The Ben Mulroney Show - There's a clear generational divide in this election

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Canada works fine — if you're a boomer with 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

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We were talking a lot about the generational divide in this country as it relates to who people are going to vote for in the next election with a lot of young people lining up to vote for Pierre Poliev and a lot of boomers saying that they trust Mark Carney to steer us through the next four years. Well, Anthony Kosh is a big friend of this show. He comes on often to talk about all manner of things, wrote a piece in the National Post that Canada works fine if you're a boomer. And so to drill down on what he means and and and and where we go from here is Anthony Kosh

himself managing principal at a case strategies and former national campaign spokesperson for Pierre poliev Anthony, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back on. Okay, so give us the thrust for those who have yet to read it and are excited to do so. Yeah, so effectively, what I'm saying is that Canada has been divided, there's a generational divide that goes right through the center of our politics. And your experience of Canada is very much a reflection and a manifestation of when

you were born. So I said for example if you bought a house in 1996 in a major city in Canada you spent about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars you wake up today your house is worth over a million right? So over the course of your life you saw interest rates decline, you saw the values of your assets massively inflate your retirement account is probably flush with cash. Things have been going well. So what I say is the reason why Canada is broken hits the ear so negatively is for because for people of a certain generation, Canada isn't broken and never was. And what I argue is for young people it never even got started. Yeah well I've taken a lot of calls on this prior to even your your opinion piece coming out and and there is a consensus among young people that they they can't get ahead but there what I'm struggling to understand is how even if you're you have all of those things that you just described you also probably have kids and you're watching your kids struggle.

And the callers that I've had on the Ben Mulrooney show who have kids feel that they have been working overtime as the bank of mom and dad or as a landlord or as a lender or as they've been helping with daycare, you name it, they have been trying their best to give their kids a leg up in a world that may not be broken for them, but it is broken for their kids. So here's the thing, and this is what I'd say to all those people, because I'm happy to hear that. Just if you look, even Abacus Data did a really good breakdown of this a few days ago, and they've been doing a sort of running update

to it over the course of the campaign, where they break down by age group which electoral issues are the most important by age cohort. If you go to 18 to 34 and even let's say 34 to 50 ish around there you see stuff the number one issues cost of living, housing costs, taxes, the domestic economic reality. And then the second you hit that 55 plus mark, Donald Trump, number one issue, far and away most important. And if you look at younger Canadians, it's still relevant,

but it's far from the most important issue. There's more of a domestic access that is prioritized on the issues that I just listed. My rent's too expensive, I can't afford a house, I have a master's degree and I'm making more money than my parents ever did at my age, yet I can't afford half as much as what they were. Right, yeah, and look, some of the samples of phone calls

that I have received as well, look, I've got a particular type of listener on this show. So I've got elderly people, I got boomers who call in who say they're voting for Pierre. But there's the odd person, I haven't received a boomer caller saying they are voting for Mark Carney, but I have people say, I have friends who are boomers

who are voting for Mark Carney. I've got grandparents who are voting for Mark Carney. And then I said, well, have you talked to them? I said, there's no talking to them. There's no talking to them. I cannot get them to see reason. I may have to stop talking to them altogether. And it does worry me for the conservative campaign

because Pierre's been putting some stuff in the window that should directly address issues of life for boomers. And, but if there's no talking to them, if it's all about Trump for them, I don't know what he can do. Yeah, well, in fairness, there's also the conservative equivalent to that voter, right?

There's those people who, no matter what Mark Carney says or does, they're not, you know, put me in there, right? There's nothing Mark Carney could do for me to get me to vote for him. So that exists on either side of the equation. But yeah, it's definitely a needle to thread. I think a lot of people, especially young people

in this country, something else that I talked about, underestimate just how traumatic Donald Trump's comments, which are reprehensible and I condemn to the full extent of everything, about annexing Canada, 51st state, tariffs and all that, just how traumatic that has been disproportionately, specifically for a generation of people for whom their first and primary political identifier as Canadians

is anti-Americanism. That has reignited that to a great extent for reasons that in many cases are justified, but it's caused, it's given an issue or people, certain people, the ability to completely ignore the domestic reality in this country and the very real problem that people are suffering that are not as a result of Donald Trump, but are a result of the lost liberal decade and the policies that we've all been subject to the last 10 years. I'm speaking with Anthony Gosh. He's written a piece in the National Post entitled Canada Works Fine If You're a Boomer.

