The Ben Mulroney Show - Have Canadians abandoned "Buy Canada"? What does Canada's energy future look like?

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Guest: Dr. Eric Kam, Economics Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University GUEST: Francis Syms, newly appointed Head of the School of Clean Energy and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology at Humber Polytechnic 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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bring sunlight into some pretty murky conversations. And then our next guest, Dr. Eric Cam economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Welcome, Doctor. Benedict, anytime I can throw sunshine on your show. I'm happy to be here. Okay, so there's a story that's out there that says Canada faces recession risk over the next six months. And look, I keep wanting to bring these conversations to a place that are of value in the every day of our listeners. Now, we've been living in a pretty crappy financial time, more or less for the better part of a decade.

Why should a label of a recession on the economy matter to people who are already just used to headwinds every single day? Well, it probably shouldn't because I don't even know what they're talking about with, you know, the last six months. It's really the last 11 years. I mean, Canada is not headed for an economic slowdown, Ben. We are in an economic slowdown. What do you need to know? Let's talk about some macro indicators. We have a very weak job market. We have very low consumer confidence. We know the impact of the trade tensions is killing exports. They're trying to do the only thing that's government seems to know how to do, and that's use monetary policy to lower interest rates. So, you know, people start to talk, right? They're self-fulfilling prophecies. And if they say, well, there's a potential recession coming. That's going to hurt our growth, our job market, our trade. But I hate to pull the lid off it for people.

Those things are already in real trouble. So this is kind of a meaningless headline, my friend. Yeah. But there are some people out there who say, like, things can't get worse than they already are. Like we've, we must have hit the basement. We must have hit rock bottom. And it's going to, and now that we've got a new government that at the very least has, at the very least, has a guy on top that knows a thing or two about a thing or two versus the previous guy.

Like things are, they can't get any worse than they were. Can things get worse than they were? Oh, things can get a lot worse. Things can get a lot worse. And I'll just give you two quick examples. We talked about the labor market. I don't think the full effect of this term. down has gone through the labor market yet.

I think that it's in a very, very drastic position. I would not be surprised if unemployment statistics spike in the next couple of years. And as I really try to tell listeners, you know, you can play with that unemployment statistic. If I throw in there discouraged workers, displaced workers and part-time people that can't find full-time work, I think the number is much higher. So if you have a job and one day you do not, oh, yes, it can get very, much worse because every stat, Ben, you can manage every statistic when you have money coming in.

When you don't, that is the disaster scenario. Okay, well, we've been living in a world where we're trying to get people to buy more Canadian in an effort to buttress against the pressures being put on our economy by an increasingly problematic president south of the border. And I have very much liked the emotion behind it. I've loved the intent behind it, but there was always this argument that if you're going to make the choice to buy Canadian, you may be choosing a more expensive option than anything else that's out there. And there is a story in the Globe and Mail that's asking, has record high food costs finally trumped the Buy Canada Dream? And when push comes to shove, people are going to look for a deal and they're not going to care if it involves a maple leaf or not.

And that's all people really care about at the end of the day if they are financially insecure. You know, with these reduced tariffs, Canadian consumers are buying cheaper U.S. goods again. And that's just going to hurt domestic producers, right? Canadians are increasingly seeking discounts, Ben. And they should because as we just talked about, our economy is not doing well. More people are facing the fear of unemployment. Now is not the time to spend a penny more than you have to. This is also why you see it.

Eric, there was a story on the CBC the other day about grocery stores that sell, that sell discounted food that are past their expiration date that are popping up everywhere. And the CBC did not frame this story as an example of failed economic policies coming out of Ottawa. They framed it as, look, what a good deal. Canadians are bargain hunting. I find that to be a symptom of a pretty bad economic system that we're telling people, go buy expired food at the new grocery. grocery store. Yeah, it's a lie, by the way. That's called a lie because we know that Loblaws is expanding even its discount store network and trying to focus on local suppliers to meet the demand for value, right? It's just reality. Rising food prices are leading Canadians

now to switch to cheaper alternatives. They are very price sensitive. You see things like loyalty programs going out of control because people want to save every dollar they can. So you tell a family, Ben, you tell a family that is insecure, financially or someone's not sure they're going to have their job next week to spend a couple more dollars per item and buy Canadian. Sadly, they start to put away the flag. And you know what? As an economist for good reason. Yeah, this is like I can tell you, I go to the grocery. So we all, every, everyone is facing these pressures differently. And what is what is a crisis for one family is not a crisis for another. So it's, but that doesn't mean that everyone isn't making or having to adapt to a world, not of, their own making and certainly not built to help us at this point. And I can tell you when I go to

the grocery store, I'm paying very close attention in a way I never used to. I had the luxury at one point in my life to actually not think about money. Money was not an issue for me. I was as successful as I could be in television. As successful as anyone in this country could probably be for a short period of time. And I'm now living in a time where I cannot escape the thoughts of trying to stretch a dollar as long as far as I possibly can. And if I am, I know that a lot of other people are feeling that as well. You know what, Ben, nobody, and I mean this to the listeners, emotionally, nobody should have a field day for me.

