The Ben Mulroney Show - Friday Political Panel - will Saab build fighter jets in Canada??

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Guest: Warren Kinsella, Former Special Advisor to Jean Chretien and CEO of the Daisy Group  Guest:  Michael Hyatt, serial entrepreneur and investor 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 Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tickets are on sale now at Salvationist.ca slash Christmas. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. It's Friday, which means we like to turn the star power of the show up to 11. Please welcome. Great friend of the show, Warren Kinsella, former special advisor to Jean Crezzi and CEO of the Daisy Group. And new to our panel, but not new to the show. Michael Hyatt, serial entrepreneur and investor to the both of you, I say, happy Friday. Happy Friday.

Gentlemen, what to make of this new liaison strategies poll that says, Liberals lead the Conservatives by eight points nationally, and that's post-budget, which I still don't think it was the home run that some people are saying it is. 58% of Canadians feel worried, pessimistic, frustrated about the economy. That's up from 55%. 50% say the budget will not positively affect their personal finances over the next year. Warren, I want to start with you because the liberals have been in power for 11 years. The Canadians are saying they're worried.

they don't think this budget is going to help them, and yet they lead the conservatives by eight points. Yeah, I was surprised by the poll as well. And liaison, it's a very good pollster. The young guy who runs it does a really good job, very accurate. So it does probably represent people's point of view, and their point of view from what we've seen is kind of a mixed bag. You know, I think the general view is you'd find a hard time finding a pundit

who didn't say that the budget was kind of, of oversold and it was underwhelming. Like you can't find anybody who ran to its defense, but even so, you know, it's polling okay and the liberal government's

polling okay. I honestly think that you've got a lot of Trump anxiety still in the mix. You've got a lot of hesitation about Pierre Pahliav and you've got a lot of people still prepared to give the balance of credit or to at least give the

doubt, that answered the doubt to Mark Carney. So I think it's a mixture of things. Yeah. And that's why we're seeing a poll with mixed results. Michael, what's your assessment? Not surprised. Uh, honeymoon face still, you know, uh, how, you know, you come up with a butt. I'm going to make a bunch of cut that kind of red meat for the base if you're like more center right and then said, hey, we're going to come out with 10 really good infrastructure projects. The headlines sound really good. If you dig into them, they're not as juicy as you think. But you know what? There's no major errors. here. There's nothing you can really bite into as a general public and say, I'm really against

this. It was a very, but you've said it a ton of time ago. Let's wait and see what this guy does. It's too early. They would tell you they're in a year, not 11 years were a new thing. They talk about that. How did this? Right. But I mean, like, they haven't made any mistakes yet because they couldn't have really made it. Yeah. And yeah, you know, we're going to try to fix your audio, Michael, because it's cutting in and out. So I'm going to go back to Warren for a second.

Warren, should this be a cause for concern for the Tories? I mean, again, it's the same party under different management. I can see that. Different style, different values, different priorities. But it is the same party that we've that's been in power. Very hard to

ascribe anything bad that's happened in the country to anyone but them. And so if after this budget that a lot of people are at best non-plussed by and at worst think it's actually not going to help them at all, if at that point, even with all of that baggage, the Tories are still eight points behind, should they be worried about that or is it too early? I really don't think like I say the budget was not a home run maybe a base hit like Michael says so it wasn't a disaster for them but it doesn't account for an eight point gap an eight point lead in the polls you know is the budget that popular yeah I got yeah and I got to wonder if you know maybe maybe it's a the honeymoon phase like I let Michael I think you you're probably right that at this point people are still

a lot of people are still getting to know Mark Carney. He was not the known quantity that so many other leaders that preceded him were. In a lot of cases we knew of him. We heard tale of him and now he's being road tested in real time. So maybe the honeymoon phase is going

to last longer for him just because a lot of people are willing to say, you know what? Let's open him up on the open road and let's see what happens in a way that you wouldn't with a guy like Pierre Pollyev because you've known him for so long. Yeah, look, it reminds me of anybody who starts a venture capital fund or private equity fund. The first few years are always amazing, right?

