The Ben Mulroney Show - Canadians booing the American National Anthem. The Canada/U.S. relationship is fractured

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Guests and Topics: Guest: Gordon Giffin, Former US Ambassador to Canada (1997-2001) Guest: Perrin Beatty, Former MP and cabinet minister, and former president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce  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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wealthsimple.com slash match. Yes, every angle of the terror Trump tariffs is what we're delivering today. And our next guest is someone who knows Canadian US relations as well as anyone Gordon Giffin, former US Ambassador to Canada, Ambassador Giffin. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Oh Ben delighted to be here. This is look so many of us we got to take the world as it is we know these things are coming but so many of us still don't know why. Yeah well there's no rhyme or reason to it it's aberrational at best and unconventional without a doubt. So you couldn't have anticipated this. Yeah. And if first it started with border issues, and then it was a fentanyl issue.

Now Donald Trump is railing against our banking system. It seems like it's a perpetual shell game. Every time we think we've dealt with the problem, he gives us another reason why these tariffs are to come in. Yeah, it almost strikes me as if we've got an intention deficit issue here. He started out, as you suggested, talking about the border fentanyl migration, as if the Canadian border was really a legitimate problem in that respect, which it isn't. But clearly the Mexican-USS. border is, but it's almost as if he was wandering through the West Wing Thursday or Friday and somebody said, did you know, by the way, the Canadians don't let our banks in? And, and, and he said, no, I didn't know that. So, you know, I'll add that to the list.

But what do you make of Donald Trump saying from the Oval Office that there's nothing that Mexico and Canada can do, these tariffs are coming in, but we recently learned that Mexico has negotiated for itself a reprieve of sorts. Well, one month reprieve before they come in because they've committed 10,000 National Guard to secure their border. So clearly there was something they could do. I wonder whether that the door is open to a similar reprieve for Canada. Well, I'm assuming yes. As far as I understand, the prime minister spoke to the president earlier this morning and they are scheduled to speak

again at three this afternoon, which causes me to believe there were some to-do's on lists after that call with the potential. And I'm making this up. This is not, this is conjecture. This is not informed. I just am assuming that there's some potential that there'll be a similar bargain struck by the prime minister. Yeah.

But it's just for people on on the outside looking in, we feel quite helpless, Mr. Ambassador, because like as I said before, we can't even agree on the facts on the ground. JD Vance tweeted Mexico sends tons of fentanyl into our country. Canada has seen a massive increase in fentanyl trafficking across its border. There are three ways of stopping this. The first is ask nicely, which we've done. It's gone nowhere. Now we're on to the consequences phase. And then he goes on to say, spare me the sob story about how Canada is our quote, best friend. I love Canada and have many Canadian friends, but is the government meeting their NATO target for military spending? Are they stopping the flow of drugs into our country?

I'm sick of being taken advantage of. Now, you know, one ounce of Fentanyl going across the border is too much. But Canada makes up zero point zero eight percent of the fentanyl going into the United States compared to Mexico. How we're getting lumped in with them makes no sense. Well, what you just heard from JD Vance is a stream of consciousness. And he almost sounds like, you know, a parrot that's been hanging around the Oval Office and he's just heard Donald Trump say it so much that he's now able

to say it, uh, there's not a lot of original originality in what he had to say, you know, there's historic frustrations, as you know, in our relationship and talking about defense spending. I, when I was ambassador 100 years ago, I hectored Canada about at the instructions of my president, Bill Clinton, about the level of defense spending. That's been a frustration forever. But to try and tie that in now, it's just the old laundry bag of going into things that can be individually addressed without

something as irrational as threatening tariffs. But here, I do have a thought, and it's not original, but I do think it would be a good idea for Canada to pick one distinguished, highly respected, almost nonpartisan person and say, this is our person who is going to Washington until such time as we get this resolved. The United States, give us a person corresponding to that, and the two of them can just work on this. And back in the 01-02 era, he was in government at the time, but John Manley did that on behalf of Canada. He was a minister, I guess deputy minister. He and Tom Ridge worked through an awful lot of border issues post 9-11 when the US was threatening to shut down the border, not as irrationally.

