The Ben Mulroney Show - Is there anything Canada can do to bring back manufacturing jobs from China?

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Is there anything Canada can do to bring back manufacturing jobs from China? with Guest: John Turley-Ewart, Contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and Corus Radio Contributor -The US Badly Needs Rare Minerals and Fresh Water. Guess Who Has Them? with Guest: Christopher Pollon, Vancouver journalist and author who reports on the environment and the politics of natural resources. His latest book is Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places -What was the Fruit Machine in Canada? with Guest: Craig Baird, Host of Canadian History Ehx 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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New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Welcome back to the Ben Mulrooney show and if you're like me you got an iPhone. If you're like almost everybody I know you got an iPhone except for those weird people with the androids. But John Turley-Uart, contributing columnist to the Globe and Mail, he's also a regulatory compliance consultant and chorus radio contributor, has written a fascinating piece in the Globe and Mail entitled Why Apple Can Make iPhones Only in China and What Canada Can Learn from

it. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Ben. So we keep hearing Donald Trump saying he wants iPhones built in the US. What's your pushback to that? Reality. My pushback is reality when when you when you hold your iphone in your hand you're holding uh... you know a testament to modern-day manufacturing that we just haven't seen anywhere else and it's a combination of of of things that we see in china and uh... you know i i don't take a obviously credit for all this research but the research it really comes out of uh... a book called apple in china that

just came out by uh... patrick mckay who's a canadian uh... reporter uh... and who is reported on apple for years and did an in-depth study on apple and interview two hundred uh... former apple employees and here's here's what we learned and it answers your question as to why mister trump will never see apple produced in apple iPhones produced in the United States.

So first of all Apple has been investing billions of dollars in in China to build manufacturing capacity. How much? 55 billion dollars a year. A year? A year. Fifty five, we'll go on. Fifty five billion a year, starting in 2015 for five years. So half a trillion dollars. Yeah. This is, this is in, in today's dollars. Um, if you looked at the Marshall plan in today's dollars, Apple has put in more than double what the Marshall plan was to rebuild Europe.

Rebuild Europe. They have also trained, you know, well over 25 million people in China. And when I say train up, you know, there's two levels of development going on in China. There is high-skilled engineers who have been trained by Apple. There's high-skilled managers who've been trained by Apple. People who do supply chain management, all that sort of thing. And also fine tooling manufacturing for all the little bits and pieces you have in your iPhone. And how many bits and pieces you have in your iPhone? You have about

a thousand and in a Chinese factory that produces iPhones they produce about half a million iPhones a month that's 500 million parts a month going into that factory. So I mean if you say it's reality and you've just laid out a pretty, what sounds like an airtight case, then what's Donald Trump not getting? So, you know, well, you know, how to read his mind. I think what he is trying to do is to get Apple, maybe to move more of its cloud service work back to the US, its servers to the US.

It's using it as a negotiating tool. I saw an analyst put a price on an Apple iPhone made in the US of $3,500. That's just wrong. It's, there's no dollar value because it would never happen. You, and here's the other piece that's so important for people to understand.

Wait, wait, wait, but hold on, hold on. Let's just live in that hypothetical for a moment. So let's just live in a world where Apple was able to ramp up sort of the training and the infrastructure and the workflow to build something here. And they've got more money than any company. So let's just assume they could pay for it, right? And let's say that happened today

with American workers being paid American wages with the cost of production, the cost of labor being what it is. Do you think that they, do you think it would be 3,500 bucks or do you think it'd be more than that? No, I think it would be far more than that. You're probably looking at 10 or $15,000 a phone.

Wow. And so here's the thing about the factories. I mean, these factories in China employ about 100,000 people. But they turn through 25,000 a month in some circumstances, meaning 25,000 people hate the work so much they quit. And here's the key thing, China, the only way this works is because the communist government in Beijing keeps an exploitable workforce available for their manufacturing base and for Apple.