Because you couldn't have really made that many mistakes. Middle of the road budget, people are happy with, you know, the idea of cutting. Also, infrastructure, there's investments. There's money going around. It sounds good. The headlines are good. Again, you're going to have to wait a year or two and see how this plays out. Remember, a lot of these infrastructure that he's putting in is actually going to take five to seven years to roll out.

Yeah. It's going to take a while to really understand. It would, you know, look, my view on that and we'll probably talk about it is that it's probably not enough and it's not aggressive enough based on where we are in productivity. Then what's happened in the past 10 years, we're way behind as a country. We have capital flight. We have brain drain. The digital economy thing is not picking up fast enough.

We're in a very difficult position. But we have dry powder and we have a lot of resources. You know, I mean, like right now to open a mine, it takes, what, 15 years? Can we do that faster? There's a lot of, we just have fundamental problems in this country. Yeah. Well, let's move on to mines that could be opened a lot faster because the second tranche of Mark Carney's major projects have been

or more or less have been announced that was reported earlier this week. You've got three critical mineral mines, major liquefied natural gas facility, a hydro power plant in the Arctic. So these are big deal. They sound like big deals, but I'm learning more about the major projects office.

It's not a green light for any of the projects, but if the office deems a project to be in the national interest, it can expect regulatory decisions in under two years. What are you making? The more we learn about this major project's office and this rolling out, it's almost like an award show where we learn who's going to be a nominee at the Oscars Warren. There's a lot of theater about this, but I can't get around the fact that it just feels like the government's getting in there picking winners. And I don't know how I feel about that. Well, I mean, if they're promise, and he has promised, the prime minister has promised,

that this major project's office main role will be to expedite this stuff happening. You know, as I like to say, we're a resource country and we shouldn't be leaving resources in the ground. Then it's all good. What I was looking for as a Calgarian, I used to work in the oil patch, is a big pipeline announcement. I guess I shouldn't have been because the problem is, unless you believe the government should own pipelines, there's nobody out there who's offering to take on that task

at the moment for all of the obvious reasons, you know, the sad history of Keystone and so on. So I guess Carney is doing what he can. Let's put it this way. It's better than what Trudeau did, what Justin did, because Justin, in his tenure in power, you know, nothing happened in this regard. So grudging credit to what they've done, they've announced so far. Yeah. And look, and I take everything, I agree with everything you just said, except for that Mark Carney is everything he can because if everything he can could be to appeal away the tanker ban and

the emissions cap and all that stuff that's making the business case for a pipeline all the more difficult to make. Michael, what do you make of this? Because I've said before, one of the chief complaints that I've heard that really strikes the problem with this major project's office is it overlays an accelerated path for regulatory approval over and above the heavy-handed regulatory approval system that everyone else has to go through. So that system still exists for everyone else. But if you are anointed by this office, you get a fast track. And I don't know how to feel about that.

Only Canada could get in their own way. Imagine China for a second, wanting to put in high-speed rail. Do you think they take 15 years to do a high-speed rail? You think they take any of that kind of time to build a port, right? I mean, you've got to really be amazed at other countries and how fast they move. Only Canada could actually get red tape in front of their own. own red tape, right? And I felt that this budget in what they're doing, they still have to kowt out to this a lot of environmental stuff all the time without saying, you know, they're going

to do LNG because it's cleaner, they won't actually do oil. You know, they could have done that, which is twice as large. Like they're not going all in. The problem with our country is that we should have gone all in and being a lot more aggressive on energy in a digital economy to spur innovation here. We have a very, very large problem in this country. We have relatively high taxes. We have capital flight. We have brain drain. We have a ton of stuff happening. I mean, I mean, I work in the tech world, and the amount of us that are just going to the U.S. is astronomical and AI. We were one of the inventors with Jeff Hinton and them of the AI revolution, and we just let all that go, and we constantly let stuff go. I don't think we're, I think the budget is fine.

It's a step in the right direction. It's fine. But is it enough? I don't think it's enough. I think he'd be a lot more aggressive. I should think you should have gone all in. How about small stage nuclear? Yeah.

