The Ben Mulroney Show - How much money would we actually save if we broke down Interprovincial Trade Barriers?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Guests and Topics: -How Apple caved to the U.K. government on privacy and why we need to pay attention here with Guest: Mohit Rajhans Mediologist and Consultant, ThinkStart.ca  -How much money would we actually save if we broke down Interprovincial Trade Barriers? with Guest: Mariya Postelnyak, Consumer Affairs Reporter for the Globe and Mail If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And if you listen to us on the radio, we say thank you in real time. And if you listen to us via podcast, we thank you for going to Amazon or Spotify or Apple Music and finding us there. We appreciate it. Donald Trump is dealing with Canada on a lot of levels. And on one of them that is the most immediate pressing concern is the looming tariff threat. Now, yesterday on this show, we gave you an update from Public Security Minister McGinty on the beefing up of our Canadian border and the work that we are going to be doing as a country to secure that

border to ensure that fentanyl does not cross into the United States to ensure that illegal migration is stemmed and on and on and on. And it was quite a fulsome explanation by David McGinty. That's what Donald Trump wanted, and that's what we gave him. So are the tariffs going to proceed? Here's what he had to say. We're on time with the tariffs, and it seems like that's moving along very rapidly. We've been mistreated very badly by many countries, not just Canada and Mexico.

We've been taken advantage of. We were led by, in some cases, fools because anybody that would sign documents like they signed where they were able to take advantage of the American people like has happened over the last long period of time, except for a little four-year period that took place four years ago But anybody that would agree to allow this to happen to our country Should be ashamed of themselves. No the tariffs are going forward on time on schedule I don't know what to do with that. You sir are the person who signed the most recent deal with Canada. You wanted to reopen NAFTA.

We reopened NAFTA. You wanted it renegotiated. We renegotiated it. You then got in front of microphones and said it was the greatest deal in the history of the world. The greatest trade deal in the history of the world. The greatest trade deal in the history of the world. So if you haven't, if you're taking issue with anybody who signed these deals, your signature is on that deal. It is the keystone, the keystone of our trade relationship

with your country, sir. You signed it. So if you got a problem you have to sir with respect look in the mirror I don't know if you're projecting I don't know what it is but you can't square that circle speaking of Keystones, Donald Trump wants the Keystone XL pipeline. This is the pipeline that got all the approvals that was going to take our crew down through Alberta, I believe. The Canadian portion consists of 1,200 kilometers of pipeline from Alberta to Manitoba. And it was denied in the United States for environmental reasons by Obama and then by Joe Biden. Here's what Donald Trump said on his true social.

Our country is doing really well. And today I was just thinking that the company building the Keystone XL pipeline that was viciously jettisoned by the incompetent Biden administration should come back to America and get it built now. I know they were treated very badly by sleepy Joe Biden, but the Trump administration is very different. Easy approvals, almost immediate start. If not them, perhaps another pipeline company.

We want the Keystone XL pipeline built. And I know it's very easy to get trapped in focusing exclusively on the Trump tariffs. And the Liberal Party is currently embroiled in its leadership race trying to position itself as the best positioned to be the Canadian counterpoint to Donald Trump in any and all negotiations. And certain polls are suggesting that that people are warming to that idea. I think it's a temporary warming, but there is a warming.

However, prior to the tariff threat, the issue that we faced with America in Canada was the productivity gap. The fact that since 2015, the day that Justin Trudeau took over, our productivity slowed and the Americans grew. So that productivity gap, we used to run in parallel with them, it is now a chasm.

And it is increasingly becoming a chasm that we will not be able to overcome. And so if you focus on productivity and not necessarily tariffs, that's an easy sell, I think, for Pierre Poliev to get people to vote for him. To say, if you want this gap to grow further, vote for the guys who grew it in the first place.

