The Ben Mulroney Show - Best of the Week Part 2 - Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, Anthony Koch

Episode Date: March 22, 2025

Best of the Week Part 2 - Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, Anthony Koch Guests: Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, Anthony Koch, Sharan Kaur, Brad Lavigne, Mohit Rajhans 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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ordinary at bet 365. Must be 19 year old or Ontario only please play responsibly if you or someone you know has concerns about gambling visit connexontario.ca T's and Z supply. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Best of the Week podcast. We had a great week of conversations including former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who went to town on the carbon tax hypocrisy from the Liberals. Plus our political panel convened to talk about our new Prime Minister sniping at reporters. Enjoy.

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Every now and then I like to know that I'm right about something. It makes me feel good. We all do, right? You know, you take a position and then you kind of wait to see which way it's going to go. And then, hey, you're right. And a couple of days ago, I had a back and forth with I think no, I wasn't a back and forth because she didn't respond. But I think I can't remember who it was. But someone in the liberal government referenced the liberals reversal on the carbon tax

as the reason for it was it was a divisive policy. And I wrote back, I said, but the world is burning. The world is burning. That's why you put it in place was to save the world. And surely a divisive policy that will save the world is worth fighting for. And while I'm saying it, dripping with sarcasm, it was an honest question. Just explain that to me.

Explain how that makes sense. And my next guest is here because it validates what I knew. I didn't know the story he's going to tell us right now that he shared on Twitter. But it turns out the logic that I applied to that tweet was a logic that he brought forth in a in a lawsuit. So let's welcome to the show Jason Kenney, the former Alberta Premier and federal cabinet minister. Mr. Kenny, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Good to be here, Ben. So I just referenced a story that I told I said you can't have it both ways. Either the

carbon tax was here to save the world from burning or it wasn't. So which one was it? And it turns out you have this, that's a similar thought. Yes. So when I got elected premier of Alberta a few years back, then one of my top commitments was to scrap the Alberta NDP retail carbon tax, which I did. And then I, I promised to sue the government of Canada for its carbon tax, which I did. And then I promised to sue the government of Canada for its carbon tax, which I did.

That we won at the Alberta appeal court in a big win, like four to one, that went up to the Supreme Court of Canada. And then the federal government told the Supremes that they needed this carbon tax to prevent irreparable harm to human life. And let me quote from what they actually said the federal liberals persuaded the court that it was necessary

yeah it was existential to human life. Critical to the response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world. How noble how noble this tax was because without it, Mr. Kenny, we were gonna burn. That's right, it was the apocalypse, it was the end times, there was no turning around, it was the asteroid that was gonna hit us and the carbon tax would save us.

And the Supreme Court bought it, six out of nine judges bought it. They actually quoted all this stuff in their judgment, saying that, look, normally, normally the federal government wouldn't be able to get into this because this is a provincial area of jurisdiction but we are going to give the feds constitutional superpowers under what's called the peace order and good government preamble which is really really rare and a very unusual

program with him take up a superpower to override the normal provisions of the constitution to prevent an existential threat to human life with this carbon tax. And then they wave it away according to Mark Cardy with quotes a signature and I don't know. I'm still here. How are things down in Toronto? You guys still going? Yeah, they're still going. Still had a big snowstorm a little while ago. But but but Mr. Kenny, I've got to ask, to me, it feels like a miscarriage of justice. It feels like an abuse of power. It feels like somebody lied to the court. And so is there recourse is there redress that can be sought by somebody by somehow here? Yeah, I think so. You know, it might be a bit of a stretch, but I think Alberta could make an application

to get back in front of the court and say, Hey, even though this may not be material right now, we don't know if and when the feds are going to try to do this again. We want you to reconsider your judgment. Because it was based on a false premise, you were convinced by government lawyers that the carbon retail carbon tax was going to necessary to prevent an existential threat to life in Canada and around the world. Clearly, that's not the case. You should reconsider this based on this new evidence. And so yeah, somebody can and should do that, I think, frankly, because this is the court was humiliated by the government. Yeah, I tell you, I would have a lot more respect for the Liberal Party had they died

on the hill of the carbon tax, meaning had they gone into an election with it and said, we still believe in this. And then and that the people would have told them what I believe they probably would have told them. And then they could have said, you know what, we're gonna we're gonna move on from it. We tried it didn't work. And the people rejected it. And now we're reinventing our environmental policies through another mechanism

But they didn't do that. This was the and the the gas lighting that's going on right now Has made me lose a lot of respect for that institution You know Ben they they claim they won the last two or three elections when I say one that's very much in quotes air quotes Because they got 32% of the vote in the last couple of elections. But they claim they won those elections partly on the carbon tax. I don't think the carbon tax was ever really an issue. And I always knew, they were going to keep jacking up the price, and it started to bite, and people would notice it, particularly with inflation doubling in the cost of housing, massive increase in the price of groceries, that people would end energy, people would start to notice it.