We could have done that, right? We could have said, hey, I understand all you massive hyperscalers like, you know, Microsoft and on a meta needed a lot more energy. We could have delivered it, right? But no, we're not doing that either. All right, so we're going to take a quick pause when we come back. We're going to talk about something that could be good news. Could we be building fighter jets here in Canada?

That's annoying. What? You're a muffler. You don't hear it? Oh, I don't even notice it. I usually drown it out with the radio. How's this? Oh, yeah?

Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bell Air Direct and use the money. money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. You may have heard of the sex cult nexium and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed. And in my new podcast, I talked to Allison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma at other people? I don't even know how to answer that question.

Allison after Nexium from CBC's Uncover is available now on Spotify. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. I did not have this next story on my bingo card. It popped up, and I think a lot of people very surprised. Saab, formerly of cars, is in talks with Canada and Bombardier to build, I think it's pronounced Grippin, fighter jets domestically, which could create 10,000 Canadian jobs, plus all the knock-on effects for the entire aerospace and R&D industry in this country. This is a big deal, Warren.

Yeah, it is. Hopefully it doesn't go the way of the Avro Arrow. So we have that sad history behind us. But this is great. And actually, you know, there's other good news this week. We're all talking about bad news or potentially bad news. But there was a manufacturer of liquor, of alcohol, good stuff,

who's moved from the United States to Canada to Montreal, because they've been hammered by tariffs and they want to be able to sell their products up here. So maybe some good things are happening, you know? Maybe we'll have to thank Donald Trump. I don't think that'll happen. Maybe that'll happen.

Listen, if you have to thank Donald Trump, I want to be there the day you do it. Michael, I want you to put on your innovation hat for me. And let's say that we are able to move the ball down the field with this Saab talk to build a huge new driver of our aerospace industry here in Canada. What would you do? If you were advising this entire thing, what would you suggest as a way to leverage this and make it bigger than just 10,000 jobs?

So, first of all, it's a great thing. I think this was really, really good news. And remember, this fighter jet is a really good fighter. It's not as advanced as like some of the strike fighters in the new generation six or five or six that the U.S. has. But it's a great fighter and it can be used in probably Ukraine in a lot of places. I would probably keep going and keep manufacturing in the same vein. I would tie in a lot of the stuff we're doing around defense and cybersecurity and an intellectual property.

One of the problems Canada has is that we tend to have intellectual property, we tend to let it go. And we tend to not want to build the digital economy alongside this. But listen, if we could start and spawn a whole defense building department here and building jets here, Warren's right. We haven't done that since the Aver arrow. Well, that was our jet. But it would be fantastic to see this pulled off. Yeah. And Warren, my fear, though, is that, you know, our F-35 order is already under review. And I got to wonder if we decide we're going to move away from that instead start building our own planes here, which can help sell around the world. I got to wonder if that's going to be yet another thing that irritates Donald Trump.

You never know what's going to irritate him. But if he hears Canada is not going to be, involved as involved or as deeply integrated as in terms of purchasing military equipment from them anymore i don't think he's going to like that i i i've reached in my old age i've reached the point where i'm just fed up with trying to figure out donald trump psychosis and you know trying to decide what we as a country should be doing i i've actually now adopted andrew coin's position andrew's calling this in globe mail and his is let's just do what we're going to do and not predicate everything that we do based upon how Trump's going to react to it. To me, he's a monkey with a machine gun.

You just don't know what he's going to do. So let's just make decisions that are in our national interest. And if it makes them happy, it makes them sad, there's nothing we can do to control that. People in the United States, people in his own administration don't know how to control them. I don't know why anybody in Canada think they could. And just a point of clarification, the liquor you were talking about is called Sourpuss. an American liqueur, but since they sell 98% of all of their sales come to Canada, they figure, why don't we just de-camp to Canada and avoid all those tariffs?