Vote liberal. If you want a government that will will match American productivity, in fact, surpass it. If you want the Canadian economy to be unleashed, if you then you got to vote for somebody who will not follow Donald do what Donald Trump does, but recognize that the key to candidate success is under the ground. And we need to unlock it in an environmentally sustainable way that respects the stakeholders, but that gets our natural resources to market

so that we can be more productive, so that we can keep up with these people. And this, to me, is an example of that. The tariff threat is huge. It is not the only aspect to our relationship with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is going to unleash a level of productivity in the United States that we haven't seen before.

And if we don't do something like that on our side, we will, being a better version of America, a more caring version of that, that dream has gone forever. Donald Trump invited the president of France, President Macron, to the Oval Office. And in real time, the president fact checked Donald Trump. I support the idea to have Ukraine first being compensated because they are the one to have

lose a lot of their fellow citizen and being destroyed by this attack. Second, all of those who paid for could be compensated, but not by Ukraine, by Russia, because they were the one to aggress. Again, just so you understand, Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine. They get their money back. No, in fact, to be frank, we paid. We paid 60% of the total default.

And it was through, like the US, loans, guarantee, grants, and we provided real money, to be clear. We have 230 billion frozen assets in Europe, Russian assets, but this is not as a collateral of a loan because this is not our belonging. So they are frozen. If at the end of the day in the negotiation we will have with Russia, they're ready to give to give it to us. Super. It will be long at the end of the day and Russia would have paid for that. If you believe that it's okay with me. Good guy gets fact checked in real

time and just lets it slide. Piers Morgan made a point on Twitter. He said, no world leader handles Trump as well as Macron. Friendly but firm, respectful but not afraid to stand up to him when he thinks he's wrong and Trump respects him for it. Here's Trump telling a story about Macron. I just want to tell you a little story. So we're at the Eiffel Tower having dinner with your wonderful wife and with my wonderful wife and we came

out and he started speaking the French deal. We didn't have an interpreter and he was going on and on and on and I was just nodding yes, yes, yes. And he really sold me out because I got back the next day and I read the papers. I said, that's not what we said. He's a smart customer. I will tell you that. My goodness, what must it be like to have a world have a leader of your country that Donald Trump respects? I

wonder what that's like. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you so much for joining us and it's time for our weekly conversation with a great friend of the show Mohit Rajan's,iologist and Consultant with ThinkStart.ca. Mohit, a lot of great topics for us to get to today and let's start with the first one that kids today, kids today, the kids today they are literally terrified of phone calls. Yeah we're talking about a class that's being taught at a university right now in Nottingham. Yeah, there's a there's two actually there's one in the US to help Gen Z,

Gen Zed who are terrified of taking live phone calls. How do you feel about this? Let's start, let's start with your own experience. Were you dealing with Gen Z people in your life? Well, my kids, my sons are 14 and they have phones. And the greatest miscommunication we have is they, they, they infer aggression from my texts based on how I the syntax that I use and the grammar that I use. It's part of that group of people who think that using punctuation in a text is somehow aggressive. So there's definitely, I do recognize that we communicate differently. Yeah, and nobody's ignorant to that.

I think what is remarkable about this story is the fact that there's two things happening. There's so many different types of communication devices that people use and the way that they use them, that there's really no playbook that's given to anybody at any age about how you should and shouldn't use these devices. Right now, Gen Z is really suffering from the fact, if you think about it, that if you go into the workforce, it's not only them, you know, it's not only them in school, it's not only them communicating, know, it's not only them in school, it's not only them communicating, teachers communicate differently. And so it's funny because on

one hand, we are going to need courses like this that are going to have to teach people how to communicate specifically within industries. But on the other hand, it's also true that I watch the gens ed people around me and they almost have a little bit of anxiety when the phone rings because it doesn't normally ring and it doesn't normally mean a good thing to them. But listen, and I get it. Listen, we have the ability to text and we have the ability to send emails and we have all these social media components, but very few of those are communication in real time. They are, as you say, asynchronous. And it is an absolute

skill and necessity in life to be able to communicate in real time. And if kids don't have that, then that is a that is a failing on society's part. It gets worse. It gets worse when we start to introduce some of the technology we've spoken about on this show. So for example, first level customer service right now has become so automatic that even kids know that they're not actually dealing with a human there either. So now we're getting into a place where we're starting to really take that interaction away from them by not having these live phone calls. You and I both know that there's nothing better than hearing a live voice on the other end when you want to communicate with somebody.

