The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben asks callers if China is the biggest threat to Global Trade

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Ben asks callers if China is the biggest threat to Global Trade? 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At first, it was nice. Hey mom, can you drive me to soccer practice? Sure can. We're having slow cooked ribs for dinner. It was awesome. And then it became a lot. Some friends are coming over to watch a movie. Oh, what are we watching? I'll make some popcorn. Thanks to Voila, they can order all our fresh favorites from Sobeez, Farmboy, and Longos online, which is super reliable. And now my parents are reliable. A little too reliable. Voila.

Your groceries delivered. Just like that. Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney Show. Thank you so much for joining us on this Friday. And before we wrap up and send you off to enjoy the rest of your day and have a great weekend, I want to talk about the really good points I thought that Kevin O'Leary made in our previous segment where he laid out the threat posed by China and why he's an advocate for even greater tariffs by the United States on China. He spoke of their infringing on intellectual property rights,

costing billions of dollars to, and costing the lives of so many small businesses that when they finally get their footing, when they finally get their footing, and they decide to manufacture in China, once they've proven out that they have a product and a market fit, the Chinese just come in and steal the IP, make it themselves and undercut the competition. And those businesses sometimes

go out of business. And then if you want to litigate that, there's no way to do it. You cannot sue them in an American court. You can't take them to court in China. And so he laid it out very, very well. And I want to hear from you. Give us a call. I want to hear from you. Do you think Kevin O'Leary made a good case? Did he win you over? Do you see China as the biggest threat that we are facing?

John, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Hey, Ben. You know, this is the line in the sand for me when I heard about the MP from like, Univille Markham and his alliance on the tail end of four Canadians being put to death. And Mark Carney says, an apology is okay. Then he puts another person with ties of China in his police uniform, pledging allegiance to whatever party in China. And I'm just dumbfounded how no one thinks that that's not a problem. Well, John, because Mark Carney is not being a forthright

with his answers, we are left to speculate, right? With the WeChat thing, the Paul Chang thing, the next guy, the fact that he's never said anything negative about China. In fact, he's always almost overly effusive about them. Now he's talking about our relationship with America is effectively over. They are the enemy. They want to take us over. Okay, so where does that leave us in terms of going out to go out and get and trade our goods and our services? I have to wonder whether this whole thing is a play

to reposition ourselves into the sphere of influence of China. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, John, but I don't have any data to take me anywhere else but to speculate. Well, the interesting thing is too, and like, I mean, my mental health, unfortunately I'm paying attention to this way more, But if you just listen to him talking, he's like, we need to, you know, shore up the border.

They were asked to do that two months ago. Yeah. Like about the guns in the federal. And then he's talking about, you know, you know, I really appreciate all the loggers. But I'm like, well, you're talking about building national parks. John, I'm going to listen. I'm going to leave you there and wish you a good weekend because I want to stay on topic with China. We had you brought up some great points. Let's turn the microphone over to Mike.

Mike, what do you think? Ben, again, not a big fan. You're losing me, Ben. In this last conversation that felt completely flat. You are 100% about China, 100%. Yes, they take our product, they copy it, they don't pay and they infringe constantly. But to have the guy from Dragon's Den who drives me absolutely crazy every time I see the show, oh, I'd rather go build it in China.

It's too expensive to make it in North America. He's being a hypocrite. Absolutely. And you fell for it. No, well, hold on. Celebrity, Ben. Hold on. In celebrity bed, not on CTV anymore, interviewing celebrities. You're taking the side of the taxpayer. This guy is a flake. Absolute flake. Well, look, I fell for nothing, Mike, and I thank you for your call. I fell for nothing.

He laid out a threat as he sees it, and if he's built stuff in China before, which he has said, he's not hiding that. He said it in Congress. He's not hiding that at all. What he's saying is he wants the rules to apply to China so that everyone can succeed. And so if you listen, you clearly don't like him. Mike clearly doesn't like him and that's fine. That doesn't mean he doesn't make a good point. And there you go. I fell for nothing, Mike, nothing. Call back anytime, by the way.

