The Ben Mulroney Show - The political panel -- long ballots and asylum bills

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

 Guest: Regan Watts, Founder Fratton Park Inc., former Senior aide to minister of finance Jim Flaherty - GUEST:  Kiki Cekota, Former campaign worker for the Ontario and Federal Liberal party. Senior Consultant, Public Affairs & Advocacy, Hill & Knowlton  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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It's Wednesday, which means it's time for This Week in Politics, the Wednesday edition, or as I like to call it, Watts Wednesdays, because Regan Watts is joining us. There he is. Regan Watts, founder of Fratton Park Inc. and former senior aide to the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty. And we've got a new face and voice joining us today. Please welcome to the Ben Mulroney show, Kiki Sakota. She's a former campaign worker for the Ontario and Federal Liberal Party,

senior consultant with public affairs at Hill and Knowlton. Kiki, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. All right, I wanna start with bonjour, mon chum, as you like to say. Let's go, let's start with a story that Warren Kinsella has written in the Toronto Sun,

that the federal government is looking at outlawing some hate symbols. And look, there are certain symbols that just should not be permitted. If you are waving the flag of a known and declared terrorist organization, that should be illegal. If you burn a cross, that should be illegal. And on, if you have the swastika, that should be illegal. And on and on.

But if, in my opinion, and I'm gonna go to you first, Kiki, if the banning of certain symbols is not followed with the commensurate political will to instruct our law enforcement to act on the banning of these things and arrest those who flout the law, then its performance to the highest degree. Yeah, I think for something like this, there has to be really stringent criteria for what constitutes a hate symbol in the first place. I think broad definitions for something like this could be a really slippery slope. And what does the government consider to be a hate symbol?

The devil would really be in the details with something like this. I know the government's just looking now at undertaking public consultations about this type of thing. And as we know, those don't tend to be the speediest process. So I don't think this is something that would come into play in a matter of months, but more so years.

And I think, you know, how do you enforce a ban like this? Government needs to consider what the punitive measures would be. Would it be fines? Would it be jail time? I think it's something that's hard to verify as well. So it really will come down to what legislation would look like in the details. Regan, if I were to talk with Jewish Torontonians or Jewish Vancouverites or members of the black community about symbols and things that they see that make them feel unsafe,

I'm pretty sure I would get a consensus that would say, you know what, instead of focusing on banning new things, how about you enforce the laws that are on the books today? So then a couple of things there, and I think it's worth it. You talked about the Jewish community, so I think it's worth starting with reminding your listeners that there are still hostages who are being held in Gaza who have not been released, and they should be brought home now and brought home immediately. I think Kiki's comments earlier, and I actually read Warren's piece, and I thought it was interesting. I learned some things in his writing that I did not know, and that is there are similar laws on the books in other like-minded countries, like the United Kingdom, for example. You know, I think if the devil, it's Kiki's comment, devil is in the details, and we've not yet seen legislation.

So I think it'll be interesting to see if it does come forward what it looks like. I do believe and while I am a libertarian at heart, despite what some of the YouTube commenters think I am a conservative, I am a libertarian at heart, but I do think hate symbols in particular like swastikas and how terrorist symbols have been used to intimidate the Jewish community in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, there's no place for that in this country. And so I think if the police associations and law enforcement are asking for these tools, it is incumbent upon government to reflect upon that request and think about it.

And when it comes to hate, and in particular the terrorizing of the Jewish community in this country and around the world, we need to do more than what is being done. And if that involves passing laws that make it illegal to promote hate symbols, whether they're terrorist organization logos or the swastika, then that's a path that we need to consider and is worth taking.

All right, let's move our attention to the by-election where Pierre Poliev is looking to get himself a seat to reclaim his position as a leader of the opposition in the House of Commons. And history is repeating itself in his election defeat during the federal election. There are, I think, 91 candidates on the ballot and this time there are over 150 candidates on the ballot. Kiki, you don't have to be a fan of Pierre Poliev to acknowledge that this is a miscarriage of democracy, that somebody somewhere is taking advantage of a system, our system, for some reason. And that reason is not the furtherance of the democratic process. I might have to disagree with you here, Ben, because I think although long ballots, they

might be ballots, they might be inconvenient, they might be irritating when you go to the ballot box, they're certainly not and democratic. And in fact, I think they're an indicator of democracy working like it should. I think Pierre-Paul Yavre needs to contend with the fact that maybe there's some people out there that don't want to see him sit as an elected official again. And so it's hard for me to imagine that if a long ballot initiative was doing this against a liberal or an NDP or a Green candidate that he would still have this much to say about it.