And that's what happened. And that's why they backtrack. But this whole thing that they're covered in rich, this is the thing I can't stand about the Liberal Party of Canada, is they imagine that they are the guardians of some special virtue in Canadian politics. They stand on a high principle. Yeah, right. This just shows that they are nothing but an election, a team that tries to win elections for any reason at any time.

Well, the National Post pointed out that they're not picking party over country if they believe that the interest of the party is the interest of the country. And when you look at it through that prism, this sort of thing starts to make sense. Another thing, Mr. Kenny, and by the way, to our listeners who are just joining us, I'm speaking in conversation with Jason Kenny, former Alberta Premier. When you were a federal cabinet minister, there was a lot of work that was done

to build out trade, Canadian trade around the world and also with Europe. So I found it a little perplexing when our new prime minister said that, we absolutely have to have an industrial carbon tax or we can't increase our business with Europe. And something I thought to myself, you know, somebody should really tell that to India, China and the United States who have absolutely no carbon tax whatsoever and do a heck of

a lot of business with Europe. Yeah, I think of the 190 some countries in the world, there are 20 some that have some kind of carbon taxes in place. And Mark Carney yesterday said, we basically can't do trade to diversify our exports away from the US without a carbon tax. And I thought, hold on a second, just a minute. I was sat around the cabinet table with the Harper government. We negotiated, we went for Canada went from five

to 44 free trade agreements. So we added 39 free trade agreements. And a bunch of those came in through the Canada Europe trade agreement with the EU and the Trans Pacific Partnership with I think about 18 Asian countries. And we did not have a carbon tax under Stephen Harper. That was never an issue. we have a Canada UK trade agreement that is stalled over supply

management over for dairy but carbon tax is not part of that Mark Carney said to get access to emerging markets we need this well the biggest fastest growing emerging markets places like India China Korea and so on they don't have carbon taxes. None of the major energy producers do, Saudi Arabia, Russia, US, the Gulf States. So I don't know what the heck he's talking about. I think Mr. Carney is a really smart man. So why would he be so wrong about this?

I think, imagine he can fool people into imagining that we have to shoot ourselves in the foot to make our export industries less competitive in order to gain access to global markets it's just simply not true. Mr. Kenney very quickly what did you make of his assessment that and he said so in French that you know it's really not his job when it comes to to be in a leadership position on the liquefied natural gas file, because that's up to the provinces and you have to have a project and you got to get the buy in from the First Nations. When, when you heard that, what did you think? I was really disappointed because I did think that in the light of the Trump situation,

that we finally were getting a consensus to get our energy around the world. It's our biggest ace in the hole. It's we've got the third largest natural gas in the world. And finally, Mark, if we really want to reduce global GHG emissions, carbon emissions, our natural gas exports are the way to do it because that helps Europe and Asia turn off the thermal coal plants, reduce their emissions to produce power by at least half. If you're a serious green zealot like Mark Carney, then you should be leaning forward, exercising leadership to get Canadian LNG exports built. Premier Jason Kenney, thank you so much for joining us. Come back anytime.

Thank you very much. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And in a world where the Liberal Party of Canada has turned its back on its defining policy, the carbon tax, I think it's incumbent upon us to have a conversation with, you know, the people who are in the trenches who were fighting against it saying it was going to be a job killer and a wallet killer and it was going to make life more expensive, only to be, and if you attacked it or if you weren't in favor of it, you were somehow a climate denier.

And so the people who were in the trenches taking the mortar fire are the ones I want to talk to. So let's welcome to the show opposition house leader and former opposition leader Andrew Shear. Mr. Shear, welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Good morning, Ben. Great to talk to, so let's welcome to the show opposition house leader and former opposition leader Andrew Scheer. Mr. Scheer, welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Good morning, Ben. Great to talk to you. So I think the conversation, I think has moved past whether or not the liberal stunt was

a cancellation of the carbon tax. I think at this point we all know that that didn't happen. But your leader, Pierre Poliev, took to the microphones to say that he's going to scrap the industrial carbon tax if he becomes prime minister. And it seems to me, I think he wants to hammer home the point that this could very well still be a carbon tax election. Yes, absolutely. And I think it's really important to kind of break this down into some components.

