The Ben Mulroney Show - Are Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland heading towards a split?

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Guests and Topics on Today's Show -Trudeau’s office at odds with Finance Minister Freeland over GST holiday, $250 cheques with Guest: Robert Fife, Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau Chief -CBSA lost track of nearly 30,000 people wanted for deportation orders with Guest: Bryan Passifiume, National politics reporter for the Toronto Sun -What is it inside of us that makes people more susceptible to believing in Conspiracy Theories? with Guest: Nathan Radke, Co-Host of the Conspiracy Theory podcast The Uncoverup -Macdonald helped Indigenous people, Riel didn’t, and other unpopular realities Guest: Patrice Dutil, author of the new book, Sir John A. Macdonald and The Apocalyptic Year 1885 -Apple jumps into the AI game in a major way with Apple Intelligence. But are there Security concerns? with Guest: Kurt Knight, Senior director of platform product marketing at Apple -Where does the Syria conflict go next, and what does this mean for the Middle East with Guest: Richard Goldberg from The Foundation for Defense of Democracies If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

Hey everybody, it's Ben Mulrooney. We had a packed show today, including is Justin Trudeau about to split with Chrystia Freeland? We lost track of how many people that are supposed to be deported, and what exactly is it about some people that get hooked on conspiracy theories? Enjoy! A lot of talk about the fall economic update that Chrystia Freeland is set to unveil on Monday, but as we gear up for that, and the attention is squarely on her shoulders, it looks like there could be some tension brewing between our prime minister and his finance minister over the GST holiday, as well as the proposed $250 checks that were supposed to go out to so many Canadians. We're joined now by one of the two people who broke this story, Robert Fife from the Globe and Mail. Bob, great to talk to you again. Good morning. Okay, so what is placing these two allies at odds right now? It's largely

the prime minister's office looking for vote-buying schemes to try to earn favor again with the electorate. I mean, they're 20 points behind the Conservatives. And they decided that they would try this GST holiday and to provide $250 rebates to people earning $150,000 or less. And the finance department opposed it because it's the kind of spending that, first of all, as one finance official described it as both stupid and embarrassing because it's just economically unwise to do

this. Ms. Freeland was, I guess, gritting her teeth and pushing back against it. But in the end of the day, the prime minister wanted it. And so she folded. And we've now been hit with this unnecessary spending. And this tension has been going on for quite a while, Ben. Back in the summer in July, I gave a story about the fact that Katie Telford, who is Mr. Trudeau's chief of staff, had been complaining to people that Ms. Freeland wasn't very good at selling the

government's economic message. It's kind of hard to sell this economic message. But they were blaming her for it because they never take responsibility for anything themselves. And she managed to weather that through, even though the prime minister did not defend her when we did that story. And in fact, he came out and said, well, he'd been seeing that he was hoping that Mark Carney would come and join the government mr carney is no fool he's not going to join a government that's in death throes uh but he did agree but then the prime minister asked him uh to uh come up with uh to be his head of task force one man task force, provide him advice on productivity and how to revive the economy, which is another kind of her job. Yeah, kind of a kick in the teeth of the finance minister.

And now we have after this GST, really, it's a gimmick that she was pushing back on it. And so there's a lot of tension now between Ms. Freeland and the prime minister. And if you watch question period yesterday, when the opposition parties were going after Ms. Freeland and the prime minister over the tensions between them over spending, because she's not, it's very unlikely, she is not going to meet her deficit target that she promised in the spring budget. That's right. One billion. Yeah, but she's not.

She's she's she's going to have to own something that she is not in favor of. The result of this this tax vacation is going to drive up the deficit. She doesn't want it, but she's going to have to sell it. And the prime minister gets to sit there next to her with a big smile on his face. We do have some audio of Melissa Lansman talking about exactly what you're saying. We know the prime minister has lost control of spending and now he sees lost control of his own minister. We have a finance minister who won't tell us what the deficit is and a prime minister doesn't think about monetary policy. And that seems like a match made in heaven. But then again, maybe not. The Globe and Mail reports that, quote, tensions have risen between the prime minister's office and the finance minister's department,

saying that the current dynamic appears to be similar to what happened with Bill Morneau before he quit. The prime minister bullies females and he bullies finance ministers. And now he's bullying a female finance minister. How much longer is she going to put up with that? I mean, that's got to be tough to swallow if you're sitting there as the finance minister, more or less agreeing with the things that are coming out of Melissa's mouth. Yeah, well, the prime minister did not defend her at all. What he did was defend his spending. Meanwhile, she's sitting there blinking away and her head moving because, you know, she's clearly embarrassed by the situation. She got up in the house and said, you know, on this side of the house, we're united. And the whole house erupted in laughter.

When you're laughed at, as Joe Clark can tell you, when you're laughed at, you're dead. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think is the most likely path forward here, Bob? Well, I think on Monday, we're going to find out that the deficit is anywhere between 46 billion to close to 60 billion dollars. I don't know how she can survive on that. It looks like we'll probably have a cabinet shuffle in January. Can she hang on? I don't know whether she can or not, to be honest. I think her days are probably numbered. She may want to try to move to handle the Canada-U.S. relations perhaps. But the problem with that is that Trump doesn't like her. Donald Trump does not like her.

