The Ben Mulroney Show - Could Canada recruit a civilian army? Also - Trump and the BBC, Vibe Coding

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

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Share the wonder of Christmas with friends and family at Roy Thompson Hall. Tickets are on sale now at Salvationist.ca slash Christmas. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for joining us on Remembrance Day. It is Tuesday, November 11th. And we wanted to start this hour with a conversation about a news story that popped up on a lot of our feeds. And when we first read the headline, I think a lot of us were caught on our back foot. It surprised us.

A lot of us couldn't believe what we were reading. And then I read it, Mike Jolet, my intrepid producer. read it as well, and I think we should break it down because what it is suggesting is not what I think a lot of us thought it was. And so there was a story about a goal by the Canadian government to start using 300,000 personnel who are non-military as part of the Canadian Armed Forces, right? That was sort of the headline that we were going to add 300,000 people to the Canadian armed forces who are technically not military and the implication was and the thought was the and I think the initial knee-jerk reaction was that this was some sort of workaround

shortcut that the liberal government was using to boost our numbers in the military without actually doing the hard work of building up the military. That's what I saw a lot of people commenting on online with. But in discussing this with Mike Droulet over the morning, that's not what this is, I don't think. That there is a plan to target volunteers, right, to prioritize recruiting federal and provincial public servants into what they're calling a supplementary reserve force. Well, if you think about countries like Finland, they have conscription. Yeah.

We do not have that here. We also do not have a massive military right now. It's only like 23,000. And they want to bump that up. But what they're suggesting is, and we do have some reserves. Yeah. But it's not the same. Yeah, it's nothing that can move the needle in any way, shape, or form.

And so the goal is to boost that number of sort of reservists. It's actually even below that. It's below that because they're not getting real full military training, right? There's no, they don't have to, in the states, if you're in the reserves, you actually have to go through boot camp and you've got to go through training. And then you also have to do some sort of, you got to donate like one one weekend a month to being on call.

And that's not what this is. This is our, I guess, our own version of that. This is, it's almost like a, it's almost like a state sponsored militia. Kind of like that. It's just, it's civil servants. Yeah, civil service. Which is wild. It's so wild.

And so they're going to be teaching people, just general people who work. I guess for the military and for the government to be able to, I mean, you'll have to go out once a year and learn how to shoot a gun or fly a drone. They would receive a one week annual training course focusing on basic skills like handling a firearm, driving trucks, and flying drones.

And the standards for entry would be less restrictive than active reserve forces regarding age, physical fitness, and medical requirements. So you'd have people of all shapes and sizes in ages being enlisted, who would volunteer, to be part of some kind of fighting force. Now, it does beg a lot of questions.

A, how much would this cost? Under what circumstances would this, quote, unquote, fighting force be mobilized? What sort of threat would require us to activate this group of people? Think about Ukraine. Yeah. It's somewhat similar to that. You're a massive country, Russia invades Ukraine,

and they need to mobilize. And they need everybody and anybody to be able to fight. And Canada's got such a small population in comparison that it's going to be like all hands on deck. To me, it just feels like, let's focus on the problem that we have. We have a storied Canadian history, which we have been talking about a lot on this. Let's focus on restoring that. This to me seems like a lot of busy work. And it feels to me like it's an excuse to create another government bureaucracy that would just waste of money.

trying to kind of train people who aren't really trained and don't really want to be there. And you're going to give them a one week course to shoot a gun. I thought we were making guns illegal all over this country. I understand that it would be great to have almost like a reserve force that could be activated in a time of war. But that reserve has to be the reserve of the army. Let's focus on building up the military first. And then once that happens, this job will be easier. Once you have a world-class military that is properly funded and trained and staffed

that feel like they are respected and taken care of so that they can then take care of us, then I don't think it's going to be as hard for you to enlist people into the reserves. I've got a fun game for you. Anybody listening out there, take a look around your office. Yeah. Now just take a look at all the people in your office and think, who do I want as part of the defense force? Yeah. Who do I want?

Who do I think can actually fire a gun, who would be someone who could fly a drone, do anything to help the defense of this country? Look around to our office. Yeah, I don't know that I would exactly be, you know, the Captain America model of, like, who you would want. I don't know that I possess that. Every time I've ever played paintball, I get shot so many times because it's hard for me to hide. Yes, hard for you to hide.