This exploitable workforce comes from rural China. They work 12, 15 hour days. exploitable workforce comes from rural china uh... they were taught fifteen hour day there is more than three hundred million of these people who are available for just in time manufacturing and you know one of the really interesting things to have done is that uh... apple and other manufacturers in china have uh... so refined the manufacturing process they can train someone in twenty minutes how to do the jobs

that need to be done. That is, you know, throwing in a camera lens or putting in a screw or whatever it is in a particular phone. So people are readily replaceable once they get exhausted by the monotony and the conditions of the work. That's fascinating. Absolutely. So I had no idea that this phone was built on the backs of exploited workers. I had no idea. I just assumed Apple, a great American company with high ethics and morals and what have you. I had no idea. That's a little bit disappointing. Well, it is. And I suppose to take Apple's, you know, side on this and give their perspective, they certainly tried to manufacture in the US and try to manufacture in Europe. They did manufacture in Taiwan. I think what they would argue is, is

that those workers who are coming in, you know, to do the labor are better off than working in the fields in rural parts of china and and i think the answer to that question is compared to that absolutely because they can make some more money but you know that the beijing government prohibits them from moving into the cities in a permanent basis their children are back home in the rural areas where they come from and it's or shift around the country and certainly to make better money than in the rural areas where they come from. And these sorts of shift around the country and certainly they make better money than in the rural areas. But in terms of how

we look upon that, like if they could stay in the cities, if they had other choices, they'd likely make them and we would see iPhone production change. In the sort of the reality that you just laid out about what what and how Apple has built out its existence in China. Is that unique to them? I mean, is Samsung doing something similar? Are the other competitors to Apple doing similar things in China? Or is this a unique Apple experience? I would say this is a unique Apple experience because again we're not just talking about iPhones we're also talking about their desktops, their laptops, all the machines they make. You know what

Apple is known for is the quality of their design and the quality of their product and so you know when you have an Apple laptop it's got that metal you know that metal case around it. That's an incredibly fine bit of machinery that makes that metal case. Those machines cost millions of dollars. And Apple, you know, basically spent millions in China buying those and putting it into their supply chain so they could make those beautiful laptops that feel so good that you can get in pink or silver or whatever. John, a few years ago, I heard the story that America wanted to sort of diversify where they were getting a lot of these manufactured goods from and were asking American companies to move

from China to places like Vietnam. The great irony was then Donald Trump comes in and terrors Vietnam as if that was somehow not a plan of the American government. Is China the only place this can happen because of the sheer number of people they have available to create these workforces? Or could they offshore from China to a place like Vietnam? I don't think they could. I've had, you know, some people argue that, you know, Apple as making things in india and brazil but if you look deeply into this what they're doing for example india is called final assembly that is all the manufacturing for a particular product happens in china they ship it over a can they get uh... you know clip together thrown in a box

and then it says final assembly are assembled in india uh... in india you don't have a government that forces rural people into a situation where they have no choice. So you don't have that kind of available workforce. And I will tell you, like, you know, one of the interesting things is they prefer Chinese women in these workforces because their hands are smaller. Right. Think about that. Yeah. It is such a refined manufacturing process that has real moral implications. John Turley, thank you so much.

It's a heck of a story. It opened my eyes to this entire thing. So I really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much. Thank you. Now that the warm weather is here, is it time to get rid of your old car? Oh, sure. there is here. Is it time to get rid of your old car? Oh sure it's served you well but you know it'd be kind of nice to have something new. Maybe a convertible.

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Welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us. You've heard Donald Trump as he talks about Canada. We don't need anything from your country. We don't need anything from you. Everything that we need we've got here. Well not according to the next this this next conversation we're about to have. Christopher Polan is a Vancouver journalist and author who reports on the environment and the politics of natural resources. He's got a new book called Pitfall, the race to mine the world's most vulnerable places.

And he's written in the walrus that the US badly needs rare minerals and fresh water. Guess who has them. And so welcome to the show, Christopher. Thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. I heard someone on a pre on an earlier radio show today talking about this very same issue, saying if Mark Carney wants to get rid of all the tariffs, he would go down to Donald Trump and say,

listen, if you take every single tariff off the Canadian economy right now, I will guarantee you that I will speed up the development of all of our critical mineral mines, and'll make you the US our priority client. What do you say to that? Well, you know, I think you're so right in saying that Canada has a lot of things that the US needs and in terms of natural resources and not just minerals, but water as well. And you know, in recent weeks we've seen with shortages right now, like all four major automakers

are saying that their production lines could be shut down in weeks because of the scarcity of rare earth magnets. This is something that China controls. We're entering this era where the trade wars of the future will be fought over things like rare earth elements and nickel and copper and the things that Canada has in spades. And so I understand the dynamic of, we've got these rare earth minerals,

we've got these critical minerals, they're essential to building the dynamic of, we've got these rare earth minerals, we've got these critical minerals, they're essential to building the economy of the future. That I get, explain to me the water situation in the United States. I mean, when I look at the United States, it seems like it's abundant in water.