I am a tenured economics professor and my wife is an elementary school teacher. But let me tell you something. I sometimes walk by at the grocery store and look at my wife and say, we are not buying that. It is ridiculous. And if we're doing that then, if we're doing that, what are two people, husband and wife, any two partners, I don't care your gender, and you both make the Canadian average of $55,000 a year. If Dana and I are walking by sometimes the fruits and vegetable aisle, what are those people buying?

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Again, I would just buy groceries and whatever they cost. I would just pay it. And now that's not the reality I'm living in. And you're right. When I say this, I'm not asking for anybody's pity. God knows I'm doing a heck of a lot better than most people, but I'm just sharing that

even people who are doing well are still having to make accommodations for an economy that doesn't seem to be working for any of us. And the lesson there is, which is why you and Mike have me on, economics is important to everybody every single day. We're bombarded by it, even if it's something as simple as making price and quantity choices. Okay, well, in our last minute or so, let's end with some good news. Talk to me about this Canadian win in the tariff war in the form of sour puss liqueur. Yeah, this is an interesting one, right?

We win one every now and then. It's better to be lucky than good. Yeah. And the Phillips filling company is moving to Montreal to boost local manufacturing and job creation in Quebec. So this is great, right? This is an example that local production can sometimes reduce costs and then meet Canadian demand for some products. But what's really going on, not to push this economics thing, is that every company in their position has a profit function. And they are profit maximizing.

And they're finding out that between the tariff impact and the U.S. export impact, their profit function tells them that they are better to be producing and bottling their product in Canada. And let's hope it's a continuing trend, Ben, because this country needs it terribly. Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if there's a way for other companies to look at this company and see, like, what are they doing that it makes more sense to do it up here? Like, if it works for them, why can't we make it work for other companies in that industry? Well, you know what? If Phillips can do it and highlight what's going on in Canada, maybe it's time for the elbows up team to get their mouths moving and tell other companies and offer incentives

to bring people here, which would in turn help competition, which would in turn, help productivity and then my god before you know it you have an economy and have you tried this sourpuss stuff i mean i'm pretty sure i know what it tastes like just by the name uh but uh are you a sour posh guy okay i got to be honest with you at my best i like a super cold beer or a super cold white wine that's kind of the extent of my alcohol knowledge so i don't want to pretend and lie but i do like the idea of businesses realizing they can win in this country i am a tequila soda at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Anyway, thank you, my friend.

I appreciate it. If that's really a breakfast choice, Ben, we should talk. Yes, indeed. Take care. All right, don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're talking with a good friend of the show, Francis Sims. 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. If there is one good thing, and there are a lot of good things, but if there's one good thing in this segment that I want to sort of be thankful for about this new incarnation of the Liberal Party and government,

it's that the tone around climate change and differing opinions on climate change has been turned down, right? A person who opposed the carbon tax and saying maybe this is not the right path is not being accused of wanting to light the world on fire anymore. It's not being accused of or, and if they are accused of it, that accusation is not finding purchase. And so I feel that we can have more grown-up conversations about what solutions we can bring to bear on global issues that will not only affect us, but our kids and grandkids. I don't know a single rational human being that doesn't think that whatever we're doing

on the climate side and the oil and gas extraction side is optimal at this point. I think there are many things that we can do to make everything cleaner, more effective, all while harnessing the power that God gave us under the ground and doing our part to ensure that tomorrow is better than today. I think that is something everybody can get behind. And so to have this conversation, we're joined by a great friend of the show, Francis Sims, who is newly appointed head of the School of Clean Energy and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology at Humber Polytechnic. That is a mouthful, my friend. And congratulations. Yeah, thank you. There's a lot to do. So here's the focus. And I think this is important for all of us, because this

shouldn't be political. Like this should not be left and right. It was made left and right for way too long. And we were unproductive in shepherding the ball forward and having intelligent conversation about how we can all get behind solutions that will help us in the future. How do we find a balance in our energy future? Yeah. So I think that when it comes to energy, there's three things that happen. One, there's the creation of the energy, there's the transmission of that energy, and then there's the distribution. And from Canada's perspective, that distribution to other countries. We talk about distributing to the U.S., right? Doug Ford says he powers 1.5 million homes every single day in the U.S. But now I think what we're seeing with the federal government is

talking about distribution to other countries with the investment of the LNG liquid natural gas investment in B.C. And so what I think we have to talk about is a balance that we want Canada to be this energy superpower. And so we need to have this balance perspective. We're investing across the board as we you know that the capital investments into the clean energy solutions those costs will come down over time yeah right and so we have to continue to do that but we can't be left behind with compared to these other nations well exactly and look at from what i understand from what it seems to be happening between ottawa and alberta is almost like a carrot and a stick sort of situation it looks like mark carney and his government are trying to get buy-in from the

Alberta government to participate in like a carbon capture program and it feels like once they get things like that, then that's when they will authorize a pipeline to be built. I think that that's what's happening. And I personally don't have a problem with that. If focusing on a technology like carbon capture will get our resources out of the ground and into the hands of people who will pay us for them beyond the discount that the Americans get, I'm all for it. And of course, I'm also, but I also have, I think we've put ourselves in a box. I don't think as many people are aware of the limitations that have been placed on us as not just an energy superpower, but as a potentially green technology superpower, right?