So I hope I hope that Gen Z goes retro and starts to pick up the phone once in a while and have these conversations. All right, let's move on to a story involving Apple. Typically Apple is the biggest the biggest kid on the block. But in this case, they caved to UK pressure about end to end encryption. Yeah, this is something that I've been following quite recently because for the longest time, like you'd mentioned, everybody does rely or are sort of boasts about Apple's encryption.

And really the fact that only you and with double authentication can have access to certain things. They have been hacked before. We have been in situations where Apple has had security problems, but the EU in particular in the UK are starting to really dial back what tech companies can do with the data in their country. And this latest legislation indicates that if there's any suspected criminal activity

that happens within the UK border, you can actually have your iCloud account transferred to the authorities. And that is making people stop and say, well, wait a minute, we thought all of this was a matter of our personal security and safety. And unfortunately, it's caused a lot of discussion. Well, I mean, the what's going on in the UK is as it relates to the thought police and arresting people for what they say online is, is the slippery slope that that we can,

a lot of people in Canada are fearful for. And, and I'm concerned that that this pressure from the UK government is part of that drive to, you know, get people to conform to social norms that they otherwise wouldn't. Well, it's definitely introducing back doors to the system, right? And so, you know, like you just said, there is this tracking that had this discussion that needs to happen. But it also needs to happen from a broader perspective of just how the guard wheels are going to be set moving forward. Because, you know, Ben, we don't want to get into a place where tech companies just start pulling out of every country. And then all of a sudden, it becomes every country has their own version of rules, because it's going to make

people not even want to travel when it comes down to what certain rules are in certain countries. Well, you won't be able to travel. If you work for a big corporation, they won't let you travel because it will put their data at risk. That's another great point I never even considered. Here I am talking to people about safety with AI AI and I think about how quickly it's changing in mobile technology as well. Oh, the liability, the corporate liability would be incredible if your data is protected in one country and not in another, then they just won't do business in those countries. Yeah, and to that point, it also makes the corporations liable in that sense too. And so they're gonna have to disclose that to clients. So there's a ripple effect for sure. Let's all right, let's move on to a happy story, a feel good

story. And this I had no idea this was even a thing. But there is a tiny Indian village that somehow became a YouTube powerhouse. Yeah, it's really so people don't realize YouTube is 20 years old. And I didn't realize it's been around that long. I feel like it's quite younger than that, but that just might be my age. I found this story on bbc.com.

It's this tiny Indian village named Tulsi. And they really sort of grabbed on to the cheap and reusable electronic versions of phones and started to make YouTube videos about their village. And it really has transcended everything when it comes down to borders and what people perceive of India and all of that stuff. And what's amazing about it, Ben,

is that it's actually a microcosm of what people can do more of within the YouTube sphere now. Gone are the days where you wanna be just the Mr. Beast or hope that your one video will go viral. This shows that there's a little bit of a movement from DIY tutorials to comedy, et cetera. Just this little niche has gained worldwide attention, and I'm so proud to see it. So are they showing that there's another business model that can be successful? Is that is that what you're saying? I think what it's showing is that there are communities around

the world that are actually reaching out to the world through a free platform like YouTube without the whole garbage associated with you know in North America what do we see right you go to your for you feed it's sponsorships it's car ads etc etc rarely do you start to get a glimpse of what's happening actually around the world this is showing that if you start to go a little bit and you use your own actual search, you'll find these amazing worlds that exist on YouTube. And I'm, I'm quite fascinated by it. Do I think it's necessarily feeding their economy? I'm not 100% sure. But I do know that it's actually caused hundreds of other villages to do the same thing in India. Well, you know, I feel that YouTube has become in my life, the most important website I visit, without a doubt.