And he's made fun of the way she speaks. So I can't see that working. Yeah. And and and the only likely person who could fill up fill that finance post is Francois-Philippe Champagne. He's probably praying every night. Bob, I'm glad you mentioned Donald Trump, because I'm trying to make heads or tails of why our prime minister. well, first why he promoted himself as a feminist in a speech yesterday, but then more or less antagonized Donald Trump in that speech,

diminishing his victory, which we know Donald Trump doesn't like, essentially attributing his victory to misogyny and sexism. On the eve of this historic negotiation on on tariffs that could affect everything in our country. Like what's a guy like that thinking? Well, you know, they're so desperate. They're looking for anything to try to, um, beat, uh, Pierre Polyev. And it looks like they're heading in the, they're so desperate. They're heading in the direction and they're going to try to run

against Donald Trump in the election campaign when the government falls probably in the spring, which is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It's the dangerous thing to do. But Donald Trump is more popular in Canada, or rather, he's less unpopular in Canada than Trudeau. Trudeau is more unpopular than Trump. You know, your father always said the most important responsibility of a prime minister is Canada-U.S. relations. If he tries to do this, he is going to cause serious damage in our

relationship with the United States. I hope he doesn't do it because this is not a joke. This is not an electoral ploy that may not even work. But this is a guy who's going to be in the White House that takes revenge and retribution. And, you know, for Trudeau's electoral prospects to run against Mr. Trump, I think it would be a great disservice to the country. And I don't think it's going to work in any case well bobby he's about to go into a remote meeting with the premiers to talk about this very important negotiation on tariffs do you think he's going to get an earful from those guys about what this this this this tit for tat uh childish ego-driven speech he gave yesterday uh yeah they've got to be really concerned about it because that's our biggest trading partner.

Over 70% of our goods go to the United States, and he's already talking about tariffs of 25%. You can't play politics with this. But I was surprised when he did that. I thought, oh, no, you're not going to be that stupid. But they're desperate, right? And they'll try anything. But nothing is going to work. The problem he has is the time is up.

It's voter fatigue. He's done it for nine years. No prime minister since Mackenzie King has gone past the 10 years. It's a fact. It doesn't matter your political stripes or how good you have been. It's just that, you know, he reaches a point and people will say, that's it. That's it. It's time for turnover. Hey, Bob, I really appreciate you on the show today. This is, this is going to be,

this is going to evolve very quickly. I don't know what's going to come of this. And I, I don't, I know that the premiers are going to be upset, but I don't know if this is going to translate into his caucus being upset. I don't know if voters are going to express it through a letter-writing campaign. I don't know what's going to happen here, but that speech yesterday was god-awful, and the implications moving forward could be severe. Yeah, and in trying to say that Kamala Harris lost because of sexism. Yeah. I mean, you know, look, I thought she ran a fairly good campaign, but she wasn't going to win.

No. And it had nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman. Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. I hope to talk to you again soon. You've heard me say it before. I will continue to say it on a number of very serious files. Canada is an unserious country. Donald Trump has called us out on that lack of seriousness as it relates to our border.

Our prime minister has chosen to go tit for tat and throw some shade back at the president in an unhelpful way. But on the border, I think that Donald Trump calling us out was the right move. And this latest news by Brian Passifium in the Toronto Sun is that our Canada Border Security Agency has lost track of nearly 30,000 people wanted for deportation orders. Of the 457,000 people in Canada's deportation pipeline, nearly 30,000 of them failed to appear for their removal proceedings and cannot be located. Sure, we take these things seriously as a nation. Let's welcome Brian Passifium to the show. Brian, thanks for joining

us. Hey, good morning. Happy to be on. I mean, look, we gotta laugh at this, but this is a very serious problem, and the fact that it's so serious that our next door neighbor has called us out on it is embarrassing. Well, it's a problem that's also compounded by the fact that if you want to, if you're in order removed and you want to avoid deportation, you just not show up to your hearing. That's pretty much what I learned from reading these documents is that it just seems ridiculously easy to avoid being deported. That's something that we've heard for years, how CBSA is underfunded and in some ways not interested in finding these people. But yeah, the fact that there's 29,000 people who are to be deported but are just uh you know not showing up for the hearings and

and getting away with it it's it's it's it's shocking and it really kind of uh shows the seriousness of the problem that's going on right now but it's not a serious problem brian because according to our immigration minister mark miller uh this will this will take care of itself won't it let's listen there are many ways that people leave the country. The vast majority leave voluntarily, and that's what's expected. Yeah, there we go, Brian. No problem here. Nothing to see here. Move along. Is this a case of us sticking our head in the sand and just not wanting to see the problem that is so clearly a problem? Well, absolutely. Anybody who is privy to the numbers that I have from this from these documents, you know, there it isn't just the fact of just hoping that people are going to on their on their good graces leave one of the best countries in the world to go back home. It's it's naive to think that. And it's it's it's absolutely ridiculous that that Minister Miller would say that because that really isn't the case. And that's been proven time and time again.

People aren't interested in going back to their previous lives. Everybody who comes to Canada, whether they're a student or a worker, you know, they want to make a life here. And I understand that. Canada is a fantastic country for all its faults. Canada is still a great country to live.