But then there's also, like, these volunteers, are there really going to be volunteers are you going to incentivize volunteerism? Are you going to is this in a situation where you're going to be paying these people? In which case they're not volunteers, in which case it's just more money that you, I think, with all due

respect, we should be focusing with laser focus on the restoration of the honor of the Canadian Armed Forces. I like that we're throwing ideas at the wall, but I hope this idea does not become a boondoggle, a financial boondoggle. And

What guns are you going to give them? We don't have enough guns or bullets for the military that we have. You're going to buy guns for these people? Like, I don't know that this is a fully baked idea. And so I'm not, I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with the idea of having something like this. But until we have a fully formed strong and powerful military that can project our ideals and when the country calls on them, they are equal to the task, let's focus on that first.

then worry about this stuff. This is the, this is the stuff in the margins. This is not, this is not the, this is not the, this is not the statement, right? This is, this is, these are the notes on the side. So anyway, we'll keep following it. And then, you know, a conversation we want, we want to start having today that will continue, um, as this story progresses, is the idea of a guaranteed livable basic income. The universal basic income, UBI is what's been called forever. Apparently there's a bill in the same. And apparently there's a bill in the Senate, S206, the national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income. It's been progressing through the Senate.

And it's under- There's some people who think that this is hidden in the budget and this is happening. Yeah, it's not. This is not happening. It's not. This is almost like a thought exercise that's happening in the Senate. And there are some very smart people out there who have been pitching the idea of a universal basic income for years.

My dad was someone who thought it was something that should be studied and examined. And, you know, there is a difference between spending by government. an investment by government, and there is an argument to be made that if done properly, I suppose, a UBI could be viewed as an investment. I'm not there yet. I'm certainly willing to have the conversation, but I guess we've got to look at... I don't know if we can afford to pay people not to work. We can't afford...

First of all, we can't afford anything like this today. This is going to cost, I mean, some people suggest it'll be $93 billion a year. Yeah, it's insane. I mean, right there, that's when you shut down the discussion. How about we generate, we create an economy that generates enough money that we could even consider something like this? That's made up money. That's money that doesn't exist. That's our great grandkids money.

And frankly, I don't have time for it. And is this a, what would be the obligations of everyone who gets a UBI? Are you obligated to find a job? Does this, if you all of a sudden you're getting a UBI, does that mean that you could. Yeah, but if you're getting $80,000 a year from the government, does that then mean that you are, obligated to get a job that doesn't necessarily pay your bills because all of a sudden then you can work for minimum wage and you can still live a decent life. Well, the Fraser Institute did analysis back in 2018 and they, I mean, go figure that they

came to the conclusion that it would require a substantial tax hike for people of all income levels. Something tells me I wouldn't get a UBI, so I would be subsidizing a UBI and that was just make my life's more challenging than it was in the past. I don't need it to be more challenging by giving people free money, especially people who are of who can work and aren't working. Not to suggest that everyone's just sitting on their butts not doing anything. So this to me, I get another half-baked, not ready for primetime ideas.

Up next, Trump is threatening to sue the BBC. Do you think he's bluffing? Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show and thank you so much for spending time with us. Currently we're on air on the Chorus Radio Network, but you may be listening to us after the fact. Or you might be streaming us on a streaming platform like the IHeart radio app. Or you may be listening to us after the fact as a podcast or you may be finding little smaller moments of the show on social media. Or you may be watching the show on YouTube. All those places are important for us to build our community, and it means so much that you're

helping us do that. It takes a special kind of behavior to concede the moral high ground to Donald Trump. It takes a special kind of a really bad actor to make Donald Trump the hero of a story or the truly aggrieved party in a relationship. And that looks like what's happened with Donald Trump versus the BBC. The U.S. president is threatening to sue the BBC in the UK for $1 billion US over an edited documentary clip that made it appear like he incited the January 6th, 2021 capital riot. Do you not need Mike Myers there as Austin Power?

One billion dollars, yes. So we aired the clip for you yesterday. We're going to do it again right now. the first thing you're going to hear is the edited clip of what they made it sound like he said, where they took two parts of his speech that were separated by, I believe, four minutes and they jammed them together.

