The Ben Mulroney Show - It took all of one day to be reminded this is the same Liberal Government

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Guests and Topics: -It took all of one day to be reminded this is the same Liberal Government Guest: Dimitris Soudas, Senior Vice President at Cavalia, Former Director of Communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper Guest: Dr. Eric Kam, Economics Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University 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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of your day with us. Yesterday was a day worthy of analysis and I think more importantly, criticism leveled at the Carney government after his performance in his cabinet meeting, which was televised by the way. I don't remember cabinet meetings being televised growing up ever and I only see that with Donald Trump and I also only see tax cuts at the stroke of a

pen from Donald Trump but sure let's level those criticisms at Pierre Poliev. So beyond that once the the cabinet ministers were able to scatter intoums, almost every single one of them was asked some pretty basic questions and they did not acquit themselves very well. Here to talk about what all of this means, we're joined now by Dmitry Sudis. He's the Senior Vice President at Kavalia, as well as the former Director of Communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Dmitry, welcome back to the show. Hey, Ben. So, yeah, chaotic. Is that a fair assessment of what we saw yesterday? It is a nightmare for a director of communications. And as you

know, I used to be one. And a great Prime Minister once signed a picture I got with him and he said, keep up the good work, keeping the media at bay. His name was the right honorable Brian Mulroney. Yeah. But, yeah, unforced errors are the name of the game from yesterday. Nobody forced these people to say the words they said, and yet almost to a person, they put their foot in their mouth. I want to start with you, if we can, with Anita Anand, the foreign minister, who had some very choice words in terms of her assessment of the issues

plaguing the Middle East. She almost unreservedly placed the blame on Israel with almost nothing to say about Hamas. Is that official Canadian policy now? Well, I certainly hope not. And hope not. And she basically laid the blame on the democratic state of Israel and did not mention a single crime, the word Hamas terrorist organization. Yeah. And again, like the questions because it was such a new, it was such a, it's such a new government. The questions are all very general. They're almost softball questions. You get to answer them in very broad, definitional ways. And if that's how you're defining your perspective

on the Middle East, I question whether you should be in the job. Well, she also referred to the Palestinian Authority as Palestine. Canada, to the best of my knowledge, has not recognized Palestine as a state. Secondly, and most importantly, in this conflict, where does the blame lie in terms of what's happening in Gaza? You know, children being used as human shields,

women's rights that this government has been at least pretending to be a champion on women's rights. Gay rights, LGBTQ rights, they don't exist in Gaza. Guess what? You cross over the border, you're going to Israel, whether you're a man, you're a woman, regardless of your faith, regardless of your sexual orientation, regardless of how you identify, you are respected. So that was, for me, Minister of Foreign Affairs, day one, fumbled at the one yard line, something that could be so easily answered.

Yeah, then you've got your Justice, our new Justice Minister who will remind our listeners and our viewers that they, that he, Sean Fraser first said he wasn't gonna run because he wanted to spend more time with his family. Then with the opportunity of possibly forming government again, said he was coming back. Now he's been given the file of justice minister.

And he was asked, how are you gonna square this really intense file that requires a lot of attention with your need to spend more time with your family? And he said he was essentially gonna work remotely. Well, let's take it one step further. Not only did he announce that he thought running in the election any election that just finished

uh... the liberals actually went ahead and named a candidate that person was campaigning and there comes along john frazer said all well i change my mind i only like my family when the polls are back when the polls are good well maybe i don't like them that much and to go further he's the justice minister for crying out loud. You can't run the Justice Department on Zoom or on Teams. No, no, there's this, this to me is this, that that's all bad.

But the worst thing that I saw yesterday was the new minister of Canadian identity, culture and official languages, Stephen Gilbo, not sticking to his lane. He literally just took an oath to be part of this cabinet and accepting a role and he's wading into waters that are not his to wade into, specifically pipelines and the environment and climate change, putting himself, putting this government on a collision course with Alberta sovereignty, which again, if he's the head of Canadian identity, isn't that his job is to promote an idea

of what the Canadian identity is? And he's saying things that could tear this country apart. Well, unless he's gonna put Canadian flags on these pipelines, I'll say this respectfully, it's none of his business. Yeah. But to add salt to the injury, he contradicted his boss. Yeah.

Mark Carney, one day prior with Vashie Kapilos on CTV said three things, man. Number one, he does not exclude the possibility of removing the cap on oil production. Number two, he said he does not exclude the possibility of reviewing and editing or changing C-69, the pipeline killing law. And number three, when Vanshee asked him, do you support pipelines? His answer was yes. Yes, yeah.