It is so many things to me that it is a distraction, it is entertainment, it is a news source, it's so many things. And that was the promise of the internet, right? It was going to put the creator at the center, whatever they wanted to do, whatever they want to create, that was the form, that was the arena for them. And it wasn't there were not going to be gatekeepers saying, No, that's not what people want. That's not you know, we're not going

to do that show because people don't want that they want x, y and z. And this is proof of that, that if you whatever you want to do, you can make happen on YouTube. is proof of that, that if you whatever you want to do, you can make happen on YouTube. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And also, I do believe that YouTube is Google's single biggest asset right now in terms of what they can do with it in terms of the future as well. So, you know, all the power to anybody that can actually find some utility in any of these social media apps.

Yeah, where where do you see YouTube going in the future? Because it's already become like this is where I get my live news. Now. This is where sometimes I'll watch sports on on YouTube. There's a lot available there that wasn't previously available. YouTube is actually I think overtaken most apps for connected television households. So people watch YouTube in their living rooms with their family now. Yeah. And they share share experiences that way. It just recently if I I'm not mistaken, has overtaken any other social media app connected

to the family, television, etc. So I think we are in a situation where your user experience is indicative of what a lot of people are doing. Mohit Rajan's Mediologist and Consultant with ThinkStart.ca. Thank you very much, my friend. Always a pleasure. Take care. Thank you very much, my friend. Always a pleasure. Take care. Crisis breeds opportunity. That's just a fact. And every crisis is an opportunity to build better. Donald Trump is the living, breathing embodiment of crisis. But the opportunity that he has provided us is to take a look at how we can be the best version of our own country without relying on the United States on so many different fronts.

And so we have an opportunity in this country today to tackle some Canadian born problems in the shape and form of interprovincial trade barriers. There seems to be the public will to attack this. There seems to be, to a certain extent and to a large extent, political will to do so. But inter-provincial trade barriers, we kind of understand it in theory. Let's figure out what this actually means for you, the listener, to your pocketbook and to your everyday life. And for that, we welcome Maria Postolniak, Consumer Affairs Reporter for The Globe and Mail, who has written a terrific piece for The Globe. Provinces are vowing to eliminate trade barriers. How much could it save you?

Maria, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. So you do a really great job breaking this down into all sorts of different buckets. Let's start in your opinion, your assessment, after doing all the research. If every single provincial trade barrier disappeared tomorrow, where would we the consumers feel it most and first? I mean, so it is difficult to say the exact impact. We have some data from Statistics Canada that says, you know, we pay up to 7% more for a variety of goods

and services as a result of interprovincial trade barriers. That data is from, I believe, 2017, and recent data suggests that companies pay between, I think, 8% to 22% for different kind of interprovincial trade that they do. So that costs their businesses. They're passing some of that along to consumers, but of course there's impact on, for example, you know, labor mobility. There's impact on the sort of competition that you see in different provinces for a variety of goods and services. So I guess it is difficult, I will say, to quantify this, but we did try to do our best. And I think where we really saw a huge impact is on food.

For example, cheese is one of the top inter-provincially traded foods, but data suggests that about 8.3% is how much businesses kind of bump their costs of transportation and trucking as a result of interprovincial trade barriers. So you can imagine that the cost of things like cheese and other dairy products will be a bit higher for us. Also meat faces a lot of interprovincial roadblocks like slaughterhouse regulations, federal inspection

rules and all that. And one of our experts calculated that Canadians can save up to $234 a year on their, just their food bill alone by removing some of these barriers. Let's talk about the surprising case of the automotive industry. Because in my mind, I was living in this, I guess a fugue state where I just assumed a car is a car is a car but that is not the case that we could be paying thousands more for our vehicles owing to as you say in your words to different provincial rules in the auto industry that demand customizing vehicles and paperwork. Tell me what you what you mean by that because I think people would be fascinated and frustrated by this news. Yeah, there's a lot of regulatory hoops that manufacturers have to go through.

For example, David Adams, the president CEO of Global Automakers of Canada, he talked about all these different programs provinces have for properly recycling and disposing of parts, like for example, tires and antifreeze, things like that. These obviously create administrative hassle and additional costs for manufacturers. Another thing that they pay a lot for is recall notices. That one was a surprising one for me. He said manufacturers can spend millions a year just mailing out recall notices.