And it's beyond naive to think that people will give up on a chance to raise their families in Canada just because their visas have expired. And there's a proof of that. Yeah, and Brian, it seems laughable to suggest that if CBSA doesn't have the money to keep track of these people who are in the deportation pipeline, then it's laughable to assume that they have the funding and what they need

in order to go find the people that have decided to make themselves invisible. And one of the big solutions that's being put around by the Trudeau cabinet is that the CBSA should expand their mandate to include patrolling the border, which is something that they don't do. Well, they don't have the resources to do the job that they have now. It's going to take millions, probably billions of dollars in investments of new manpower, new equipment, new techniques, new policies to be able to turn the cbs into a border patrol yeah but they

can't even do their their current job with what they have right now and i have to assume in order to do that to put new um workflows and protocols in place and and retraining people this is a generational shift this doesn't happen overnight and this doesn't happen by just simply signing over a check. No, absolutely. This is not a problem that's going to get fixed by February. This is a problem that's going to go well into the next administration. When Polyev becomes prime minister, this is one of the big problems that he's going to have to be dealing with. And one of the things that his administration is going to be judged on is by how well they solve this problem. And this isn't like

you said, this isn't a problem that's going to be fixed by throwing money or, you know, hiring new people. This is a generational issue. This is going to be an issue that goes right to the heart of a problem of what's wrong with Canada's bureaucracy right now. Well, if we needed to MacGyver a solution that could at least help find some of these 30,000 people who have found a way to just disappear, what's the quickest way we could do it? Is it empowering local police? Because the majority of the people that have disappeared are located in Ontario. So is it about talking with the OPP and Toronto police and bringing them on board to help being boots on the ground? It is a problem that's going to be solved by the provinces.

You know, I think it was Manitoba Premier Webb Canoe mentioned that. I think conservation officers are going to start doing that. I think that, you know, in Alberta, Premier Smith said something similar, how they were going to deputize local law enforcement officials and provincial law enforcement officials to help beef up the border. Because any of you listeners who have never been out west, the border out there is porous. I used to live in Regina. When you're driving south to North Dakota, it's incredibly easy just to walk across the border. I've had anecdotal stories of people who live out there who have gone hunting along the border and accidentally shown up in towns with U.S. post

mailboxes. I don't think people realize how incredibly porous the border and accidentally shown up in towns with U.S. post mailboxes. The borders and people, I don't think people realize how incredibly porous the border is. And there needs to be some sort of, and it's going to be more than manpower. It's going to need infrastructure. It's going to need drones. It's going to need monitoring systems. You know, this is Canada, you know, this is the world's longest undefended border. But at the same time, you know, you got to protect what's yours. You have to protect the national security. And if that involves putting some sort of electronic frontier across the fortnight parallel that's what it's going to have to take brian when you reference the fact that this is 30 000 people that are within quote unquote canada's deportation pipeline what does that mean in terms of their status because

they can't all be of the same status no like there's think in my story, it was 400,000 people in the pipeline, and that includes everybody from various stages of hearings, people who have been ordered a porter but are under judicial stays. But the numbers that I concentrated on in my story were the people under the wanted category. Those are people who have either not shown up for their hearings or their proceedings or people who have active arrest warrants against them issued by cbsa so these are people who know darn well what they're doing that they that they're they're they're choosing to stay put so yeah so brian these are people that if captured if we found

all 30 000 right now we would be we would have the legal standing to kick them out of the country but it doesn't make a huge dent in the millions of people that wants its population to reduce. And that's the problem. Oh, that's one of the many, many problems. So where do we go from here? What's the next step? I mean, this is further evidence that Trump and his team are going to bring to any negotiation with our prime minister and his team.

How do we show him? How do we show Donald Trump and his incoming administration that we are taking these things seriously? Because as we just said, we can't fix this problem by January. So what do we have to do to show him that we mean business on this file? We have to be a lot more demonstrative in what we're doing. We can't just talk big. The prime minister just can't hold scrums outside a cabinet meeting and say, yes, we're taking it seriously. We're doing things. They need to do things like redirect people to patrol the border. They need to actively invest, purchase, and deploy drones along the border.

You know, the U.S. regularly run drones along the Canada-U.S. border. But, you know, Canada needs to start doing the same. I think Canada for a long time has been kind of naive as to the threat that our border poses. I think everybody expects that everybody's coming into the U.S. from Mexico, but that really isn't the case anymore, especially with how porous our border is. It's an active port for terrorists, for smugglers.

Just look at the guns problem we have in our cities. It's not homegrown guns. They're guns smuggled from the West. Yeah, and Brian, it occurs to me, I can't remember the last time I saw our prime minister or anyone from his government even at the border.

No, unless he's flying over to go on vacation. Hey, thank you very much, Brian. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Anytime. Thank you so much. Welcome to Kidsplain, where kids explain how underfunded our schools are. Let's take a call from a listener.

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That's K-N-O-W-M-O-R-E dot C-A. A message from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association. Here's a question for you. What is it inside of us that makes some people more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories? And there's

different types of conspiracy theories and different ones appeal to different people. But right now, there are two major conspiracy theories running wild. One, the CEO shooter didn't do it. They got the wrong guy. Nancy Pelosi is connected. And the other is those New Jersey drones. What are they?

