The Ben Mulroney Show - President Donald Trump wants Canadian Jobs and industries to move to America

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Guests and Topics: -President Donald Trump wants Canadian Jobs and industries to move to America 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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Brick in the wall that is the drama of the Trump administration as it relates to these tariffs. Uncertainty is the name of the game south of the border. They're not letting us have a moment's rest, a moment's pause. Yesterday, Donald Trump, JD Vance, as well as Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, are on the phone with Justin Trudeau, demanding that Justin Trudeau walk back his counter tariffs on the US economy after Donald Trump unilaterally slapped 25% tariffs on Canada. Justin Trudeau said, that ain't happening.

And he pointed out that we've done a lot of work on Fentanyl that we've done a lot of work on fentanyl. We've done a lot of work on the border. We said what we were going to do. We did what we said we were going to do and this is this is how that is. And I do not have a reflexive knee-jerk reaction to criticize the liberals just because they are liberals. And I believe our Prime Minister acquitted himself very well in defending Canada on that call. There are a lot of different ways to push back against the Americans. None of them, just because you disagree with one, does not make you anti-Canadian or not on Team Canada.

I will not subscribe to that world view. There are far too many people who say if you're not with the government or if you criticize their plan or if you point out why you think it's a bad plan or you simply want to discuss it you are not quote unquote on Team Canada. I do not subscribe to that. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is not on board with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is not on board with a tit-for-tat counter tariffs, and she has her own way of doing things. Here's what she had to say about sort of Canada's trump card in this fight. My government will enter into free trade and labor mobility agreements with every province that is willing to do so. The goal is to have no exceptions, just free trade and free movement of Canadian workers

right across our province. I also want to point out that Canada has a secret weapon in this trade conflict with the United States, a trump card, so to speak. And it is located directly under our feet, and it is called Alberta Energy. You see, Alberta happens to have one of the largest deposits of oil and natural gas on the planet. It is significantly larger and far more accessible than the quickly declining oil and gas reserves located in the United States.

Whether the US President wishes to admit it or not, the United States not only needs our oil and gas today, they are also going to need it more and more with each passing year. Once they notice their declining domestic reserves and production are wholly insufficient to keep up with the energy demands of US consumers and industry, let alone having anything left over to export as they do today. You may disagree with Danielle Smith's tactics in this trade war, but there is no denying that she is one of the smartest people in the room. And I listen anytime she speaks and I'm very happy to report that at the end of this hour, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will be joining us on the Ben Mulroney show.

We're going to be talking about everything she laid out there, optimizing internal Canadian trade, making sure that we are as efficiently run as a nation as possible, and we highlight and promote and support Canada's oil and gas sector to the benefit of all Canadians. So that's coming up a little bit later. Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Alberta have all taken American alcohol off the shelves. There's a lot of booze that Canada buys from America and we have taken. Now it's a symbolic gesture to take what we've already purchased off the shelves. Like that in the immediate term, that

doesn't hurt the Americans. We already bought that from them. They have our money. But it's the symbolism of saying, eh, eh, eh, not in Canada, not right now. And Jack Daniels has, the maker of Jack Daniels has said that the impact of this is worse than tariffs. They think it's onerous and it's mean and it's hurting them more than the tariffs and you know what? So what man? So what? Go cry to your mother. I don't care.

You're coming for your nation is coming for us. Jack Daniels and the maker of Jack Daniels should have opened their mouth months ago. Months ago because Doug Ford said he was going to do this and now it happened and now you're crying foul and no I don't care I don't care this is a war and people get hurt in wars your collateral damage sucks to be you there's plenty of pain that's going to be felt on this side of the border and unless you are actively advocating for the reduction of these tariffs, the elimination of these tariffs every day to the administration, I don't have time for you.

The Americans are worried about the Americans, I'm worried about the Canadians. And look, look at what we're doing here. We're talking about trade. We're talking about commerce. The one thing this was supposed to be about was fentanyl on the border. That's why this was, Donald Trump launched his tariff threat in the first place. Canadian fentanyl is killing tens of thousands of Americans. It's a scourge. It's a cancer. Canada's been irresponsible. Well then we beefed up the border. We did everything

that was asked of us. And still the tariffs came into effect. Peter Navarro, senior advisor to the administration, Peter Navarro, gave us his take on how bad things are in Canada. Let's listen to this guy. What I want to say to every world leader who gets up in arms when all we're asking for is fairness and to have them stop killing our people is please listen to us. Canada could do a lot more. Canada has been taken over, Brett, by Mexican cartels.