I'm trying to figure out how young people could talk to those boomers in their lives who believe all the things that you just said, that they've got the money that they want, and they've got the house that they want, and they've got the security that they want. So Canada's never been broken for them, or the Canadian Promise rather,

to use the parlance of Pierre Puglia. The Canadian Promise was honored for their generation, whereas it's been completely broken for younger Canadians. But at some point, they start thinking about what happens when they leave this earth and what happens to the things that they pass on. Is there something that the conservatives could do about making it? I don't know, allowing so that whatever you're gonna leave your kids, they get to keep more of it? Is that something that could appeal to the boomers?

I think so, but I think this is not necessarily a political solution. I think this is a generation generation. One of the things that I had difficulty, whenever I would bring these topics up in my family, people would get upset. You're saying, I didn't work hard. No, I'm happy that you were able to accomplish what you were able to accomplish. But take my grandfather,

Italian immigrant comes to Canada, four or five years later, he buys his first house for $23,000 in the 1970s. If you adjust for inflation, that house today costs $185,000. I encourage you to find anything in the greater Montreal area, let alone Toronto or Vancouver. But I'm just saying when you do that adjustment, you really understand just how insane things have become. And I think young people need to be a little bit more sensitive to the idea that sometimes we're very sweeping and we make them feel like they didn't do anything to deserve what they have.

But at the same time, I wish from some of our older Canadians that we would just get an appreciation for just how much things have really changed since they were our age. Well, and look, I get that these are two different realities and it's sad that that's the case. I'm just trying to figure out how both sides can communicate with each other.

And I think you just laid out a possible solution where everybody needs to put a little water in their wine. And so that nobody feels particularly attacked. But, you know, there is an election to prosecute here and it does feel like people are lining up on opposite sides. And have already, I'm just trying to figure out, like, is there room for people to be swayed? already, I'm just trying to figure out like, is there room for people to be swayed? I think so. And you see that already. Not only on the left, but also on the right, especially with Mark Carney's

positioning right now that a lot of his support is a manifestation of the moment that we're currently living. Yeah, but it's not what we call hard support. We discussed this, I think last week when I was on the show. Yeah. conservative support right now is locks on it. You're not peeling any more pieces off that onion. Whereas Mark Carney, he sort of, you know, the Liberal Party has been very adept at seizing the Trump moment, but you're seeing like a complete nutter collapse of the NDP, the blocks down, all sorts of stuff like that.

I think in this election campaign, the debates are going to matter far more than they ever have the previous ones and when the tenation tunes in to see this guy on a major platform for the first time they're gonna see what people like me and you have been seeing yeah when he jumps in front of a camera and a microphone in front of the journalists and makes a complete clown of them especially in Quebec especially in Quebec I think it's gonna be a massive impact but we still got right 27, I believe, if my count is correct, 27 days to go.

All right, Anthony, we're gonna we're gonna leave it there. Thank you so much. The article is called Canada Works Fine. If you're a boomer, it's by Anthony Kosh in the National Post. I appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Thank you. All right. Something that I'm very glad is not an April Fool's joke is that the consumer carbon tax, which has been reduced to zero, it has not been canceled, reduced to zero is gone today. And it means that in some places, you can expect to be paying 20 cents less per liter of gas. And I'm very glad that that's happening. But if you think that I'm gonna fall for the gas lighting

by the liberal party that I'm gonna thank them for this, I'd rather blame them for the fact that I've been paying 20 cents more a liter for every liter I have been putting in my car for years. I'm placing the blame on them. I'm thanking Pierre Poliev for putting the pressure on them to do this. So you don't get credit for something that you caused.

Sorry, you lit the fire. I'm not crediting you with putting it out. And look, for people who think that saying you're gonna do it means you're gonna do it. I mean, just listen to British Columbia Premier David Eby. Listen to his voice here where he talks about the carbon tax. And I'll give you my assessment on the other side of this clip. Yeah, it's an interesting time in terms of climate change discussion globally. You can see that that one man in White House, almost single-handedly, has done a lot of work to reverse some major policy efforts across North America.

And you can see the shift around the world as different governments, particularly right-wing populist governments, undermine climate action. The bottom line is climate change is real. We can see it here in British Columbia, the forest fires, the floods, the atmospheric rivers. We have to take action. We're going to continue to take action in this province. We're going to lead on clean tech. We're going to have the cleanest industry driven by clean electricity.