And then you're going to hear what he actually said. So let's play that. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on

are brave senators and congressmen and women. Yeah, they spliced together two parts of his speech and made it sound like he was going to join them and they were going to fight like hell. And instead, what he said is we're going to go down, we're going to cheer on the people that are fighting for our side. Now, you can take issue with whether or not he thought he had a case. I do not think he had a case.

I think so much of that should be left up to the courts and to figure out. But he did not say what the BBC made, a lot of people think he said. And for that reason, they, I think, did a disservice to their viewers,

their listeners, to the profession of journalism around the world, to the hard work of and to the hard, the toil and the sweat and the belief in journalism that so many people have,

they helped break the trust between the public and journalists, and that's on them. Donald Trump is the type of guy who loves using the criminal justice system to his benefit. And he likes to achieve, extract vengeance by suing people. He's done it before. He's done it with bigger companies than the BBC.

And he's going to do it to them. And frankly, if it's up to me for stuff like this, they deserve what's coming to them. Whatever that happens to them, if it's something negative, there's a payout. It's because of them. They did it to themselves. Simultaneous to this,

There was some whistleblowers and a big dossier that came out about the rabid, virulent anti-Semitism that has infected the coverage that the BBC has done on the war in Gaza over the course of over two years. It is blatant. It is omnipresent. It is destructive. It is toxic. It is corrosive. And it has led to the BBC chair resigning as well as I think the head of news. uh it is uh this is uh awful stuff is not a good time for the bbc and it's not a good time for journalism

and you know and and and trump like he's a dog with a bone when it comes to stuff like this they will not let go they will not let go until they extract their pound of flesh so trump's lawyers are demanding a full apology or retraction and compensation or they're going to sue for one billion dollars and the lawsuit adds as i said to his pattern of legal action he's gone after the CNN, the New York Times, CBS, you'll remember, and we talked about this earlier, where Donald Trump, we all believed because we heard it with our own ears that Donald Trump said that, you know, in a fight between racists and non-racists, that there were good people on both sides, right? And the clip ended there as if he was making an moral equivalency between racists, actual racists,

and the non-racists on the other side of the protest. Oh, they're the same. They're good people on both sides. That's not what he said. He actually said they're good people on both sides, and I'm not talking about the racists. I'm talking about the other people who take issue with certain things. The thing is, I don't know if he can actually apologize, though,

because I don't think if they'd be, sorry, the BBC can apologize because what Trump is demanding, he is demanding also all of the records, all the electronic records and papers, anything related to this whatsoever, and he wants it. Yeah, he wants it. And an apology's not going to be enough. They're not going to hand that stuff over. His lawyer sent a letter saying, we're putting you on warning. You are not to destroy anything, electronic or physical, because we're coming after everything.

We want a big data dump. But like I said, systemic bias, according to this leak, has been revealed, including downplaying anti-transgender voices and as I said the uneven coverage it's not even uneven it's completely unbalanced in the war in Gaza where they favored Hamas and minimized Israeli suffering it's in there there was a whistleblowers were all over this stuff this is a like I said this is this has been a this has not been a news gathering organization it has been a it has been a a vehicle for misinformation based on a select group of people's preferences and they have been doing it with taxpayer dollars in the UK.

The reactions in Britain have been interesting. Prime Minister Keir Starrmer backed the BBC. Of course he would. Why wouldn't he do that? Denying it's corrupt. Sure. Why would you deny? Now I promise you,

if there was a pro-Trump bias at the BBC, there would be a heads would be rolling far more than the ones that volunteered for the guillotine already. Critics on the right, including Nigel Farage, who by the way, so Nigel Farage, for those of you who don't know, for the longest time, he was a fringe politician in the United Kingdom. He was the founder of the Reform Party. He could never, never punched through. He was never able to punch through the public consciences. And then because of what's been going on with the rampant violence in the streets, with the arrest of people for what they say on social

media with the grooming gangs and the rapes, the raping gangs because of unchecked immigration. He is now the leader of the most popular party in the UK. Yeah. And this is fueling the fire. And you've seen that a lot in Europe. Germany has had to say that they are going to repatriate 1.3 million Syrians. Why? Because the only reason is because they're doing it is because they don't want the far right to get even more of a But this, listen, everything is a reaction to something else. And Nigel Farage is popular in the UK today. He's the head of the most popular party in the UK.

