The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben talks to a trade policy expert about if Donald Trump is planning on renegotiating NAFTA... Again

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Guests and Topics on Today's Show -Is it Time to defund the CBC for good? - We Discuss -How much harm did Covid do on Kids Social Skills? with Guest: Alyson Schafer, Therapist, Author and Acclaimed Parenting Expert -Does Donald Trump want to renegotiate NAFTA (USMCA) again? with Guest: Kurt Huebner, Trade Policy Expert, Professor at UBC -More women are the breadwinners in Canadian families with Guest: Nora Spinks, one of Canada’s leading family experts, CEO at Work-Life Harmony 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, it's Ben Mulrooney and welcome to the podcast. We had a packed show today, including, is it time to put a fork in the CBC for good? Is Trump looking to renegotiate NAFTA again? And concerns about the social skills of COVID era kids. Enjoy. This morning, when I walked in, we didn't know we were gonna be talking about this story,

but Greg Brady's conversation with Chris Sims, the Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, made us go back and listen to her testimony, uh, on parliament Hill yesterday. Uh, well, first let's listen to her on, on Toronto today. I think that's happening day one. I do right after scrapping the carbon tax. Sorry, I should have referenced that's in reference to, uh, what is Pierre Polyev going to do? And when is he, when is he going to defund the CBC? It's happening on day one, according to her.

And so that was on the radio this morning. So we went back and watched the testimony. And it's, well, boy, she makes a compelling case. She really does. And so we're going to listen to some of this. The CBC is getting $1.4 billion from taxpayers this year. That money could instead pay the salaries of around 7,000 paramedics and 7,000 police officers. That money could instead pay for groceries for about 85,000 Canadian families

for a year. That's an impactful comparison. I would simply say that money doesn't exist. That is made up money. We do not have that money. We owe that money. And so do our kids, our grandkids, and possibly our great grandkids. That's how financially mismanaged we have been as a nation. So it's a, it's an impactful comparison, but it is by no means like that money. If, if, if Pierre were to defund the CBC, there's no pile of $1.4 billion we can go to. There's a minus next to it, and we owe it to somebody. So that's impactful. One of the things that is brought up is Catherine Tate, the head of the CBC, how much she makes for this, to run this organization.

CBC CEO Catherine Tate refused to tell this committee if she will take a severance when she leaves the state broadcaster. Tate considers that to be a personal matter. It's not personal if it's taxpayers' money. Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation show Tate is paid between $460,000 and $551,000 this year, with a bonus of up to 28%. That is a bonus of $154,000. That bonus is more than the average Canadian family earns in a year. Yeah. See, I don't take, uh, listen, it's a big organization. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of work. The money is what the money

is. I take issue with the bonus more than anything else. A bonus for a job well done. A bonus is what you get when you exceed expectation. That's the definition of a bonus. That's why you get it. You were paid to do a job. Not only did you do that job, you gave us bonus benefits and therefore we're giving you a bonus and the fact that that that is a system the system is based on or it allows for something like that when when listenership and and viewership is down ad revenue down uh relevance down that that's just that's the thing that really uh sticks in my craw uh hey welcome to the show david uh what do you think uh do we do we need the cbc should we need the CBC?

Should we keep the CBC? Should we defund the CBC? Well, I mean, like, she should get a bonus. I mean, she's only cut in half the viewership since 2015. I mean, like, they're getting billions of dollars. They're not, you know, it's like the thing that I said when I first got on, I was like, news division, that's one of the big things about cbc was to inform us that the population to create a national identity on stuff that's not what they do anymore they are extremely left-wing they're extremely progressive there's only one set of viewpoints on there i mean to basically a mouthpiece for the liberal party and progressivism so there's no balance in the news at all and i don't want my taxpayer money going for something

that's so politically charged yeah i like i i there's there's a lot of i i watch the cbc i listen to it but it's because i'm a i'm i'm that kind of person like i want to i want to see what's out there uh i don't need the cbc i certainly don't need them to help me to help build this nation and and if they were if they actually did fill that role, I don't want the nation that they want to build. Like my perspective. Let's go back to Chris for a moment. There were, because she highlights what happened when people got fired. Just before Christmas, the CBC announced layoffs in its newsrooms. I've worked in many newsrooms and getting let go is not a bowl of cherries. But what about the bonuses at that same time? Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC did hand out bonuses costing 18 million dollars. As the CBC fan group Friends of Canadian

Media put it, quote, this decision is deeply out of touch and unbefitting of our national public broadcaster, end quote. Thank you to the members from the Conservatives, the Bloc, and the NDP who voted to hold the CBC to account for these bonuses. Yeah, it was, that was a self-inflicted wound and they got what they deserved because Catherine Tate was brought before committee before these were handed out and obfuscated and hedged. And I don't know if we're going to be handing these things out. First, they should have been taken off the table or at the very least, Catherine Tate should have said, I'm going to lead by example. And because our our our viewership is in the doghouse and and and the trust in the CBC is garbage. I will not be accepting a bonus if I am if I'm viewed to be deserving of one.

