The Ben Mulroney Show - Our economy this decade under the Liberals has been disastrous

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Our economy this decade under the Liberals has been disastrous with 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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The running board under a Chandler 6? Dearie, life was cheery in the good old days gone by. This is the Ben Mulrooney show. Welcome to the Ben Mulrooney show on this very special March 20th. My dad's birthday, he would have been 86 today and I want to share a little bit of his love of a particular type of music. I remember when I was a kid, I had this realization, I was doing the math in my head, he was born in 1939, which means he would have been in his prime in the 50s and 60s, 60s really, 60s and 70s.

And I said, dad, how is it that you were like, you're living your best life as a young man in the 60s and 70s and you don't know a single rock and roll song, like not one. And then he proceeded to hum what sounded like when Irish Eyes Are Smiling, but it wasn't humming it, he was singing tooty fruity

to the tune of when Irish Eyes Are Smiling. And that's when I realized, and it's a joke I've told family before, that he didn't live through the 60s, he had two 50s and went straight to the 70s. Anyway, happy birthday, dad. I think if at my two cents, if I had an audience with the leadership

of the conservative party, I would say do not focus on Trump, do not focus on tariffs. Make the central question about this election. Are you better off today than you were 10 years ago? That's it. That's what this is about. How can you trust people the next 10 years if this is what they did to the last, which is increasingly being called the liberal lost decade, the productivity gap, the per capita growth, and GDP. Last week, there was a chart that showed American growth over the past 10 years of over 20%. Ours was about 0.5%. Now there's an even worse chart, real GDP per capita growth

in across the OECD. For example, Ireland, 41%.. The United States, 18.2 percent. Canada, right at the bottom, just below above Luxembourg, at 1.4 percent. So to discuss this and every other economic story I could find, let's welcome to the show Dr. Eric Kam, economics professor at TMU. Doc, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Benedict. And I have to ask you an honest question. Yes, sir. Your father's singing voice wasn't bad.

Was there anything he couldn't do? Is there anything he couldn't do? He wasn't a particularly good driver. Ha ha ha. Well, because for years, he wasn't. You know, he goes into politics in the 80s, and he comes out in the 90s. And, you know, I don't know, the technology in and he comes out in the 90s and you know,

I don't know, the technology and the cars change. I don't know. He's a very slow driver. He was a very, very slow driver. But but no, he could do almost anything. Never ever ceases to amaze me. Okay, the lost liberal decade. I know it's very political to call it that.

But what else do you call it? A tire fire. I mean, what is so infuriating, I know that graph you're talking about, is that if you want to wreck an economy, here's how you do it. Number one, you increase immigration to levels that nobody has ever seen to make sure that you push every per capita variable as low as it can go. And then you decrease economic growth to as close to zero as you can. Those are two things you can do to ensure economic hardship. And lo and behold, we did them both. And so what I don't understand is with this groundswell

of liberal support I see over the last couple of days, you have the exact same people. I mean, all you did was take out one guy with good hair, bring in another guy with worse hair, but you've kept the generals all around. So you have the exact same liberal brain trust as we've had for the last 10 years, and you're telling Canadians,

okay, they didn't do so great the last 10, but trust them now. Now they've seen the light, and this is baloney, Benoney, Ben. And Eric, does anybody think that Justin Trudeau was ever the smartest guy in the room? And that's not a knock on him. But if you look at the team around him, a lot of these people are people who are educated or worked in the fields in which they became experts

and ultimately ministers. A guy like Mark Carney versus Justin Trudeau, when they would sit around and hash out economic policy, do you think Justin Trudeau, when they would sit around and hash out economic policy, do you think Justin Trudeau was ever the guy leading those conversations? It's asinine to assume that that would be the case. So you've literally taken out the least significant person from the equation and replaced him with somebody who I have to assume was the Svengali of it all.

Yes, Svengali. Well, it's time for that guru to start growing. The problem is, is I don't think he has any guru in him. All I've seen over the last 10 years is a roller coaster ride on interest rates. They went up too fast. They went down too fast. We printed gobs of money. 70% of all the currency in circulation today,

we printed since the pandemic. What kind of idiocy was that? That's like saying, please go and inflation on a spiral, which of course it didn't take God, it did it by himself. So I don't understand what's going on. Every recipe for the economy in the last 10 years has been disastrous. And we wanna run it back with the same B team.