Some people think they are aliens or maybe foreign military spying on us. So we're joined by Nathan Radke, the co-host of the Conspiracy Theory podcast, The Uncover Up. Nathan, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me on. Okay, let's take a step back. And before we look at the conspiracy theories, let's look at those who are drawn to them. I have to assume that there are different types of people who are attracted to conspiracy theories for different reasons? Well, I mean, it's interesting when we ask ourselves what sort of person believes

conspiracy theories. The answer ultimately is all of us. Every sort of person might be susceptible to a conspiracy theory. I mean, for one thing, some conspiracy theories are actually accurate and we should believe them. But as humans in general, we're constantly taking in information through our senses. And then our brains try to turn all that mess into a story that helps us understand the world around us. And conspiracy theories are extremely seductive to our brains because they offer to explain everything that's happening. And in stressful times, and let's face it, we're in some stressful times this is a particularly appealing thing to come across because they're promising to fill in all of the missing pieces

when we don't have all of the information well yeah a few years ago it was it was q anon which was quite destructive uh quite insidious and quite harmful to a number of people i believe someone got murdered because of Pizzagate. And so, but by definition, it seems to me the sort of the first barrier to get over is you have to be a skeptic, a pure skeptic to be a conspiracy theorist. Yeah. I mean, there's skepticism, which is super healthy. But when you crank that skepticism up too far, then it turns from skepticism into paranoia. And that's when things get dangerous. And it's easy for this to happen. We spend so much time consuming media.

We start to expect the real world to be like the fictional world we see on our screens. And that's what QAnon was all about. It was a conspiracy theory that turned the complicated world into this simple place with good guys and bad guys. And everything that happened meant something and it's connected to some kind of plot. And it gave us this idea that if we could just figure out the puzzle pieces, we could fix everything that's wrong. But the truth is, the world is actually a very unsatisfying place a lot of the time, with coincidences that don't mean anything, and chaos and complexity and gray areas. I mean, there's very complicated reasons why things are the way that they are.

And it can't just be reduced to bad things happen because bad people are secretly pulling strings. Yeah. But that's an idea that we want to believe so badly. And then, you know, you've got the situation that affected so many of us with the origins of the COVID-19 virus, that anybody who suggested that it originated in a lab in Wuhan that was studying that very thing was labeled a conspiracy theorist. And now that's less of a theory. And it's in a lot of circles, it's viewed as if not fact,

pretty darn close to fact. And so when you see something like that, it adds fuel, it bolsters and emboldens conspiracy theories saying, I told you so, I told you they were lying to us. And when you have that as an example in the real world, then it makes all these other conspiracies in those people's minds all the more likely. Yeah, absolutely. And we saw something similar in the last few years with things like UFOs. For decades, governments have been saying, no, there are no UFOs. This is ridiculous. They're all easily explainable.

And then in the last two years, the government finally comes out and says, okay, you know what? We're not saying that they're aliens, but there definitely are some things in the sky that we don't know what they are. And so, yes, UFOs are real. And, again, this sort of plays into people's paranoia because then they can say, well, wow, we've been lied to and being like gaslit for decades. This is why transparency and honesty from people in power is so crucial because once you sort of burst that bubble of trust, it's almost impossible to get back. And once that happens, then like false conspiracy theories and scammers can can jump into that arena and just take advantage of a vulnerable population. Well, let's dig into the most recent one that we're dealing with right now is that the CEO shooter didn't do it. They got the wrong guy. And,

you know, I was talking a little bit earlier that at his first opportunity to speak to the press as he was being hauled into jail, he screamed to screamed to the world's press that was covering him. He didn't scream, I didn't do it, I'm a patsy, you got the wrong guy. He said some nonsense about lived experience, and this is an insult to the American people. So what do you make of that? Well, I mean, this is an example of exactly what we were just talking about, that we want there to be a satisfying narrative.

When something shocking happens, we want there to be a satisfying narrative. When something shocking happens, we want there to be some kind of cause that is sort of almost cinematic in scope. But the sad truth of it is the more we're going to learn about this guy, probably the sadder his story is going to get. And rather than being part of some interesting, fantastic movie-style plot,

it's just going to probably be a little bit sad and a little bit depressing. Yeah. And so it's, it's, it's not surprising that we instead jump to these fantastic theories because they're just not as sad to us. And it is easier to dismiss sort of the photo evidence. I mean, I look, once I saw the picture of this guy and I saw the picture of him in his mask and all I could see were his eyes. To me, the eyes were identical. I mean, identical. They're very distinctive, very easy to identify. But with deep fakes being what they are today and Photoshop being as good as it is,

you can't necessarily believe your eyes. So it is hard to fight against these theories on an even playing field. Yeah, I mean, we're absolutely in a crisis of reality right now because, as you say, of things like deep fake technology, because of generative AI, you can pretty much instantly conjure up an image that will look pretty realistic at first glance. And they're only going to get better and better and better, which means that the zone is going to get flooded with more and more convincing disinformation. And so we have, unfortunately, a bit of a responsibility to get better at recognizing the difference between information and disinformation and misinformation. And we're

going to have to do it early and we're going to have to do it often because this is the world that we're moving into. Nathan, talk to me about these New Jersey drones. I honestly have no idea what they are. I don't know why the Air Force is letting them stick around. I don't know why they're just floating there. I don't know why they keep coming back. I've never seen anything like it. So I kind of am open to any answer that somebody wants to give me. Yeah, that's the thing, especially for something like that.

And because in the last few years, as we were saying, there has been so much talk about UFO, it's completely understandable that people immediately jump to, well, this has got to be aliens. But you said something really important. You said you didn't know what they are. And this is something that we need to do more and more often. We need to admit, you know what? We don't know what these are. I'm going to wait until I have more good information to make up my mind.