Consumed by all first year are university students, probably. Okay, I want to move on to something quite serious. And we were talking about it earlier today. When the head of CESIS speaks, there's probably a really good reason for it. And the lay of the land in terms of radicalization of not just Canadians generally, but youth in Canada should be very, very alarming. Michael, apparently one, almost 10% of all the terrorism investigations occurring with CIS involve at least one person

who is 18 years or younger than 18 years. This is a cause for concern. You know, it's interesting. It's terrible. It's increasing. And I'm going to make this slightly scarier. But AI is moving so quickly. And if you ask me what the biggest concern I have with the way technology is going with radicalization,

what I will tell you is what AI is learning to do is learning to control people's dopamine. And it's very, very effective more and more on helping to create the narrative. If you wanted to use it as a weapon, they get more radicalization, not less. I expect this to become a bigger and bigger problem, convincing people of things that they couldn't normally convince them of and doing it in a very automated fashion. Well, Jesus, look, Warren, we've got one guest from him. Michael's telling us that the AI is going to be weaponized to increase our dopamine levels and essentially it's one step closer to mind control. So, so we just close up shop and 100% that. That's the direction this is going in.

I think people are underrating AI and how fast it's moving and how that superintelligence will come out in the next five years. And I'm speaking orders of magnitude stronger. And we have orders of magnitude ability to weaponize and do these things and convince people of things that we can't convince them of now. So Warren, just to sum up, because I don't know that you can necessarily hear Michael, but he's saying that the AI as an agent for radicalization is going to supercharge any group, any group trying to bring acolytes on board, which is absolutely frightening. And you're somebody who's been following and documenting and chronicling radicalization as well as anti-Semitism online and in person for years.

You've got your new book coming out, which I'm so excited to read. but this is a tool that I don't really want terrorists to have. Well, they've got it. And yeah, I do talk about it in this book, The Hidden Hem, which is coming out in a few weeks. I talk about it extensively. And, you know, the degree to which these extremist organizations, whether it's Hamas or Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, they are radicalizing youth. Our youth is becoming more and more profound. And I give tremendous credit to cease.

CESIS has been sounding the alarm about this for years now. I regret this story this week hasn't attracted as much attention. Like if you look at the start of this year, Ben, and I know you remember this. On the first day of this year, a young man in Texas drove to Louisiana and killed 14 people in the early hours of January 1st, 2025. He was completely radicalized online. In fact, he was a former member of the U.S. Armed Forces. And when they looked at his life, he was in a trailer in the Houston area.

All he did was go online and look at these videos on meta and YouTube and X and TikTok and so on. That is entirely how this All-American boy became radicalized and then went out and killed 14 people in the name of ISIS. So it is a huge problem. And AI is just the latest most lethal addition to their quiver is AI is making it easier and easier. easier for the bad guys to do their things. So we need to be paying way more attention to it, like CESIS says. Well, so it feels to me like this is something that the genius out of the bottle very hard to control. You can only hope to contain it, I guess. But one thing that I think we could be doing more about Michael is, you know, the CIS warning continued about China and

Russia being active in Canada. This is one of those files where it feels to me like the government has dropped the ball over the years by just not taking certain things seriously that they should have been taking seriously, not properly funding those departments and those groups that are tasked with and entrusted with our safety and our security. Yeah, you're talking about probably the Arctic and look, if you asked me if we spent our money properly the past 10 years, I'd say I think everybody knows it's a huge no. Our Arctic is not only a trade route, it is also huge on rare minerals and there's just a ton of opportunity up there and it's very hard to protect.

This is also a problem to the United States at the same time. not just us. I would strongly think we need to like a lot more outpost up there, do a lot more research up there and put a lot more money into it. You know, resources are getting more scarce on this planet and there's a lot of people would love to take advantage of it. I've always joke with people

that if they redraw the borders today, no one would let us have Canada. Let's be serious. It's a gem. It's a real gem on resources and everything else and it is a literal gold mine, a diamond mine, a resource mine, a rear earth mine, and everybody wants it. Uh, the last word to you, um, Warren Kinsella and you got about 20 seconds. I, sorry, I guys, I, I, I didn't hear what was said.

Oh, no, well, you know what in that case, you know, we're going to, then we're going to rewind the tape to what you said before and it was fantastic. To the both of you, Michael Hyatt and Warren Kinsella, really appreciate you on this Friday. I hope you guys have great weekends and we'll do it all again next week. I want to stamp myself one of the best players to ever play this game. Wednesdays on Global. That's how you do it. This is their moment. The lying.

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