The Ben Mulroney Show - Jeff Bezos makes it clear, he's aligned with Elon Musk and Donald Trump

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Jeff Bezos makes it clear, he's aligned with Elon Musk and Donald Trump with Guest: Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters, Founder of Chatter AI -Reliance on AI reduces critical thinking skills, ability to perform tasks with Guest: Mohit Rajhans, Mediologist and Consultant, ThinkStart.ca -18 injured after plane crashes, flips at Toronto's Pearson airport with Guest: Robert Kokonis, President of AirTrav, a global aviation advisory -Conservatives must build on the legacies of Macdonald and Mulroney with Guest: Geoff Russ, Columnist for The National Post and The Spectator Australia 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

TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Welcome back to the Ben Mo Rooney Show. Thank you so much for tuning in. You guys, you know, I like to give you my opinions on the show. It's the only way this show works, but know, I like to give you my opinions on this show.

It's the only way this show works, but it works even better if I get your opinions back, which is why we have the opinion line at 1-833-724-1811. That's 1-833-724-1811. And as always, you just call us 24-7. It's open all the time. In about 45 seconds, we want to know who you are, where you're calling're calling from and what your hot take is and look I I'm a Mulroney I got thick skin It's not all about

Blow and smoke if you have an issue with the show and you want us to improve it Let us know and always the best hottest takes make it onto our show on Fridays so as we know there has been a rise in Canadian pride We've seen it in in the way people have been, well let's be honest, booing the Americans at hockey games and sporting events. But the question that we have is how do you take advantage, how do companies take advantage of the rise in Canadian pride? And joining us to discuss this and many other issues is Tony Chapman, the host of the award-winning podcast, Chatter That Matters,

and the founder of Chatter AI. Tony, welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Always a pleasure to be with you, my friend. Yeah, so we've seen it exhibited in, you know, sometimes in ugly ways with the booing of the American national anthem, which I'm not a big fan of, but I kind of understand the motivation. But we also see it in many polls since the reelection of Donald Trump. And so the question is, if you're the owner of a Canadian company, and you want Canadians to really focus on you as opposed to your American competitors, how best to take advantage? You know, it's a great question. And I would first say, is this a fad, which is going to come and go? And often you write a fad and you spend a lot of money and you go, what happened to it?

Or is this a trend? Have we in fact, ignited Canadian pride? And I always look to America, when I go down and see my friends in America, they still have their college t-shirts. Yeah. see my friends in America, they still have their college t-shirts. Yeah, their patriotism is is unbelievable. I mean, they hold their their hand to their heart. It's evergreen. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who the enemy from without is. The pride always comes from within. And that's something that I think it's an important distinction.

And you're right. We still don't know what we're dealing with here. Yeah. And that's the issue that I have with is we spent the last 10 years chasing ideology and preaching a better planet and a better world, not only domestically, but internationally. And in doing so, we've lost a lot of our identity because, you know, preaching is a religion where an identity is, is do I bleed Canada? Is Canada mean more to me than my partisan beliefs, whether I live in the East or West speak English or French? And I can only remember a couple of times in Canada way before your time. Well, maybe you were you actually it's right. You were probably a young boy, but the referendum happened in

Quebec and we brought the Canadian flag down and we brought buses of Canadians and we reminded people that Canada was more important than the ideology of a Rene Levesque. And that was a big moment for Canada. And Tony, you bring up a good point because we can't forget the backdrop of the past nine years and what Canadian voters have voted for. Yes, it's true that 2015 was a change election, right? Didn't matter. Justin Trudeau won because he wasn't Stephen Harper. But the next two elections, yes, Justin won a minority, but he won enough and the NDP won enough. Both of those parties were parties

that were not too bullish on Canadian history or Canadian patriotism or the Canadian identity. And both of them want enough to secure a let's call it a de facto coalition that has led us since then. And so Canadians voted for that. And now we're it's only now we're rediscovering our patriotism, which makes me a little cynical for the belief that this could be a long term trend. Yeah. And I want to also point out not only did they ignore it, I would say they beat patriotism, which makes me a little cynical for the belief that this could be a long term trend. Yeah, and I want to also point out, not only did they ignore it, I would say they beat our identity with a horse whip. I mean, even schools, curriculums, we were told to just look at the sins of our past. And we were never looked at celebrated or never talked about the Bombardieres, the