Just doing that one thing can make us more resilient to fighting off things like disinformation and misinformation. I guess in our last couple of minutes, I got to ask, who killed JFK? Ah, you know, that's a really long and complicated question that we would take more than a couple of minutes to cover. No, you only have two minutes, Nathan. Only two minutes. In that case, I'd use that two minutes to cover. No, you only have two minutes, Nathan. Only two minutes. In that case, I'd use that two minutes to suggest that people listen to our hour-long episode

on the Uncover Up about who killed JFK. Excellent. What did you think of the movie JFK? Because it was a heck of a thriller. I don't know if it was rooted in reality, but it was a heck of a thriller. I mean, that's the other thing, right? It was a heck of a thriller,

but there's always that danger in that we see something like that in a film, which is for entertainment. And then we confuse that with the documentary or reality. It's always important to keep your fiction and your reality separate, even as it becomes harder and harder to do. A lot of conspiracy theories are just fun. A lot of them are silly. What's the most dangerous one that is floating around these days? The most insidious one, the one that could cause real damage to society and fray us at the edges? Well, I mean, we've seen a lot of conspiracies that can cause damage. A lot of the stuff about the vaccine ended up getting people killed. A lot of the stuff about COVID ended up getting people killed. But personally, I think any kind of

conspiracy that tries to scapegoat a group in the population. Yeah. Any kind of conspiracy that tries to make an enemy out of people or tries to dehumanize a group of people. These are the conspiracies that can have like extremely horrifying consequences. And we've seen this throughout history. Again, we have a responsibility to recognize that when somebody is trying to do this, to manipulate us and to prevent them from doing it. Nathan Radke, co-host of the Conspiracy Theory Podcast, The Uncover Up. Appreciate your time.

I hope that the next time one of these conspiracy theories rears its head, you'll come join us to either say, get on board or to tell us to back away. We appreciate it. I'd be happy to. It feels like as a society, we are slowly but surely waking up from the fugue state that we've been in for the past few years, being governed by emotion, placing a premium on how we feel about things versus how things actually are by judging people in history based on the social mores and ethics and values of today, feels like that time is slowly going away. But for a time, we were very eager to look down our noses

at our forefathers, at the people who built this country, and point out the idiosyncrasies of the time as failures, as failings, as moral fail failings and pointing at those things and saying for that reason for those reasons those people are not worthy of holding a place of honor in our society ever again we saw with henry dundas we saw it with ryerson we've seen it with a number of people but no more so and i think no more inaccurately than with our first prime minister, who my father, I believe, accurately held in the highest esteem as the greatest prime minister in the history of this country, Sir John A. Macdonald. Many of his statues have been toppled. Buildings bearing his name have been changed. And I'm glad to see that we're now living in a time where we can have an

honest conversation about the things that this person did right. And the things that this person did wrong, but also remember that without this person, the Canada, as we know it would not exist. I'm joined now by the author of the new book, Sir, Sir,

Johnny McDonald and the apocalyptic year, 1885, Patrice.utille. Patrice, thank you so much for coming to the show. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. So let's talk for a moment about, you chose in order to tell the story of Sir John A. in this book to focus on one year. You refer to it as micro history. Talk to me about what makes that valuable and why it appealed to you to look specifically at the year 1885. more interesting to see how the whole cascade of events seem to be colliding with each other through the year 1885. You have a wave after wave of crisis, foreign affairs, you have relationship with the United States, you have, of course, the confrontation with the Métis

under Louis Riel, you have plague. You have the issue of starvation. You have the issue of Canada's relations with the indigenous people. You have electoral reform. You have a whole bunch of things. Everything's happening in 1885. So really, it's the whole cascading events of 1885 make it captivating.

Yes. Yeah, and what I liked in the early parts of the book you referenced, because you take such a short time frame, Make it captivating. Yes. we are living in a time where he is a lightning rod of controversy, but, but according to your book, a lot of, a lot of that controversy is either grossly exaggerated or unfounded altogether. Yes. Well, there's,

yeah. I mean, I think there's, as you said in your introduction, and we've, we've now, and we've entered a period and I'm, I'm delighted to think to,

to hear you say that it might be over. I'm not convinced of that. But we've gone through a period now, over close to a decade, where everything MacDonald has done has been seen to be wrong. MacDonald is portrayed as somebody who didn't do anything, when in fact, it's the opposite. John A. MacDonald did a great deal in addressing the issues of his time. And what I want to show in this book is how he did it. And to do this in a documented fashion, pointing to the record, pointing to what he thought. So to do this through the months, as the months progressed and through the year.

So, yeah, things like, for example, the most obvious controversy, the issue that Sir John A. Macdonald starved people on the prairies, starved them to death. I don't find a lot of evidence for that. There are people, of course, who went hungry. It was extremely difficult for the government of Canada to send food to the Northwest. It required enormous technology. The railway did not exist. Yeah. Keep going.

The railway didn't exist? The railway didn't exist. So, yeah, I mean, it was very difficult to move food. And, of course, you could not move food until after November. Again, we're talking about out west. So you had to calculate, you know, food rations. And inevitably inevitably people did go hungry in april and may the crops aren't coming in and it's again we're expecting the government to

we're expecting the government to calculate all this but people did suffer hunger i'm not denying that what was the 1880s too people are suffering all the time for a lot of reasons that they don't suffer today but you look at you you you look today. But you look at the federal budget as an example. Listen, you want to know a government's priorities? Look at the federal budget. To me, that is a mirror. What a government believes is mirrored in its budget. And based on the budget that you tell us about, this was a huge priority for the prime minister.

It's the third or fourth priority government canada is spending huge amounts of money on indian affairs it's certain and it keeps growing until 1885 after 1885 the railway is installed it's a lot easier to move food there's nobody people are not starving anymore of course you know the indigenous population out west is still stricken with all sorts of diseases and tuberculosis. I'm not disputing that. But I'm saying, you know, the McDonald government did respond and created programs for experimental farms, for model farms. It sent over agents.