Do you support pipelines? His answer was yes. Yeah, yeah. And then he goes on to say that the pipeline the government of Canada bought, why the government of Canada buy a pipeline? Because regulatory, the regulatory regime they put in place, no promoter in the right mind would ever invest in pipelines. Yeah. And he said only 40% of it is, it's at 40% capacity. That's false. It's almost at full capacity. What's even more false is that the pipeline that the government bought brings Alberta's

oil to the West Coast. We need a pipeline that brings Alberta's oil to the East Coast. And by the way, on a podcast today, Premier Legault for the first time, but I can remember a Quebec premier on a podcast today with Stephane Bureau in Quebec, but I just finished listening. He opened the door to a pipeline going through Northern Quebec. Cecil, by the way, that I think you're familiar with. I am absolutely.

Dad worked long and hard in Cecil. But this, Dimitri, is again, a messaging issue. And I want to tie this all back up in a moment with you. But he said in that same interview with Vassil Kapoulos And this, Dimitri, is again a messaging issue. And I want to tie this all back up in a moment with you. But he said in that same interview with Vassilis Kapoulos that he's willing to build these massive infrastructure projects if there is a national consensus. But the question that should be posed to him is,

will you be, are you willing to be the leader to get that national consensus? And when you've got Quebec saying, oh, we're open to it, we need somebody in Ottawa who is going to spearhead that to cobble together that consensus that will then lead to our ability nationally to build this. And I don't know that we have that leader. He has not been full throated in his endorsement. I want to bring, I want you to put your communications cap on for me now, because now that we've

given the lay of the land of the fires that all appeared yesterday after the caucus, cabinet meeting. What would you tell Mark Carney in that moment after he saw his cabinet behaving like kittens and he was trying to herd the kittens, what would you tell him yesterday after that disaster? Are you sure you want me to answer this question? Of course I do. Fire your chief of staff. And why? At the end of the day, it's the chief of staff's job to make sure that everybody is on the same page. It is the chief of staff's job to ensure that every single minister, number one, as you said, sticks to their lane. Number two, things from the page that the prime minister has written on. Yeah.

And his chief of staff right now is Marco Mendocino, former minister of public safety. Again, I will say this as politely as I can. He wasn't exactly, you know, okay, I'm not going to be polite. I wouldn't assign a two-car funeral to Marco Mendocino if my life depended on it. And I think that a new chief of staff is on his way in. Yesterday, you know, Mark Carney actually had a decent start from the day after the election to the swearing in ceremony. Yesterday, it was a disaster. Loose lips sink ships. And yesterday the government, I remember Prime Minister Harper on our first day, the swearing in day,

February 6, 2006, he turned to me and he said, Demetri, we will get criticized for this. But we are going to control the message. We are going to control the way the government runs. Because if you don't look like you're in control, you look like you're out of control. And if when you're out of control, you're looking competent. And my recommendation to the

conservatives today is do nothing. Do nothing. When you're, when you're getting away. Yeah, when your opponent wants to light themselves on fire, just hand them a match. You know, Dimitri, thank you very much for being here. I really hope we get to talk to you again soon. Thanks, Ben. Have a good day. We can't move on from yesterday because there was just so much audio gold came out of that caucus meeting, that cabinet meeting rather, the first one of this new Carney liberal government. And to talk about the economic and fiscal impact of some of the words that we heard yesterday, we're joined now by great friend of the show, Dr. Eric Kam. He's an economics professor

at Toronto Metropolitan University. Good morning, Eric, how are you? Benedict, I'd like to invite you to the grand opening of my very own subway station. Oh, gosh, are you paying 4.5 million bucks for it? We're paying a lot for it. That actual number hasn't been released, but it's a lot. I have to say, you probably think I'm going to come on and slam my employer, but I have

to tell you of the many decisions that I have been critical of the people who write my checks, this actually isn't one of them for two reasons. Number one, I think it is really good advertising. And number two, if we, I mean, we have a lot of areas on our campus that study transportation and things like this. And if we can marry those two things and possibly help this pathetic city's infrastructure, its ability to move people from A to B, then I think it's not a bad move for both sides of the equation. Well, we will bring you back on to discuss that more in depth. But in the meantime, I want us to go to Parliament Hill.

Yesterday, finding out that we will not be receiving or having a budget table this year. Instead, we're going to get a fall economic update. To me, I've got a lot of questions about that. And the first question is, how bad are the books really that you're not willing to delve in and tell us what the state of play is? But you see things a little differently. Well, I mean, what's going on, right? The circus is back in town. And basically, it's

the same group of clowns, except for the one on top. I'm not surprised that they don't want to have any meaningful economic discussion right now, because any discussion that they don't want to have any meaningful economic discussion right now, because any discussion that they have is going to be so negative. And I took this occasion in the next 10 minutes, we'll talk about especially the housing markets, but I went and did a little bit of a deep dive into the statistics about Canada's productivity, Canada's gross domestic product, Canada's ability to produce goods and services. And we are so at the bottom, Ben, not near the bottom, but at the bottom of all the G7 countries that by the government saying,

we don't want to talk about it. Well, of course I blame them because I blame them all the time, but until there's anything, a morsel of positivity, they're probably doing the optimizing choice by saying, let's not talk about it. Yeah, they want to rearrange the deck chairs before they invite people in.