Aldo shoes, the Jean Coutus, the AI that we invented, the fact that the Emmys and Oscars are dominated by Canadians. We pulled everything down that reminds us of what an extraordinary country is. We took statues down of some of the founding fathers because they weren't perfect. And I think this is important for Canada. Right now, what every Canadian in my AI is showing is they want to invest in Canadian brands because they're worried about Canadian jobs. So if I was a company, I would focus on how many people do you employ in Canada? How important are you?

And if you're a small business, I would say, how important are you to my main street? And I would remind Canadians that because we can make a big difference with our dollars. But in terms of long term patriotism, we need to move away from ideology to ideas and ideas that say to Canada, not rhetoric, ideas that say, look, if we put this plan in place within a decade, we're going to be the most extraordinary country on the planet. We have everything we have. We have 40 million people. We've talked about it last week. Our resources, we got our assets at our disposal that any country in the world

would just absolutely die for. We just need leadership that says Canada comes first. But if you don't like it, Tony, those are the big ideas. I want to drill down to the small business, right? There's the pizza shop or the corner store or the clothing company. If you are a Canadian company and you have a lot of American competitors, how best do you differentiate, how best do you take advantage of this moment, whether it's a moment that lasts or it's simply a flash in the pan? How do you harness this Canadian pride and remind your remind the, um, the, the, the people with the dollars that you were the Canadian in this fight.

So the two words, buy and be the place to buy and the place to be. And what do I mean by that is you've got to remind Canadians that this is a place to buy because you support a circle economy. You do everything you can within your business to support other Canadians and the place to be is because your values and what you stand for and what matters most is the sovereignty and the future of Canada. And I think that you put this front and center. So I would be slapping maple leaves. I'd be telling people today's apps you should be able to put an app out. We literally should have an app already in the marketplace. I scan a product that tells me what percentage is made in Canada, how many jobs were employed,

how many trucks were used to ship that product. So just the same way I can look at packaging ingredients, I need to understand the Canadian ingredients. You do that and then and through social media and amplification and influencers like yourself and Arlene Dickinson's and others, what we can do is we can lift Canadian business so it stands out versus being outshouted by big multinational companies. Let's just make sure that whoever builds that app, it's not the guys who built the Arrive Can app. Just my humble opinion.

Hey, in the few minutes we have left, I want to talk about something a little bit different. The Washington Post, I guess, was offered up this anti-Elon Musk ad campaign. And at first, they seemed open to it, and then they shut it down. And so you can give us a sense of what was this ad campaign like? And should we be worried about the future of free speech if the Washington Post, owned by one of the richest men in the world was unwilling to put out a campaign that for all intents and purposes, it was about free speech. So if you look at the new fathers of the United States, just look at the inauguration and

who was in the front row. Musk, Bezos, Tim Cook, all the titans of technology, and they're now banding together as brothers. And they're going to technology, and they're now banding together as brothers, and they're going to control AI, and they're going to control data, and they're going to control how we think, feel, and act. And is that an irresponsible to put so much power in the hands of a few? Absolutely. Is this Washington Post move a demonstration of it? Without question.

The fact that a newspaper that has the integrity of the Washington Post, I would argue not to New York Times, but it's certainly something that's a respected newspaper that chooses not to run an ad that is not hate, but just in fact just reminds Americans of what they're dealing with. When they let Musk go into the data, it says to me that we are surrendering the sense of checks and balances that the Constitution of the United States was built on in favor of a handful of a band of brothers who are going to have immense power on how the world moves in the next 10 years. And let's not forget that just a few years ago, that band of brothers was, for all intents

and purposes, pushing back against Donald Trump and some of the anti-democratic instincts of some of his team and now it seems like they're falling into lockstep with him which look could be bad it's not necessarily bad but I want to thank you Tony for always showing up for us and giving us your insights. Always a pleasure we'll chat next week. and giving us your insights. Always a pleasure. We'll chat next week. Well, right now, we wanna talk tech. We wanna talk tech with our friend,

Mohit Rajan, he's a mediologist and consultant at thinkstart.ca. We've got some big stories to get to. Mohit, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for being here. And always a pleasure. And might I say that it always becomes so difficult to actually narrow these stories down because of how busy this world is.