It tried, you know. And despite, Patrice, despite pushback from the opposition in the House of Commons who said he was doing too much. He was doing too much. I mean, you've got to put MacDonald in his context and to topple his statues. I mean, nine of the 11 statues that existed in Canada when we celebrated the bicentennial of MacDonald in 2015 have now been removed. And I think that's really unfair. There was a reason why Canadians erected monuments to MacDonald immediately after his death in 1967 when we celebrated the centenary of Canada

because the man was recognized, justly recognized as the most influential prime minister in our country. Setting up a country is not an easy thing to do. And he accomplished that i think that we have to i'm not saying that he's beyond criticism of course everyone every single public official everyone from soup to nuts is worthy of of criticism it is it is insane to hold people from the 1880s to the uh to to a moral standard that everyone today would fail at. And we only have time for one more, but I want to talk, let's go even farther west to

British Columbia and the calls by the British Columbians to circumscribe the rights of Asian Canadians or the Asian population. Yes, yes. Well, I mean, again, McDonald is constantly criticized for levying a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants. And, you know, he did that. And people might think it's wrong. But if you look at it in the context of his day, Canada was the most generous jurisdiction on the Pacific Rim. Nobody admitted Chinese immigrants in 1885, not Australia, not New Zealand, not Japan, not the United States. It's, you know, again, by today's standards, and even by today's standards, you know, it's actually worth calculating.

A $50 head tax today is about $1,500. We actually charge immigrants $3,000 to apply for Canadian citizenship. So, I mean, you know, we can criticize MacDonald, but put him in his context. You know, he created a Royal Commission. The Royal Commission said there's nothing wrong with Chinese men. They're honorable people. They work hard.

They contribute to Canadian society. We have no business saying that they are bad people. A Royal Commission appointed by MacDonald, he knew exactly who he appointed to lead that commission. He tried to lead public opinion, but, of course who he appointed to lead that commission. He tried to public opinion, but of course, he has to follow his caucus. He has to follow the liberal opposition. He had no choice. He had no choice. This is a democracy. The name of the game is to get reelected. And sometimes you have to make compromises. And through 1885, McDonald made

all sorts of compromises. That's what it's like to be in government. And we have to remember that. Look, I'm about to say something that is evident to anybody who's been paying attention to the news for the past two years. AI is a big deal. AI is a big deal. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into developing this technology that is changing industries at lightning fast speed. It is driving down costs. It is shortening timelines.

It is helping us in ways we could have never imagined when it when it was first really made commonplace a few years ago. And over the summer, I think Apple surprised everybody by saying they were ready to jump into the AI revolution with what they call Apple intelligence. It was coming to smartphones soon and pretty much all of their devices in short order. Well, in Canada, that day is today. And we're joined by Kurt Knight, the senior director of platform product marketing at Apple. He's calling us from Toronto. Kurt, welcome to the show. Thank you. Excited to be here. He's calling us from Toronto. Kurt, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Excited to be here. It's an exciting day. You know, I think a lot of people were taken aback when Apple announced Apple Intelligence because to outside observers, you know, a lot of big companies had staked their claim to the revolution a few years earlier, investing a lot of money. You went a different route. You partnered with ChatGPT to create sort of your own version of this for consumers. Well, the core of our system is

actually all Apple design, Apple built. And what we've really done is focused on personal intelligence, a system that you can trust with all of your data, all of your writing, all your photos, things that you want to take action on, all protected privately. But we also know that the people want sort of broad world knowledge. So people also have the option, if they want to, of using chat CPT to go and get that world knowledge while they use all of our models for everything that's personal that they want private. Yeah, Kurt, we'll talk about security in a minute. Let's just talk about how this is going to change the experience because there are so many people who love their Apple products.

And this is a quantum leap forward in terms of how they can use their products and how useful their product is going to be for them. So, for example, look, years ago I used to have a personal assistant who would help me with all sorts of stuff. I no longer have a personal assistant who would help me with all sorts of stuff. I no longer have a personal assistant. I got to do it all myself. And stuff falls through the cracks, specifically as it relates to using texts and emails. I tell people I'm going to write back to them, and I forget.

Is Apple Intelligence going to be able to help me manage those relationships better and remind me, hey, you promised you were going to email Kurt today. You're going to get on that. Yeah, there is something for everyone here from a sort of a business standpoint, being productive. We have notification summaries, priority emails, things that help you. The deluge of information you get help to surface some of the most important things in a concise, easy-to-understand way. I use summaries in emails all the time. You get those really long things where you're not sure you want to invest the time to read the whole thing. With one click, I can just get a quick summary that gives me the gist of everything in an email. And, Kurt, when we say it's available

today, it's not just available on new iPhones, correct? So this is a free software update out today for iOS on iPhone, iPadOS on iPad, as well as macOS. And it's on iPad and Mac. It's every device with the Apple M1 processor or later. And for iPhone, it's iPhone 15 Pro and later. So all of the current generation 16 models are supported. And there's also a big change. I mean, when I hear AI, I also think, how is that going to affect Siri? Because I interact with Siri all the time. Sometimes she does not give me what I ask for.