So as you point out, the carbon tax law is still there. Senior Liberals still talk about how they believe in carbon taxes as a tool and that it's not going to go anywhere. The industrial carbon tax though still exists, still is planned to keep rising. And the reason why this is important is because, and I know that many Canadians are worried about their jobs with the US administration threatening these tariffs. Here in Canada, we have a government imposed tax that the Americans don't pay. So when we're thinking about how we stand up to this threat and protect jobs and the

economy, the industrial carbon tax needs to go. And only conservatives are promising to do that. A steel plant, which I have in my writing That has to pay carbon taxes looks across the border and says well We don't have if we were there if this production shifted to us. We wouldn't have to pay this extra fee So yeah for steel workers for auto workers for anybody in the manufacturing sector They know that their jobs are threatened with the industrial carbon tax and mark Carney said yesterday That he's going to keep it and it's gonna keep going up under his government. Well he also said that it's necessary to keep it. He said if Canada wants to

expand trade into the European Union and the United Kingdom as well as emerging Asian markets it must have an industrial carbon tax. Now I got to say Mr. Scheer that's a new one for me. I don't think I've ever heard that spin before. And I think somebody might want to tell India, China, and the United States, because that would be news to them as well. Well, exactly. It's just utter nonsense. There are so many countries around the world that do massive, close to trillions of dollars' worth of trade with European countries that

don't have a carbon tax. And that hasn't stopped the Europeans from importing things from China and India. Also, why would we want to make ourselves preemptively uncompetitive? Why would we want to put burdens on ourselves? If European countries are going to suddenly start looking at imports in a different way, well, let them figure that out. But we should look at our own economy and say, how can we make ourselves the most competitive, give our workers the best advantages so that our Canadian companies can bid on projects and manufacture goods that the world

will buy? Instead, Mark Carney's approach is saying, well, if we shoot ourselves in the foot first, then maybe the other European countries will have sympathy for us and buy our stuff. I've never known an economist or a trade analyst that has ever suggested something so stupid. Well, listen, we're getting to know our new prime minister very slowly, in drips and drabs. He doesn't sit for long interviews and we really didn't get to know him during the coronation that was the liberal leadership race. But we're getting, I mean, if you build the image of him

as a mosaic, then we're getting to know him one tile at a time. And so we got a few, we just talked about a few of those tiles, but in French, during his trip to Europe, he made some very, I thought, telling pronouncements about LNG and the development of liquefied natural gas in Canada and getting those building pipelines from East to West, where he essentially threw up his shoulders

and in French said, you know, that's really not my job. Like it's up to the provinces. And of course we've got to get buy-in from the First Nations. And of course you have to have a project first before you even talk about these things. I mean to me that was a very telling moment where we got to see how he truly feels about you know mineral and natural resource extraction and development in Canada. Well exactly the answer is that he doesn't want to develop that. And when before the Trudeau Liberals came into power, before they started imposing, and we have to remember this, it wasn't just Justin Trudeau who became unpopular, it

was his policies. And one of his policies was to leave the oil and gas in the ground, something Mark Carney has himself said. One of his policies was to tell our allies no when they came looking for our LNG. I got to tell you, Ben, when I saw Canada's allies like Japan sitting in the Oval Office making deals on LNG with the US administration that could have been done here, I just, I almost, you know, I want to punch the wall or something because we are going through a tremendous amount of uncertainty and anxiety right now. We could have had those multi-billion dollar investments that other countries would have invested here in Canada, putting Canadians to work, steel workers, pipe fitters, and that's all going to the US.

is because we know that when he was chair of Brookfield, they were heavily invested in companies that compete with the oil and gas sector and natural gas sector. He still won't disclose what those assets are. And when we're talking about jobs and investments going to the United States, we have to remind everybody that Mark Carney himself, to make a little bit more money for his shareholders and for himself, move the head office of his company to New York City. We've now got data from Brookfield, his company that shows that they increased investments in the US by 34% while decreasing investments in Canada.

So this is just the worst guy in the world we could have going to go toe to toe with the US right now. Look, I want to spend the last couple of minutes we have on that disaster of a press conference yesterday. As I said, you know, we're learning about him in drips and drabs, but another tile in that mosaic was that press conference where he dressed down two consecutive well-respected female journalists simply for asking I believe the questions that it is incumbent on him to answer Given the fact that we just don't know this guy yet. He did not want to go into detail on his blind trust He condescendingly suggested that there was ill motivation behind the questions themselves. What do you make of that way?

If this is a snapshot of the Prime Minister today, what do you see in that snapshot? Well, clearly he's got something to hide. People who are open books and not worried about revealing information, don't lose their temper. Don't become so furious as he was yesterday. I found the question back to that reporter, you know, look inwards or, you know, look inside yourself. Look inside yourself, Rosemary. Like, you know, whatever we might think of, politicians might think of the media from time to time, asking a sitting prime minister who has just installed without an election

with just a small number of liberals voting for him, who has the incredible power that comes with that. You know, the prime minister has incredible personal power to as we saw, you know, to sign regulations to change rules. He has millions of dollars invested. He hasn't told us if he's what those assets were so we can't see OK, if he makes a rule change,

does that benefit the company that he knows he owns shares in? Is he doing that to enrich? Yeah, don't you think given the fact that look I don't take issue with the system that that allowed him to rise to where he is. I don't take issue with that. That's the system we have.