I will not lead by example and I will urge everyone to turn down theirs. And they did no such thing. Let's say hello to Dan. Dan, what do you think? Yes. OK, don't defund them completely. Just keep the news going we still need national identity but but put in there that there needs to be unbiased report you need to have a reflection of half the country which according to what we're looking at polls these days is is conservative leaning you need that and you keep steve bacon i mean that guy is worth his- Yeah, Steve Bacon is a national treasure, but he's on TVO. But that's, you know what?

So you bring up a good point. Look, the news was vital when they were the only ones doing the news. Now there is news that is being offered by legacy media, new media, social media, content creators, YouTubers. We do not need them for that. And I am not living in a world where I require Air Canada, CN Rail, Via Rail, or the CBC to help build this country and keep us together. That is not, they are utilities.

We are past that point. Heck, according to Justin Trudeau, we have no national identity. So what have they been doing for the past few hundred years? If we don't have a national identity, what exactly has the CBC been doing? You could argue they've been undermining it. I don't know. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Good morning. Good morning, Ben. How are you today? I'm well, thank you. I'm well. So where do you land on the CBC and its value to Canadians? I don't think there is a value anymore. There was a time that you could, you know, basically through your rabbit ears, you could watch CBC from coast to coast.

When we go to the cottage now, I can't even get it. So now in order for me to watch it, you have to subscribe to something. So it's not free to Canadians. No, exactly. They've got those streaming apps you've got to pay for, and they're competing with streaming music apps as well. How is that part of your mandate? Well, exactly.

And they've run it into the ground. Instead of treating it like a business and seeing an opportunity to air the NHL and the Stanley Cup playoffs, they've chosen not to. So how, you know, they're not a business. Nope. And we should, they should not be, we should not be funding them all the time. Aaron, I want to thank you for your call.

And speaking of that, nobody's watching. Let's listen to what Chris Sims had to say about the viewership of the CBC. Let's take a look at viewership. According to its own latest quarterly report, CBC News Network's audience share is 1.7%, meaning more than 98% of Canadians are choosing to not watch CBC's news channel. We have some breaking news here in committee. Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC's supper hour news audience is so small, it's difficult to measure.

In Toronto, the CBC's 6 o'clock news has an audience of 0.7% of that city's population. Yeah, if the CBC falls in the forest, is anybody here? Welcome to Kidsplain, where kids explain how underfunded our schools are. Let's take a call from a listener. Kelly, are you there? Hi. I was wondering why I get less one-on-one time with my teachers. Great question, Kelly. It might have something to do with the fact that we have 3,500 fewer teachers under Doug Ford.

Ugh, that sounds about right. Want to help support students and teachers? Visit nomore.ca. That's K-N-O-W-M-O-R-E dot C-A. A message from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association. Well, enough time has passed from the COVID-19 pandemic that we can now start looking at the effects that that isolation, the remote learning, no playtime, not allowed in parks, not allowed traveling, not allowed going to summer camp. What those impacts were on our kids. A new survey by Scouts Canada has revealed that the group calls surprisingly negative opinions about the social skills of Canadian youth age 10 to 21 with serious concerns about their future prospects.

So this survey was conducted with a thousand random Canadians, and it showed that many feel kids lack what they call soft skills, social ability, and aren't ready to tackle the future challenges that come with landing jobs and careers. To dig in more, we're joined by Alison Schaefer, therapist, author, and acclaimed parenting expert. Alison, I have to assume, thank you for being here, and I have to assume that these sorts of findings don't surprise you. Well, thanks for having me. And no, I think we're going to be seeing more and more as we track this over time, this cohort at different ages and stages that were impacted by the pandemic and what that is going to mean for their future development.

