been hearing, as I say, for decades that we need to diversify and get all of our eggs out of the American basket and spread them around a little bit more. But, I mean, if this slap across the face from Trump doesn't get us to do that, nothing is going to get us to do that. Is it doable? It's doable. I mean, look, we've been talking for a long time about our inter-provincial trade barriers. And they've long fascinated me, too. I think a much more interesting question is why we have them,

why certain ones have persisted. And we've seen a newfound energy and policy attention to these. There are cautions, right, caveats. We don't want it to be a race to the bottom in terms of things like adopting the lowest common denominator in terms of labor training You know, that's part of the conversation But it seemed like maybe we needed a bit of a kick in the pants to take that on However, at the same time that felt like very

Provincial thinking to me right to the point about growing up. It didn't very Shania Twain It didn't impress me much, right? Because I thought, okay, great, that's maybe a one-time sugar high for the economy, you know, it's not gonna save us. What else are we going to do? Like, start here, but what else and where else? However, the people who are in favor of this kind of thing are saying, Jim Hinton, that whatever the tariffs

are gonna represent, three, four, five, six, seven percent of our GDP in the minus, if we can get rid of some of these provincial trade barriers, we could recapture that GDP through more efficiencies and economic growth and so on. Worth doing? Yeah, it's worth doing. It's like, let's get your house in order.

You need to have a spot where you're not bumping into the door every day trying to get out of your house. But you have to get out of your house and get into those global markets. It's too provincial, it's too small focus to just say we need to reduce our internal barriers. So how do we actually do that? We've been talking about it for decades.

How do we do it? We need to move up the value chain. We need to be more than just creating the ideas, we need to be more than just the ones putting our hands to the machines and operating them. We need to be the ones that commercialize those technologies, getting into those foreign markets, and then having the IP royalties, the data revenue come back to Canadian firms and be innovative, have global champions that

capture the global markets and really drive value back to Canada from the whole system. For trade to work, we need to give some and we need to get some. And for the last 40 years, we've been not getting anything. All right. In our last few minutes here. Yeah, Jim, come on in. I just got to jump in on that inter-provincial thing again. The point you mentioned where there's some forecast saying if we got inter-provincial

barriers out of the way, that could offset the damage done by the tariffs from America. That is absolute nonsense. I mean, there are some things we can do to improve trade within Canada, absolutely. But the idea that, you know, allowing us to produce wine in one province and sell it in the other could somehow overcome what's happening from Trump is just absolutely wrong.

One other final point to keep in mind is the global importance of trade is obvious, but remember most of what we actually do in our economy is stuff that we produce in Canada by Canadians for Canadians. About 80% of our GDP is not traded. It's produced and used here in Canada. So this idea that we can't survive without the trade, I think, is also wrong. We've got the capacity as a big country, the 10th largest economy in the world, 40 million consumers and well-trained workers and huge natural resources, of course. We can absolutely be a strong, viable, continuing country.

Donald Trump is absolutely wrong to say that we need him, otherwise we can't survive. No, fair enough. But having said that, in our last couple of minutes here, Vass, let me get you on this. This seems to be one of those hinge moments in our history where we have an opportunity because of this crisis to make some really big decisions. There is a national consensus, the likes of which we haven't had before, thanks to Trump, I guess. So what do we do with this moment in history?

Well, one thing we could think about is maybe we need a national champion that's digital, right? Maybe our Canadian merchants need to get the F off Amazon, right? Whether or not there are tolls from Trump, we know that Amazon takes about 45% of the revenue from merchants that are on that platform, from all the kind of taxes and tolls that they charge, all these little fees that really add up.

And that hurts productivity. So maybe we should be asking people and motivating them to switch away to a company, a hometown hero like Shopify, that could be a better kind of actor in the e-commerce space. Jim Hinton, how about to you? How do we take advantage of this moment? Yeah, I like this idea of prioritizing Canadian firms and bringing them to the forefront

and making sure our policy manages that. I was just dealing this morning with an Amazon counterfeit. They love counterfeits and having fraudulent items, and small Canadian firms selling on their platform has to deal with it. And so we need to prioritize those Canadian firms, have our policy oriented to expand and grow these firms. And really, we don't need to be prioritizing U.S. firms anymore because we know that they're not even allowing us to trade as we did before.

Jim Stanford, let me give you the last 30 seconds on this. How do we take advantage of this moment? I think ultimately the shock to Canadians of realizing that our viability as a country and what we stand for is being challenged is really motivating. It's a wake-up call, and I hope that it leads us to put aside some of the divisions,

whether it's regional divisions or ideological divisions, and say, yeah, we're going to keep building this country because it's something we believe in. And I absolutely think we can come out of this stronger if we stick together. Well, you heard John Kretsch at the Liberal Leadership Convention say we ought to put Donald Trump up for the Order of Canada because he's brought us all together

in a way that nothing else ever has. To be continued, thanks to the three of you for a great discussion about this tonight. Vasaliki Bednar at McMaster University, Jim Hinton, Own Innovation, and at CG. Jim Stanford, the Centre for Future Work out there in Vancouver, British Columbia. Thanks so much, you three. Thank you. Thank you, Steve.