I assume that powered by Apple intelligence, I'm going to get a little more. Well, first of all, Siri is used by people all the time. There's over a billion requests to Siri every single day. And you're right. With Apple intelligence, Siri is going to get even better. In these latest release, Siri is a to get even better. In these latest release, Siri is a lot better with sort of conversational. You start talking like, well, actually, no, I didn't mean that. I meant this, the ums, the ahs. When you start talking

and assume that Siri remembers the context of what you're talking about, it's going to remember that. Siri actually now knows everything about our products. So if you want to ask how to use a feature, um, learn more about how to use your, uh, Siri. Well, cause I always used to think that as powerful as a, an iPhone was, or any smartphone for that matter was, it was only as smart as the person using it. And I don't pretend to know everything about, uh, about every aspect of my phone. And so to have a product inside it that will maximize or optimize my use of it, that to me is, is it's really, it's really heartening to be honest. Now I wouldn't be doing my job, Kurt, I wouldn't be doing my job if I, if I didn't go back to the security question, because when Apple launched Apple intelligence and to much fanfare

and in me, you have a fan just know that, but Elon Musk, love him or hate him, one of the most influential people in the world, really took issue with how AI found its way to Apple. Going so far as to say if any employees at any of his companies were using Apple products, they'd have to leave them at the desk or leave them at home. So what did you make of that issue he had with your product? And since that announcement, have you done, I have to assume there's been even more work to ensure privacy? Well, if Elon is listening, I can reassure him he has nothing to worry about. And we didn't have to make changes. We have designed privacy security into the core of this feature set from day one. So specifically to ChatGPT, first of all, again, this is an option for people who want to have more information. It's off by

default. And if you use it, it's very clear that you're choosing to use ChatGPT. And we've worked with OpenAI to have, I think, the most private implementation in the world. So by default, all of your requests are anonymized. We've worked with OpenAI so they do not store, use, train any of the requests or information that are sent to them from our users. And so everything has been designed to be private by default. And if you're a business and you still want even more control, businesses have the ability to make sure that that's turned off for their employees and so they don't even have the option to use it.

So no matter where you are on this, you are completely covered. Kurt, people have that fear that their battery is going to run out and they're constantly looking for a charger on good days. And I don't know a lot about AI, but I do know it takes, it requires a lot of computing power, computing power requires battery power. How have you squared that circle for the consumer? Well, it's something we're really good at is designing powerful features that run

well on device. And so our features that both have features that run device and in the cloud and on device, they're incredibly battery efficient. And they are in the cloud as well, which by the way, unlike anyone else, when you send information to our cloud, we've extended the privacy security model of our phones to the cloud so they are not being seen or retained or used by Apple. It's just between you and your device. And even in the cloud, they're incredibly power efficient. We're actually using all renewable energy to support all of our data centers. It's right. Listen, you know, I remember years ago when BlackBerry was taking was taking aim at at Apple saying that it didn't have the security, uh, for business

and, uh, and, and Apple rose to the challenge. And I, I I'm viewing this situation the same way that when, when, when faced with a challenge, Apple says, all right, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to see it at any time. I see Apple in the news, uh, as it relates to security features, when, you know you know, there are court cases that they want to get into a phone. The story is always told about how impenetrable the phone is. So I personally have no, no fears or worries about that. And I'm just glad, I guess I'm glad that you've dealt with the battery power. We only have about a minute left. Kurt, tell me, there's a couple of really cool features that are coming to photos as well. Yeah, so a bunch, actually.

So, first of all, there's cleanup. So if you ever have, you know, someone photo bomb you in the background, you didn't quite want them there, other little distracting objects, with just a tap, you can remove those from your photos. We are using the power of the language and visual understanding so that you can now find a photo or video that you want. Just descriptively talk about who it is, where they were, what they're wearing, or the car that you're looking for, and it can find things just using natural language. Or you can even create a photo memory just by describing what you want. I can have the photo memory of me and my dad,

you know, hiking over the years. That's awesome. Kurt, I want to ask you for it. Kurt, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on the launch of Apple. I should not be more excited. This is really a new era for us and our hardware. For a lot of us, the toppling of Bashar al-Assad's terrible regime in Syria caught a lot of us off guard. And we've, at least on this show, we've decided to wait a couple of days to maybe let things settle a little bit before we decide to jump in. It's a moving target. But now that it's been about a week, we thought it was important to ask, where does the Syria conflict go next? What does it mean for the Middle East? And let's welcome Richard Goldberg from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

to the show. Richard, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thanks for having me. So what I'd like to do, Richard, is I'd like to start specifically with Syria and then pull out and look at the wider region. Because, you know, the Syrian people have been under the boot of Bashar al-Assad for a very long time. There has been at least the visuals that I've seen on online and on television. There has been a joyous reaction to this in the streets. But talk to me about who Bashar al-Assad was and what it means now that he's gone, if in fact we know what it means yet. Yeah, this is probably one of the most complicated, complex, nuanced environments on the face of the earth. I mean, you ask a foreign

policy expert to tell you their thoughts on North Korea, they'll give you, you know, chapter and verse. You ask about even Russia, Ukraine, which itself is complicated, but you get to Syria and people for the last decade have looked at you funny, saying just not sure what to tell you, because the brokenness inside the factionalization inside Syria for many years since the civil war broke out, you know, now 14 years ago almost is is really something. time, previous dictator in Syria, a client of both Russia and Iran, defended in that regime by Hezbollah, Iran's flagship terrorist organization in southern Lebanon that had rushed to his defense as opposition forces tried to topple his regime at the beginning of the Arab Spring back in 2011. We remember the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people. And I remember President Obama saying he was going to use military action to intervene in that civil war on behalf of what at the time appeared to be more secular democratic forces trying to topple the regime. Is that the change this time? Is that the change between the last

failed attempt to take him down and this successful takedown of his regime? Well, the big change here is you look back, the United States did not intervene back then, and that gave Russia and Iran the space to save Assad from collapse last time. This time around, Russia is overstretched and focused on Ukraine. Now, that's been going on for almost three years now, so you can't say that's the linchpin here to bring down Assad. What has really changed in the last month is Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps got wiped out in Lebanon and Syria by the Israeli defense forces in their campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, but people forget also in Syria as well. And so once that line of defense was gone, Iran tried to send some resupply.