I know and it's getting busier and busier and it seems like these tech stories are getting wilder and wilder. And as you've got Elon Musk who's sending up Starlink satellites. Well, Elon Musk and Starlink has been in an amazing amount of progress when it comes down to technology. Well, the story is so odd. The story is so odd that Metta is now planning to span the globe with a subsea internet cable. So one's in the sky and the other's taking to the sea.

Explain this Metta move to me. Oh, well, this is actually fascinating because it's one of those situations where a lot of people have asked, where's Meta's actual connectivity gonna come from when it starts to release all of these models into the world that they're hoping that will change the world.

Remember, Meta is no longer just Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it is actually competing heavily in the arms race of AI. So basically they're stopping and saying, well, we're not going to wait for infrastructure to be built around us. We believe we have the power to actually build this infrastructure with these various companies. And they're using the underground underwater system to be able to build it. What makes it more interesting is who owns it. Right.

So with her, they're in a situation where Elon Musk on one hand is battling for data centers and you know, even Zuckerberg is talking about building these data centers, but the truth is he does not want to wait on the reliability of an infrastructure that's already run by a certain few amount of people. Well, I guess that's where my confusion comes in because I thought it was all about data centers. I thought it was about power and energy and data centers. And so I've heard stories, Microsoft and Amazon owning their own nuclear energy plants,

a nuclear power plants, so that they could power the data centers that they own. I'm trying to figure out where this global spanning subsea internet cable falls into that sort of that workflow. Like, why do they need this? We were talking about connectivity, but I'm unclear as to understanding how that plays into AI.

I think what ends up happening specifically is that Meta has realized that there's a large part of the world that doesn't have expanded internet access. So if they can start to control the data over these pipelines where they start to introduce what the quality of connectivity can be, they can stop and say, oh, okay, we're able to get to all these places where this information hasn't been led. You can lead to development. We can make solutions. But to be honest with you,

it's a little bit like this Ford plant, right? Because a subsea cable project is probably going to cost a lot more to be able to do than pacing these things in the sky. But let's be honest, Meta does these things in order to make sure that they're maneuvered so that they're not considered small fries in any business. Yeah.

And so whether we see it actually come to fruition or not, we'll wait to see it. Okay. Let's move on back to Elon Musk and his work here on earth, uh, with, uh, with X the rebranding of Twitter into X, it certainly has become a different company than it was before. And one of the new features that has popped up over the past few months is the AI chat bot GROK. Terrible name, but what I'm learning is GROK3

is supposed to be the quote, smartest AI on earth. Everybody is touting their AI model as the smartest, the fastest, the most robust. What claim can Elon Musk lay for GROK3? Yeah, it's starting to feel like the most robust. What claim can Elon Musk lay for Grok 3? Yeah, it's starting to feel like the most exciting rose ceremony ever that they used to do. Remember when you would watch shows like The Bachelor, you have to stay tuned. This is going to be the most exciting season ever. They're really getting ahead of themselves when it comes down to AI companies and branding because everybody is really trying to flex

a large amount of geek muscle into these products that people don't necessarily know why they should care. So Grok, for example, has been doing wonders for Elon Musk in the AI intelligence side of things. So anybody who follows Elon on Twitter slash X will understand that he's been developing this product in real time. And every time, whether it's DeepSeek or ChatGPT comes out with something, he starts

to go to town about what other improvements he's going to bring to the AI world. Grok3 is his latest example about how he's challenging both OpenAI, Google, and of course, Microsoft in this race. And original studies show that a subscription to Grok3 is more valuable to somebody than a chat GPT subscription, et cetera, et cetera. But Ben, let's talk about who needs this. We're in a world right now that's still trying to decipher between what videos are real and not to have their grandparents scammed. Exactly. Let's figure that part out.