They bring up these pill presses and printers and the medicines that they fake. You can't tell the difference. Okay. I don't know how you negotiate with somebody who's making up facts from whole cloth. Do we have a cartel issue here? I'm sure we do. I've been on this radio station every day for over a year. I can promise you I have never done a story on the gangland violence of the Sinaloa cartel taking over downtown Toronto. It's fiction.

We have, do we have cartels operating in Canada? Yes. Are they producing fentanyl? Yes. Have we taken steps now finally to start taking those issues seriously? Absolutely. I don't know how you negotiate with somebody who's making up facts. I don't know how you negotiate with somebody who's making making up facts.

I don't know how you do it. Here's what I know to be true. The US administration, the president, does not have the power to tariff unless he's in a crisis. So he created this crisis. It's easier to create the crisis or to state that you have a crisis on the southern border. You literally have cartels that run entire swaths of Mexico. That is not the case up here. Despite that, we have now named those cartels as terrorist entities. We now have the power to deal with them in far more robust ways because of that designation.

So it's not about that. It's not about fentanyl. It's not about the border. It's about hollowing out the Canadian economy. It's about convincing, forcing, influencing businesses and people to move to the United States. And I know that to be true because JD Vance, the vice president, said so. A number of industries have reached out to us to ask us for exceptions to the tariffs, but I think the president's been very clear here that he wants the tariffs to apply broadly.

He doesn't want to have 500 different industries getting 500 different carve outs. And the way to avoid application of the tariffs is to have your factory and have your facility in the United States of America. That is the way invest in America. That is how you will avoid being penalized by these tariffs. That is that's what this is about. You just heard the second most powerful man in the United States tell you what this is about. This is what they want.

This is why these tariffs were applied. They're fighting dirty. Doug Ford wants to fight dirty. I have no problem with that. We're going to be talking to Doug Ford a little bit later today as well. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show and you know I'm a Jack of all trades. I know a little bit about a lot. I like to say that in college I majored in cocktail party conversation. Just enough, knowing just enough to have

interesting conversations about five minutes before I migrate to somebody else and have a different chat. But what's going on today because of these tariffs requires a depth of knowledge in economics that I do not possess, but again, I could talk about for a few minutes. So let's invite somebody in who can help steer this ship, Dr. Eric Kam, economics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Eric, welcome to the show. Benedict, in lieu of a real expert, you've got me for a few minutes.

Okay, let's talk about how these tariffs, well, they're doing a lot, but one of the things that the market seems to be telling us is they're causing uncertainty. A precipitous drop at the beginning of the day on the Dow Jones, because look, we don't know which industries are getting slapped, and they get carve-outs, and the percentages change,

and then there's a pause, and then there's a pullback. This is not a country, a continent, a world cannot do business in this environment. Absolutely not. You can't keep moving the goal posts. But back to your question about what tariffs are, I mean, there's only two things that we know with certainty that tariffs do and I don't care what Lutnick or anybody else says.

Number one, any tariff, any quota is a departure from efficiency. It is a departure from letting demand equal supply and any time that you shove a wedge between those two forces that guide our country's economies, you're going to get inefficiency, you're going to get quantities that are too low, and you're going to get prices that are too high. So that's number one. And number two, because just of the gross nature of these things that most people don't understand them, and I include myself in that, nobody knows everything about what's going to happen, they inject a certain amount of fear and uncertainty and there isn't a financial

labor money Credit capital market that exists that isn't made worse off when you inject such uncertainty Ben because it sends investors scrambling and again Diverges between the two forces that guide our economy. So all we know for certain is that these things are destabilizing and not healthy for any capitalist economy. Yeah, and well, let's look at what commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick says tariffs don't do.

We just talked about what they do do. Let's, I said do do. Let's see what Lutnick says about what tariffs don't cause. Inflation comes from a government printing more money. Some prices can rise, you know, this bottle of water. It can't happen at all. No, tariffs do not, tariffs do not, do not, do not create inflation. Printing money creates inflation. You have a balanced budget.

There can't be inflation. It doesn't mean one product could be more expensive and one product could be less expensive. But China, I'll give you an example, China has the highest tariffs in the world. In the world, everything gets taxed in China and they don't have inflation. In fact, they have deflation. India, the second highest tariffs in the world, they don't have inflation. So this concept is just people whining and complaining and not being truthful. Eric, how much of what he's saying is accurate?