Reform dwarfs every party right now. He is popular today because the BBC did stuff like this. Because politicians allowed for certain things to happen that nobody asked for. The unintended consequences of a lot of these ideologically driven decisions and policies are the pendulum swinging in the other direction and Nigel Farage is now the most popular politician in the UK and he said that this has proven that the BBC has been woke and biased for decades and he has a lot of people listening to him but there's a lot of parallels you can sort of see change BBC to some of the letters yeah to uh uh CBC and you can

start there's there's still people that this country we still feel I don't know there is this weird comfort that Canadians have that they feel that what they see with their eyes and hear with their ears is not reality and we still are not we're not looking at Europe as a warning like oh we should we got to change course

or we're going to be like them we are still convinced of our own exceptionalism and our own progressive exceptionalism and that is to our own detriment but the bottom line is the controversy has turned into a full blown crisis for the BBC with questions over trust and political influence

and the future of the public broadcasting in the UK. And yeah, if you don't want that to happen here, then the CBC should take note and they should check their privilege and they should check their bias and they should check, remember where they get their funding from because this will not end well for any public broadcaster if they continue to abuse of the trust

that has been given to them by the people. All right, up next, another word of the year and this one is way better than six, seven. Let's face it, finding your next favorite podcast can be tough, but that's about to change. Curious cast discovery is the destination for award-winning podcasts from true crime and history, like crime beat. Documentaries like Stop, Rewind, The Lost Boy, music with Uncharted, and even the paranormal, like Dead Man's Curse, all 100% ad-free for less than the price of a coffee. Curious Cast Discovery. Available now on Apple Podcasts for just $4 a month. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. All right. Well, we witnessed the appearance of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse last week when Dictionary.com decided that their word of the year was six, seven. I'm not doing the thing. Six, seven. If you got a kid in the car, I'm sorry. I apologize. That's my bad.

But there are lots of dictionaries out there. And this year, what is it, Merriam, no, Collins' Dictionary's word for 2025 is entirely different. Collins' word of the year is vibe coding, which apparently means using AI to turn natural language into computer code. I don't know what that means. Fortunately, my next guest does. Please welcome Miles Harrison from Practici, which is a business management consulting firm. Miles, welcome the show. Thanks.

Great to be here. Okay, so using AI to turn natural language into computer code, what does that mean? It means that because we have AI now, it has lowered the barrier for entry to do software development, and folks that don't know how to code necessarily can now build software just by giving the AI's instructions in English and not worrying about actually understanding the code that it's writing. So I'm sure this is not. the reality of the here and now, but are we getting to a place where vibe coding could

essentially mean I could use a particular AI engine and I could write a prompt that says create an app for me that does X and it would create an app for me. Absolutely. There's the ability to do that right now. What? Hold on. Hold on. If I wanted to, I could create my own app just by putting a detailed,

prompt into an AI and it would pop out a fully functioning app that I could then market and sell. This is where we get into the caveat. But yeah, I mean, the person who came up with this term, Andre Carpathie, who was one of the co-founders of Open AI, and he was also the lead of self-driving at Tesla as well, he has this quote where he says, the hottest new programming language is English. So now you can just give instructions. Wow. And it's not so much that you would have

AI build you software with a single prompt, but you can have a conversation and you just give the AI instructions. And the whole idea of vibe coding, which is this term that Carpathie coined, is that you're not worrying too much about the details of the code. You're just going with the flow and the feeling and you're letting the AI do the actual building.

You're just giving a direction. So, yeah, so I would say, hey, hey, AI. I want to build an app that helps me scour the internet for the best deals in travel. And then it would give me some version of that back. And then I would just keep going back and forth in conversation with the AI, honing it down and making it a better version of that app until I had something I was happy with. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, it's more like you're functioning like a project manager or the manager. And the AI is a software developer and you're working with it to build a, a product without necessarily having to be a software developer yourself. Okay, but then questions of ownership come into the conversation, don't they? I mean, if you're a coder and you're sitting on your computer and you're building out, you're building out an app or a project, one line of code at a time that is coming directly from you and you're putting it with every keystroke into the computer, building it one line at a time, that's one thing.