I'll never understand it. And I hope Canadians open their eyes and realize that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and hoping for a different result. That's a good point. That's a good point. But hey, some good news,

whether or not you like that the liberals did it or not, the fact is with the consumer carbon price at zero, Desjardins saying consumers could find quote meaningful savings as the carbon tax ends. Define meaningful savings for us. Like how soon do you think it could be noticeable? I think it could be noticeable very soon as long as you realize that you've got to take these things in small increments. It's not going to come in thousands. It's going to come in fives and tens. Well, yeah, but Eric, I mean, the liberals were very proud to tout that on April 1, a liter of gas was going to drop 17.1 cents. So immediately like that's an immediate pocketbook fix.

Pocketbook fix. But what is it in real terms in your pocket, Ben? $7, $8, $9. And I'm not trivializing that. If everybody saves $7 or $8 every time they fill up their tank, that's fine. But here's my question, and I'm gonna sound like a broken record because that's what you got for nine years, is if all you do is put money back into people's pockets, if all you do is reduce the interest rate,

all you're doing is saying, please continue spending. That is fine. That is fine in the short run. If you don't care about the long run health of your economy. And this government doesn't, if we don't create some true productivity, supply side growth and shift that aggregate supply curve to the right. The only thing that any of these policies is going to do is create further inflation. And that's how we got in this mess in the first place, Ben. That was Eric Kam, economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Of course, great friend of the show will be joining us again in short order.

Fairy tales can come through. It can happen to you if you're young at heart. For it's hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind, if you're young at heart. You're listening to the Ben Mulroney Show. You are listening to the Ben Mulroney Show, but you are just listening to the dulcet tones You are listening to the Ben Mulroney Show, but you are just listening to the dulcet tones of the self-professed, self-confessed, frustrated saloon singer, Brian Mulroney. Today marks my dad's 86th birthday, and in honor of my dad and the time he served Canada as our 18th Prime Minister, Canada Post is celebrating him with the unveiling of a stamp with his

image on it. And that's happening today after the show. I'm going to get on a plane and meet my family in Montreal. And we are going to celebrate my dad again. And I got to say, I've said it before, that there's something really special about the life that he led and the life that he allowed us to lead. And now that he's gone, because of that life, he keeps coming back into ours. And it's a wonderful reminder of how special he was as a dad

and how impactful he was as a leader. And let's be honest, how friggin' fantastic he was as a singer. Happy birthday, dad. All right, we are finally getting what we asked for, Canada. We are finally going to be able to go to the polls. If the reports and the rumors are to be believed, an election will be coming as of April 28th, possibly the week, May 4th I'm hearing as well. We'll have to see how that lands, but the person in me who's been chomping at the

bit to get to the polls for months, if not years, is finally, I'm going to get to scratch that itch. And I like to say that campaigns matter and platforms matter and debates matter. And so wherever parties are in the polls right now, don't get comfortable. You got to work for every vote. Now, I've been clear with my listeners. I've been clear with you. You know where I'm coming from every time I open my mouth. I have told you that I believe that Pierre Poliev has earned my vote. Nobody gets my vote for free. He has demonstrated that what he, the way he wants to shape Canada in the next few years is the Canada I want to be part of. Not saying you have to agree, but I want you to be very understanding

of where I'm coming from. He is being accused almost every day of being empty slogans and acts the tax and all that stuff. Everyone's got slogans. I disagree. I think that he has put more meat on the bone, more big ticket items in the window. At this point, let's not forget, the writ has not dropped than any other party. And he continued doing so yesterday by unveiling a plan

to make blue collar trades jobs something to celebrate and something to strive for. We're gonna back the trades. It starts with bringing in tax fairness to allow traveling trades workers to write off the full cost of their food, transportation and accommodation to go from one job site to another in order to get things built. Second, we will ensure that the lion's share of federal education and training dollars is directed not just to university education, but also to trades-based education.