Well, climate change is gonna change a lot of that, and we're already seeing that. Think the southwest of the US, states like Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, even California. Moving forward in the decades to come, water, fresh water, will become this scarce thing. And what doesn't help the situation is that Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as a metaphor of a giant faucet that he can open at will as if it's his. Right. Yeah. I remember years ago, Christopher, there was a CBC mini series, a political drama called H2O.

And it told the story of a prime minister who was secretly trying to negotiate Canada becoming the 51st state of America by selling off our fresh water to them. Did you ever see that show? No, never. You gotta go back and watch it, man. It was actually one of the better things

the CBC's ever produced. But yeah, 25 years ago, they predicted that the issue of the 51st state and freshwater being vital to that negotiation would be in play. Something I think Canadians really need to be mindful about is the Great Lakes. And up to this point, the Great Lakes have been an absolute model to the world

of how two countries can share access to such an enormous freshwater resource. Yeah. I talked with Maude Barlow for my story, and she said that Canada is particularly vulnerable because think that, look at vulnerable because, you know, think that look at a map of Lake Michigan, Ontario, Lake Erie, Huron, all of these things. We share those. And if Trump rips up some of the rules, there's a compact against sharing

or bulk water exports, that kind of stuff. But he she used the metaphor of a straw. What's really stopping them from just siphoning that water southwards? And we don't really have an answer for that. And Canada needs to prepare for the worst in some ways. We're like, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. But Christopher, don't you think part of the problem is that we as a nation for far too long, we haven't valued the things we have, right? Like, I'm all for, I want us to develop our natural resources. I want us to do all of it in the most environmentally responsible

and sustainable ways. But I look at what we have in the ground as something that can make Canada strong and independent and can possibly spread Canadian values around the world, all that stuff. But we don't seem to have taken those things seriously, in case in point, say, our relationship with our freshwater and with our critical minerals. It's almost like most Canadians, they don't see those things as valuable. And if we don't see them as valuable, I see the possibility of someone taking advantage of that.

If anything positive comes from the latest Trump administration and the rhetoric, and even what the motives behind that, I'd like to think that the benefit will be that Canadians have had a massive wake up call to all the things we've taken for granted. Everything from national defense, which we've been a bit of a laggard on, let's be honest, but water, critical minerals, and we're going to need to take responsibility for those and absolutely stop leaning on the US.

Yeah. No, stop leaning on the US. And if we as a nation, as a strong democratic nation, I believe we have values worthy of pushing out into the world, if we can help supplant the chokehold that a country like China has on these vital minerals that are essential to building the future economy, that's a net benefit for the globe. Well, you know, the China thing is it's a wicked problem. And the US has a really big problem with that because even if the US can secure rare earths from, let's say Greenland from Canada, where what they don't have is processing and China has a stranglehold on that. And, and there's no immediate fix.

Like, what do you mean by pro can can drill down on what you mean by processing? So we extract nickel or lithium from the ground in the Ring of Fire in Ontario, for example. What is the processing process, if you will, to turn it into something that we can market and we can leverage economically? Well, so there's a mining operation. So it's digging a hole in the ground. But that's just one piece of the supply chain. So think of like rare earths are probably the best example. They require massive amounts of processing to turn that stuff out of the ground into those permanent magnets, for example, that all our cars and electronics require. China has spent decades building an ecosystem where they control from mine to finished product.

And the U.S., it would be a miracle in the shorter term if they could even get close to that. And miracles happen, but we're gonna need China. And I think that's a fact that the Western world really has to accept. Well, it also feels as you describe that, that the most Canadian thing we could possibly do is mine this stuff and then ship it to somebody else

who then adds value in the processing. Whereas, what we should do is what we'd never do or rarely do, which is build that processing workflow here at home. Well, there's efforts to process Canadian rare earth elements right now in Saskatchewan. And it's slow going because it's very complex, but it's promising and it's had a lot of government funding. So that's something to watch.