But if I'm using somebody else's technology to translate my desires into a reality, who owns that final product? Does the AI own it or do I own it? Or the person who created that AI? I mean, these are open questions, right, that haven't been answered. And a lot of what people have said about vibe coding is not necessarily that the AI, you know, quote unquote, knows how to do anything. it's actually regurgitating existing examples that are already out there on the web of people that have built similar

to what you ask it to do. You know what you? Hold on it, yeah. Okay, finish your thought, please. Well, I was just going to say the dirty little secret about most programmers is that, you know, very few programmers nowadays write code off the top of their head. They are usually going on the web and looking for existing steps of code and other people that have solved similar problems.

So it's not too dissimilar. No, yeah. I've heard, listen, I just rewatched Silicon Valley from start to finish. By the way, it totally holds up, and it's totally worth watching again. But the guys at Huli, which is the big, bad version of Google in that show, decide to sort of reverse engineer the Pied Piper app. And the goal is, like, how can we change the code just enough that we aren't going to infringe on their copyright? So I understand that there are limitations there. and I guess you're right

I mean depending on the AI they might just be lifting too much code for it to pass that bar of ownership and you wouldn't know if you don't understand if you don't understand coding like at some point if you're really trying to build a robust

technology to stand on its own and that you want to leverage in commerce somehow you're going to have to have somebody you can look under the hood of whatever you've built with AI to ensure that what you've built is yours and yours alone and not lifted from a series of a not Frankenstein together by AI absolutely yeah absolutely and and what people have found with vibe coding that's really funny is that sometimes it will write things that's brilliant

and then other times it will write things that look like they should be correct but are basically complete nonsense uh and so i i say about vibe coding if people want to try it it's great it's fun you can build it's it's very much for prototyping yeah and and for people that are learning how to code but i say the same thing about that as i do about our clients that are learning to use other like uses of of gen ai technology and that's you know trust yeah but verify so so so what's going to happen in the future is is google going to have their own proprietary vibe coding AI and every company is going to have their own and they're just they're just going to sit there a group of creatives with perhaps a handful of engineers and they are going to iterate and iterate and

iterate and then the and then the engineers are going to look under the hood to make sure everything's clean and they're going to keep is that how the future of of building out the apps and building out online services is going to happen? I mean that that's the future that's happening right now. Okay. Okay. So there's two things. There's vibe coding and there's agentic coding or AI-assisted coding, right? So vibe coding, you don't know about the code and you just don't care and you just go with the flow. And there are companies now like Replit, which is more for engineering. And Unlovable is another company that specifically more so lets people build websites. They've been valued at almost $2 billion that are doing that right now. They're giving platforms that allow people to

vibe code and build product. Well, websites are sort of different than, say, like, an app, right? Because a website is just like a piece of real estate, right? And we've been using Canva, for example, to build out websites forever. Canva doesn't own, all the tools from Canva are used to build the website, but Canva doesn't own my website. And you could say the same thing for an AI that builds a website for me. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's very hard to go back. and look at kind of the provenance of the exact things that AI spits out. But in terms of like whether that's happening right now, not with vibe coding, but we talk about AI-assisted coding and agentic coding where you have people that already know how to do software development, the big companies in the world, your Googles, your open AIs, you know, your metas already have tools that are force multipliers for software developers. and that's things we've done here at my company where we can turn out product very, very, very fast,

which in the future, in the past, excuse me, would be impossible. So, yeah, I guess I want to end this on a high note because you've got this entire generation of kids that built careers on becoming the best coders they could possibly be. All things being equal, you probably want somebody with engineering

and coding experience, working with hand in hand with AI to build the best possible product versus a slub like me who knows nothing about it doing the same job. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think vibe coding is a fun new thing that people who want to learn coding can do. And it also allows people to prototype things very quickly. So you could build your idea of your app what you envision with very little technical knowledge. And then when you want to build it, you know, quote unquote, for real, you know, that's when the brains come in. Miles Harrison from Pacti, we got to leave it there.

But thank you, my friend.