It may be an exceptional scenario, but that's the system we have. But given that this is so exceptional, don't you think it's incumbent upon him to do so much more than what the bare minimum is, which is respecting the letter of the law according to the ethics commissioner? 100% percent, and you're absolutely right. You know, the system of the law according to the ethics commissioner? 100% and you're absolutely right.

You know, the system is the system and and and and that's that's how he was installed. Fine. But you cannot ignore the fact that the rules are there to achieve an end. It's not just that we have this this rule for the sake of the rule. The rules are there to provide Canadians with assurance that people are not going to abuse power once they get in office. If we find ourselves in a situation where the rules are inadequate for that, then it is absolutely incumbent on the Prime Minister to say,

I'm going to go above and beyond. I'm going to just simply disclose, here's where I had my money invested. So now you can see if I make a rule change on, say, renewable fuels, you can see that I have millions of dollars invested in a company that sells renewable fuels. And we don't know, we don't know. And listen, he's not a politician. He loves touting that. Were he a politician for even a couple of weeks, he would know if you answer the question to the satisfaction of the press, they will stop asking the question. But until he does, those questions are going to keep coming back, keep coming up. Mr. Shear, thank you so much for your time today.

Always great to chat with you, Ben. Thanks. managed portfolios, you'll get an investment portfolio made and managed for you. Invest for a fraction of the cost and become wealthier with Quest Wealth Portfolios. Get yours, Questrade. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With audio erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights

based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Welcome back to the show. I'm feeling particularly spicy today. So all the more reason to welcome into the show our midweek political panel this week in politics. Let's say hi to Anthony Kosh, Managing Principal at AK Strategies and former National Campaign Spokesperson for Pierre

Poliev, Brad Levine, President and Council PA, President of Council PA and NDP strategist and Sharon Carr, political strategist and partner at Sovereign Advisory. To all three of you, I say hello. Hello. Hello. Anthony, I want to start with you because like I said, I'm feeling spicy and I bet you are too. Let's talk about Prime Minister Mark Carney getting testy, getting testy with two reporters who I think were asking good faith questions

and demanding answers that a lot of Canadians have about a prime minister we don't know very well yet. And let's listen to his, because we all heard it, but I think our audience needs to hear one more time, his conversation with Rosemary Barton. There's no possible conflict of interest in your assets. It's very difficult to believe. Look inside yourself, Rosemary.

I mean, you start from a prior of conflict and ill will. I have served in the private sector. I have stood up for Canada. I have left my roles in the private sector. I have stood up for Canada. I have left my roles in the private sector at a time of crisis for our country. I'm complying with all the rules. Your line of questioning is trying to invent new rules. I'm complying with the rules that parliament has laid out

and the responsibility of the ethics commissioner. And I will continue to comply with those rules. Anthony, what kind of temperament is this? I mean, you get a soup of condescension, obfuscation. I'm the smartest guy in the room. But what is this? What does this say about the man who went through a leadership race and now finds himself at the head of our country? Yeah, no one has ever received a more favorable media environment than Mark Carney has over the course of the last three months. And the thing is, not only is that question very fair,

there's also a very easy answer to it, which is to say to the best of my knowledge, I have no conflict of interest. I'm following all the rules. The ethics commissioner is doing their job. If and when something does come up, it'll be rectified in short order. You're right to ask and Canadians have every right to know. Instead, he plays the, who are you lowly peasants asking me, his Royal Highness Mark Carney, any question of the sort. And I think if I'm the Liberals, you know, polling is going in a positive direction for a lot of folks. But I think there's there's starting to largely be a perception that this guy is really not good in front of a camera when journalists are asking him questions. And they're probably going to have to count down on this quite

severely because if you as a liberal leader are going after Rosemary Barton and think she's being unfair, Yep. And I have news for you, brother. This is clearly somebody who's not accustomed to being asked political questions in a political context, and still thinks he's a chairman, a CEO or a governor of the Bank of Canada who gets lobbed softball. So I want to bring Brad Levine to this. Brad, I mean, if those questions were, that's a one in terms of intensity compared to the scrutiny he is going to experience during an actual election campaign,

the number of journalists following him, the amount of access he's gonna have to give them, and the questions and types of questions. I mean, he's gonna get volleyed questions all day long. If this is the beginning of the game, he's gonna get volleyed questions all day long. If this is like, if this is the beginning of the game, he's not doing well. It's, uh, this is, this is the one topic that he, that he did not do well in yesterday, nor did he do it well on Friday. He was asked a very similar question on Friday about his,

about his, about his, uh, his wealth in blind trust. Clearly his handlers should have known that this was coming and this was one of his personal vulnerabilities. I mean, I think a lot of people would say the CV looks pretty impressive in terms of his work on the world stage, his work at the Bank of Canada, but his personal wealth.