Something to watch. And this is, look, I'm really glad we're having this conversation, Christopher, because, like I said, I think we you said it really well, we've taken a lot of things for granted for a very long time. And because we take it for granted, it's almost as if it's not there. If it's not there, it's it's it's right for somebody else to take advantage of and leverage at our expense. And I got to say, it should be a wake up call.

And I want to thank you very much for joining us. I should tell people again, on thewalrus.ca, Christopher Apollon's article, the US badly needs rare minerals and fresh water. Guess who has them? Christopher, I hope you're always welcome here on the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure. Summer is Tim's ice latte season. It's also the season of ice cream. Christopher, I hope you're always welcome here on The Ben Mulrooney Show. Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure.

Summer is Tim's ice latte season. It's also hike season, pool season, picnic season, and yeah, I'm down season. So drink it up with Tim's ice lattes, now whipped for a smooth taste. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. You're listening to The Ben Mulrooney Show. Welcome back to The Ben Mulrooney Show,

and the Edmonton Oilers are in the Stanley Cup final. Starts tonight, a lot of Canadians beyond Edmonton, excited that, perchance, perhaps, another Canadian team can win the Stanley Cup final, hoist Lord Stanley's Cup. The last time that happened was in 1993 when my Montreal Canadians beat the Los Angeles Kings. And here to talk about,

here to take us in the way back machine, to take us all the way back to 1993, we're joined by our great friend, our Sherpa of Canadian history, Craig Baird. Welcome to the show, Craig. Thanks for having me. So I was at that final game in Montreal when the Habs beat the Kings. I remember it as vividly as this moment that we're experiencing right now.

And I also remember that there was, there were riots outside and after they won and we had to take refuge across the street at the RCMP offices, their barracks, and we had to wait out and wait until the police got control over the crowds. Yeah, it was kind of like a it was a very important year for Canada in 1993. I mean, obviously beyond the fact that it was the last time that a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup. I mean, just looking in politics, we had three prime ministers that year. Obviously, your father was the prime minister for the start of the year, then Kim Campbell came in, and then Jean Crecente came in. That's only happened four times in Canadian history, where we had three different prime ministers over the course of a single year.

And then we had somebody like Catherine Colbeck, who won the P.E.I. general election. She became the first female premier to actually lead her party to victory in an election. And that was also the first year that we had two female premieres in Canada. And that's something that wouldn't happen again until 2011. So just in politics, it was a pretty amazing year. It was. But in sports, if we can go back to sports for a moment, it was a really exciting time for sports in Canada. We had, so yeah, I mean, the Habs won. It was the last time. We didn't know it was going to be the last time. It just happened to be. But also, let's not forget the

Blue Jays. Yeah. I mean, the Blue Jays winning the World Series against Philadelphia Phillies. I mean, I remember exactly where I was when I saw Joe Carter hit that home run, you know, sitting with my father watching the game in our house. And then the Sacramento Goldminers became the first US CFL team. And we had the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds win their only Memorial Cup. Edmonton won the Grey Cup, and the Toronto Raptors were kind of approved to be the newest team in the NBA. Obviously, they wouldn't play till 1995 though. I remember when I was living in the United States for the summer, I was watching ESPN and they had a whole show on trying to teach Americans the difference between American football and the rules of the CFL. It was really funny. I remember that because there was

that, yeah, the Sacramento gold miners, but then there was also, yeah, it was this like failed attempt at expansion into the States. They had the, they had the Shreveport Pirates. I don't know if you remember the Shreveport Pirates, but they essentially lifted, they totally copied the, the New England Patriots logo. They just changed the colors and the Patriot became a pirate. It was really funny. Yeah, it was a very odd experiment that only lasted two years. By 1996, we had actually seen the end of the American teams that played in the CFL. But the Baltimore Stallions actually were pretty successful. They did win the Grey Cup. I remember that.