I get that this is eventual. We're going to help science and help people understand deep thinking and regionalization. But we are not in a place yet where anybody's standing by for the latest update on Grok. In my opinion, we have other problems to solve for. All right, Mohit, there's another story. There's a study that says that reliance on AI reduces critical thinking skills and ability to perform tasks. Now this should sound like a red flag to me, but I'm not going to be the guy who criticizes young kids today for using AI because they said this about the internet and they said

this about calculators back in the day. They said this about personal computers, that those things were going to make us dumber. And instead what they did was they changed what skills we needed, but they didn't, I don't believe make us any dumber. Is this a tempest in a teapot? Well, you know what? You actually summarize the best perspective on this

because this is by the Swiss Business School. It does highlight a lot of the issues associated with steadying people between 17 and 25, Swiss Business School, it does highlight a lot of the issues associated with studying people between 17 and 25. And really just what they refer to as the cognitive offloading, right? This idea of not really thinking about how the process is of getting from A to B and just knowing that there's an easier way to get to it. And it's too bad that not everybody knows that.

But truly, you know, they tried 600 some odd participants and it's great. This is a sign of the time, a stamp of the moment, but it's not necessarily indicative of how we have to treat this moment. I think that when we start to see the natural intuitiveness that's being built into tools, we'll understand why where kids are going to be able to use things.

But the critical thinking part, Ben, this is what keeps people like you and I up at night. The critical thinking part is where we're missing. So if we don't get into this education system soon, it's just gonna be a bunch of people smuggling this technology into their lives. Well, yeah, no, you're right. Until this gets folded into the education curriculum,

until it becomes a tool that we teach kids how to use. You're right, it's going to be a tool that kids use to cut corners. We have to show them that there is real value in learning the ins and outs of this and to use it in good faith so that the future is one where this is an assistance to everyone that speeds up, that gives us the best version of the future where it speeds up outcomes and lowers costs. That's what we want. I'll give you a great example. I read more because of AI now.

How so? Well, I put myself in a position where I understand the validity of the type of information that I need rather than have to sit through somebody's 300 word opinion about how technology is going to change something. So I'll compare how these tools are being used in different cases in a much better way by reading a lot more with AI as a companion. See, I fully admit I am still a Luddite when it comes to AI,

but I recognize it's coming and it's coming fast for everyone. And the sooner I get on board, the sooner I will be more efficient at my work. The sooner I will optimize my workflows and make sure that if I'm spending an hour working, that is the most efficient hour I could possibly be working. And I know because I don't know those tools right now, there's no way I could say that with a straight face. Well, I can appreciate one thing, Ben, is that you're never going to be able to break it. So you're in a good situation there. And then the other thing is you don't have to learn everything all at once. Just, you know, as we start to have these conversations,

let's just demystify them as they sort of come up in our lives. Mohen Rajan's, mediologist and consultant at thinkstart.ca. Thank you so much. Always love talking to you, my friend. Take care. Have a great one. This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With audio erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions.

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Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. It's a great way to get your hands on the latest and most important features of the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. It's a great way to get your hands on the latest and most important's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And if you're just joining us, then you are unaware that I'm not in studio today. I'm in Montreal. I have been going back and forth. I went down to Florida for work and I came to Montreal for work and in each instance, I was at the mercy of Mother Nature. It was a realization that,

I mean, I'm sure I've had in the past, but it really was brought into stark relief just how little control we have when it comes to air travel in the winter. We are subjected to so many different forces, most of which are natural, and never more so was it painfully obvious as to what happened actually after I had landed in Montreal yesterday when all of Pearson was shut down because of a flipped plane that was landing from the United States on the tarmac at Pearson. 18 people injured. Everyone at this point is going to pull through. But why don't we listen to a first person account on CNN yesterday? Here's what they had to say. Yeah, it was a typical flight from Minneapolis to Toronto.