Now, the question then becomes, is how big of a vulnerability is this? There's certainly, I agree that he could have handled it much much better. No question about it. Is this a vulnerability? Is the time that we're in now with the Trump tariffs, with the economic uncertainty, is this the kind of thing that Canadians are going to focus on, is it enough to stall his momentum that he currently has? He's learning on the job, and I don't know if this is going to be a killer for him or just a minor setback among those that talk about the news like we do.

Sharon, nobody suggests that he isn't following the letter and probably the letter of the law as it relates to the Ethics Commissioner, but the rules were not written with this scenario in mind. This is a very specific scenario. Caretaker government, prorogued parliament, unelected prime minister, all of which is allowed and I have no problem within our system. But it seems like when he says I'm listening to the Ethics Commissioner, what I hear is I'm listening to the ethics commissioner, what I hear is I'm doing the bare minimum. When the people have been given the bare minimum from him already on all these other files,

that it's incumbent on him to do more. Don't you think? Don't you think that would go a long way? Yes. So I personally would not tell a journalist to look inside of themselves. And I don't think any of us would. And I'm not gonna defend it.

Listen, the ethics and conflict, the commissioner's office is a very complicated process. I was in government dealing with someone of great deal of wealth and it was a very, very complicated process to deal with. That being said, all you have to communicate is that you are gonna go above and beyond. You're gonna go above and beyond the law, the rules.

And you know what? I'm going to cut him an a teeny tiny ounce of slack yesterday because he was clearly in a bit of a mood. And a lot of that likely had to do with the fact that one of his children were being completely thrown online in an inappropriate way. So was his response appropriate? No, I would not do that. And I've already made my thoughts clear to folks on his team about what not to say, having dealt with the situation myself, even when I was in government.

But let's not all tell people to look inside themselves. I agree. I agree. Well, listen, we are noticing some separation. A lot of people are saying, oh, this liberal party is just stealing the conservative party's policies. We're noticing that's not necessarily the case. Yeah, yesterday, Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that having an

industrial carbon tax is necessary for Canada to expand trade into the European Union, the United Kingdom and the emerging Asian markets. Now, that's a new one for me, Sharon, because I look at all the other countries in the world like Europe, like China, India, the United States, no carbon tax. And yet they seem to be doing quite a bit of business. So what's he telegraphing here? So it's interesting because we saw him do a 180 on the on the consumer portion of it, and that was a big hoopla.

And and now he's saying it about the industry side. Now, listen, this could just purely be a bit of political rhetoric that's going on around there. But that being said, I think he needs to come out and just say, listen, price on pollution, carbon tax, whether it's industry or people, doesn't work in our current state in our current economy. No one is gonna fault you for changing your mind.

At least I wouldn't fault someone. I would fault them for lying. I would fault them for flip-flopping. But if you say times are different, the economy is different, people are in a different position, we must pivot. I would agree with you, except for the fact that the narrative for so long was climate change is an existential threat to the country and the world, and therefore we need this

to stave it off. So that's not changing your mind. That's saying something different. Anthony, what I'm noticing here is, so you've got this position by the Prime Minister, Pierre Poliev has again created separation by saying under a Conservative government there is no carbon tax, there is no industrial carbon tax, creating two completely different options for voters. Are we going to have a carbon tax election after all? Well, here's the thing right about industrial carbon tax versus consumer carbon tax. All taxes at the end of the day are paid by consumers, whether you hide it, or whether you apply it in a more obvious ways and consequential. I

think this goes directly to the point Mr. Paul, he has been making, especially in the economic difficulties that we're living, that if you quote unquote get rid of the consumer carbon tax only to massively hike the industrial carbon tax to obfuscate it, guess what? All those businesses still pass on the costs of those tax increases onto people like me and you. So it's just a sort of political sleight of hand to get people to think they're paying less for something when in reality what's gonna happen

is prices are still gonna be going up, but it's gonna allow them 60 days of rep rape to pretend that that's not what happened. Brad Levine, 30 seconds to you and then I start with you after the break. Fundamentally disagree. In the EU, what we have to deal with, if we wanna diversify our trading options, as

I think most Canadians want to do now since Trump's made his moves, we have to recognize that they've got something called the carbon border adjustment mechanism. And that means that if we ourselves don't have an industrial price on carbon at the industrial side of things, they're just going to tack it on when it comes across their border. All right. More on our political panel next, including why is the NDP lost their voter base to a central banker? We're going to ask Brad that next. The Ben Mulroney Show marches on with our This Week in Politics midweek panel. Welcoming back Anthony Kos, Brad Levine

and Sharon Carr. Brad, I want to start with you because the liberals, they seem to have ceded their left flank, opting now to reintroduce themselves as a centrist option in this election campaign. And yet, despite that, if polls are to be believed, NDP support is cratering. I mean, there's one poll that has them at 9% nationally. If they're not, if the liberals aren't fighting

for those votes, where are those votes going? Yeah, in the last handful of weeks, the NDP have lost about five points nationally to the Libs. At the same time, the conservatives have also lost a number of points. There seems to be this middle ground between new Democrat voters and conservative voters Walter dough is in who have now kind of