The fact that the constraints around the Paris Accord or whatever it's called are that we can only be responsible for changes that we make within our own borders, I think is ludicrous. Like, there's only so much Canada can do on CO2 emissions at home. When you see the explosion of CO2 emissions in China and India and around the world, we're not doing anything to solve the global problem. However, there are technologies that we have here that if they were scaled and they were advocated for by government, we could export them to places where you could move the needle. 100%. So yesterday I met with a delegation from the Philippines, from Vietnam, and from Indonesia talking about nuclear.

We had a roundtable at Humber where we had the president of Sass Pauly and many other leaders from across the country talking about that. And the challenge that they have are similar to us. One is the capital investment, which I know Mark Carney is trying to solve. He's trying to convince the private sector that it's okay and safe to invest in Canada, the public opinion piece which we talk about and the workforce development piece. And what we know is that Canada has done a lot of work across all those three areas, whether it's oil and gas, nuclear or renewables. and that that's something we can export to the rest of the world. When we talk about being an energy superpower, it's not just powering 1.5 million homes down south.

It's training the world on how to do this safely and be a leader in clean tech and everything else you talk about. We were talking about it during the break. For example, there is a company out of Calgary called Flash Forest. I have no relationship with them except I think they are awesome. Flash Forest is a company that uses AI and drone technology to fly through forests or deforested areas and shoot saplings in the ground at an incredibly rapid rate

that would allow the reforestation of tracts of land that are barren because of deforestation right now, if we were able to take that to scale and bring it down to Brazil and other places that have been just raising forest to the ground, willy-nilly. Could you imagine what that would do to the CO2 emissions around the world? That would be literally the re-greening of the planet.

A country like Canada should get credit for that. If we make the technology and we solve your problem, then we should get all the credit for it. But I want to go back to the energy file because we only have a few moments left. Chat GPT, AI is here forever. And people just think when they pull up chat GPT on their phone, they ask it a question.

They think it's just like it's magic, just like Google was magic. But the energy requirements for that search on chat GPT or about require 10 times as much energy as a similar search on Google. Yeah, and we predict that 2% to 8% of the global energy grid is going to be consumed because of AI data centers, right? It was 2% now in a few years, it's going to be 8%.

And if you look at the website for Google, they've backed away from their net zero goals, right? Quietly in the background. Because everybody knows with AI there's not enough energy to go around. And we have the water issues. So this problem's not going away, so we need a balanced perspective. But all the more reason for us to get ahead of that curve because Canada is so ideally suited to solve for so many of those problems. I gave a speech over the weekend in Saskatoon where I said Saskatchewan is ideally suited to be a major player in AI data centers, given that 40 to 60% of all of the capital output for an AI data center is energy.

And it's the natural, the temperature there makes it ideally suited. That's free money. That's free money. And they've got infrastructure that's already built. more water than anybody else on the planet. And we've got the energy and with our sort of our burgeoning advanced SMR technology as well as all the uranium, like we've got everything we need here. It's our opportunity to lose. Yeah.

And I do find it interesting what you just said with Google's backing away from their net zero goals. Those are all what people think are in good times, must haves, really quickly become nice to haves when times are rough or circumstances change. But the problem's not going away, and it's our time to meet the moment, right? And I think what the federal government doing is a good balanced approach, but we need to continue to pursue the clean energy goals, but we just need to do it with everything else. And I think, but we have to recognize, Francis, that it's not about, it's not about trying to change people's behavior by taxing them into a new set of rules. It's about incentivizing them.

It's about empowering them with new technologies and new vehicles so that the paradigm itself changes, we're not looking at it in a binary way that oh if you burn fossil fuels then that means that you can do it all the technology is there and with the know-how that we have and if we have the willingness for it we can do both things at the same time yeah and we can build a workforce that can do it all and then we can explore that workforce all around the world and be leaders yeah so congratulations on the new with the new role as the head of the school of clean energy Real quick, did it come with a pay raise? Not in these times, my friend.

But you must be busier. It's a lot busier, but I'm a public servant still. Oh, good for you. Well, listen, congratulations. You can come back here anytime, my friend. So I did a lot of the talking there. I do apologize. Yeah.

No, that's perfect. No, I think we should be bullish on the future. I think we should be optimistic, but we have to start changing the conversation and the way we've talked about these things in the past will not work as we try to build the future. Yeah, I'm hopeful. Up next, you send us the emails, we read them, and now we read them on air.

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