The Israelis turned around planes reportedly. The Russians could only do so much. Assad was a shell of his old self. People didn't realize how weak and vulnerable he really was. The Turks and this group called HTS, which is the 2.0 version of al-Qaeda in Syria, which should give us all a little pause when we say that out loud, rushed to take advantage of this vacuum and unexpectedly moved from the northwest, moving on down south all the way to the capital. And in the end, Assad had to flee and the regime has fallen. That's where we find ourselves now. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone has to fill the leadership at the top. And right now it looks like rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Gholani is the man at the top, more or less.

And as you said, the leader of HTS, it's a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. and the U.N. So what is the – I know what Israel has done. Israel, in a defensive action, has wiped out the Air Force and has taken defensive position in between Syria and Israel. I think that was, to me, a very smart move. But what are we doing in the West? Are we holding our breath? Are we trying to navigate this? Are we trying to bring this guy on side? What's what's what's the play?

Well, the good news is that this is a big loss for Iran and a semi big loss for Russia. The big, big, big loss here is Iran's because this was a major transshipment point for weapons onto Israel's border. With Hezbollah wiped out, it significantly degraded southern Lebanon. Now Assad falling in Syria, this ring of fire that Iran had created to try to take control of the Middle East is rapidly collapsing. That's the good news. The bad news is we don't fully understand Golani's intentions at this point. As far as we can tell, he is the 2.0 creation of Al Qaeda in Syria and its HTS group, the former al-Nusra front. In my view, unless proven differently, we're sort of dealing with an Al Qaeda leader in a suit. So it's sort of like dealing with the Taliban all of a sudden,

where it's like, oh, we're not really terrorists. We want peace until you take control and then you see what happens. Exactly. Yeah. They have their interests, which are maybe not aligned with ours if they are, in fact, radical Islamists. We might see a resurgence of ISIS to compete with HTS control in Damascus. We've got to keep an eye on that. We obviously have the Turks and what they're going to do with their own forces that they backed to create their own buffer zone. And they're going to want to try to wipe out the Kurdish forces on their border and prevent any autonomous Kurdish region in Syria from forming. The Israelis you mentioned have their interests, keeping chemical weapons stockpiles and missiles and air defense and air forces and naval forces.

Everything Assad has left behind, his entire military apparatus, the Israelis are doing us a favor and destroying it all so that radical Islamists don't take control of it and ensure that they don't have these ISIS or al-Qaeda guys on their border. What do we do? Well, Richard, but what do we do after January 20th with the Donald Trump of it all? This is a man who likes to project american strength but also donald trump's strength around the world essentially warning people don't step out of line this i i i he prided himself on on on sort of the the global peace uh that more or less existed during his first term um i don't know that he would be very happy. I don't know what happened to that narrative

if on his first day in office, you know, Islamic terrorists took over Syria. That's it's not a good look for him. And he wouldn't like that one bit. No, I think that's right. And he's taking the right approach, in my view, which is to say, go slow, do nothing at the moment, let it play out. That was his message on Truth Social. That, to me, makes a lot of sense. That's not the same as saying, relieve all sanctions immediately, get out, pull out the troops that remain at the Al-Tanf garrison, which gives us some leverage at the moment. There are cards he can play when he comes into office, and we will know a lot more about people's intentions and control and who's who in the zoo when you get to January 20th, looking a month and a half away. At that point, you get to decide, what do we do with U.S.

sanctions policy on Syria, which is blocking a lot of reconstruction or foreign assistance coming into these groups at the moment? Are there conditions you put on those sanctions? Do you keep them? Do you relieve them? Do you relieve them only for certain groups? And what are those conditions? Do you keep the troops in Syria? Do you want to monitor to see if ISIS is going to try to come back and rebuild the caliphate? I don't think Donald Trump will hesitate to use military force against radical terrorists who threaten the West. We now have an incredible moment to seize in the vulnerability of the regime in Iran as they sit so close to the nuclear weapons threshold. Israel has done us a great service in enabling the collapse of Assad, destroying all the Iranian infrastructure in Syria, really degrading Hezbollah. And that means that if Donald Trump wants to reimpose maximum pressure and really try to get rid of Iran's nuclear program, he has a pretty clear runway. With only a couple of sentences, Richard, because I don't have a lot of time, is Israel in a better position today than they were prior to the fall of the Assad regime? It

feels to me like they might be, even though it might be a temporary situation, it feels like a better situation for them today. It's definitely a better situation because the existential danger to them is Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons and all the missile capabilities. It's built not just in Iran, but on its borders. If they can degrade all the strategic capabilities that were in Syria, which they're doing right now, and they've degraded the strategic capabilities that Iran built in Lebanon and Hamas has been degraded in Gaza. They are absolutely in a much better position. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. We hope you enjoyed it.

We hope you'll join us again tomorrow for another stacked edition of The Ben Mulroney Show.