I also think if you're talking about electoral reform, there's other things that come into play. I mean, there's stuff people want to talk about, like lowering the voting age or proportional representation. So I think he needs to be not conflating maybe dislike of him with something that's actually anti democratic. Reagan, what are your thoughts? So there's a couple things that come to mind when I was listening to Kiki and reading some of the coverage on this. The first is, let's call it on a political level,

I cannot for the life of me figure out why Pierre Poliev in his by-election is even talking about this issue. He sounds like a whiner and he sounds like a guy who lost. And from an optics and a communication standpoint, I think it's a really bad place for him to be. And there are others and surrogates who can carry that message for him or on his behalf. He doesn't need to be carrying that message.

That's a good point. That's the first thing. The second thing is, the longest ballot initiative is, they're only following the laws that Kiki's party passed when elections reform was tabled in the House of Commons several years ago. I think there's some changes that can be made, whether it's minimum requirements around official agents and being an official agent. And for those who are listening, an official agent is essentially the chief financial officer of an election campaign, a local election campaign. Many times these longest ballot initiatives have

the same, the candidates all have the same official agent. We can make some changes there. Elections Canada can make some, do some better work around enforcement because of course you need to have signatures to be nominated as a candidate in a writing and I know a number of stories where photocopies of signatures are being used for people to be able to get on a ballot and I think there's maybe some enforcement changes we can make. You know, the Liberals had an opportunity to make electoral reform changes and Prime Minister Trudeau when he was elected in 2015, young people said overwhelmingly that they voted for him based on two reasons. One was weed, which he got done, and two was electoral reform, which he did not. And so I think there's some things that the government can do and working across party lines, I would suggest they strike an all party committee or they refer this to a to one of the House of Commons committee made your procedure in House affairs to have a conversation and review some of the elections Canada laws. I don't blame elections Canada for this at all no

they're just operating yeah and reading what it is what it is sometimes a law ceases to to be as effective as as it was intended and when that happens you've got to reevaluate we have this conversation on this show all the time about the Youth Criminal Justice Act it feels like there are forces at play in society they're taking advantage of the fact that people under a certain age are treated with kid gloves. So they're enlisting them into criminal enterprises. If that's the case, and they are conducting

more and more violent crimes, we have to look at that law to say, is it doing what it was intended? And we can say the same thing about this. Now, not for nothing, when Justin Trudeau made that promise, he was sitting third place with very little prospect of forming a majority government. So of course he was gonna say, yes, proportional representation, I'm all for that.

Once you form a majority government, nobody is taking that power away from you, let alone yourself. That's just a fact of human nature. I agree, Ben. And I think with that analysis with respect to Prime Minister Trudeau and when he made the promise,

I do think most sensible adults would say that if you are not considered by society in a legal term to be responsible enough to buy alcohol, which in this country is at 18, you should not be allowed to vote under that age. I think what Mr. Starmor, Prime Minister Starmor and the Labour Party are doing in the UK is an abomination. And I think they're gonna run

into a lot of headwinds against that. You know, being 16 is a milestone in life. You learn how to drive, but you can't buy booze until you're 18, at least legally. I can't speak for your growing up then, but I was prohibited from buying booze. I'm not so much of the drinking in 24th Sussex Drive. But I'm not asking my 16 year old neighbor what they think about policy issues and nor should elected officials. All right, guys.

Thank you so much, Kiki. I'm going to come to you first after the breakout. We're going to be looking at the bill has come due for the hotels that we use for asylum seekers across this country So don't go anywhere much more with our political panel on the Ben Mulroney show when we come back Hungry now Now What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O'Henry Bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big crunchy salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and

chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today. O'Henry, O'Henry. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us and please welcome back to our This Week in Politics midweek panel, Regan Watts. And for the first time, hopefully not the last time, Kiki Sokoto, welcome back guys.