Here's what they had to say. Yeah, it was a typical flight from Minneapolis to Toronto. And we were coming in and I did notice that like the winds were super gusty, the snow had kind of blown over the the runways. And so coming in it just it was routine but like it was noticeable that the runways were kind of in a weird condition. And when we hit, it was just a super hard light like hit the ground and the plane went sideways. And I believe we skidded like on our side and then flipped over on our back where we ended up. There was like a big firewall out this left side of the plane. And when we got finished, it was, I was upside down. Everybody else was there as well. Thankfully, everybody was okay. But we tried to get out of there as quickly as possible. And then shortly thereafter, I got done filming the video, there

was another explosion, but luckily the firefighters got out of there. Wow, I mean, that's a very, I'm so glad we got this first person account because there were a lot of questions prior to these first person accounts coming out. And joined now to give us a little more context and hopefully a few more answers is the president of AirTrav, a global aviation advisory company, Robert Kokonis.

Robert, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Good morning. So yesterday, as a lot of people were in the airport everything gets shut down because of this accident. A lot of questions for a while. What do we know now that we didn't know yesterday? Well first of all by the way you're right about winter weather. I mean just a couple days ago I was stranded in New York because I was flying into Buffalo and it was closed because of a freezing rain. So this time of year, the weather can be pretty

crazy in Toronto, in particular, the cold, the snow, um, and, and everything else was, were, were potentially factors. What we know further today is that it's been several videos, uh, high quality videos that had been released and analyzing that video, along with some of my flight operations, people, a certain couple of things.

One, the aircraft didn't seem to flare that much just before landing. As you know, it tilts up so you're landing on your rear main gear and not on the nose gear. So it seemed to be a lack of a substantial flare. Number two, it didn't seem to uncredits to the fact that if there was a crosswind. And for people saying, oh if there was a crosswind and for people saying that all there's a crosswind Across one is when a substantial portion of the wind is coming from a direction Perpendicular to the airplane. It didn't seem to be the case The third thing is when the aircraft landed it seemed to be a heavy landing and it seemed that the right main landing gear collapse

Which then of course led to the skid and then ultimately to the flip and then of course there at least one of the wings separated that's I think the new news today is seeing that video so yeah we can see that video but does does that sort of visual evidence get confirmed by by the by the information contained in a black box I know that that's always something that that they look for after a crash. Is what information about mechanical failure or wind speed that might've caused the failure to land properly,

is that information that is included in the black box? It would be. One thing I always caution listeners and I've covered many, many incidents on this channel before and from coast to coast is any aviation incident or crash is always the culmination of a cascading series of events that sort of culminate in the one specific incident. So we'll be looking at both the black box, the data, and also the cockpit voice recorder. We'll be looking at air traffic control tapes.

We'll be interviewing the crew. And luckily, everybody has survived some injuries, of course. We'll be speaking with the pilots that landed before the Delta crash, all sorts of people. So we look at the Canadian Transportation Safety Board that will be leading this investigation will be looking at every possible source of data. Yeah and because this includes an American airline, will the American, the NTSB, are they going to be involved in the investigation as well? Correct, yes the

NTSB will come in but the Canadians are the leads. The aircraft type, Canadair Regional Jet 900LR, that was made in Canada, in Montreal, by Bombardier, the company that leads that product line of regional jets, has since been bought by Mitsui of Japan. But the aircraft manufacturers, the Americans, everybody will come in, everyone's gonna try and drill down quickly as to what happened.

Now this is the first crash that I've seen at Pearson in a long time, but it's certainly not the first issue with airplanes that we've seen. There's almost been like a cluster of events over the past little while. What do you make of that? I don't, maybe there's been a lot of conversation in the US about a lack of staffing of FAA air traffic controllers, other safety staff. We have no idea if that had any relationship, at least as far as the safety inspectors to this particular event.

My experience going back 34 years in this business is that incidents tend to happen in clusters, right? We'll go through a period of years where the skies are safe and there's hardly any incidents and all of a sudden, boom, we get the two, three, four, five in a row. So I put it down to that. But again, I'm not going to speak too soon. I think they've got to understand exactly what happened. Was there a crew training issue? Was there a mechanical malfunction? A lot of people are fast to say, well, it must have been crew air. We have no idea at this stage.

