The Ben Mulroney Show - Carney looking for savings and the CBC called out by a former host

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

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Prime Day is here so you can get a great deal on a new footspa. Transforming you into the queen of kicking it. Wait, this has bubble jets. Okay. Shop great Prime Day deals now. ["Principle of the Weekend"] Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show and thank you for joining us on Tuesday, July 8th.

It has been a great start to the week. I can say that confidently because last night I enjoyed the first Canadian screening of Superman on an IMAX screen with my kids. And while I can't give my full review yet because it's under embargo and I do not want to upset the hosts, Warner Brothers, because I'd like to get invited back to a movie. Suffice it to say that I'm going back to see another advanced screening on Thursday.

That should tell you all you need to know about whether or not I enjoyed my time at this first foray by James Gunn into the DCU, where he intends to build out an entire cinematic universe. Our prime minister intends to build out the one Canadian economy, but in order to do that, it's going to require investment and it's going to require choices. You'll remember last week on this show, we talked about how this prime minister has written a lot of checks, and I don't know that we have the funds to cash those checks.

During the election campaign, he asked Canadians to trust him with $130 billion in new spending. And that was before he agreed, at least verbally, to join Donald Trump in his very ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system of North America. This was before he announced that we would, as a nation, achieve our 2% of GDP military commitment for NATO,

and with an additional 3% in broadly military spending as Warren Kinsella pointed out that if you build a road that leads to a military base that would fall under that additional 3% that we're going to get to over the course of let's call it a decade. But you throw all of that together onto a spreadsheet and Canada is on the hook for a sizable increase in government spending. A lot of it, as I just said, I agree with. A lot of it is real investment. It will yield benefits for us. It will bring more money back in. yield benefits for us. It will bring more money back in.

And so I'm in line with a lot of this, generally speaking, spending. I haven't seen the budget yet, but they are gearing up, right? The liberal government is gearing up for their first ever budget. And with so much new spending, there will be cuts that will be required. And so he has sent out

directives to his ministries, find cuts, find ways to save money because cuts are coming. And I'd rather them be your choice than my choice. You're not going to like it if it's my choice necessarily. Here's the problem. His cabinet, by and large, is made up of people who fought and governed under Justin Trudeau. And it reminds me of a story of a friend of mine, someone I know, who was younger than me. And they were at school in Boston during the rise of Facebook. And the way Facebook worked is Harvard students were the first to gain access to Facebook, and after they conquered Harvard, every university in Boston was given

one of these Facebook accounts, early access. And this guy that I know used Facebook as most people did as a way to meet girls and so later on in life I noticed that he wasn't using Facebook anymore and I said why aren't you using Facebook you're one of the first people to take to gain access to it and he said well here's the problem if you use something if you're used to using something as a as a sword you can't then turn it into a shield and I was used to using something as a sword, you can't then turn it into a shield. And I was used to using it in a particular way, and I couldn't just turn that off and turn something else on.

If your habit is to do one thing, it's really hard to form a new habit. These ministers that were tried and tested under Justin Trudeau, formed habits under Justin Trudeau that I don't know that they can break. They see a sword, they don't see a shield. And so if you ask people who for 10 years spent money that was not their money and spent money that did not yet exist to the point

that we had to print more and were partially responsible in their own ways of adding more money to the national debt than all previous governments combined. And then on a dime, you ask them to become penny pinchers. I don't know that you are going to see the results from a self audit that you are going to see the results from a self audit that you are hoping to see this is and like I Don't want to say use consultants because these this government on top of adding more bureaucrats to the government than we need

They've been spending money on on outside consultants in a way that I've never seen What's an outside consultant gonna be that a hundred thousand new bureaucrats couldn't do? But if ever there was a need for an outsider to come in and do an audit so that we can get a dispassionate view of what's being spent and what we need money for. It's this. And so I don't know that at the end result of this is going to be anything more than performative cuts

because in a lot of cases, these are the people who got us into the fiscal mess that we're in today. So I'm gonna be watching with great concern and honestly a cynical eye that these guys aren't going to be able to do what the new guy says they need to do. If they are able to do it, kudos to them, tip of the hat to them. But I suspect that when they come back and say, well, here's where we think we can do

better. You're going gonna have think tanks and you're gonna have experts pouring over those results and saying, yeah, how come you didn't look at that and this and that and this and that pet project and this check that goes out every month to, this organization on the other side of the world that doesn't help Canadians one bit.

