The Ben Mulroney Show - Carney's big budget sell and are land claim storms brewing?

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

GUEST:  Keith Wilson, KC, constitutional and property rights lawyer from Alberta If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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During the Nissan all-in clear-out, get zero percent financing plus up to $500 bonus on some of our best-selling models. You have zero reasons to wait. Conditions apply. See your local Nissan dealer today. to the Ben Mulroney show. It's Thursday, October 23rd. Thank you for spending your time with us. We can't do a show without people tuning in. We wouldn't last very long. I can promise you that. There are some people who just linger in media, and I struggle to understand, who watches them, who listens to them. Oh, Dave Bradley. Oh, you need to get it? No. Okay.

What did I say once? No, what's his name? The host of... Carson Daily. Carson Daily. Trust me. I know who I am. I see myself. I have wherewithal and self-awareness. So when I say this, I say this knowing all of those things. Never in the history of media has someone done more with less. I would agree with you, absolutely. Well, because he had this, he had a late night talk show that ran for years that nobody watched. I don't think I ever watched it once.

Yeah, I did. It was before the internet. You had to watch it. It didn't have clips on YouTube. But he was cash in a paycheck. And then, then he becomes a host and the producer of the voice. Which I never understood that either. Never understood that either.

Anyway, that's neither here, no there. Let's get back to the here and the now. But to do that, we got to go back in time. Does that make any sense? Because this tweet did not age well. This is a tweet from Justin Trudeau, our former prime minister. And when's the tweet from? I think it's from 2020.

I think. Earlier this year, we made investments to help GM Canada retool this plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. Today we went back for its launch. It is officially Canada's first full-scale commercial electric vehicle plant. By 2025, now, they plan to manufacture 50,000 electric vehicles per year here. Now, you might be asking yourselves, because you might not be from Ingersoll or from Ontario, why did that tweet not age well? Well, because earlier this week, we got the bad news that GM was shutting down that plant because the appetite for EV vehicles had waned. And I think 1,100 jobs are on the line. I don't think it's...

Oh, I mean, 800 jobs. Something like that, yeah. But the images of parking lots full of these EVs that are just left, I don't know, to rot. I don't know what happens. Well, just nobody's buying them. No one's buying them. and, you know, the investments that they made were sizable. And the thing is, I like the idea of delivery vans in the city being electric.

Oh, absolutely. I think they should all go that way. And who knows if this vehicle's good enough for that? Yeah. But they're just not selling them for some reason. And look, I'm not railing on Justin Trudeau because we had Regan Watts on the show, one of our political commentators, who made the point, if you believe, as he does, and as I do to a certain extent, that the government, in order to protect,

industries that we've built will get involved in courting business and keeping them here with investments. Those are bets, right? Those are bets that you place on sectors of the economy. And if you believe in that, then you have to believe that every now and then a bet's not going to pay off. We're also going to be talking to some farmers next week because I spoke to a bunch of them yesterday who were telling me about how, yeah, we keep on throwing money at these plants. Yeah. But we're not throwing anything. There's nothing in the budget regarding farming. Thank you for teeing that up for us. Thank you for teeing up the budget. We are awaiting the full rollout of the budget next week. But in the lead-up, and there hasn't really been a lot of talk, Mark Carney gave a preview of the budget. He was in front of a number of students and staffers, young people, at a university in Ottawa. And there's a lot that you've got to interpret and read between the lines of because every budget has a theme and I don't know what the theme of this one is. And that's not a bad thing. It just,

I just find it interesting. So the one of the goals of this budget is to double Canada's non-U.S. exports within 10 years, adding $300 billion in trade. He said that we can no longer count on the United States to be a reliable trade partner and therefore we have to diversify. And I think that's a fair assessment. let's listen to a bit of our prime minister setting some ambitious goals our goal for canada is to double our non-US exports over the course of the next decade generating more than 300 billion more in trade and that's new orders for canadian resources technologies and expertise the fact is that federal spending has been growing over the course of the last decade by more than

seven percent year over year we've been spending faster than our economy was growing so we have to change that and our government is changing that yeah uh i listen i i trust him to to see the lay of the land to see the fiscal cliff and to steer us uh to try to steer us away from it uh to a certain extent but it feels to me when we look when we look at at at at this budget that it's less about that than it is about i don't know managing his caucus right there's some people on the right, some people on the left, so I'm going to give some lefty policies and some righty policies. The budget is going to feature larger deficits than expected.

Carney said that Canada has fiscal capacity to act decisively. I don't know what that means. But we're either in a place where we have to stop spending or we're not. And we're going to keep speaking. He's going to focus on major investments over the next five years to grow the economy. Spending cuts are coming, though core social programs will be protected. Okay. Define core. Honestly, define core because after 10 years of a liberal government, and yes, this is a new team or under new management, if you will. A new team? No, under new management. Under new management. I think that's what we'll say from now on.