You're always welcome. Dan, welcome to the show. Good morning. Actually, the last caller said what I wanted to say about Kevin O'Leary being a hypocrite. However- But how is he a hypocrite? I mean, if that's where the best chance of success is

for his business, what's he supposed to do? Hang on, hang on. This is my world in manufacturing. Yeah, please, go ahead. I deal with this all day long, especially the tariffs. But this has been going on for 30 years, this flight to China, and it has nothing to do with the government.

This is all the corporations and all the bean counters and every company saying, hey, I'm going to save $15,000 shipping my tooling, which I was doing in Coburg or Newmarket this year. I'm going to ship it to China and save 15 grand. And this slowly has been happening for 30 years. It's all the corporations, it's all the companies. And then people are complicit, the consumers are complicit because look how great Walmart does, right?

Everyone loves going to Walmart. Well, that is watching your hundreds of thousands of jobs, well-paying jobs being sucked out of the country and the US. And now they're blaming it on China. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's food for thought, certainly food for thought. And, you know, I think I think there was a push, there was a push to to get similar value for the cost of production in places like Vietnam. And then Trump turned around and then tariff Vietnam, which is he wanted

at least the US government wanted people to move to Vietnam. Dan, thank you for your call. We've got who's next we've got Angela. Angela, welcome to the show. Hi, Ben. Yeah, I work for a company in Richmond Hill, and we made this fantastic movie camera and sold it to filmmakers all around the world. And of course, China ordered one and they did they reverse engineer it? No, well, they tried. Yeah. But we had two brilliant engineers that own the company. And they told me that they protected they somehow they made the software that it could not be broken into. Oh, interesting. You know, never able to copy. I work for a company as an advisor. It's a green tech company and they have,

the chemical composition of their product is not patented because when you patent something, you've got to list all the ingredients and the ratios of those ingredients. So they decide they were not going to do that. Instead, it's protected by trade secrets so that they don't have to divulge it because there is such a fear of the Chinese coming in sweeping and undercutting them and killing the business. But Angela, thank you.

I just wanted to mention that Kevin didn't talk about the dumping and that's one thing we ran into. China dumps, like we bought like tens of thousands of nuts and bolts and screws. Yeah. And China will dump our markets, Canada and US. Oh, interesting. Yeah. With their stuff that is maybe less than half the price. Yeah. And this is what they do. So they deserve these tariffs. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Have a great weekend. And thanks for sharing that story. Dave, you are, you're agreeing with Kevin. I do, Ben. I think he makes perfect sense what he's saying. There are a lot of technology gets stolen, cheaper products manufactured ship back across. I also agree with him 100% that the US doesn't want to do anything until they see who's in power here.

And then we'll be in a better position to work a little bit closer with him and try and get these problems resolved. Dave, thanks, Ben. Enjoy the show. Thank you very much. You take care. Who's next? Frank, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Hey, Ben Ben, enjoy the show. Thank you very much. You take care. Who's next? Frank, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Hey, Ben, how are you? I'm great. Thanks. I like listening to

your show. I don't always agree with you, but I like listening. Well, you know, I don't expect everyone to always agree. I hope to have good conversation and look, every now and then my mind gets changed. So it's worth a listen for those moments. I can promise you that. We're going to go back to two callers where he said about Kevin O'Leary and going into China. And he said that had nothing to do with the government, the Chinese government. Of course it has everything to do with the Chinese government because people fail to understand

that the Chinese government intentionally keeps their currency low to maintain slave labor to build the products that we buy at the same price or whatever. And everyone thinks, oh, China's a powerhouse. They're really a paper tiger. They have stolen so much technology. People forget what's happened in this country with Northern Telecom. Yeah. Yeah. Chinese espionage and people forget about it. But because they keep their won, their currency so low, why do you think

manufacturers flock there? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's also because we have an appetite for low-cost goods here in the West. There's no limit to how far criminals will go to cover their tracks. But investigators will go even further to uncover the truth. I'm Nancy Hicks, a senior crime reporter for Global News. This season on Crime Beat, I'll take you from the crime scene to the courtroom

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