We know it's in lag time, but exactly what it means is still to be determined. So these are interesting conversations. Yeah, I knew as a parent that, you know, my kids were having an experience that was different than anyone that I know. And probably anyone who was living up until that point. But I didn't know what the effects would be. So what are these soft skills that the survey talks about? Yeah, so soft skills need to be differentiated from hard skills. So hard skills are the things that we would recognize as your IQ score. It's about your knowledge and your skills, whereas soft skills are much more about your

interpersonal abilities, your relational skills, your emotional quotient, emotional regulation, your character traits. And we generally as a society have put a very big emphasis on IQ, knowledge and skills, and we have under-emphasized the requirements needed for the EQ part of development. That's changed in recent years. We're becoming more aware of that now and why that's such a huge part of human success, including in the workplace. And if you talk to anybody in HR, they'll tell you we have lots of people that are smart and have great grades and qualified for the job, but they can't get along as a team or they can't lead or they can't follow. And so we're realizing that those are really, really important for human success. And that was one of the areas that the isolation piece of COVID

really took a hit for our kids. And Allison, if this were just a snapshot, then that would be one thing. Okay, they got a bum rap, but they've got some runway now and we can make it better. But it turns out, at least to me, it seems like things might even get worse for them, given that the only antidote they had to the social isolation were tools that we know have knock-on negative effects, specifically social media? I mean, we have to accept the fact that social media is not going away. That is the new reality for our kids.

I think that rather than just moaning about it, I think parents have a real responsibility for getting themselves educated, that they themselves also then need to educate their children so that it's used wisely. And there's still a big fear factor. There's still a lot of hesitancy that parents often feel like it's too much. I'm overwhelmed. I don't like the fight. So they kind of know it's a big problem, but they really feel at a loss about how to be impactful in their role around social media and phone usage. So I still think that's a huge area that parents are still needing tremendous amount of support in. But given Allison, given the fact that it was adopted by so many kids in in a terribly unhealthy time, where it was almost it was a coping mechanism

for some like when I when I look when I jumped on Instagram, it was because I wanted to see some nice pictures. But for a lot of kids, they jumped onto social media because it was their lifeline to having some sort of social life. They were deprived of oxygen, and this was a breath of fresh air. And so given that paradigm, it seems the value that it has, the importance that it has in their lives. I'm not suggesting we can get rid of social media, but we have to find a way to revalue it for them, for them to have a new perspective on what it is and how they should use it. Yeah, I agree. And I think that's where we were already going, tracking in that direction before COVID hit, that it was a very easy way to socialize, very low risk, very high gains, lots of things that we know about social media.

But we have this other part, which is our in real life, our IRL relationships that, you know, didn't get fostered because of the circumstances. And so, you know, in the existence of a vacuum, we are social beings, we want to connect. And that, to your point, became the lifeline. Now the question is, how do we pull our kids back out of that? Exactly. Now they're all standing in the hallways at school, and they're all looking at their phones instead of looking to the person to the left or right of them and striking up a conversation. And in fact, they have missed some of the social skills on how do you make to learn how quickly do you text back um you know do you show interest there's so many social rules around being online that our kids know they now they're they're missing the social rules for how do you hang out you know at recess how do you ask someone to be your lab partner and share homework they they don't have those. So what do we do? What is the

most optimal path to putting them on the right path? So I do think that we need to force the situations of being in real contact with other human beings. So you got to know, the last report I heard was something like 25% of Ontario students hadn't gone back to school. They just think it's a joke they want to do online. They don't even see the value of going to school. So we need to get kids going to social things again, whether that is in the classroom, signing up for sports, signing back up for extracurriculars. They need to be in those situations. And they, to your point, they'll be resilient. They will get it back, but they're only going to get it back if we kind of

push the agenda and make more of those in real life situations, a higher priority for us. You know, putting those phones down and actually doing the in-person socializing, I think is huge. And that's a huge part. Alice, would it be helpful if, you know, we identified, all right, who are our kids' friends? And then talk to their parents so that you don't just have one kid who's learning how to be social without their phone. Because if everyone else in their social circle is still leaning on those technologies, then it could be easy to just, you know, to do it to get along. But if we do it as part of a cohort or a pod, as we use the expression we used in the, or a bubble, as we used in the pandemic, then maybe it might be more effective. I agree with you. I certainly know that