What I will tell you is that all the pilots on commercial aircraft would be trained religiously and relentlessly on any kind of challenging wind or cold or snow event. As I mentioned, at this point, it doesn't look like this is a traditional crosswind landing, as we say. Sure, there was a wind that was slightly off the centerline of the runway, but nothing that any training competent crew couldn't deal with very, very professionally and easily. Well, I'm glad to hear that. It does seem like in listening to you, your assessment at first blush is that if there was an issue, it wasn't,

it's not, I don't know, how do I explain, you don't seem to getting overly excited about this, that this could just be, I mean, if there's a problem, is it a standard problem? Is that what I'm reading here? It could be, but again, I don't want to get ahead of myself. It could be any one of a number of issues. And as I said, a couple of minutes ago, it could be three or four issues that banded together, uh, that for whatever reason, uh, you know, culminated in the, in this, what again, appeared to be a hard landing, a collapse of the right main landing gear, aircraft

flip, one of the wings separated, uh, the flames that came up clearly related to a fuel that would have been stored. Wings are the primary source of storage on most aircraft of a fuel. Some long range aircraft will have fuel stored in part of the rear center fuselage, but this aircraft likely in the wings

and that's where the fire would have come from. But again, as Deborah Flint, CEO of Toronto Pearson Airport, also was quick to say kudos for the experience and the training of all the airport staff, particularly the firefighters. Robert, we're gonna leave it there, but thank you so much for your insights. We appreciate it. Anytime, Ben. Alright, listen. It's not like I have a Google alert for my name. I used to. I used to in my earlier days

when I wanted to know what people were talking about, about me or my family. I don't worry about that so much anymore. But every now and then something pops up on my feed and when I see my name, it picks my ears up and I got to look at it. And there's Jeff Russ of the National Post wrote an incredible piece that says, conservatives must build on the legacies of McDonald and Mulroney. And

here to talk about that perspective is the author himself, Jeff Russ. Jeff, welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Thanks much for having me, Ben. Really appreciate it. Okay, so listen, it was no secret my dad's favorite prime minister, he believed was the greatest prime minister was our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. And so I believe that were he around today, he would very much get a kick out of your perspective. To our listeners who have yet to read the piece,

what's the general thrust? Well, the general thrust is that both McDonald and Rooney were pivotal figures in history. They had very different, I don't want to say the word ideologies, but they had different outlooks to governing, but they were both very good for their time, I would say essential for their time and Canada is better off because of them. Yeah, yeah, I mean, exactly. What was needed from a prime minister in the 1800s is not what was needed in the 1980s and it's certainly not what's needed in 2025.

But there's bits and pieces you can take from both. in the 1800s is not what was needed in the 1980s, and it's certainly not what's needed in 2025. But- But there's bits and pieces you can take from both. Yeah. And so, yeah, and listen, to me, generally speaking, what the two of them had in common was a great confidence in Canada as a nation, to stand on its own and to represent itself with honor and equate

itself with honor on the international stage. And so what would today's conservatives need to take from, for example, we'll start with our first prime minister, Sir John A. They need to really assert their independence. I think when Sir John A. Mac John McDonald built the railways across Canada, that was a big statement that Canada is not going to be subsumed or annexed by peaceful or forceful means. But I think we really need to look towards the Arctic now as that next great frontier of Canadian sovereignty, because it is under threat from states like China and, well, it's just China

and Russia and their allies, but we do need to look towards the Arctic and we do need to gird the Arctic with economic, military and political defenses. So I think if so, that's something to emulate there from what McDonald did. Absolutely. And I mean, you've got you've got I believe it was like two weeks ago where Pierre Polia was up in the Arctic announcing sort of the beefing up of our military presence, as well as the doubling of the number of icebreakers that we have. So I mean, listen, everything is going to be a first step these days because we have been asleep with the switch as a nation for so long that anything that happens right now

will not be everything we need. But at the very least, we have to start somewhere, right? And it does seem like on that front, the conservatives have an eye at protecting the Arctic. I don't know if it's enough, and I don't know if it'll be sufficient given the aggressive and expansionist natures of Russia and China out there, but it is what it is. Correct. Absolutely. I would prefer to have nuclear powered subs, but it might be wishful thinking at this point.