The scope of government and what would qualify as a core spending and a core program has been growing full. faster than the population of gremlins if you fed them after midnight or poured water on them. I can't remember which one it was. So, like, honestly, the spending from what I can see, didn't we just, how much money did we just hand to Ukraine? 500 million. Listen, that's a drop in the bucket for what they need, and I like that we're supporting it. But, and that, I'm not, I'm not taking issue with that. But there are, there was $25 million for Senegal that was announced.

And what did we just learn about the food map? banks. The food banks take no government money and they are being stretched beyond their capacity and they are supposed to be used as an emergency and they are not. They are being used as a daily intervention into people's lives because they cannot afford groceries. And I don't know that we have the money for some of these new core programs that took purchase under Justin Trudeau and may still have life in them under the new management of Mark Carney. So, we're going to need details on that as well. We learned about trade and industry that the new buy Canadian policy for steel, aluminum,

lumber, manufactured goods and tech. He talked about that a little bit a few weeks ago where that will be the default setting for procurement for this government. I like that. I like it a lot. The aim is to make Canada more self-reliant in production and global trade. Absolutely. We make all this stuff.

But can we do it cost effectively? Well, yeah. like here's the thing. There's nothing more irritating for than to know we've got all the lumber and then we ship it down to the states and then they make a chair out of it and they send it back here and we buy it.

You know, it'd be nice if we made those things. We had the wherewithal. We have the people. We have the skills. We have the trades. We've got it all. We could do a lot of this stuff at home. So there we go.

That's where we should possibly look for subsidies to be able to get, to be able to equalize in terms of of, if you can make stuff super cheap in Slovakia, well, why don't we figure out a way to make it here and support businesses here? So there's some climate and immigration stuff that was touched on as well, but the political context is where we're going to end this

because it is a minority government. It's a strong minority government, but they don't have the support within their caucus to get this over the line on a confidence vote. So the conservatives are demanding the deficit to be under $42 billion. No way that's happening, which means they're not going to vote for this. And I think they can do so with a clean conscience.

The estimate's been closer to 100. Right. And they want cuts to taxes, income, carbon, housing, farm, etc. Meanwhile, the bloke-Khequeque wants to end all oil and gas subsidies. And I think that's one of their non-negotiables. And why would they want that? Now, the government warns opposition could trigger it an election if demands are too high. You know, I think the pressure needs to be put on the government to say,

hey, put some water in your wine. You do not represent everyone in this country. And why don't you try being a little more conciliatory and seeing if you can get some votes from those guys. I do think the NDP are just going to fall in line because of all the parties, they are the ones least ready and capable to run an election. They don't have a leader.

They don't have a vision. They don't have money. They don't know what they stand for yet. So all to be continued. Up next, a warning about land ownership going forward. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. We are a national show and so we're going to go all the way to British Columbia for a legal story that could have national repercussions. Of course, a lot of us are well versed now on the BC Superior Court ruling in Cowichin v. Canada, where the court ruled in the Cowichin case that a successful determination of Aboriginal title can declare fee simple interest invalid and justified infringements. This means that the assumed indefeasibility of registered titles of BC home and businesses owners under BC's Land Title Act just flew out the window.

Not my words, the words of my next guest. Please welcome to the show Keith Wilson, constitutional and property rights lawyer from Alberta. Keith, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me on. So you point out that 95% of British Columbia's land base is currently subject to unresolved claims of Aboriginal title. Therefore, all of that land could be, the ownership of it could be called into question. Well, it's called into question now for sure because of that decision of the BC Superior Court. Listen, I am accused almost daily of saying that the sky is falling by simply highlighting things that could be of concern.

There are people who have seen this exact same ruling and have determined differently. For example, Andrew Coyne, the writer and journalist argues that the decision is not primarily a threat to private property rights, but rather an extension of rights to indigenous people whose historic property rights were ignored. And he suggests the way forward is negotiation and settlement, not simply relying on the courts. What do you say to that? Well, clearly, Andrew didn't go to law school. He just demonstrated that. Why? Tell me why.