I've had great stories of people that have, for example, were afraid to send their kids to the park, and they backed onto a park. They bought a house that backed onto a park and none of the kids went to the park. And she finally door knocked up and down the street and said, why aren't your kids going to the park? And I'm like, well, because no one's there. No one's watching. She goes, well, I'm watching from my back kitchen window. I'll watch the kids. And she kind of had to get a group of people to take back the park and take back going outside. And so if you need to be, you know, the person who advocates the power of one to start creating a pod where you get together and people start playing ball hockey out in front of the house

before dinner or whatever it might be, then that's great. Take that initiative. I think that's wonderful. Alison, in our next, in our last minute, is there any jurisdiction, is there any place that is taking the bull by the horns and actively working to get our kids back, getting their kids back to a place where they can be full and productive expressions of themselves? gets to take ownership for that job that needs to be done. I would certainly say that one of the call-outs that I would say to parents is we have to realize that our kids really are quite capable and competent and our parenting style has moved towards being very sort of permissive and protective. And we're also interfering with some of their development just in the way that we're parenting. And so I think if we could believe that kids were more robust, to trust them to manage life, to put a little bit more tension on our children, I think they would thrive more

if we believe and had more faith in their competencies than we currently do. Allison, thank you so much. I appreciate it. You bet. Thanks, Ben. I gotta say, there was something that struck me in Donald Trump's conversation with Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago. We were originally led to believe that the issues that the president had were exclusive to the border and the military. And he said we were going to get slapped those 25 percent tariffs if those things were not dealt with. But then when he was telling that little joke about Canada becoming the 51st province, he dropped another nugget, which almost looked like he was adding another grievance to the list of grievances. And that was America's trade deficit with Canada, stating that

it was about 100 billion dollars. He said that we were ripping off the Americans. And it seemed like he was looking to renegotiate that as well. And I thought that was really, really interesting because the first part that I was talking about, the border issues and the military, that's something I can wrap my head around. That's something I do think we should have done a long time ago. And that was a crisis of our own making. And I'm glad it's being addressed. But when it comes to the trade deficit, I really need to bring in some people who can explain this to me and explain it to our listeners in a way that where we can understand whether or not we have an issue on our side of the border and whether or not Donald Trump has a reason to be

upset. And for that, we're welcoming to the show Kurt Ubner, trade policy expert and professor at the University of British Columbia. Professor, thank you so much for being here. Good morning, Ben. So if you can, let me, so first of all, what is a trade deficit as it relates to Canada, U.S.? Is it necessarily a bad thing?

Is Donald Trump right to be upset? And is it really $100 billion? Yeah, let me start with the last part. The deficit is not $100 billion. Still, it's significant. It's swinging around. Probably in 2023, it was like $60 billion. US dollars, it may be in the same kind of range, but it's far away from the 100 billion dollar.

But still, we're talking big numbers. And so there is a trade deficit. The trade deficit is, per se, generally spoken, not only with US and Canada, not automatically a good thing. What does it mean is a country is importing more than it's exporting. That's the case of the U.S. when it comes to Canada. But actually, the U.S. is, since the 1970s, importing more from the rest of the world than exporting. So the trade balance deficit is now like 50 years old of the U.S. So, you know, it's not something new. So that's the first thing to see. Why is he so upset?

Now, when it comes to trade relations between Canada and U.S., we have to be aware that for us, for the Canadian side, close to 80% of our exports are going to the U.S. It's a very important part. At the same time, Canada is also the largest market for the U.S. So it's highly integrated economic relations, and most economies are highly integrated. Again, we share the longest border of the world. So again, it's not a surprise that those things are happening.

And Professor, I've got to ask, it seems to me that if they need these goods and we are providing them reliably and safely and securely, what is the problem? Yeah, I mean, I think so. You know, it's a first move. We don't know exactly what's happening. From a pure economic point of view, it doesn't make any sense to put in a 20 or 25 percent tariff across the board for Canada. I think so. It's the first move on the side of the incoming Trump administration. We are aware that in the agreement

US next to Canada comes 2026, so it's one and a half years from now or so, that we will have a revisit of this agreement. So that's part of the agreement anyway. And I think the threat now is a preparation of what will come. I think so there will be more than only a revisit,

even though this agreement, the follow-up of NAFTA, is the baby of Donald Trump, as we know. So I don't think so he will throw it out totally, but he will use this revisit to look at particular kind of elements. I guess we're talking about the car industry, something, a big element in his campaign, securing jobs of the U.S. We will see steel.

We had this kind of conflict in the past and this continued with the White administration. So there are a couple of sectors where the U.S. may have a concrete interest to safeguard U.S. interests and to decouple a bit from those exports from Canada. Whether this is a safe or a safe, there is another kind of problem.