But you know, I dig manly out of retirement. Ambassador Giffin, my dad used to say that his most important relationship was with his caucus and his second most important relationship was with the President of the United States. And it wasn't that he assumed that that he would get everything he wanted from the President, but he knew that he would get an audience and that's the best that a prime minister can hope for. So what does it say that Donald Trump, yes he's speaking with with Trudeau today at 3 p.m. but prior to that, he had not spoken to him since the inauguration. This is, I mean, I think he's probably spoken to Kim Jong Un more

often than he's spoken to his large the leader of his largest trading partner. Well, first, Ben, I hate to tell you, but you're our third largest trading partner this and sinking. But that really isn't the point. You are our next door neighbor. You have been a centuries long ally, friend, and partner. One, you have to acknowledge or I have to acknowledge that the President of the United States is not conventional. So your dad's proposition was exactly right. He practiced it extraordinarily well, as did his successor, Jean-Claude Créchan, in my view. Créchan and Bill Clinton had a very close relationship. But that was based on a global partnership. Canada and the

United States, Prime Minister Mulroney, Prime Minister Craychan were people who were consulted by the American president on things that just didn't have to do with what we sold to each other across the 49th parallel. They were on things that mattered global. In the last couple of decades, not so much. And so that partnership has not been valued as much and is not valued as much in the United States leadership today as it was 25 years ago. So some of its interpersonal chemistry and your father with both Ronald Reagan and with George HW Bush was extraordinarily well respected, but he was also a close friend. And so that's lacking.

That's certainly lacking. Yeah. Yeah. Ambassador Given, thank you so much for coming onto the Ben Mulroney show. We appreciate your time. We appreciate your sage advice and I wish you a very good week. Today has been a day where this is the topic. It is the fight of the fight of our lives. And I'm so glad that our next guest, Perrin Beatty, the former MP and cabinet minister

and former president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, can educate me a little more and help educate our listeners a little more as to what's coming down the pipe and how it's going to affect businesses here in Canada. Mr. Beatty, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. I've been glad to be with you. So we heard that Mexico got a temporary reprieve from Donald Trump. I believe Canadians expect that our leaders should get us something similar, although I don't have a whole lot of faith in the team that's currently leading the negotiations. Canadians expect that our leaders should get us something similar, although I

don't have a whole lot of faith in the team that's currently leading the negotiations. So we have to assume, Mr. Beatty, that these tariffs are coming tomorrow. And if they do, what would be the impact on small and medium-sized businesses across the country? Well, the impact on small and medium-sized businesses would be particularly hard. With larger businesses which have operations on both sides of the border, it's possible for them to ship some of their operations south of the border.

So they're producing closer to their customers and they can get inside those tariff walls. But for small businesses and for medium sized businesses that have operations here in Canada and that are looking to get by the tariff wall into the US, it will be much, much more difficult. You know, we didn't, we've not fully recovered from the pandemic.

And then the Canada post-strike took a big chunk out of the revenues of small medium-sized business across the country during their most valuable Q4. And so it's just been, it's just been headwind after headwind after headwind. I don't know how much more our entrepreneurial class can take. And that's a real problem. And you know, the message from the spin is that however this works out, we all hope that some sort of an agreement could be reached this afternoon. It may happen, it may not. Eventually all trade wars end.

One hopes this one doesn't start, but there's a message here, and that's that we've allowed ourselves in Canada to slide for the last decade. We've lost touch with the need to focus on the fundamentals of ensuring that we have a strong, growing, prosperous economy, and that we're resilient, that we can absorb these shocks. While we've been chasing issues related to plastic straws and issuing apologies, other countries have been building their resiliency, building their productivity, increasing their growth. We need to get back to fundamentals. So if you had the ear of either this prime minister or the next,

