The Ben Mulroney Show - The political panel -- A heated discussion on Carney's conflict of interests

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Guest:  Max Fawcett - Columnist, National Observer 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://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: @benmulroneyshow Twitter: @benmulroneyshow TikTok: @benmulroneyshow Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new Baker you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TV Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD, ready for you. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show and every Monday we kick off the week with our This Week in Politics panel and we are joined today by Max Fawcett of the National Observer as well as Anthony Kosh. He's the managing principal at AK Strategies.

He also used to work for Pierre Poliev to the both the USA. Happy Monday. I hope you had great weekends. Thank you. Happy Monday. Good morning. Okay, Max, you are not an official spokesperson for the Liberal Party.

I would never ask you to speak on behalf of them. But if I had to guess between my two guests, you are somebody who would be a little more generous towards our Prime Minister than the other. And so I've got to ask you, like your honest opinion on, so the revelation, which to me is not much of a revelation, I knew there was gonna be something there on the disclosure

and the holdings that our prime minister has when he said there were no conflicts. It turns out there are over 100 of them. And he said he was back for Canada. He believed in Canada. And yet his holdings say that if he's bullish on anything, it's not Canada, given the fact that 0.3 percent of his holdings are in stock for Canadian companies. I have to also believe, Max, that he knew that one day we would all uncover this. And so to me, it felt like a cynical play, a calculation.

You know what? They're going to find out they're going to be disappointed later, but let's make sure you are prime minister by then. So give me your sense from your political vantage point. My sense is that this is a litmus test. And it's a litmus test for the Conservative Party of Canada and its proxies more than anything. Do they do they want to chase this down a rabbit hole? Do they want to make a conspiracy out of Mark Carney having a significant ownership or position in a very successful Canadian company, Brookfield? Do they wanna make a big deal out of that

and follow these very loose with the truth influencers who have been proven wrong time and time again with this stuff? And do they wanna run down a successful business person? That has not traditionally been the Conservative Party of Canada's position. I mean, look, you wanna get mad at him for having a big piece of Brookfield. Hold on, hold on, hold on. It is the one that owns all of these's position. I mean, look, you want to get mad at him for having a big piece of what Hold on. Okay, it is the one that owns all of these American

companies, not Mark Carney, personally. Okay. And guess what guess what if you own an exchange traded fund, if you are a pensioner in Canada, the CPP 47% of its assets are held in the United States. Yeah, finish this idea that owning American stocks makes you disloyal is a form of economic illiteracy that anyone who knows the market understands. Okay, listen, I asked you a question

and that's your answer, but I've gotta follow up and I've gotta ask you, where's the accountability for the man that was asked point blank, do you have any conflicts? And he looked, not only did he say no, but he attacked, he attacked, he shamed the person asking the question. Where is the accountability for the person who,

by the way, he said he was complying with the law, but let's, I mean, let's be adults about this. Yes, he is. Well, okay, he was compliant with the letter of the law, but in no way was he compliant with the spirit of the law, which was to allow Canadians to know more about the person that they were going to elect. I'm not hearing any accountability from you about what we expect from the man himself. Yes, how people react to it is

entirely, you're right, it's a Rorschach test, but this started with somebody who, come on, you have to be honest, he was not honest. Where's the smoking gun here that he held a position in Brookfield, a company with which he was very publicly associated? Well, let's ask Anthony, where's the smoking gun? I think the smoking gun is more to do with the fact, again, given his very senior position at Brookfield, that for all to talk about how wonderful the economy Justin Trudeau was building while he was prime minister in Canada, it's very clear that he and the company that he was directing didn't buy that and much rather preferred to make investments in Trump's

America in many respects than they would in Canada. But as far as the conflict of interest stuff is, unfortunately, I find myself in the position of mostly agreeing with Max in the sense that I don't think anyone cares. No, they don't think anyone will. I don't think anyone will care. And you know, quite honestly, like if I look at myself and I look at the holdings that I have, I'm very long on America, and I don't really have that many Canadian equities. Now there's a reason for that.

There's a couple of good dividend paying stocks. I'm not here to give stock advice, but the long and short of it is if you're trying to get the best possible return, bang for your buck, you are investing in American equities. Yeah. That's not only been true now, it's been true for a very long time.

