The Ben Mulroney Show - State of Play Panel: Who capitulated between Trump and Trudeau?

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Guests and Topics: Guest: Warren Kinsella, Former Special Advisor to Jean Chretien and CEO of the Daisy Group  Guest: Anthony Koch, Managing Principal at AK Strategies and former National Campaign Spokesperson for Pierre Poilievre  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

Wealthsimple's Big Winter Bundle is our best match offer yet. Get a 2% match when you transfer over an eligible RRSP. For a $50,000 transfer, that's a $1,000 cash bonus. Enough to buy a fancy parka. A ticket to somewhere you don't need a fancy parka. Or just be responsible and top up your retirement fund. Plus, move any other eligible account and we'll give you a 1% match. Minimum $15,000 transfer registered by March 15. Additional

terms apply. Learn more at wealthsimple.com slash match. This is the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you very much for joining us. And let's just jump right in because I'm so pleased to have these guests back on the show. Please say hello to Warren Kinsella, former special advisor to Jean Chrétien and CEO of the Daisy Group. Welcome back, Warren. Hey, my friend. And let's say hi to Anthony Kosh, the managing principal at AK Strategies and former national

campaign spokesperson for Pierre Poliev. Welcome back, Anthony. Thanks for having me on. Okay, so we're talking tariffs. We're talking like what happened yesterday. I think that's that's the level set, right? Canada, Mexico got 30 day reprieves. But the question I have for both of you and Warren, you can go first, who capitulated here? Was Trump always playing a game of chicken? Or did he? Was he surprised by the blowback he got? That's a really good question. There's a lot of speculation about that this morning. And my answer is I actually don't know. I mean, the markets tanked when they opened. And then Mexico announced that they'd been giving a 30 day reprieve,, the markets tanked when they opened, and then Mexico announced that they'd been

giving a 30-day reprieve, and the markets recovered. So did Trump look at that? Because the one thing we know he does listen to and pay attention to is the markets. Did he look at that and say, geez, maybe I've gone too far here. I need to recalibrate? Because at the end of the day, if you look at what Mexico and Canada agreed to, and I've now seen plenty of evidence of this, they've basically agreed to do something that they were both already doing with respect to either deploying or having deployed in

the case of Mexico, troops to the border to deal with the fentanyl issue. So like, I don't know what Trump won. If his objective was to show everybody that we are under his, his heel, I think he probably accomplished that in terms of getting what he wanted on the fentanyl front. I'm not so sure. Anthony, what do you think? So it is weird because Trump is a master showman. and he's also, I guess, engaging in what we call mad king diplomacy. But he does this, he did it in his first term and he's starting way out of the gate in the second term where he basically manufactures a crisis so that he can then deliver some sort of solution to it, whether real or imagined, and he can maintain this perception of being

the ultimate dealmaker. But like Warren said, very little changed. Mexico basically re-upped commitments that they effectively had already made. In Canada, there was some new material. So you see Canada is now going to join the United States in declaring drug cartels as terrorist organizations. But in terms of border patrolling and stuff like that, there's a new joint task force. There's a couple things there, but even in terms of border patrolling and stuff like that, there's a new joint task force. There's a couple things there, but even in terms of funding, the $1.3 billion on border security, which I believe is over the course of five or six years, that was already announced

by Prime Minister Trudeau a few months ago. So that's not new, but it's being made out to be as if this was this big concession that Trump had extracted. But it is important for people to note that we still have like this is not over. No, there's gonna go we're gonna go through this all over again in 30 days. So there's still probably more things that they're going to try to extract. Yeah. But in the meantime, yeah, not really the deal that Trump was looking for. But let's let's look at this from a different angle now. And let's look at it as sort of the at the end of the symphony that has been the political career of Justin Trudeau.