First, first, we got to figure out how to feed our soldiers before we can buy them nuclear powered subs. Yeah, because we are way behind the eight ball on that. But again, we got to start somewhere, right? And let's move on to what what conservatives today can emulate from my dad's time. Absolutely. Free trade is good. Free trade for pretty much four decades in North America has been a very good thing for Canada. I said in the piece there shouldn't be any revisionism about that because of Donald Trump's sort of intransigence towards Canada with his threatened economic

warfare. But let's take that principle of free trade abroad. There's many emerging countries we can expand our trade ties with, and they do want free trade, whether that's Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, all of them are great subdues. I mean, we don't really want to be expanding ties with China. Look at the EU's experience with Russia after the Ukraine war. I mean, if they go to war over Taiwan and we're more economically hooked into China, where does that leave us? Yeah, and if somehow those free trade deals could include our LNG and our oil and gas,

that would be a heck of a thing as well, especially given the missed opportunities over the past few years at exporting our LNG to Europe, for example, our LNG to Japan. LNG to Europe, for example, or LNG to Japan. And so if we could find a way to streamline those purchases and those financial relationships, that would be a heck of a thing. Look, I remember when these tariffs were levied, there were a number of people who came at me on social media saying, oh, this is all your dad's fault for making us overly reliant on the states with free trade. I was like, listen, if you want to blame,

you want to go back 35 years and blame the single greatest wealth creating moment or agreement in Canadian history, you go right ahead. I can't stop you. But there are people who are going to look back at these things through a revisionist lens and you're urging people not to do that. Absolutely.

I remember on Twitter, some people were saying that John Turner was correct in the debates of a free trade. I'm like no he was not like Canada is stronger now because it is very attractive for investment to have that proximity to the United States and the free trade access. So we have been lifted very much by free trade and it does put us in a stronger position now than we were in 1984, 1988. So no, there should be no revision about free trade, but we should, and we should not abandon the principle of free trade.

And if the United States wants to pull back on it, that's their decision, but we should continue to uphold it with new partners if we can. Well, and let me play devil's advocate for a moment. I can't believe I'm going to do this given the subject matter that we're talking about. But what do you say to those who would posit that, given the fact that we've got a United States that's positioning itself more as an antagonist and possibly an enemy to Canada, that someone we should be looking to would be Pierre Trudeau who looked for that third way, that other way, that way to build on Canada's international presence and international trade by avoiding the United States. I think that shows no moral backbone.

The Pierre Trudeau approach to the third position was to become friends with communist countries like Cuba and China. I don't think that should be acceptable on a moral level to Canadians and the geopolitical dangers are out of this world. Like I said, if China goes to war over Taiwan, that is going to plunge the world maybe into World War Three. Even the Trump administration, they are taking an Asian approach. They just brought in Elbridge Colby, who is very much a hawk on China, at least from an

economic standpoint. So for us to have our fingers interlocked with Beijing in the event of war is terrible for us. I mean, who are we? When you talk about third positions, that is just a covert for China, Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And there's pieces in left-wing publications in Canada advocating just for that. And it blows my mind. And lastly, you know, you say these are positions that we should take.

How do you think the conservatives have been doing at this point, laying out their vision for, you know, the next four years where we might not be as friendly or as cozy with the Americans as we have been in the past? I think they're taking the pragmatics solution that I think really much is the consensus solution with Canada, which is that if the United States wants to play ball, we'll play ball with them. If we don't, we'll stand up to them. And regardless, we will seek new partners abroad. So I don't think it's a radical departure from what is emerging in this new, I guess

you could say, second Trump presidency. But I do trust them to handle it more, considering they have more going for them than just trying to stay in government and keep their jobs. Well, no, exactly. And like what people have been telling me is, oh, things are tightening up because the liberals are moving back to the center. And I said, ask yourself why they are.

They're not doing it because they believe it. It's because that's where the votes are now. And yes, they're just saying they're moving back to the center. In fact, they haven't even said that. But do you trust them to do that when they're in government? No, it's the same people. And Jeff, we're going to have to leave it there. But I thank you very much. It's a great piece. I wish my dad could be here to read it. Thank you so much. I hope to talk again soon. Thank you so much, Ben. Have a great day. 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. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.