And again, yeah, could he forthcoming, did he need to be a jerk with a journalist? Absolutely not, but at the end of the day, when you've got a guy who had the successful private sector career that Mark Carney did before he became prime minister, this kind of stuff was gonna come up. And like again, man, you know me, I'm a partisan.

I never miss an opportunity to rip a strip off this guy. But I also think right now conservatives are sort of looking for something to latch on to. And it's not always, I don't think we have anything particularly obvious right now. So we're sort of wandering through the wilderness trying to grab at stuff. And I think this is just not going to be it.

No, no. And listen, I take your point. This is not going to be the thing that sticks to him. But my point is, I think it was a cynical calculation that happened behind closed doors, which is, look, yeah, the spirit of the law is probably that people need to know, but the letter of the law says you don't have to. So let's just get you elected. And people can be upset after the fact, because you'll be prime minister by then.

And I don't think we need any more cynicism in politics. And by the way, Max, I wanna be clear. I want the most successful people who've climbed one mountain and they view politics as the next mountain. I want those people regardless of their political stripes. I think this was, I don't like people talking to me like I'm an idiot and saying you're complying with the law I think this was, I don't like people talking to me

like I'm an idiot and saying you're complying with the law when it's clear to everybody that you are not complying with the spirit of the law, I don't like being talked to like I'm an idiot. That's my final point on that. Fair point. Yeah, so let's move on to dental care. Like the liberals and the NDP got together to give us a dental care program,

and now we're learning that it is not working as intended. It's costing too much, and there's a whole bunch of people who are trying to get into it that are being denied. And Anthony, I'll start with you. It always stuck in my craw when opponents of the conservatives would say, they voted against dental care. They don't want you to have dental care, to which I would always say, no, they, they voted against dental care. They don't want you to have dental care,

to which I would always say, no, they didn't vote against dental care. They voted against your plan to provide dental care, which is garbage. And now we see that it is. 150%, like, man, it just, the liberals are realizing what concertus has known for a very long time, which is, we're broke, man.

We're broke. We don't, it's all sweet and dandy, you know? Yeah, I love the typical rhyme and reason of elections where the liberals promise Canadians free stuff. The conservatives try to be the adults in the room to say, we don't have the money to provide it. And then they call us evil who don't want to provide free things to the public. It's like, it's going back to, you know, if I was running for my elementary school class president, I said, I'm going to give everybody free candy. And the guy says, I don't know if we can do that. We all call him nasty because he's the anti free candy guy. This is sort of the way things

work. No, but it's, it's ridiculous, unfortunately. And again, my feelings on in theory versus in practice regarding dental care, the fact of the matter is you need to have your fiscal house in order and you need to be able to create the kind of environment in this country where wealth creators build the kind of wealth that you need to tax to fund these programs. We haven't been doing any of these things. We're just promising stuff, blowing it in the wind and hoping that it's going to work out. I think this is a much bigger failure and the sign of many things to come from this

government than any of Mr. Carney's personal random dealings or whatever. And I think this is the kind of thing that does actually have pretty substantial chance and risks for them to cause some backlash with the ballot box. But I'm not surprised, man. Max, there are certain government programs that I do view as investments, child care, absolutely. The more you can give a license, an agency

to both members of the family to go out there and pursue their dreams of whatever job they want, absolutely, that's an investment the knock on effect is more money comes into the into the coffers than goes out. This to me seems like a bureaucratic mess that really needs to be taken down to the studs. Yeah, I mean, fair enough. If you actually look at the at the reporting around the way this has rolled out, it was bad in

the beginning, there was some confusion with the insurers. There was a flood of applications. They weren't ready for it. And the reporting has said they're actually getting through it. They've improved the technology. It's starting to work better. This is the way it is with all new programs,

just as it is with all new sort of programs at businesses where the first few months are a learning process to find out where the problems are, where the gaps are, and then you fill them. And so we can have a conversation, a philosophical one, about whether we should fund this. But in terms of the efficacy of the program, I think we should give it at least a little while to get on its feet. And then we can say, does it work?

Does it not work? Is it a Phoenix pay system boondoggle? Or is it like the childcare program where after a few fits and starts, it actually has started to work really well in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah, well, listen, if you know anything about me, I believe that this government should either be given the runway to succeed or enough rope to hang themselves. It all depends on how they perform, but you're right.

