The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben reacts to Mark Carney's first interview since being Elected Prime Minister

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

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Welcome to the Ben Mulrooney show. Thank you for joining us on this hump day edition of the Ben Mulrooney show. I am your host Ben Mulrooney. And I was away yesterday. I had an event in my schedule that actually predated the Ben Mulroney show, and I could not get out of it. And I missed a lot. I missed the announcement of the cabinet. We're going to be talking about that a little bit later. But yesterday, our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, elected to form government, sat down with CTV's Vashi Kapilous. And I have to say it was a wide ranging interview. They spoke on a lot of subjects

I think important to a lot of Canadians. And Vashi to her credit, asked a lot of questions that people like myself have of Mark Carney. Hopefully one day I will be able to ask him those questions myself and perhaps new ones as well. The invitation is always open to the prime minister to join us here on the Ben Mulroney show.

But in the meantime, let's break down some of the key points that came out of this interview. Vashy asked Mark Carney how he was looking at his cabinet as a whole. So there's some similarities. There's experience, experience being deployed in different ways. I'm a new Prime Minister.

And let's look at the cabinet as a whole. Because I'm not quite sure I make the distinction between the quote front bench and the cabinet as a whole. We only have 28 cabinet ministers. That's down from the mid upper 40s, some previous governments. Half of those ministers are new. Never been cabinet ministers before. In many cases, they're new to Parliament as a whole.

So we're bringing in a lot of fresh energy, fresh ideas, fresh perspectives, alongside with experience. And that's, that's a good team. That's a good management team in my judgment. Obviously, I spent a lot of time trying to construct it that way. Yeah, listen, I'm not going to complain for the sake of complaining. My biggest chief complaint of this cabinet is the gender balance of it all, the 2015 of it all, if you will, 38% of his caucus is female, but 50% of his cabinet is female, which tells me that he prioritized gender

over the best people. That is a binary choice. Not everything in life is binary. That's a binary choice. By definition, prioritized the appearance of progressiveness over making sure that you had the best people in. And look, we've been doing it for years. This is another layer of that we've been we do it when we try to balance the the cabinet regionally and linguistically. Those are choices we have made as a country,

no matter who's been in power. The liberals have now added this additional layer of performance over, not performance, performance suggested the performance of the people there, but the pageantry, the look of progressive values over the actual performance of for and striving for excellence, and and it just it is what it is. So that was disappointing. But he did have a really difficult job to do that people decided that they wanted him and his team to represent Canada and form government and And so that's just a fact. There's no mincing words, and I'm not somebody who is gonna complain about that.

It's just, it's the fact. So how does he put a new face on an old team? And we'll have to see whether the choices he made translates into a successful government or not. I'm not gonna complain yet because he hasn't done anything with it yet. We'll have to see. But he, Vashy, continued on pushing him on why you've got the same faces in there. How is that different?

Constructed that way. And I do take the point on the fresh faces. But even when you point to the experience of those who are in the sort of biggest roles. The reason why I highlight them is because they were at the forefront of the decisions that the previous government made. I disagree with that. They were, I mean, Melanie Jolie, Francois-Philippe Champagne, he led the industrial policy.

Now he'll be in charge of finance. Dominique LeBlanc led a lot of those files as well. We are used to hearing from them, justifying and explaining the decisions that Justin Trudeau made. So now we're gonna hear from them again. Well, first off, now you're hearing from me. I'm a new Prime Minister. I'm the 24th Prime Minister of Canada.