Oh my god, I can't believe Baltimore had the Grey Cup. That's right. And I cannot believe that in 1992, there was no such thing as This Hour Has 22 Minutes. 1993, it launched, and it's been eponymous ever since. Or ubiquitous, rather. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they launched that during the election campaign,

actually. And so that was a very big part of, you know, entertainment. But we also had like the first albums from Jan Arden and Great Big C and Shania Twain. So even just in entertainment, it was this huge year. And lastly, because I was there when it was first announced, but the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act, Nunavut Act were passed, I was with my dad in what was to become Nunavut for the big announcement. And I just remember that being, I remember being there and knowing something special was happening. Yeah, the creation of Nunavut like you mentioned, and even the Social

Credit Party ended its run as a federal party this year. So, like so many things happened in 1993. And you know, you don't really think about it when you're in that year, how important that year was to Canadian history. Well, let's talk about your episode this week as we are launching into Pride Month here in Canada. There was, I mean, I couldn't believe this. I thought I was reading an article from the Onion. There was a machine used by the federal government to what sniff out gay people? Yeah, essentially that's exactly what it was. It had the rather unfortunate name.

It was given the name by the people who administered it. They called it the fruit machine, which was a very unfortunate name. And yeah, it was a series of psychological tests that were given to anybody suspected of being gay and working for the federal government. It was actually created by Dr. Frank Robert Wake, who is a psychology professor at Carleton University. And this program actually ran from 1960 to 1964. So it's not really known how many men actually lost their jobs because of this testing, but it could have been in the hundreds, but it did allow the RCMP to collect files over 9,000 people. And really it just used a lot of pseudoscience to determine if a person was gay just based on their responses, like

their eyes dilating. So, so let me see. So somebody's, somebody's just a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher going through their day and then somebody doesn't like them and suspects they might be gay, and what lets the authorities know, and then they have to go in for psychological testing? Yeah, pretty much. They were told that it was stress testing, and they were just put into a chair

that looked like a dentist chair, and then just shown essentially pornographic images of men and women, and then their responses were analyzed. And like I said, it's very much pseudoscience. There's no real basis for this. But for a lot of people that, yeah, just on the suspicion that they might be gay, they were put through these tests. All right. Well, let's listen to a snippet of this week's episode of Canadian History X and the LGBT history of Canada. But why was the federal government interested in outing people in the Civil Service, Armed Forces and RCMP?

At the time, it was a commonly held belief that gay men suffered from a mental illness and had weak character. During the Cold War, the government saw gay men as a security risk. In their paranoia, they believed that they could be turned into Soviet spies by agents who preyed upon their quote-unquote weaknesses. To determine this so-called security risk, the government began to compile a list of men and its employees that were suspected of being gay, but the process was taking too long. So the government turned to Dr. Wake to build his device.

If a federal employee was suspected of being gay, they were called to a room for the purposes of undergoing a stress test. The subjects sat in what looked like a dentist chair, and as their heart rate was analyzed, images of naked men and women were displayed. A person next to the subject would analyze the size of the subject's pupils and measure any changes through a camera. Another test had a subject hold a bag of cobalt chloride and silica gel in their hand as they read quote unquote homosexual words like circus, bagpipe, blind, camp, fish and so. The test was supposed to measure changes in moisture as it was believed that sweat would change the color of the crystals. It goes without

saying that the accuracy of these tests was highly questionable. I can't believe this happened. And I get that in 2017 the federal government apologized for the machine. But if I were the descendant or the relative of somebody who had been traumatized and embarrassed and marginalized because of a test that was like a witch trial, I would need more than an apology, Craig. Well, I agree, absolutely. You had careers ruined by this. When I mentioned the homosexual words, I don't understand why something like bagpipes is

in there and how this is determined. But yeah, I absolutely would say that people deserve to be compensated because it would ruin lives and, you know, ruin entire careers. Which could lead to ruining families. I mean, a lot of these people, I mean, whether they were in the closet or not, some of them might have been married, whether they're straight or gay, some of them might have been married and this could've derailed the entire course of their lives. They might've lost their homes. They might've lost their,

they might've committed suicide after this. This is, I mean, it's got that dumb name, the fruit machine that might make people smirk, but this is a human rights abuse that really, I do hope, I just don't feel that an apology from the government is enough for something like this. But I do. I do. Thank you, my friend, for highlighting it. This is the type of thing that Canadians need to be armed with. The more we know about our history, the more we can move forward with our eyes open. Hey, thank you very much, Craig. Thanks for having me again.

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