I think patience, especially with a new government, is what they deserve at the very least. When we come back, I wanna go back to the issue with what we've learned about our Prime Minister's holdings. And I'm gonna ask you guys a very specific question. How does a Prime Minister govern if he has to remove himself from so many decisions involved around his conflicts?

So don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. I'm very pleased that we've kept our panel together with Max Fawcett and Anthony Kosh. And look, guys, I want to ask you a procedural question, and it's a good faith question because I have no answer for this. But I don't understand in a world where a prime minister, let's take Mark Carney out of it. Like, let's not make it about him.

If a prime minister has a number of, let's take Mark Carney out of it. Like, let's not make it about him. If a prime minister has a number of conflicts that he says he's going to recuse himself from, how does that even work in the basic functioning of government? If our prime minister is the decider in chief, to use it to steal an expression from George W. Bush, if he's the guy who decides stuff, how decisions get made if he has to recuse himself from

one decision or another? I'll start with you, Anthony. Yeah, it's a very good question. And I think it's one that Mark Carney should be answering to the Canadian people. Because like you said, is asset holdings are quite large in all sorts of different industries. There's all sorts of perverse incentives one way or another. I don't know how blind the blind is.

Obviously if he's got conflicts, he seems to know what's in there. So I think the question becomes at what point, like why don't you just divest? Why don't you just rid yourselves of these conflict of interests? So that way you can dedicate yourself 150% to the job of being prime minister

and making decisions that are in the best interests of, it's like the equivalent to some extent of having a CEO who is incapable of making decisions on behalf of the company well And that yeah, but that's where that's where why are you the CEO? Yeah? Like I said max it I promise you it's a good faith question because I we heard about it on a smaller scale with the public safety minister who had to step back from quote any matter related to the liberation tiger of the world Tamil movement because he had a conflict. And I thought, well, how can you do your job? Like what happens when an issue related to that comes up in the furtherance of your duties as the public safety minister? Who's going to be deciding on behalf of your ministry?

Now you take that to government writ large. I don't understand how. going to be deciding on behalf of your ministry. Now you take that to government writ large. I don't understand how, I'm just trying to figure out the process by which that happens. Well, it's why you have staff. You have a chief of staff, you have the clerk of the pretty council. They know, you know, where the red lines are and they make sure that those are flagged for you. We have an ethics commissioner who if there's any question or doubt, you can file proactive

submissions to them. They will say yes, no, maybe so. You know, as to Anthony's point, and this is one that Pierre Polly have brought up, you know, why doesn't Carney just sell everything? He can't because he has shares that haven't vested in, you know, Stripe, which is a payments company, a very successful private company. He has shares that have invested in Brookfield. If the Conservative Party was still the party of business, they would understand this. And they understand, they wouldn't have this sort of NDP attitude of like, well, why don't you just sell everything, you big capitalist? But they seem to have adopted that mantle of like not knowing things about the thing they used to know a lot about. And I don't think there's any risk there for Carney in that.

It's a pretty easy issue for him to navigate. I think it's sectorally pretty well defined. You know, it's renewable energy, it's infrastructure. His decisions are not going to impact that because Brookfield is an international company with, yeah, just those with assets in the United States, Europe, abroad. It is not some little podunk Canadian company that is going to get rich if he makes one decision. So I want to bring in Anthony. I did not know that you had picked up the mantle of the NDP.

So you gotta comment on that. But I don't know if I'm being obtuse or dense or I'm missing something, but I just don't, so I'm gonna go back to you on it. How does a government make a decision if the ultimate person making the decision is not the prime minister who eventually has to sign off on something? I mean I guess though they'll do cabinet committees they'll do all sorts of sort

of stuff like that but it's a suboptimal situation there's no way to work around it and I understand the concept of vested shares you know this is the first time I've ever been called the Dpper or communist by anybody. It's very, it's very, it's very funny that it's coming from Max, I guess, you know, but, but all that being said, and again, it's just infrastructure and it's just renewable energy. Those are two pretty substantial files, one of which the prime minister has spoken a great deal about. And I think it is kind of concerning that when those final decisions are being, like again, to what extent does that mean recusing himself? Is there no participation in the decision making process whatsoever?