Great to be here. So our prime minister has thrown down the gauntlet. He's laid down the law. He has said, dude, there's a new sheriff in town. We're going to do things differently. And he's leading by example. And he's telling his departments and he's telling his crown corporations, find cuts. If you don't find the cuts, I'm going to find the cuts and you're not going to like it if

I find the cuts. So when I read in the newspaper today, Kiki, that the bill has come due for the asylum hotels and it's to the tune of 1.1 billion dollars. I'm thinking this prime minister has a lot of work, there's a lot of work that can be done on trimming the fat. Yeah, I think he has his work cut out for him. I mean, I'm in my late 20s and I'd love to be able to afford a home in Canada or even a condo. And so, seeing the federal government spending over a billion dollars on this stopgap solution is really confusing to me. I think why is the federal government holding this money and not passing it on

to municipalities and provinces? We know they're much better suited to run accommodation for asylum claimants. And so the federal government really needs to work with their counterparts in the cities and provinces to land on a long-term solution to this because we know asylum-seeker numbers are just going up year over year. Where's the permanent housing? How are they going to integrate into the workforce? I think these are questions that Prime Minister Carney and his team really has to think hard about or we're going to have a bigger problem.

I mean, Regan, I do not envy our Prime Minister and the work that he has to do, because so many of the crises that are of our own making, but so many of them intersect. There's a nexus where two or three of them collide and intertwine. How he's going to undo that and deal with each crisis separately? I have no idea. Well, the crises that you mentioned in the Tiki discuss, let's be clear, those were created by the long national nightmare known as Justin Trudeau. You get one of those. You sneak one of those in every week, man. He, he, well, it's true. And it'll never get old because it was he, Prime Minister Trudeau and his government who destroyed the Canadian consensus on immigration,

which is a tragedy because I am the son of an immigrant. And when I hear Kiki talk about her challenges around housing, she's like thousands, hundreds of thousands of Canadians, particularly young people, who are struggling to find homes and they look at the expenditures and have a question of fairness. I think it was Michelle Rempel-Garner, who is the conservative immigration critic, who I happen to think is an exceptional member of parliament. I don't agree with her on everything, but she's a very good member of parliament. She spoke to this. And I think regular Canadians look at the bill and go, that's a lot of money. What could we do with this? And I think the total spent over the last six or seven years is something like two and a half billion dollars. Look, I'm all for genuine asylum claims. I'm all for immigration

But I think even mainstream Canadians and not just not fringes on the left or the right are saying we need to do something different here because it's costing a lot and the and the crises and it is a Venn diagram Ben that you talk about That that is impacting the country and And I think it's, you know, I think Mr. Carney is the right person to be reviewing federal spending along with Minister Champagne. And I wish them well in that endeavor, but you know, asylum claimants staying in hotels and other benefits is something that for regular Canadians,

and I think Akiki in her comments, just doesn't sit well. And I think we need to have an honest adult conversation about that. All right, you know, in the United States, the Republicans like to say that one of the reasons they win is because they always pick the right side on these 80-20 debates. They're always on the side of the 80 and for some reason the Democrats pick the 20. When it comes to the trucker convoy, that is an 80-20 debate as well with about 85%

of Canadians lining up against the trucker convoy. And yet for some reason, the conservatives are lining up in defense of the leaders of that convoy right now, very publicly, and are championing these two leaders who could be facing as much as seven or eight years in jail. It's a head scratcher for me. Regan, I'm gonna start with you because I gave Kiki the first word of this entire thing I can give her the last word as well. So you go first, my friend. So I think there's a number of factors on the convoy that need to be unpacked here and I'll do it very quickly. The first is, you know, the two folks that we're referencing have been convicted in a

court of law. And in this country, we respect the courts. That's not to say that there weren't errors in the application of the law, and Tamara Litch and her co-defendant are certainly entitled to appeal, but they were convicted by a judge. And so when I hear politicians, and in particular, Mr. Poliev and the Conservative caucus, making comments about and questioning

the Crown's request for sentencing, I just shake my head. And I ask, you know, I think the phrase that comes to mind is where did it all go wrong? Because I think the convoy is not, should not be held out as demonized, because I think what the truckers in that moment in our country's history did was, if you can draw a straight line time-wise, is from their protests, we gradually saw the lifting of COVID restrictions, which I think was a net positive.