And they're gonna say, well, of course we can't do that. That's so important to our, you know, our priorities on gender fairness in Uganda. Okay, well, if you had been dispassionate, you would have cut that first. So anyway, that is something to pay attention to. I wanna spend some time right now talking about the dinner that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister from Israel,

had with Donald Trump. Here is what he offered him and gifted him at the beginning of dinner. I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It's nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved. And you should get it.

Thank you very much. This I didn't know. Well, thank you very much. Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful. Thank you very much, baby. Thank you. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you.

It's a great honor. All right, that's the anti- Zelensky. That's the opposite of Vladimir Zelensky. We remember the dressing down that he got, which I thought was wrong on every level. I thought the, the, the hosts behaved boorishly to a man who's trying to defend his country against Russian aggression, but Zelensky could have done things differently. Zelensky should have, he should have known what house he was going into and who the resident of that house was and what he responds to. And he should have said, and this is not my idea. I heard this from someone else.

Mr. President, on behalf of the thankful people of Ukraine, whom you have stood by as we have faced down the tyranny of Vladimir Putin. I come bearing gifts, a gift of thank you, a gift unlike any our country has ever bestowed on anyone else. It is the highest civilian honor that we can offer anyone who is not Ukrainian. And it is so special, in fact, that we had to invent it for you. It did not yet exist. This is how much we value you

and the commitment by your government to help us in our time of need. And he would have brought out a giant box and in that giant box would have been the biggest gold medal you have ever seen. That is how you get on Donald Trump's side. You flatter him, you flatter him. And it works. And he didn't do that. And that's why that's why in part he got Zelensky. Bibi Netanyahu did everything he needed to do

to keep his greatest ally on his side. Will he get the Nobel Peace Prize? I don't know. That's actually beside the point. But he gifted the man something he knew he would appreciate and I guarantee you the talks afterwards went a lot better than Zelensky's. Alright, don't go anywhere. When we come back we're talking about the CBC and do they have a bias on their hands? Well according to their former host Travis Danraj, they absolutely do. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. The CBC has been in the news, has been the news for a significant amount of time. Pierre Poliev made defunding the CBC a big part of his election campaign, which did not find purchase with enough voters. So he did not win the election.

And on the other side of the equation, our Prime Minister made the promise that rather than defund the CBC, he was going to swing the pendulum in the other direction. And he was going to not only fund it at the level that they expected, but he was going to top them up with millions of more dollars. That's how vital they are to the Canadian conversation. According to him, in my experience and in the experience of a lot of people in media, the CBC has a bias issue.

They have a bias issue, they have an entitlement issue, they have a spending issue, and all of those. And they also live in a world where they are not, in my opinion, as someone who's been in media for 25 years, they are not nearly as vital to our national character or the national conversation as they like to believe. They are a player in a game that has more and more players in it. And saying something doesn't make it so.

But I'm on the outside looking in. Now there is a story of a prominent CBC television anchor who has denounced the public broadcaster as plagued with quote dysfunction at the highest level in a fiery all staff announcing his departure to colleagues that was yesterday. Travis Dan Rush, who was a colleague of mine when I worked at another network, he left that network and eventually found his way to the CBC in a very prominent role. He was the host of Canada Tonight with Travis Dan Rush on the CBC News Network. And he wrote that he was, quote, forced to resign from the CBC, said, it comes after

trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions about tokenism masquerading as a diversity, problematic political coverage protocols and the erosion of editorial independence became a career ending move. And look, here's the gist of it.

Travis looks like the diversity that the CBC wants you to buy. He looks that way. His name, Travis Danrash. It says a lot. It's not Ben Mulrooney. It's not, well, let's use Ben Mulrooney because you don't need another example. Right. And so, so he looks the part. But when when he took the role, and it was a much Ballyhooed announcement,

he started asking, he wanted to have guests on that offered various perspectives. He had our own colleague, Alex Pearson, on a couple of times until all of a sudden she wasn't there anymore. He pushed back. He asked questions that came from a position of being critical of the liberal government, for example. This did not go over very well. And so all of a sudden, one day,

he just disappeared from the airwaves. And the rumors were that this was swirling I reached out to him and I won't engage. I won't tell you what the content of the of the conversation was I haven't been given permission to talk about that but I I did offer my support as a colleague and he was very cagey in His responses for I think for fear fear that this would come to pass, that he wouldn't be able to come to an understanding with them.