Does that manifest itself when he's writing, you know, letters to the ministers to tell them what their responsibilities and what their objectives are going to be over the course of the next parliament? What does that actual process look like in a meaningful sense? And I think, you know, transparency is a good thing. And I'd like to see a little more detail provided where that's concerned beyond just sort of I'm washing my hands. Especially like you said, Ben, because we just went through him saying that he has no conflicts to actually,

yes, I do, but we're doing something about it. So it always seemed that there's more information that makes itself available down the line the longer this conversation goes on. And I think it would be better for everybody if we just went all the way to the natural conclusion before sort of pretending that these things are not an issue until they actually become one.

All right, well, in our final few minutes, I want to talk about the NDP, your party, Anthony. Yeah. So we all watched when Benjamin Netanyahu met with the President Trump and did the ultimate flattery of him by saying, I've nominated you for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, I don't know if it's gonna go anywhere,

but I thought that that was a very shrewd thing that he did because you know that that works on Donald Trump. The NDP in Canada saw red and have decided that their reaction to that, as they are facing what I think is a pretty substantial, if not existential, pretty close to existential threat to their very existence, they've decided that rather than focus on where they used

to have success, which was promoting workers' rights and the like, they are are gonna stand up to Donald Trump by nominating a special rapporteur to the UN, Albanese, for the Nobel Prize. And if you go through her hits, she's about as rabid as an anti-Semite as you can get. They're not doing themselves any favors of getting back to their roots, Max. And it seems like they are hell bent

on becoming this one issue party where Warren Kinsella said more focused on Gaza than Guelph. Yeah, I mean, I think Anthony's new party should really try to, you know, do a test. Don't make this a thing. Where they don't talk about international relations for six months. Yeah, just right, just right, international relations for six months. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. Exactly. Just six months. If you're a party with a handful of seats and you are supposed to represent the working class in Canada, you should not be paying any attention to things that are happening outside of your country's borders. Now, I understand the issues that animate them there. We don't have to get into them, but it's just, it is a misallocation of their time

and their political capital to be focusing on, even focusing on Donald Trump and his international relations choices, just focus on, and we saw this in the Democratic primary in New York, Zoran Mamdani won by just being relentlessly focused on cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. And Anthony's true party, I mean, that was the lesson of Pierre Poliev's rise

was he was just relentless on that issue. And it really spoke to a lot of people in the NDP's demographic. It's time for the NDP to start speaking to them or they're gonna lose them forever. Well, and Anthony, it begs then the question because there's a great sub stack that was just written by Fred DeLorey

who said that these guys are facing a critical emergency where if they don't pay back some money in three years, it becomes a political contribution. And if they don't pay that back, they could be facing criminal charges. If I'm one of these traditional NDP voters or NDP organizers, maybe I'm thinking to myself, this isn't my party anymore. And maybe I take my toys and I go home and I start a new party. Yeah, well, forget even that actually, what's actually ended up happening over the course, like since Jack Layton's passing, quite frankly, and then subsequent to that with Jagmeet Singh

becoming leader, a lot of former, as you call them, traditional new Democrats have actually found themselves new homes in either the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party, depending on which part of that ideological spectrum within the NDP that you find yourself. That's what's happened, that's what's gonna continue to happen. It's all fun and dandy to be the party of student unions, but it turns out there's not that many people

that are interested in having the Student Society of McGill University's governing documents be a roadmap for governing a country like Canada. So God love them. Like I said, as a conservative, I always wish the NDP the best of luck. I really wish that they could be at 25% in the poll party. Unfortunately, it's just these guys,

I've said it on the last time I was on, I'll say it again, they could not know how to win if it hit them over the head with a baseball bat. They're just bad at politics and that's how she goes sometimes. Well, I want to thank both of you for joining us. I want to, Anthony, I want to thank you at the end for really reminding us that you are a conservative

because it got a little confusing during this conversation. But guys, thanks so much. Hope you had a great weekend. I hope you have a great weekend. I know we'll talk to you soon. All right, until next time. And thank you for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. You know what to do.

Follow us on all our social media platforms. You can follow me personally at Ben Mulroney. We're on YouTube. We're a podcast. We're everywhere that you are. So join us in this journey. We'll be back here tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your Monday.

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