You know, he was going out quietly and then this happened and he came out. Listen, we didn't get hit with tariffs, so that's a win for Justin Trudeau. And I wonder if this is going to change anything in the way that we think about him. And I also wonder if it's going to change anything for how we look at the liberals going into the next election. So, Warren, back to you. It really reminded me of Rudy Giuliani. And bear with me here as I kind of explain the comparison. You know, when 9-11 happened just before, Giuliani was incredibly unpopular

in New York City. He's going through a nasty divorce. He'd had all kinds of scandals. You know, people couldn't wait to see the end of him. And then 9-11 hit, he became America's mayor and he became one of the most loved figures in the world, not just the United States, because he was so courageous and strong. Trudeau, it kind of is analogous to that. I don't think anybody loves him per se, but you know, the polling I've seen and certainly my own gut have told me that people feel like he did a good job, as good a job as he could do in very difficult

circumstances. What it means for his future while Giuliani went back to scandal and getting into all kinds of trouble. So he's not so loved anymore. I guess, you know, does Trudeau do what prime ministers usually do like Harper and Christian head off to the lecture circuit and write, write his memoirs and kind of keeps quiet about current affairs. That's what I'd advise him to do, but I think I'd be the last guy he'd listen to for advice. Anthony, what do you think is, is he so past his expiration date that it doesn't matter

or is this is this a relative high point for him? I think we got to see what happens in 30 days. But in any case, I'd say that beyond this being a good thing for Justin Trudeau or a bad thing for Justin Trudeau, I think yesterday was mostly a good thing for Canada. I think a lot of people underestimate just how many Canadian jobs and how much Canadian prosperity relies upon our relatively free access to the American market. I'm a partisan guy. People accuse me of it all the time.

It's fair. A lot of us in this game are partisan people. But at the end of the day, I'm a Canada first guy also in terms of how I want to see a relationship with the United States and I want the Liberal government to have as much success as humanly possible in the meantime when dealing with the United States. So there's a lot of investment dollars on the line. I know I barely slept the last few days. My clients are freaking out. This was a big thing and I'm happy that at least we get 30 days of reprieve, but that uncertainty hasn't gone away.

And I hope we're not going through a six month period of just repeated 30 day delays where they continue to try to get new extractions out of us. Anthony, I'm going to stick with you on this next one, because we're talking about Pierre Poliev. It seemed like over the weekend, it was a tale of two speeches. You had Justin Trudeau speaking on Saturday, and then you had Pierre sort of laying out his vision for how to deal with Donald Trump. And it seemed to me that he had a few things that he needed to accomplish. And one of them was to blunt the future attacks that are going to come in a political campaign, that he is the, you know, he's the maple maga. You know, he came out very forcefully against Donald Trump very much in favor of Canada and Canadian

interests and I wondered when you saw that speech did you see the same thing well 100% but I also think again there's a lot of like weirdos on Twitter that are Canadians who want to I said this on my Twitter I said there's a certain kind of Canadian conservative that worships Donald Trump and I say they are mentally and spiritually Colonized by the United States much in the same way that you have a lot of Canadian liberals who exclusively consume their news from CNN And frame any and all Canadian issues from the lens of the American Democrat cultural issue of the day in the United States That exists on both ends of the political spectrum. But you know, Mr. Poliev has revived the quote from our one of our greatest prime ministers

as far as I'm concerned, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in St. Canada first, Canada last, Canada always. And at the end of the day, whether we're liberals, whether we're conservatives, we love our country and we want to remain a country and we want to get the best deal for Canadians. Well, let's say, you know what, I'm going to stick a pin in that because I want to remain a country and we want to get the best deal for Canadians. Well, let's say, you know what, we're going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stick a, stick a pin in that because I want to go to the liberal that we have with us today. And if you were advising the liberals going into the next election Warren, I wonder whether there's danger in campaigning against Donald Trump, which has really been their stock in trade because we now know he's listening to what's