And the lying... It does... Oh, so go ahead. Yeah, only one element. You know, it's not only trade, it's also foreign direct investment. So that's the main part. If you look at the car industry, it's all about supply chains. It's not that we are producing unique cars and they're going to export to the U.S. Those are, yes, and other companies operating in Canada and sending them stuff back to the U.S. Yeah, to me, what he's saying,

it seems to me like he's signaling that he wants to play hardball when it comes time to reopen the NAFTA 2.0. But what he's also saying is the deal that he struck in 2016 or whenever it was, wasn't a good enough deal for America. So he's almost saying that he didn't negotiate well enough with Canada. Yeah, you know,

I wouldn't put any kind of words of Donald Trump very seriously all the time in the sense that he talks quite a lot. And when he starts with the number he gave out, he started with a 100 billion deficit. It's not covered by facts.

So there are other elements. But behind all that is definitely the idea to America first. And there are only sectors. It's not across all the board. Those sectors I mentioned, they will be key, I think, in those renegotiations that will come. It's not built on the way we said there will be a renegotiation happening. And that's the main idea, I think.

Do you think it's about Canada laying out a vision for the future about unbeatable immigration, there could be a renegotiation happening. And so that's the main idea, I think. Do you think it's about Canada laying out a vision for the future where, yes, there are certain things that, there are certain

aspects of our trade that can be streamlined and improved, but by and large, if there's something that you need from us that you don't make, we provide a reliable

market from a democratic ally in close proximity versus going to someone that is not an ally to go get it, say China or Russia or the generally speaking, the BRICS nations. Is it is about sort of creating or like turning down the temperature and having him view us again as the ally that we have always been a reliable partner on trade, on defense, on on values of the free market and individual freedoms? Yeah, it's a good point, but you have to be aware it's not only Canada and Mexico that is now in the eyes of Donald Trump. It's all the rest of the world,

particularly China. So I don't think so that the argument that we are more reliable, more democratic and the like than other trading partners, yes, it makes any kind of big point. The thing is that the U.S. will have much more intense trade wars with other parts of the world. And this will be probably much more pronounced than it will at the end of the day happen with Canada. I don't think so that those kind of relations so deeply entrenched that they will go away. I think Trump is only putting pressure on Canada. And we can see this, you know, one byproduct we haven't discussed yet is that we see, for example, that Ford in Ontario already mentioning we should go bilateral. So maybe, you know, the total threat is also about putting Mexico in a corner and to rather than Canada because Trump made the point that Mexico is the entrance door

for cheap Chinese and other products entering the North American market. And that's the main kind of culprit. It is indeed. And the fact that we've been lumped in with them and the fact that the president of Mexico had the gumption to say, yeah, Canada, you have a real fentanyl issue.

Are you kidding me? You're telling me, okay, that's a pot and kettle and black situation, as far as I'm concerned. That's true. But then, you know, on the other side, it's also, you see the kind of, Trump is a pretty good negotiator. He already achieved one thing, that Mexico and Canada may not play on the same cards, on the same side, to see this kind of divisions. And we see them also inside Canada, that some provinces take this kind of route and others take another one.

Well, you know, this might, Kurt, this might be a very good opportunity for Canada to start looking at lowering interprovincial trade barriers, which is a form of protectionism that we've imposed on ourselves. Kurt Uebner, trade policy expert at the UBC, thank you very much for joining us. There's a story on the CBC website that says more and more

women are the breadwinners in Canadian families, but it does come at a cost. So the numbers, according to StatsCan, analyzed by an independent national think tank, shows that women provide more than 50% of total family income in a growing share of husband-wife families compared to one-third in 2022 and one-quarter in 2020. However, that is less likely to be true if those women have children. And those numbers get worse if they have more than one child, if they have two, if they have three, with that proportion dropping by three to four percentage points per

additional child. So here to dig into what this means is Nora Spinks, one of Canada's leading family experts and the CEO at Work Life Harmony. Nora, thank you so much for being here. Oh, my pleasure. So from the outset, I would like to say that I have no ego about it. If my wife were the primary breadwinner, I would be very proud of her. It would not be a hit to my masculinity or my identity. If she loved what she did, if I loved what I did, I wouldn't care where the money came from. But this dynamic is changing. What does it say to you?