Run over to the Carney liberal camp It's absolutely true campaigns are going to matter and we're going to the rip will be dropped in a handful of days here We're in the pre-election period now will be in the formal Election period in the coming days In that election campaign the NDP are going to have to fight like hell to make sure that they get the message across that a banker, a central banker, a guy from finance, a guy who's spent most of his adult life with the elites does not have the backs of working men and women. They're going to have to make that case and they're

going to have to fight in every region of the country. I think most of the support has come out of places like Ontario and they're going to have to fight like that. But I think that they, I think that right now a lot of those new Democrats who have fled to the liberals are more concerned and their ballot question is, I got, I don't want Pierre Pauliev to be prime minister at a time when Donald Trump is in the White House. And now with Trudeau gone, they have, you know, they're giving themselves permission to flee to the liberals. And I think that there's a real opportunity here that they've yet to seize. But I think in the campaign, there's a, there's an opportunity to do so.

Anthony Kosh is, has the liberal party in fact rebranded itself as moderate and centrist based on the limited amount of information we have thus far. And I think that's part of what Mark Carney was supposed to represent. But as we're seeing, we'll see how successful that will be. Mark Carney, if you even look at polling right now, a significant portion of Canadians still have no idea who he is and have no idea of what they think about him just yet. So I agree with Brad. This campaign is absolutely going to matter. But vis-a-vis the NDP, I think the big problem here is Jagmeet Singh is going to go up there

and attack Mark Carney, the banker. Meanwhile, he's going to be dressed in a $5,000 tailored Italian suit wearing a Rolex, and who knows all that? Maybe he'll pull up in his Maserati to the debate. And then the big solution that he has, you want to talk about who's serious vis-a-vis Donald Trump. This is a man whose solutions include trying to build F-35s in Canada. So I just think there's a little bit of a lack of credibility there.

I think Jagmeet Singh is probably the worst leader in the history of the NDP. This would have been a golden opportunity for them. It should have been a golden opportunity for them to sort of retake their mantle as the main left-wing party. I just got back from BC. There are real professional NDP parties in this country that are viable options for political office. The federal party is not one of them. So I'm not expecting them to rebound in any incredible, remarkable sort of way. And we'll see. Mark Carney is definitely trying to brand himself the centrist, but I think the second people scratch the surface and look below, they're going to see is the same old Liberal Party with the same old Justin Trudeau policies.

Sharon, is it the same old Liberal Party with the same old Justin Trudeau policies? Or is there a real attempt, like whether or not it's successful, that's for an election campaign. But is it an earnest attempt to say, you know what, we did go too far to the left and there were some voices in the party that were making it really hard for us to appeal as a centrist option? I would like to say so. As somebody who spent five years working for this government

and left and was very vocal about their shortcomings, I would like to see them go centrist. They went far too left because they believe that, ideologically, they can pull from the left and they can't. You might pull some folks from the left, but a lot of, and a lot of dippers are ideological lefters and they're never gonna vote for the center. So I would hope so.

Well, look, we only have a few minutes left. So I'm gonna try to put the question out and then I'm gonna go around the horn. And the question is, look, the polls are gonna move. We know that they have been very dynamic in the past few weeks. I don't think the liberals should get comfortable in the poll position right now, but that doesn't mean that's not where it's going to end.

Let's look at this from the perspective of Pierre Poliev, who for the longest time, Sharon, was in the driver's seat. What does he need to do to reassert that control and reassume the position that for the longest time so many Canadians were comfortable with him being in. You know, Pierre Palié is an excellent communicator. He always has been, his French is impeccable, but he has been unable to pivot lately. And we saw that he is sticking to the carbon tax message.

And you know what, it is a message that you want to stick to when it comes to the periphery, but it's not what's going to get him over the edge in this campaign. He's being drowned out right now and they're struggling. You can see them struggling to find their their footing with someone like Carney. They need to go back to the basics. They need to have a position on Trump that's strong. They need to have a position on affordability and they have to ditch the carbon tax narrative as their main pivot.

Anthony, I'm going to ask you to be a little introspective and a little bit self critical here. But he was in control by a country mile for so long. And oddly to me, a lot of people said, you know, I'm done with the guy for now. Now that not to say that can't change. What does he need to do to restore the dynamic that he was so comfortable in for so long? I think he needed he saw a little bit of this yesterday. He needs to start talking about the lost liberal decade.

That's what we're calling it. And it's the fact that there's data that was released a few days ago that demonstrated that over the course of the last decade, Canada experienced GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity growth of only zero point five percent. That means we've had absolutely zero economic gains. The average gain is that zero economic gains in the last decade. We've done worse than countries like Italy. No disrespect to Italy.