I don't agree that people's bank accounts are frozen, and I think that was unconscionable. But these are two people who were convicted. The second thing that I want to say, Ben then is just because the Crown is asking for seven years doesn't mean that the defendants and the convicted folks in this case are going to get seven years. And so when politicians comment on sentencing, it shows a remarkable lack of understanding and sophistication. And I think regular mainstream Canadians, the vast majority in the middle, not the 80-20,

but I mean the 66% of Canadians and 60% of Canadians who are in the middle, not the 80 20. But I mean, the 66% of Canadians and 60% of things who are in the middle, listen to politicians commenting on sentencing, and just kind of go like, why are you doing? Yeah, and for me, it shows a real weird lack of judgment. And I can't quite figure out why the conservatives keep doubling down on this. I want to get I want to get I want to give the mic over to Kiki Kiki over to you. Yeah, I think Pierre Poliev is clearly looking for an edge in a rural Alberta riding that may

be leaning more towards a separatist candidate. We've seen that conversation percolate more and more over the past year. And so, you know, I don't think it's particularly encouraging for a major party leader in Canada to align himself with the likes of a convoy movement that saw support from Martry Taylorene and Eric Trump in the US. But I think he really is looking for that edge to make gains over the separatist movement. And he's digging his heels in here, which he's done on this convoy issue for the last couple of years. I'm not sure if that'll be enough for him to overtake a separatist candidate or by

how much, because I think people will really be looking at, at how successful he is in this by-election if he is successful and maybe that's a little bit of a vote of confidence on him as a leader. Regan, go ahead. Ben, Kiki's right that there's, it's local political dynamics that are driving this commentary, um, because he is running in a rural Alberta riding. He's going to win this riding, whether he says something about the convoy or not. He is a national political leader who has an obligation as a national political leader to behave like one.

And when he makes comments about judicial proceedings and sentencing, he shows that he's just not up for the job. And I can't for the life of me figure out why he can't learn the lessons that he was given earlier this spring in his Ottawa riding and subsequently in terms of public opinion polls.

This is about his leadership and preserving the quote unquote base, but the fact is Pierre Pauliet will never become the Prime Minister of Canada unless he can expand that base. It's not just a question of tone, but he also has to evaluate his strategic positioning. And look, he's going to win and it'll be great for the people of Alberta to give yet another Ontarian a job after he wins his by-election. But he needs to think about the next election. Yeah, listen, for me, for the life of me,

but because it's not just him, by the way, you're talking about this being a local issue. It's a caucus, too. But the caucus is making these comments as well. And I just, for the life of me, if you believe in the 80-20 that the Republicans keep talking about in the United States, and if you're on the life of me, if you believe in the 80 20 that the Republicans keep talking about in the United States, and if you're on the side of the 80, you're going to win.

This is not a winning side. If you agree with the truckers, if you if you support them, then keep your mouth shut. Yes. However, there are moments when you can express that support, but putting political pressure on judicial actors, the Crown and the judge in this case, is not a wise decision. There are other ways you can express that support. And as I say, I support the work that the truckers did in terms of lifting eventually COVID restrictions and what that meant. How the government reacted, that's a whole other conversation. But I don't believe it's right for a national political leader who seeks national office to be making comments about the judiciary this way. And Kiki is absolutely right.

This is about his by-election. And the difference between his win is going to be 65% or 68%. And in the end, it doesn't matter. Kiki, do you subscribe to that real quick? Do you think that he's going to win by a landslide? I wouldn't say a landslide. I think let's just wait and see. We saw what happened with the last time he ran, so. Yeah, all right. Regan, Wa, Tzikiki, Sakota, thank you both for joining me. I hope you have a great end to your week, and I hope you both come back real soon.

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