We're going to grow our economy and show it's possible. And we're also going to recognize the reality that British Columbians can't be expected to bear all the expense of that. We can't be the only province in Canada with a substantial carbon tax and expect our goods to be able to compete and expect British Columbians to be able to deal with the affordability challenges that they face. I struggle to understand the logic in what the Premier said there.

At the end, he said, we can't be the only ones to bear the cost. If we're the only ones with a carbon tax, then our goods are going to be more expensive. But right before that, he talked about how we're going to invest in all this stuff, and we're going to be the tip of the sword on on on environmental stewardship. And we're going to build the greatest economy around. Well, which one is it? If you've got a carbon tax and your goods are more expensive, how do you square that circle? Either you can't sell your goods because they're too expensive

because of your carbon tax, or we are building a rocket ship of an economy. And that's the nonsense that has been peddled by the liberal government. They told us for 10 years that central to building this new economy that was going to propel Canada to new heights, central to it was a carbon tax. And we've seen what's happened over the past 10 years. We were also told that the world was going to burn and anybody who suggested that the carbon tax was a bad thing wanted told that the world was going to burn and anybody who suggested the carbon tax

was a bad thing wanted to see the world burn and they get rid of it as if it was nothing. As if it was nothing. But apparently carbon taxes or the climate change is still real. I don't think anybody's suggesting climate change isn't real, but it was not tackled in any way by the carbon tax. And two things can be true at once. You can believe that climate change is real and we need to take real action. And you were killing the economy with the carbon tax. Those two things can be real at the same time. The world is not binary. be real at the same time. The world is not binary. So when I hear Premier Eby talk that way, I hear a longing in his voice.

I hear a sadness in his voice. He wants to go back to a time where progressives were dictating the terms of the game. And I wonder what happens if Mark Carney and liberals get that fourth term that they want they get to dictate the terms again and I Am beginning to believe that yeah, he may have turned the carbon tax down to zero for the

for the consumer, but I don't think that's the end of the liberal a liberal government's foray into wealth redistribution by way of carbon pricing. I hope we don't get to a point where that question that I have is tested. I really don't wanna see that. But I think if given the okay by the Canadian people, they would get right back to work on that.

We have to talk about Paul Chang. Got to talk about Paul Chang. I know that Mark Carney wants to turn the page on this, but he's the one who let it fester for four days. So just to recap, Paul Chang, MP, in January, amused that his opponent, conservative opponent, should be kidnapped and given to the Chinese consulate where there is a bounty on his head where he would no doubt have been renditioned to China and executed. He said that in January. Apparently, upon the mainstream media picking that up a few days ago, he apologized online, did not apologize directly to the candidate. And Mark Carney, despite this egregious behavior by his MP and candidate, stood by him yesterday.

He has apologized. He knows it was wrong. I know he doesn't know it was wrong. I'm sorry. You can't, you can't do that. You don't apologize after you've been caught and say, I really, I, it was the wrong thing to do. You should have, had you come out before the press had said that, I may give you, I may give you a longer leash, but no, sir. Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. You got caught and you thought you could save your ass by apologizing. Somehow, for some mind-boggling reason that defies all logic and all partisan

politics, Mark Carney stood by this guy. And then, at midnight, Paul Chang resigns. Now, what happened in the interim? The only thing that I can see is that the RCMP said that they were going to look into this thing. That's the only variable that entered the equation. But let's go back in time to prior to that, when Mark Carney stood by his man. I am deeply offended by those comments. As I said, they're a terrible lapse of judgment. I view this as a teachable moment.

It underscores the respect with which we treat human rights in this country, the differences between Canadian society and other countries. This after all, though, I will go back to the character of the individual who made it lap stud. This is someone who has served our community, has been on the front line of policing for almost three decades and has been standing up for those rights and has that track record for it. He's made his apology.

He made it to the public. He made it to the individual concerned. He made it directly to me. And he's going to continue with his candidacy. Thank you. Teachable moment. That sounds exactly like the words that came out of Justin Trudeau's mouth. And I'm not the only one who says so. Jody Wilson-Raybould tweeted, This new guy is starting to look much like the old guy. There's no limit to how far criminals will go to cover their tracks. But investigators will go even further to uncover the truth.

I'm Nancy Hicks, a senior crime reporter for Global News. This season on Crime Beat, I'll take you from the crime scene to the courtroom and inside some of Canada's most high-profile cases, and some you've likely never heard of before. Search for and listen to Crime Beat on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favourite podcasts.