You know, my mother's Italian, wonderful country. But when you think of productivity and economic growth, the idea that the Italians are outperforming Canada or in fact most of the world is outperforming Canada is absolutely outrageous. And we need to say the people who ground our economy to a halt for a decade are not people who should be rewarded with a fourth term. In other words, if somebody lights a house on fire, you don't hire those same people to put that fire out.

And Brad Levine, you may be allergic to the next question I'm gonna ask you, but let's live in a world where the Tories adopt Anthony's suggestion and are successful at reclaiming that narrative. Wouldn't that narrative also stick to the NDP who supported the liberals in a great many initiatives? It may.

Now, that's premised on the notion that voters are looking back and not ahead. And I think that when incumbents are running for reelection, that is the top of the ticket is the same, it becomes easier for the opposition to ask Canadians to look back. With the change of Carney and with the threat of Trump's and with Trump and his tariffs,

I think that that's gonna be a challenge. I'm not saying it's not good advice, but it's gonna be a challenge because I think a lot of people are going to say, what do we do now going forward? How do we, you know, secure the economy? How do we protect jobs? How do we protect our sovereignty? These are big ticket issues. And you can look back. But the minute that Trudeau left, you saw that's when the polls started to change. That's when Canadians started to come back to the Liberal Party of Canada. So for them, changing the top of the ticket seems to be at this stage enough for them to say, we'll give these guys another look.

And for looking forward for the NDP, they can champion that which they secured. Very popular policies, pharmacare, dental care, other things, very popular. So they can say, look, this is what we got done with the with the last true, you know, send us back to Ottawa with bigger numbers. And and and we can do the same if not more. Okay, very, very quickly, I'm going to ask each of you just

for a name. And the question is this Donald Trump has been very quiet this week, when he goes quiet, which which political leader does that help the most? I will start with Brad. Paul Yev. Paul Yev, the quieter he is, okay, what about you, Brad? Or Anthony, I'm sorry, Anthony. Paul Yev.

Paul Yev, so, and Sharon, last word to you. Three out of three, Pierre, man. Yeah, the quieter that guy is, the better it is for Pierre? Oh yeah. I never thought I would achieve consensus on this show and with this panel ever. Well done. But honestly, I love talking to the three of you.

Thank you so much for joining me. And let's do it again sometime soon. McDonald's new cheesy jalapeno and bacon quarter pounder with 100% Canadian beef is here. So if you crave beefy burgers with a pretty peppery punch and pickled jalapeno peppers pile in a perfect bunch, and if you plead please if a cheesy taste came in threes with cheesy jalapeno pepper sauce poured with ease,

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The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. It's time now for the opinions of a good friend of the show and of mine. We're talking tech with Mohit Rajan's, meteorologist and consultant with thinkstart.ca. Mohit, welcome. Ben, nice to hear from you. I always, I get, I get a bad rap for railing against Gen Z. I'm the old man screaming at clouds.

But I read this article and thought, oh my God, Gen Z, get your act together. They have perfected, according to this article, task masking in the workplace, which is when you look busy, but you're not busy. This is something that I think is probably not just a Gen Z problem, to be honest with you. I think we're getting to a place right now where, yes, we're there study being studied because their tactics right now show that 65% of Gen Z workers feel pressured to appear busy.

And they do that by doing everything from highlighting what it is that they, you know, they have heightened stress and burnout. So they'll highlight what they're doing. They'll do things like rushing around the office and joining non-existent virtual meetings and stuff. So it sounds very, very harsh. But the truth is, there's a broader problem here. Why? Why are they able to? And what is it that's happening in the workplace that's maybe not as efficient as we think? Well, that's a question too. Let's come to the defense of this generation.

We have tools now that can optimize your time and make the work that you do even better in the form of all sorts of AI tools. And it seems to me that this generation would be the one that it was most apt and eager to adopt those tools and fold them into their workflow. Oh, yeah. And I think you and I can probably agree that we've been in situations where even back in the day when we were researching, it was certain things that we knew the quicker way to get to the path. But obviously, because of process and because of compliance, you didn't do it. because of process and because of compliance, you didn't do it.

So I think Gen Z is really looking at this and saying, well, we know how to do this more efficiently. We can get the job done work faster. Maybe we want to hit the yoga class at lunch. That's an hour and a half. I'm not saying that's exactly what's happening, but what I am saying is that we need to start to learn from the younger demographic about how efficient

they're actually becoming, because otherwise it's going to become problematic very quickly. I did not know that Google had any sort of partnership with Reddit. So when I read that Google is expanding its partnership with Reddit, I was quite surprised. So maybe, may rather than talk about the story of the day, take me back a few steps into why has Google even partnered with Reddit? And some people don't even know what Reddit is. Why has Google even partnered with Reddit? And some people don't even know what Reddit is.