Absolutely, our young people need to be encouraged to go into the trades, because the trades are where the big paychecks are going to come in the future. And finally, I'm gonna be sending a big, beautiful present to every single high school principal. It will be a box about the size of this stage. And in that box will be modules

for every single licensed Red Seal trade for pre-apprenticeship programs that they can voluntarily take on and provide to their kids in the school. I think that that is a really smart announcement for a lot of reasons. If you believe, and there's no reason not to believe, that Pierre Poliev is going to go full bore

towards unlocking Canada's energy potential, digging and mining and transporting our natural resources from one coast to the other and finding new markets and exploding the value of Canada's potential. Well, we're going to need people to do the digging and the mining and the building. And so for him to support the trades as strongly as that is essential to his plan. So to me, that's the signal of a well-thought out plan. And also given the mess that we witnessed on our university campuses with the protests

and the anti-Semitism and the miseducation, the gaslighting and the violence and the mind-numbing moral equivocation and the indoctrination that we're watching of our youth. You know what? Maybe the trades are the way to go if you're coming out of high school, just saying. But because we're getting closer to an election, you're going to hear more and more announcements of big ticket star candidates. A colleague of mine at 640 Toronto just left his job

the other day as the host of the morning show Greg Brady, because he will be running for the nomination of the conservative party in his hometown of Ajax, Ontario. You're gonna hear more of those people with a high profile. Well, someone with a very, very high profile is former journalist, Evan Solomon. He worked at the CBC and he spent a few years at CTV. He's now been down in New York for a few years. He is now slated to run for the federal liberals

in the next election. And just a couple of words about Evan. I've known him for years. I know that he got into a little bit of hot water at CBC over not disclosing some work that he did, selling some art, and that got him to depart from the CBC. And eventually he made his from the CBC. And eventually he made his way to CTV.

I saw a tweet that I co-signed where he says, I believe that he's paid the price for that. Under no circumstances are you going to hear me attacking Evan Solomon because of that. I believe that when he was at CTV, he acquitted himself honorably as a good faith interviewer. I honestly, there were some days I didn't know what his politics were.

I thought he treated everyone fairly. And so as he comes into this race, I wish him the very best. I think he's going to be a formidable candidate because he's charming, he's well-spoken, he's good looking. He knows the issues. And he's probably gonna run in a downtown or midtown Toronto riding that is predisposed

to liking a liberal. There's a lot to like about an Evan Solomon liberal. So that's gonna be a tough one for the Tories. And my hope is that when Evan makes his way back from New York, he comes and sits down with us for an interview here on the show. Okay, term limits. The issue of term limits pops up every now and then.

And there's a really good case to be made for them. And you can make an equally good case against them. But sometimes you got to see the case for term limits in practice. Sometimes you just got to let it speak for itself. in practice. Sometimes you just gotta let it speak for itself. Here is former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is about a, what is he, a million, million and a half years old?

Yeah, about that. He's asked a pretty straightforward question about tariffs and their impact on his home state of Kentucky. Let's listen. Senator McConnell, a question about tariffs, He called it a bad policy back in February. Have you had any conversations with the president just about that impact or what that looks like here in

Kentucky or talk to him about it being a bad policy at all? My hearing is not what he used to be. Tariffs, Senator. Your comment is about tariffs. Tariffs. Comment about tariffs. I'm not a fan of tariffs. Tariffs. He said tariffs. Okay, that's not hard of hearing. That's something else. That's being a million. And that's not ageist. I'm watching it. I saw it. You heard it. Okay. Speaking of term limits, former Donald Trump's senior advisor, Steve Bannon, he was on Chris Cuomo's show and he said they're working hard on a third term for President Donald Trump.

I believe that President Trump will run and win again in 2028. So I've already endorsed President Trump. A man like this comes along once every century. If we're lucky, we've got him now. He's on fire and I'm a huge supporter. Want to see him again in 2028. And obviously anybody who doesn't like what you say, but judges is at a function of the lack of intelligence, doesn't know anything about you. I don't make that mistake. You're a smart guy. Oh, you know, he's term limited. How do you think he gets another term? We're working on it. I think we'll have I

think we'll have a couple of alternatives. Stephen says that when Steve Bannon says we're working on it means he's working on it. I'd be worried. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do, business.

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