Very little. And people should know that lotnick's now, by the way, I, you know, I'm not an arrogant person, but I think that for somebody who has a BA in economics, I went to school on a tennis scholarship. He could be a little bit more forthcoming. The reality is, is that there's no way that these tariffs are not going to be inflationary and they're going to be inflationary to both countries because just as we said a minute ago, they're just driving a wedge between the natural price

or the price that would settle among equal and competing wants and it's creating in a sense a gap between what people want to pay and what people will pay. So he cites countries that have such different economic infrastructure to us. He's not talking about their level of unemployment. He's not talking about anything else. I mean there's many ways to absorb price increases and in those countries you know there's a lot of issues that we really shouldn't get into like human rights and this and that People are slaughtered. I mean, there's a lot of ways to push people to competition that we'd thank heavens don't do in our countries But no, he's absolutely half right when he says printing too much money too fast causes inflation

Sure. Yeah, but so do so do import tariffs and quotas. There's no other result than inflation, Ben. What Canada does in response is really the question that we're going to be asking ourselves every day. Are we on the right path? Did we bite off more than we could chew? Are we trying to get into a knife fight with somebody who's got a semi-automatic rifle? And so there's a conversation going on online about whether counter tariffs make for a good policy in this environment. And there was a tweet by somebody who said that counter tariffs make the US more likely to repeal their tariffs sooner,

and therefore you're inducing less total pain. The answer is, I'm a trained economist, so I fully understand and usually support the argument against retaliation. However, this is exactly what I've been thinking about. The simple traditional analysis is static. The world is not. I don't have an answer, so any input is welcome.

I don't have an answer either. But is it true? I mean, counter tariffs sort of in a static world would make sense, but this is such an ever evolving, ever changing situation. Maybe it's not the right policy right now. Look, it depends on whether you want to just look down a pure economic textbook road, Ben. And if you do want to do that

and you turn to chapter 11 on international trade, the answer is no, it's not a great idea because if you have tariffs and then you act backed with tariffs that inevitably come with more tariffs, again, you're just pushing the inflationary effects of those tariffs for both countries higher and higher. So on a purely economic argument, no,

that's not the way to go. But we know that economics is tied with politics, you can't get those things apart. And so this is really a power play on the part of the Canadian government and Premier Ford, who I think has done a tremendous job coming up on your show very soon to the good listenership because what else are you going to do? What are you going to do if you don't push back?

You're going to look like a weak person and a weak country. So I don't disagree with Canada's doing this. They really, in a sense, have no choice. When your back's up against the wall, you have to push back. So what you can't do here, Ben, is you have to sort of marry economics and politics. The textbook will tell you it's a bad idea, but I think in terms of a globalized world,

I don't think Canada has much choice. No, and I agree with you, and I was likening it to sort of the Americans in Vietnam. Like, we are the Viet Cong in this situation We don't have the numbers and we don't have the firepower but we are we are going to if if the first volley of tariffs caused uncertainty in the markets then Canada was going to lean into that uncertainty and create chaos and Force the Americans to pay attention to what this is doing to their stock market. I mean, today, if the trend line continues and the stock

market closes a thousand points lower today, I think a lot of it will have to do with the fact that Canada is not taking this lying down. But the economic threats from the US, it does appear, are having issues beyond what we've been talking about and into the Canadian housing market. When I saw that Toronto sales dropped almost 29% in February, that's a crisis, isn't it, Eric? Ben, this is astounding because we have, especially in the GTA, we've lived for years saying what is going to cool off the housing market if it's not interest rates, what is going to bring this thing down?

What's going to burst the proverbial bubble? Well, we found it go into a trade war with a country that, that we need much more than they need us. And I know that, that premiers you're going to talk to are going to say that that's not true, but you can't look at the GDPs of the two countries and the number of trading partners and the percentage of GDPs that each other is and not come up with the conclusion that we need them more than they need us. Now, that's a long-winded answer to your question, which is back to the fear, back to the uncertainty. The most important statistic in economics is the unemployment rate, Ben, because as

much as we complain about inflation, things are handleable. You can substitute out one good for the other when you have a job and an income. This trade war is doing nothing but telling ordinary, and that's all of us Canadians with a job, be careful. You might not have yours for much longer if you're one of the five or six biggest goods we trade with the United States. So the answer now we know Ben, we know now it's out of the closet. How do you kill a housing market?

Have a trade war and threaten the jobs of potentially a million people every other month. And that's not an exact figure, but that's not a bad approximation if you look at the five biggest goods that we trade with the US. If you shut those down, you're gonna lose about a half a million jobs a month. So take that out of the equation,

there goes your demand for housing. Dr. Eric Kam, economics professor at TMU, thank you so much for joining us and giving us the economic lay of the land. 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.