Yeah, so what's interesting is if you consider the fact that a decade ago, blogging was one of the only ways that Google was starting to index sort of the wide variety of conversation. It really did ignore what Reddit is, which is a massive search and information trove for an entire generation. And so if you can imagine that if you and I

spent most of our time going to Google and researching, there's a generation after us that spend most of their time on Reddit going through that Q&A process because it really does micro niche, it really does find conversations, but it is also problematic and it is also places where trends start and begin.

So we're in a situation now where Google realized that they're not, they're not going to be able to index the actual internet for all of its value, just based on the way they've been traditionally doing it. And so Reddit ends up becoming this, this partnership, which you have to remember, right? It doesn't start as a profitable company. It doesn't have the ability right now to be able to move in a direction where it can survive on its own, just based on users.

So this Google ecosystem is supposed to bring everyone together. But as you and I know, Reddit is not moderated by any professional company. It's moderated by the people. And so it'll be interesting to see if Google, while they partner with them, has the ability to get the best out of Reddit,

or if it's going to be a non-moderated mess. How far do you think Google would be willing to integrate with Reddit? I don't believe that it's going to be possible when it comes down to filtering. That's gonna be the biggest problem, because as you and I know, when you look at your first page, Google entries,

you're looking at a mix of sponsored and extremely vetted, IE people who have been in the system and baked themselves into the Google system. It's going to be, you're going to have to go and really get deep into search queries before you're able to find what Reddit value you're looking for, but you will find it based on what people share and click on. So it's the Google problem, right? The more people click on it, the more it gets bumped up to the top.

BBC is talking about a shift towards reduced online profiles. Now, if I just read the title, that would seem to me a good thing that all of a sudden people are, I don't know, valuing privacy a little better, a little more. I think we're just finding the maturation of social media three decades into this, this world, people are starting to realize that we've gone from being people who felt like we were doing these documentaries of ourselves. And really just finding a reason to be different people at different stages in our life. And my daughter is a great point of that. She asked me before she went to university to remove all of her youth pictures, let's say, that I happily posted from really bad basketball games.

But that's not the point. The point is that 39% of the respondents in this conversation said they were worried about how companies start to use their online data. And so it can be anything from reducing your social allegiance to a brand right down to the personal profile you have on other social media. So I think- I found that my relationship with social media has completely changed. I don't post anything on Instagram anymore. I search it, I'll follow it, I'll watch stories on it. And I really use Twitter almost exclusively for work. And those are really the only two I've got.

And so you're right, there is an evolution that happens in a person's life. But if you're on the early part of that journey, then you're probably still still like you're on Snapchat and on TikTok today, the way I was on Twitter and Instagram 10 years ago, which is to say a lot. But I also think we also lived through the time period where at one point everyone's like,

well, you gotta be kind of everywhere and no, you don't. So that maturation comes in our personalities. And also, and this is where we have to remember, we need to go back and delete things we've set up. Like I'm on Blue Sky and apparently people interact with me on it. I don't remember when I signed up for it. So, because it can be co-opted.

So don't forget, Ben, your identity can be used on another social media platform, even though you're not on it. So it's very, you gotta be very careful about where you disengage from as well. What is the unsent project? So this is fascinating to me because it's something that's found a resurgence just recently because of your favorite app, TikTok.

But it's actually been around since 2015 and it's created by a person named Rora Blue and it actually the seat of it was just out east and PEI when she was doing her thesis originally. And quite simply this, it's a collection of over 1 million unsent text messages to first loves and people who do it anonymously. And it's this website where people just go and find how people were wanting to communicate with people and TikTok. One of them, for example, that went viral off of TikTok and has found this research and says 13 million views just watching these, reading these unsent messages. So it's really enacted or triggered a little bit of a nostalgia thing for people where they've

started to realize that the internet is also about documenting history and this this expression and not just about doom-scrolling. It feels like the new iteration of missed connections you know people who have a moment on a bus or a subway and then it's only later on that they realize they should have done something about it. Very much so I think we can't forget that right like so much has happened in such a short amount of time. It'll be fascinating to see what actually survives in our online environments to be able to show what the sign of the times really were. And listen, I like this as an idea and as a concept

and it seems entirely positive, which is not something we talk about often with social media. So I kind of have to say, okay, TikTok for the win on this one. Okay, but it's not for everyone. And you and I both know that it can get annoying quickly. No, I don't know. I've never been on TikTok. I don't know anything about it.

And I'm very happy to live in a world where I know nothing about TikTok, Mohit. Yes. This isn't actually, this is more about the whole concept of the UnSend project than it is. It just bubbles over on these popular apps as we talk about them. Mohit Rajan's always love our chats. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Have a great one. Chat soon. Thanks for listening to the Ben Mulrady Show podcast. We're live every day nationwide on the Chorus Radio Network and you can listen online through the Radio Canada Player and the iHeart Radio Canada apps. And make sure to follow and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your streaming audio.

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