So if there was a kind of a more formal inter-provincial records exchange where you could do kind of an easy VIN number check when someone renews their plates, that would kind of automatically flag to consumers where there are outstanding recalls and potentially save consumers and manufacturers money, according to David. Yeah, to me, it's just, it's just so I remember reading that one of the one of the problems in with with the automotive industry is what we stuff inside the the car the the chairs in the car the seats in the car in the cars is different saying Quebec than it is in Ontario and that just adds to the overall cost of all the cars. It's a fascinatingly frustrating Canadianism

that we've been paying for without knowing for so long. What about beer and wine? Those are big ticket items as well. Yeah, for sure. I mean, as one of the experts I spoke with put it sort of aptly was that an Ontario winery would find it easier to send their product to Europe than Quebec. I thought that was pretty jarring.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you a story. I went to New Brunswick years ago when I was on television for a sort of a tourism event. And I went to the oldest winery in Canada. I can't remember what it was called, but it's owned now by a Swiss gentleman and he said that it is easier for him to sell a case of wine to China Than it is for him to sell it across the border to Nova Scotia Yeah, there's tons of examples. Yeah After the after researching those that's no longer surprising to me, but it's but it's explain it to me Why how how does that make any sense? How is this a a status quo that we as a country have been willing to live by?

I mean it's hard to say obviously provinces wield a lot of power. There are a lot of I guess there's a lot of interest in keeping some of these inter-provincial barriers in place as of now. But as you can tell with Donald Trump's tariff threats, you know, it's just pushed Canada's economic growth to the top of the national agenda right now and policymakers are looking to sort of diversify away from the U.S. and increase domestic trade. I mean we'll need to if tariffs do come into play to the extent that they're promised. And of course we know that last week Ottawa said it will be reducing federal exceptions if tariffs do come into play to the extent that they're promised. And of course, we know that last week Ottawa said it will be reducing federal exceptions to I think 19 of the current 39, a lot of them to do with procurement.

So we'll see a few of those inter-provincial barriers hopefully dismantled, but it remains to be seen. You know, we've talked, we talked a lot about goods, but services are also subject to these barriers as well. And you highlight quickly the financial and insurance services industry. What do you mean by that? Yeah, for sure. So banks, for example, insurance providers, banks specifically, they operate nationally

and they're federally regulated in Canada. But they they have different regulations by province. So the banks will have different compliance costs across different provinces. And those are, you know, for example, if a bank is in 10 jurisdictions, they're going to have to pay compliance costs for each one and satisfy those compliance regulations. So yeah, that's interesting, Ria, because we're always talking about how this will help the consumer, but it seems also, I'm not even looking at the other side of the equation,

which means in almost all these cases, bringing down these barriers would be a boon for the bottom line of these companies as well, be they massive insurance companies or a mom and pop shop that makes cheese? Yeah, absolutely. The impacts of interprovincial trade barriers there's done from I would say from cars, construction industry, like houses and cottages can be potentially significantly cheaper. If we make it a bit more accessible for businesses to transport materials, say from

Ontario to Quebec, where there's a lot of intra-provincial trade barriers between the two, despite them being neighbours. There's a lot of impact that can be made. And for example, on average, I think more than a quarter of the goods and services bought by businesses in Canada last year came from suppliers in another province. So you can imagine if we ease some of that, some of the hurdles they face, that can probably lead to some cost savings. Well, Maria, thank you so much for the work that you did on this. There is very good at the end of this road. Unfortunately, in Canada, we really very much love talking at the beginning of the race about how we're going to win the race. And then we don't necessarily do the

hard work to get to the other side of it. So here's hoping that on this important file, we as a nation do the right thing and do the hard work. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ben. Daniel Blanchard is no ordinary thief. His heists are ingenious. His escapes defy belief. And when he sees the dazzling diamond CC Star, he'll risk everything to steal it. His exploits set off an intercontinental manhunt. But how long can CC Star stay lucky for Daniel? I'm Seren Jones, and this is a most audacious heist.

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