Well, I think a couple of reasons why women are starting to out-earn men. And one of those is more education. So the more education you have tends to correlate with the amount of income you earn. And historically, over the last several years, more women have graduated with university degrees and college degrees than men. men yeah we've been seeing that for years we've been seeing that's that's been uh sort of a talking point when uh when when the idea that women were earning 75 cents on the dollar for every dollar that men would make that that would be the pushback saying that's changing and uh so what do you what do you how how do the politics of this add to the conversation? Women are still earning less than men, even if they are top income earners in the household.

Okay. So there's still an imbalance there. So if the women have children and they're the top income earner in the household, they're earning less than women with no children. So there still is a motherhood penalty, even for those who are the top family income, and there's still a fatherhood premium. So men who have children tend to out-earn men that don't have children right across the age spectrum. Now, Nora, there's certain aspects of biology we can't get around, because I know that in Canada,

it's not maternal leave anymore, it's family leave, right? And it can be shared between the husband and the wife. But there is a biological fact that the woman carries the child, and therefore there is going to be some innate and intrinsic downtime for that parent because they're with child. There's nothing we can do about that aspect of it, but I have to assume that there are other contributing factors. Well, you're absolutely right. Biology does play a huge role in here, and there's two parts of that biological equation that we need to consider. One is families are deciding to have their first child much later in life. And so they're much older when they have their first child. So, you know, a generation ago, you were having your first at 23, 24 years of age. Now it's 31, 32 years of age and continuing to creep up year over year. Men are much more actively involved in parenting than they have ever been before.

85% of men in Quebec take a big, they both have a share of the parental leave and they have a dedicated paternity leave in Quebec. 85% of men in Quebec. So it's, men are asked, when are you taking parental leave? Not, are you taking it? And a big part of that is higher income replacement rates. And it's becoming sort of a part of the culture. Elsewhere, men are only taking parental leave at around 10, 11, 12%, depending on where you are in the country. So women are still using up the majority of the parental leave. But if you're a top income earner, regardless of whether you're men or women, most families do the math. And if women are the higher income earner and you're only going to be getting

55% of earnings, it tends to be the lower income that takes the majority of the parental leave. Nora, I've got to ask you, I want to take like a step back from this and see if it's part of a larger problem, because on this show, we've discussed the lowering of Canada's birth rate. You just mentioned the fact that couples are choosing to have their first child later. How much of women in the workplace, even though they're earning less, has to do with the fact that life is becoming more unaffordable and therefore, in order for people to have the life they want, both members of the couple need to work. That's absolutely true. And that's been true for the last couple of decades.

As the cost of living increases, the need to have two incomes is now an absolute must. And we see that the fastest pathway to poverty is divorce. And so if you're not born into poverty, you can achieve poverty status by divorce. So we know that it's a huge issue. You need two incomes. About two decades ago, it was an income and a half was enough. A whole generation ago, one income was more than enough to cover basic costs. But the other reason why couples are choosing to have fewer children is the sense of instability or insecurity. People tend to have more children when they feel very stable and secure and capable of taking on more responsibilities. So if life were more affordable, if life cost less,

is that the thing that would give them more security? Partly, but also job security, more people working contracts, gig work, self-employed, and the broader issues of global stability, global security, environment, a lot of people are saying they're not bringing in any children into the world because of climate change. And so those kinds of decisions aren't quick and easy to resolve. So we're expecting that more couples will choose to have no children, more will choose to have only one child, and the likelihood of having families with three or more children

where it's not involving blending families is going to be less and less and less. Nora, it seems like we're facing a looming crisis in this country if the people who are here aren't having babies, and you've just laid out a compelling case explaining why, and the government has reversed a position where effectively our immigration levels are going to stay stagnant for the next few years, it looks like our population is going to shrink over the next few years. Oh, very definitely. You know, most of our policies and programs and benefits in this country were designed when we had basically a population pyramid. Lots of people in the paid labor force, few elderly balance that out, you sort of square the triangle by immigration. And we've been doing that for the last several years. And it's been fairly stable. But the minute you stop bringing people in, you're going to start to see that squaring off of the inverse triangle becoming less and less stable.

So it will be very evident if you've got family members who are in their 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, that there are fewer people to look after those seniors. And those seniors are getting older. They're living longer without a commensurate ad, uh, adding on to the quality of that life. Well, that's a whole lot. I don't know.

But it used to be that there were four or five, six children that could look after one or two parents. Now it's one or two people looking after parents, grandparents, three, four, five, eight people in your caregiving circle. And it gives you less resources to bring in more children because all your caregiving is going to senior family members. Thanks for listening to the podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. And we hope you'll join us tomorrow for another loaded edition of The Ben Mulroney Show.