what would you want to see happen in with lightning speed to help us build that resiliency, especially in our in the entrepreneurial class and the people who are building businesses, hiring Canadians and creating wealth. The thing that could be done this afternoon is for our provincial premiers to take down inter-provincial barriers to trade. Nobody can say with precision exactly how much that would increase growth in the economy, but every single report that has been done

shows that those barriers are slowing us down, they're costing jobs, they're limiting consumer choice, they're making it more difficult for Canadian businesses to scale up to compete internationally. Nobody else did this to us. This is self-inflicted. We could undo that this afternoon. We could cool it with the anti-business rhetoric that we've heard so much of from our politicians in recent years. Why do we keep on telling investors that they're not wanted here? They're going to go where they're wanted. If we say that they're not wanted here, not trusted here, they will go somewhere else. We need to start work on regulatory reform.

So very often, we get decision by delay where investors simply write off their investment and say, I'm going to go somewhere else because I can't get a decision out of this process. So we've become in Canada a nation of builders that can't get anything built. We need to start building infrastructure to get our products to global markets. It's been so difficult to get done over the course of the last several years. And we need to have a strategy that says that we're proud of our resources in Canada, that we have the three F's that all of the world needs, food, fuel, fertilizer, and that we should

be having an explicit policy of saying, we're going to take these to the world. Same with critical minerals and with other skills and other resources that Canada has. But we need to get back to fundamentals and focusing on how do we encourage investment in Canada? How do we encourage growth and opportunity for Canadian families? Well, we also, I think, should look at this situation as an opportunity to reset and rebuild our relationship

with the leadership in Washington. I think right now we don't have anything that resembles a healthy relationship. And you were in government at a time when Ottawa and Washington DC were the best of friends where that line of communication was open. There was a free exchange of ideas. There was forthright conversation. Advice was given and advice was taken. We need to get back to a time where we have something that resembles that kind of relationship. I'd like to think that we could do that then. It's going to be very difficult to do. The time when I was in government, your dad was prime minister.

There was a relationship between the president and the prime minister between Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Brian Mulroney that was both personal and professional. They would spend political capital to help each other. They shared the same values. They genuinely liked each other. We're dealing with somebody in Washington today who is very different and who's indicated that he wants to uproot so many of the traditional relationships that the US has had, including the relationship with Canada. And indeed, it seems as if the people who are closest to the

United States are the first ones to be on the firing line. So it's a much more different climate, but we need to have a strategy over the longer term that we rebuild the relationship and that we look for ways to partner with each other, but it has to be a genuine partnership. And the other big change from the time when your dad and I were in government was that all of the relationship was based on the premise that we were in the same boat together, the Americans and us. And it made no sense for either of us to try to drill a hole in the other guy's side of the hull of the boat, because we would both sink. And it was

inconceivable that we would ever find an instance where either party would deliberately attempt to damage the other. Unfortunately, what Mr. Trump has shown is that we can no longer take that assumption for granted. Yeah, even under Jean Chrétien's liberals, when they decided and famously decided not to join the coalition of the willing in the second Iraq war, and Jean Chrétien wore that as a feather in his cap. Even that wasn't antagonistic the way this this relationship is today. Well, if you if you remember, Bill Clinton, at the time of the referendum in Quebec, came into Canada to say that the United States favored a united Canada. Would Donald Trump say that today? favored a united Canada. Would Donald Trump say that today? Yeah. It's, uh, it's, so if you were a betting man, how does this play out?

I don't know. It's, uh, we hope, I think we all have to hope, but we also have to prepare for the worst. And the other thing we need to do is however this works out, we need a new national plan to go back to Sir John A. McDonald's day. We need a strategy that takes Canada's future into Canada's hands, that looks at what we can do here in Canada to restore international respect for Canada, to restore growth in Canada, to restore opportunity for Canadian families. We can do that, but we need to have the leadership, the vision, and the will to make it happen. Perrin Beaty, former MP and cabinet minister

and former president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. I say thank you and I wish you a wonderful week. Anytime Ben, all the best. BC Children's Hospital is one of North America's top pediatric care hospitals, leading the way in groundbreaking research, treatment and innovation.

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