But, yeah, tell me why, like, what? Yeah, and let me help your listeners break this down and illuminate what's really happening here, is in law, and this applies across the country in every province, Ontario and everywhere else, we like when we own our property, when we own our home, when we own our land, you know, we treat that as solid as granite, right, that the government gives us a title to our property. Those are our property rights. And no one else can claim better, right? That's our land. It's something that gives us comfort, confidence, the ability to sleep at night to make the largest investments of our lives for most of us. So along comes this decision from British Columbia where the Cowichin tribes said, they said, no, no. You know, my great, great, great, great, great uncle used to go fish on the banks of the Fraser River by the Vancouver.

airport and therefore I think I have a better Aboriginal title and my aboriginal title trumps your your simple title the title that all of us the rest of us hold and the court in this case said yes that's true so that's that's the earthquake the earthquake is that the court has ruled that a pre-existing Aboriginal title is better and trumps overrides eliminates invalidates your fee simple title. So that's the, that's where the legal earthquake is. Okay, so we'll take,

we'll stick a pin in that for a second because I do want to look, I want to look to the future, but before we do, I just, I had one question for you, because I remember hearing a story, I heard it in political circles growing up,

so I take it at face value, but it may not be entirely accurate, but there was a push when Pierre Trudeau was drafting the charter. And there was a push, to include property rights as one of our rights. And it was pulled.

It was pulled. So, okay, so if that's true, we would have had a charter right to property. Would that have changed this judgment in any way? It could have, because then it would have been a competition between two constitutional rights, for sure. Yes.

Yeah, so there you go. So that could have, there's so many people who hold the charter up to be the end all, be all of everything. and this, and it is not, it is not, and certainly not in this case. All right, so let's look to the future because it seems to me, like, does British Columbia have more unseated land claims? Do they have more of those issues there than other provinces? Yeah, let me.

Unresolved land claims, that's what I should have said. Yeah, no, that's fine. So how it works is that in 90% of the land base in Ontario is covered by treaties. So that's where we talk about the term ceded land. So the First Nations ceded the land through treaty to the government. That then gave the government clear rights to the land. The government could then issue your listeners, their land titles. British Columbia only has 5% of its land.

covered by treaties. So that's why they're super vulnerable. And the entire coast, practically the entire coast. And the parts of the coast that aren't, that aren't unresolved, have no access to the inside of the country. It's mostly actually, some of most of the treaties are along the coast. It's on the interior that they're super vulnerable. And the whole Vancouver, all of Vancouver is at risk here. So, and Quebec is the next one.

But 100% of Alberta, 100% of Saskatchewan, et cetera, and I believe 100% of Manitoba are covered by treaties. So we're not as vulnerable to this decision. It does create underlying uncertainty. But if you have land that is the subject of a land claim and it's not covered by treaty, you are at risk of losing the title to your land. The 760 acres at issue here in the city of Richmond, according to the witnesses in the trial, are valued at over $100 billion. Yeah. And the court has directed a negotiation.

So they want the government to negotiate with this judgment looming over their heads. That's no way to negotiate. Well, exactly. And that's why I take issue with Andrew Cohn. Like, what's he talking about really? And note as well, the court said there's a number of options here. one is that the first the couch and take the position that the the titles are invalid and basically say get off the land and thanks for the nice home another is some revenue sharing agreement with the homeowner another is this kind of lease concept it's all this all just leads to the danger of extortion yeah well and exactly which is why like i don't of course i i want um I want respectful dialogue between First Nations and different levels of government.

But to suggest that go negotiate, that's the right thing to do. Yeah, but they can just say, no, the couch can say, we don't like your offer. We're just going to wait for the judge to apply their judgment. So it's a terrible way to negotiate. In the meantime, you own that property, you know, you get a transfer, you get a promotion to, you know, for to Toronto from, from Richmond, how are you going to sell your home? Yeah. You can't sell your home.

And now you and I are on the board of directors of a major company deciding to build a manufacturing plant. We got two locations. Not doing it in BC. You know, one's in BC and one's in Alberta. Where are we going to go? Yeah. So the investment chill this brings, if I was a banker holding large portfolios of mortgages

in British Columbia, I'd be nervous right now. So what to do? Is there a court challenge to this? Is there going to be an appeal? It has been appealed, and the BC government has asked for a stay of the decision pending the appeal. And it's probably going to work its way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. But, you know, the pattern of the Supreme Court in all of these First Nation decisions has been to favor the First Nations. So this is a bad precedent and it's going to create prolonged uncertainty generally for property rights in Canada,

but more acutely it will create a problem for property rights in British Columbia and their real estate market and their investment climate as well as anywhere else in the country where there's no treaty on the land. Well, it's so unreasonable this judgment on its face that it's, in my opinion, detrimental to what we all want, which is real reconciliation, because the government is then going to, of course, appeal, and there will be some on the First Nation side that will look at that as not being, you're not good faith, you don't mean what you say when you want real reconciliation because you're challenging this court case, it upholds our rights.

So it's designed almost to be a bomb that explodes in the middle of a time where we're trying to mend fences and build relations. And I do thank you for joining us today and laying this out. Thank you so much, Keith. Thank you very much. That was Keith Wilson, constitutional and property rights expert. A kidnap child. A kidnapped child whispers dark secrets from his kidnap child whispers dark secrets from his kidnap child. past in a language he no longer understands, but a lost cassette will reveal the ugly

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