going on up here. Yeah. And that's why I actually was nervous about all the hallelujahs that were going around social media last night saying we won and we fooled him and he got played because we all know that you know when Trump sees that when he sees somebody getting coverage like that he lashes out so I would caution all of my Canadian friends to temper their enthusiasm for the result. Because, you know, the sentence was commuted somewhat, but it wasn't, you know, we didn't get a pardon, right? As Anthony said, we got 30 days from now, we're going to be in it again. And the problem we've got with this guy, and you know, full disclosure, I work for Kamala and I work for Hillary and the only thing I learned about him is he's predictably unpredictable. So you know he

said it was about banks, he said it was about fentanyl, he said it was about illegal aliens. He threw dairy in there as well. Oh dairy I forgot about that one and then of course he you know wants to be the 51st state. So we don't know what we're gonna get in 30 days, but we're gonna get something. The thing that worries me to answer your question, I apologize for taking so long to do it. Well, you got 30 seconds, Warren.

The Liberal Party is not gonna be led by Justin Trudeau at that point. It's gonna be led by a guy who doesn't even have a seat in the House of Commons. Looks like Mark Carney is gonna win. What legitimacy legitimacy is he going to have to pick up the phone and speak to Donald Trump? That, I think, is a real worry. Warren Kinsella, Anthony Kosh, really appreciate you coming on and giving us a state of play. Thanks. Thanks, guys.

We're now on the other side of Donald Trump's tariff threat, at least for the next 30 days. And the running joke in Canada right now seems to be, well, you just accepted the deal, the plan, the proposal that the liberals put together three weeks ago. I don't think that's entirely accurate. I think a couple of things have changed. I think domestically for Donald Trump, the impact, negative impact of these tariffs was coming, was pushing back on him a little bit. But Canada had to concede a few points as well. Had to, the show of force of 10,000 new border patrol agents to patrol the border to make sure there's always eyes on the border. That's new. The, oh, the Fentanyl Tsar. The Fentanyl Tsar. Canada is

appointing a Fentanyl Tsar to oversee, I don't know, the taking down of the cartels. I'm not quite sure. I think we've never had someone like that in this country. So I don't think we actually know what he's supposed to do from a international cooperation standpoint. I believe he's supposed to be the counterpoint to Tom Homan, who is the new border czar in the States. So I think they'll be working very closely together,

but what mandate this person is gonna have, where they're gonna fit within the workflow of a government, I don't know. Is it going to be a ministry? Is it gonna be an entire government agency? I don't know. Someone is gonna have to figure that out, but a new Fentanyl czar will be appointed. And so, yeah, depending on how you choose to look at it,

either Donald Trump just accepted the plan that was proposed three weeks ago, or Canada had to show even more of a commitment than they originally had. Canada's UN ambassador, Bob Ray, ruffled a few feathers south of the border, where he downplayed concessions. And he thinks Trump folded like a cheap suit. Clearly the administration sees it as a movement today with Mexico and Canada promising a lot that they weren't promising before.

Not true in our case. I mean, you can only speak very directly on this. We've had candid conversations with the administration for a long time on what we felt we could do and what we felt needed to be done, not just for you, but also for us. And many of those expenditures were already announced by the prime minister many, many weeks ago. Yeah. So he's not wrong, but there's a number of new big things. I mean, the naming of the cartels, the drug cartels that are operating free of real repercussions in this country,

they're all terrorist organizations now. They have targets on their backs. The police will be given have targets on their backs. The police will be given exceptional powers to go after them because of this designation. And if you cast your eyes back just a few months, you'll remember the opposition conservatives begging and pleading with the government to name Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, and they wouldn't do it. They moved like molasses on that file until they just couldn't do it anymore. And they finally said, yes. They studied it to death while people were actually dying.