I've got a very clear set of objectives which I laid out in the course of my initial government from that cabinet table, cancel the carbon tax right there. In fact, just to our right, my first act. But developing this focus on one Canadian economy, getting rid of internal trade barriers, we'll do our job by Canada today, that means the federal government, we're working with the provinces

so that they can move out of the way. Some of them are moving really fast, Nova Scotia, Ontario, others moving fast, we're trying to get all of them. But plus unlocking these major projects that are gonna build this economy for the next generations, not just growth today, but growth for generations. That's a focus. That is an entirely new focus of this government. Yeah, there's there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, he referenced

interprovincial trade barriers and the one Canadian economy. I believe he's got one minister who's in charge of the one Canadian economy, and one that's in charge of interprovincial trade barriers. I don't know that those things, there's a difference between them. So I don't know why one has one. They're the same thing. One Canadian economy implies you're getting rid of interprovincial trade barriers. So that to me, there's a redundancy there that somebody's going to have to explain. I take his point. He was elected on a new platform. The people were asked to choose and they chose this team based on his new platform. And so in that way, there is a reset.

You can't, I'm not gonna go back and say, oh, but they were the face of the Justin Trudeau party and the values that he espoused. Yes, they were, but they are now part of a new government with a new leader who is espousing, well, he says he's espousing different values. So the reset has happened. So they are old faces,

but they are now representing his vision. So I'm not gonna complain about that. We'll have to, I mean, we can have a more esoteric debate as to what that says about their own personal values. Do they even have any? If they were willing to stand against the carbon tax only to now be against it. I mean, but that doesn't get us anywhere.

That doesn't help shepherd a conversation forward. And the only other issue I have with that piece of audio is he did not cancel the carbon tax. He brought it down to zero. He brought the value of it down to zero, which means he could bring it back up if he wanted to. So that part wasn't true, but the performance was very nice. The stroke of a pen got rid of it, very Donald Trump of him.

Vashj was very smart to bring up the fact that we're still getting to know this guy. You know, we still don't, and things he's said in the past haven't really stuck to him. And she's trying to square the Mark Carney of his book values with the Mark Carney who's now prime minister. We're getting costs down, including the oil sands, the marginal production is low cost and low carbon. All three of those come together. We have the ingredients of all that.

Let's get together and move on it. And it takes more than just one pipeline in order to accomplish it. And I do understand that point, but I think like in your book, multiple occasions, for example, you talk about the merits of a carbon tax. And now we have a different Prime Minister, Mark Carney, who says, I'm getting the first thing I did in this very room was get rid of the carbon tax. Got rid of the consumer carbon tax, which is different than- The industrial side, but it's still a portion of the carbon tax scheme that existed in this

country. And how much of the resources did that consumer... How much of the emission reduction did that consumer... Nine percent. Yeah. Well, it's actually six, but you extrapolated out to 20, 30 is nine. If it went the further... Yeah.

As far as it was supposed to go, it's supposed to be... It's not nothing. It's not nothing. It's not much. It's not much. And we can do much better with different approaches, including collaborative approaches, which is what I'm looking to do. The big question that most people have, and certainly I have, is does Mark Carney stand

for building pipelines? And this is what he had to say. If you want a simple answer on, will I support building a pipeline? Yes, that simple answer, given that multiple times. But I don't stop at that. Let's stop it. For example, if you want a simple answer on how do I make homes more affordable, I could just say, we're going to cut GST on homes. But that doesn't solve the problem. Just doing one

pipeline. It's good. Don't get me wrong. It's good. That's a positive thing. And, and working collaboratively in order to happen. Don't get me wrong, it's good. That's a positive thing and working collaboratively in order to happen. But it's not enough. It's not enough to make Canada energy superpower. It's not enough to build our full potential. It's not enough to truly get incomes growing across the country.

We can do much more. We are going to be very, very ambitious. Build big, build bold, build now. I'll say one last thing. I've noticed, and I'm gonna see if this bears out over time, that when he's speaking about something he doesn't wanna talk about, he stumbles, he shortens his words,

he speaks very quickly, and then he will slow down at the times where he's talking about things he wants to talk about. I think I'm accurate on that. We're gonna have to see if it bears out over time. To celebrate the days of our lives, I think I'm accurate on that. We're going to have to see if it bears out over time. A VIP Days of Our Lives set tour, a helicopter ride over LA, and so much more. Watch Weekdays at One and look for the weekly code word to enter. Days of Our Lives. All new Weekdays at One. Only on W. Stream on StackTV.