What was I heard during the election campaign? Same circus, different carny. That's the line I heard, and I like that quite a bit. Let's move over to the housing minister. In our previous segment, we talked with a housing expert about the fact that this new housing minister, who did not have a great track record as the mayor of Vancouver, making housing any more affordable, is now in

charge of the national file. And according to our experts, as he just does not have a handle on what the problem actually is, how do you see it? Well, I like Eric's name. He said a couple of things I agreed with. But if you really want to play economics, let's dig into a couple of killer housing facts. And when people hear this, they're going to drive off the road, Ben. I dug it up. From 1975 to 2000, the average after-tax income in our country and the average house price increases were the same percentage year over year.

So they kept pace. Yeah, they kept pace. Ready? From 2000 to 2024, housing prices are up 325% and nominal incomes, 95%. So to put that into hockey terminology, we're losing 325 to 95. Contrary to what people are telling you in Ottawa right now, Put that into hockey terminology, we're losing 325 to 95.

Contrary to what people are telling you in Ottawa right now, lower mortgage rates, Ben, do not solve this problem. In fact, they don't touch it. And you bring up British Columbia, if you want to do a really quick dive there, they are worse than Ontario, worse. They are the only province worse in their affordability problem. So I'm really glad to see the person steering the ship now is the one that drove the boat into the iceberg. It is so scary where our housing market is. Let me give you one more stat

if you haven't driven off the road yet, right? Let's say you hold, and I did this, let's say you hold and I did this. Let's say you hold housing prices where they are now. Now, remember, we're losing 325 to 95, but just hold them right where they are. No open housing prices. It would mean for the next until 2044 to catch up with incomes, we'd have to go up by 3.6% annually. Today, we're at zero. Good luck, Liberal government. All right. From there, we've got to turn our attention to Stephen Guilbault, who is the new Minister of Canadian Identity, Culture and Official Languages, although most people remember him in their hearts as the Minister of the Environment. And he was asked yesterday in the Scrum about Canada's position,

this Liberal government's position on pipelines. Here's what he had to say. On pipelines, people should remember that we bought a pipeline, Trans Mountain, and that is only used right now at about 40% capacity. So I think before we start talking about building an entire new pipeline maybe we should maximize the use of existing infrastructure and the

Canadian energy regulator as well as the International Energy Agency are telling us that probably by 2028-2029 demand for oil will peak globally and it will also peak in Canada. So as far as I know, there are no investors right now, there are no companies that are saying that they want to build an east-west pipeline. And as you know, these things are built by companies. There is a lot to unpack there, Eric. Never mind the fact that's not his file, right? He's not the energy minister, he's not the natural resources ministry. Staying in his lane should be, it should be his mantra, and yet he seems incapable

of doing that. Never mind the fact that his actual job is about the Canadian identity, culture, and official languages, and he just stirred the pot as it relates to national unity by suggesting that a pipeline, which would go a long way to solving the issue of Alberta sovereignty, is a hot button issue. But he also contradicted his own boss, who spoke the day before with Vasshi Kapulos on CTV. So what do you make of this guy?

You know, they say that an idiot should keep his mouth shut. So you don't want to remove all air of belief that you might actually be intelligent. Roy Green uncovered this guy months ago as being completely incompetent, and he's done it again. His boss, Mark Carney, who isn't incompetent, that's another story, he's always talking about making Canada into some sort of energy superpower, but how are you going to get us to be a superpower if you don't remove all of this ridiculous legislation and rules and regulations that keep this from being profitable? Because I guarantee you, if this sucker was profitable, some private sector company would have come forth

to at least do it or help the government do it. But right now, we're so buried in rules and regulations that they make this not a popular decision. And by the way, let's not forget that for a country that needs business worse than life itself, we've turned people away at the door in the last year who want our LNG and who want our resources. Contrary to a staples economy survival, we just keep throwing the playbook in the garbage bin and it's tragic. Well, and I, you know, fundamentally my biggest issue, so the one question mark I still have on Mark Carney, I wish I could ask him this question myself, is, you know, he keeps saying, I'll build a pipeline

if there's a consensus on a pipeline. And my question to him, based on now what I've heard from Stephen Gilbo is, it sounds like you are unwilling to be the leader who will build that consensus. It seems like if it doesn't exist, oh, you're gonna throw your hands up and say, well, there's no consensus. Oh, there's no business case. Oh, there's no, there's no private sector interest. No, you have to manifest that stuff as the leader of the country. You have to put yourself in a position. You gotta go,

you gotta spend political capital to get what you want. And the question is, do you want a pipeline? Because as the leader of this country, if you want a pipeline, you have the capital, the political capital to get it done. You just have to have the will to get it done. Eric Kemp, thank you very much for joining us. I hope to have you back on soon. He has no will. Stay healthy, Benedict.

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