And for that reason, he was, quote, forced to resign. And so yesterday on the Alex Pearson show here at this radio station, Alex was joined by Travis's lawyer, Katherine Marshall. And here is what they said. Well, there's a lot of reasons. But I think started with the fact that Travis was trying to bring a diversity of opinions and voices on to the network. That was part of his job, right to be controversial to start, to, you know, look at an issue from all angles, not just, you know, have four people on who all agree with the same angle.

And that diversity of viewpoint was not, that was not respected by certain members of the leadership at CBC, and in particular, certain senior correspondents based in Ottawa, who I won't name right now, but that might be something that you all hear about a bit later. Yeah, look, this could have wide reaching implications. I think names could get named.

And I don't know how far this is going to go. But if this liberal government wants to push back on what is increasingly believed by people at the center and the center right, that the CBC operates as a de facto publicity arm of the liberals. If they wanna push back, then if this news comes out, if this dirty laundry gets aired, then they should take a position that the rot needs to be excised from that company, rather than just throw more money at them and say,

oh, we need the CBC, because without the CBC, Canada doesn't have a national character. And we fall into some dystopian thunderdome where there are no rules. Like without them, we've got nothing, right? Discounting all the good and hard work done by other media agencies around the country. So we reached out to CBC for comment.

And here's what they told us. They said yesterday, Travis Danraja unionized employee, I don't know why that matters of CBC, Hadjo, Canada, who's currently on leave sent internal notes, making serious allegations. While we are limited in what we can say in response to the privacy and confidentiality considerations, CBC categorically rejects the accusations made about CBC news, our staff and management. So it does feel like there is a battle brewing that they're staking their The CBC is not going to be able to do that. It's going to be a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,

very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very a lot of ways. It's old, it's stodgy, it's self important. And therefore, it's going to be one like one of those institutions that protects its own it digs in and protects its own. So I am not, I'm not suggesting that names won't be named. I'm

suggesting that consequences won't be what you would expect suggesting that consequences won't be what you would expect were this to be, say, another organization. He claimed that he was forced to resign due to retaliation, exclusion, psychological harm, and CBC's culture of avoiding hard questions on diversity and editorial integrity. And look, that has been a problem in this country and in this world for the last let's call it five years Where we very much like the performance of showing off the picture of look how diverse our team is

But if everybody thinks the exact same way It all you have is a whole bunch of people agreeing with each other I've said this about TV shows in this country. There is a TV show I don't have a lot of time for where all the women look different, but they all read from the same hymn book. The very first lesson I learned in television was from my producer who works down the hall at the morning show now where he refused to allow the group of hosts to ever get on TV and talk about an issue if we all agreed on the same thing

because it was the first lesson I learned in TV. Nothing is more boring for the viewer than four people sitting around a table agreeing with each other. And that is, that to me is a code I have lived by. I want to be challenged on this show. I wanna have differing opinions because I want people to know that my opinion,

no matter how much I cherish it, is open to being changed. And the CBC as an institution is being accused of refusing to live in a world where their opinion could change. Because God forbid the CBC, because it's like if God is fallible, then is he truly God? And I think the CBC subscribes to that. If we can be wrong, then we can't be the CBC.

And so this is not the end of the story, and Travis made that very clear. This is only the beginning. Where it takes us and the impact that we feel, time will tell. But oh, and lastly, because we've got a few questions. They're looking, the CBC was looking for a senior reporter for the fifth estate. Here is what you were required to have, a university degree,

an informed understanding of Canada. And you've got to come from an underrepresented community in Canadian journalism. So essentially, they're asking for anybody who doesn't look like Ben Mulry. And you gotta come from an underrepresented community in Canadian journalism. So essentially they're asking for anybody who doesn't look like Ben Mulry. So not asking for differing opinions, you just gotta look different.

["Swarma in a Doritos Bag"] And we'll see you next time.