And in lightning fast blitzkrieg speed, this decision got made. So that's a big deal. That's a very, very big deal. But if we go back to what I said off the top, that the negative financial and economic headwinds of the potential of these tariffs was hitting Donald Trump. And Laura Ingraham from Fox News, who is normally a big champion of Donald Trump. Even she speculated that this might have had more to do with poor planning on Donald Trump's part. I'm not sure what's going to happen in 30 days, maybe some other concessions,

but I think President Trump saw a huge negative reaction to this, as I know you predicted, I predicted from Wall Street, from the markets, from all the establishment types. Do you think he reacted to that? Or maybe some of his advisors said, Whoa, whoa, we got to we got to rethink this? Yeah, pump the brakes. That's what that's what the markets were telling him. And look, I don't know anything for sure about what happened in this instance. But I do know for sure that Donald Trump loved tweeting about the records being set at the during the his first term at the in the

stock market. For him, that was a great badge of honor. And so he holds the Dow Jones in very high regard. And so if the Dow Jones tells him the decision he's made is not great, he's gonna look for an exit ramp. That's my theory. And I think it's been proven out. But he's a skilled negotiator. So even though he probably didn't have the best hand to play,

he leveraged that hand to extract even more concessions from a Canadian government that has been derelict in their duties on a number of these files for years. And because this was a big American story that affected, Canadian story that affected America, a lot of Canadians were trotted out on American TV to talk about it, not the least of which former conservative foreign Minister John Baird on Fox News. And here's what he said about what we're going to need to have the best relationship between Canada and the U.S. moving forward. I do think it's a really difficult time for Canada, though, because the Prime Minister has resigned. He was taken out by his own party. We're going to have a new Prime Minister in several

weeks and a new government in several months. I think the new Prime Minister, new government will be a better partner for the United States and frankly for for most of the free world. Yeah, look, I've said it before. I'll say it again. The relationship between the Prime Minister and a president is important. And yes, it's true, we've got a different kind of president in the White House right now. And Pierre Poliev does not want to be seen as being anything but firmly ensconced on the Canadian side when discussing matters with Donald Trump.

He wants to put Canada first, Canada first always. That's what he said. And he said as much in a speech yesterday. And I muse that part of that speech was specifically for domestic purposes to blunt the accusations from the liberals in the next election that he is in cahoots with Donald Trump. A very confrontational language,

but also productive language. And I thought that he was able to thread that needle very, very well. But, yes, Justin Trudeau was able to get a deal, just like he got a deal with the first free trade renegotiation. However, it's been unofficial policy of this government since Donald Trump came down the escalator to denigrate him, to insult him, to look down their nose at him, and to throw

jabs at him, unnecessary jabs at him. As we've said before, most of the information he gets is from a screen. He watches on TV, or someone will brief him about something that was on TV. And when Justin Trudeau went to that conference, days after coming back from Mar-a-Lago to chastise the American people for not being, for not voting and taking the opportunity to elect the first female president of the United States. He saw that. He saw that. That was not beneficial, not beneficial at all. There's something about, there's something about people on one side of the spectrum where they think,

do as I say, not as I do. They preach respect and then they don't necessarily serve it up. And lastly, Mark Carney isn't doing any Canadian media. That we know. But he was on the BBC over the weekend and he joined Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday where he was asked the hard-hitting question of how he defines being Canadian. Well, I think there's many differences between our two great nations. One of them is that Canada, look, Canada is a mosaic, the U.S. is a melting pot. Canada puts greater weight on social services, on healthcare, protecting each other. Canada has different ties. We have deep, deep ties with the United Kingdom,

through the Commonwealth, we have deep ties through Europe. We have a different approach to international relations. We're not the superpower, we're looking to support it. So we are quite different, but look, we love America, we love Americans. This is, as I say, one of the greatest relationships in the world. All right. Well, hey, Mark Carney, if you're your people are listening, we'd love to have you on the show. Home Network is here.

I love it. Discover the best shows and your favorite trusted experts all under one roof. best shows and your favorite trusted experts all under one roof. Are you kidding me? Every Thursday, watch heartwarming programs like an all new Extreme Makeover Home Edition at 8. Home at Five! We are so lucky to be a part of this. And Honest Renovations, starring Jessica Alba and Lizzie Mathis at 9. Changing these homes, we can change families.

There's no place like it. Home Network. Stream on STAC TV.