The Ben Mulroney Show - U.S. Ambassador to Canada says Media fueled the 51st State Rhetoric

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Guests and Topics: -U.S. Ambassador to Canada says Media fueled the 51st State Rhetoric -Poilievre says immigration needs to be slowed down -Federal Government with Lazy fix for Youth Unemployment 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

Welcome back! Welcome to The Ben Mulroney Show on this June 11th. It's hump day here, Wednesday, the Wednesday edition of The Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for joining us, and I want to thank you for joining us wherever you might be. You might be listening in your car, you might be listening on your phone via podcast or a streaming service, or you might have decided that you'll miss my face on TV and you'll want to watch me on YouTube. Well, The Ben Mulroney Show is now on YouTube. So thank you for finding the show and helping us build this into what I hope is an undeniable show in Canada. We really appreciate it. The the ever the ever evolving saga that is the boondoggle of the arrive can app continues. And now we're learning that GSC strategies, which was the company behind this

app that nobody asked for, that we got despite the costs exploding, we now find out that they were paid millions of dollars, millions of dollars, without ever having to show their work. We just handed them checks and we don't know what they did with it. It's simple as that. We handed them millions upon millions upon millions of dollars to the tune, I think of a hundred million dollars.

And we don't know what they did for it. There was zero accountability. And that was par for the course under the Justin Trudeau liberals where any pet project they had, they were spending money like a drunken sailor and no accountability. Well, finally, the Auditor General came back.

The rubber met the road. And now we get this report. Here is what conservative MP Michael Barrett said about laying out this waste, laying it out for all to see. His Auditor General reports reveals the shocking contempt that this liberal government has for matters of national security. They can't demonstrate that security clearances were held by 50% of the contracts that they

awarded to G.C. strategies and in more than 20% of the cases contractors were working without the required clearances. They didn't check before the work began. They don't know if the work got done. There weren't security clearances for the workers, but they cut the checks anyway. And then this prime minister gave the ministers responsible a promotion.

So through you, Speaker, will the prime minister stand up today and tell us when we get our money back? Of course, the government stood up and said, well, G.C. Strategies has been barred from any government contracts for seven years. Well, that's not the answer that we as Canadians that just that, excuse my life, pissed away a hundred million dollars is entitled to. We are entitled to actually know. And I find it very rich, very rich that the Liberals made a whole meal out of Pierre Poliev not taking his

security clearance during the last election when they actually had people working on something as important as our border security with no security clearance. Like that's a very rich position to take but it's a position I mean if you're in the liberal party, you can hold those positions. It's the stock and trade, do as I say, not as I do. I think we're entitled to know where that money went. And if we're gonna get it back,

it's not good enough to say, well, don't worry. They're on the outside looking in for the next seven years. We've given them a timeout. No, you gave them a timeout after giving them a hundred million dollars of our money. Sorry, not even our money, our grandkids money. We ran out of our money a long time ago. We're now working off the backs of people who aren't even born yet. And the Auditor General, that wasn't the only investigation that sort of came to a head. The F-35s, you'll remember that we

had an aging fleet of planes and we were gonna buy these F-35s, you'll remember that we had an aging fleet of planes and we were going to buy these F-35s and then we find out that they cost a heck of a lot more than we originally thought. Let's listen to the Auditor General's report. We found that estimated costs of the Future Fighter capability project have significantly increased and that the project faces several risks that could jeopardize the timely introduction of the new fleet. National Defense originally estimated that the project would cost 19 billion dollars. The audit found that this figure was based on outdated information and that by 2024 the projected costs had increased to $27.7 billion,

almost 50% more than the original estimate. Okay, so when I hear that, my brain starts going into all sorts of different places. And one of them is, I remember a couple of days ago being very excited that the government had announced that Canada was going to commit to spending 2% of our GDP on the military to get us to a place of respect and compliance with our NATO obligation. like our F-35s goes up 50%, and that's probably indicative of a lot of irresponsible spending on military procurement, then maybe what it means is we as a country don't have to spend, we don't have to buy anything to get up to 2%.

We just have to wait for incompetence in procurement to raise the cost of the things we've already bought. That the cost is just gonna balloon to the point that we hit that 2%. We don't have to hire out one new soldier. We don't have to buy a single bullet. We don't have to buy a tank. We don't have to upgrade facilities. We don't have to buy a submarine. Just wait for the stuff that we've already budgeted for. Wait for that stuff to balloon in cost, as is the case with the F-35, we'll hit that 2%, no problem. No problem. Because if you think the F-35 is the only thing that's

going to go up in cost due to, oh, we didn't plan properly, well, then you haven't been living in Canada very long. This is where my brain goes. This is why I say we are unserious about serious issues. They have to do a massive overhaul of our procurement system. They have to do a massive overhaul to find the inefficiencies, to find the redundancies, to find the waste, so that when we say we are going to commit 2% of our GDP to military spending,

that 2% is spent in the most laser focused way possible. Because the most Canadian thing we could do is to keep doing what we've been doing. And just watch the cost balloon. Watch the waste grow. Watch the pork get keep getting added. And then we don't have to do anything to raise, raise that rate, get to the 2%. We have to do anything to raise that, get to the 2%. We have to do anything. Waste will get us there. And that doesn't help anybody. That doesn't help anybody.

You'll remember during the talk of the 50th for state was the talk of the town during the election. The liberals rode that wave to another government under Mark Carney, because you'll remember, Mark Carney told us, they want to own us. They want to weaken us so they can own us. I can't remember what the expression was. They want our land, they want our water,

they want our natural resources, they want everything. And enough people got scared enough to vote the liberals back in under Mark Carney. Well, the new US ambassador to Canada was on the CBC recently. They talked about this, that the beating of the drum of the 51st state by the president and the ambassador turned it around and said, you know what, maybe you Canadians should look in the mirror. You don't understand the skepticism, can't you ambassador on this side of the border?

Because you know, the 51st state stuff, and I know you said that that was gone away, but then the president put it out on social media, if you join, you get Golden Dome for free. Let's get it clarified. I said it was away unless the president or Carney decided to bring it up. And coincidentally, I think you could argue, you could make a credible case that as the president brought it up, maybe the Canadians were bringing it up and maybe the media was bringing it up at the same time. It wasn't just the president of the United States with his tweet. It was 36 hours of nonstop media coverage and Canadians talking about this is proving

our sovereignty. And it's kind of like you're thumping the president in the chest for 36 hours. Yeah. Look, that's not a theory. We were proving it out in real time on this show. Every time, every time I got in front of the mic over during the election campaign, somebody on this side of the border was talking about this, the threat of Canada being the 51st state, the annexation of Canada by

the Americans. It was always vapor. It was always a fiction. We as a nation cannot agree on anything with the exception possibly in this moment of a pipeline and natural resource development. This is a moment in time that will not surely repeat any time soon. We can't agree on anything.

You think all of us as a nation are going to agree to just be absorbed into the United States? It was never going to happen. It will never happen. Not just because we as a nation would rebuff those advances. Even if some of us wanted to go, you think we can barely convince Quebec on a daily basis to stay in Canada? You think Quebec,

a French-speaking, proudly French, independent in spirit province, would want to join America? It's, it was never going to happen, but it served the liberal narrative very well. This is the Ben Mulroney Show and thank you for spending part of your Wednesday with us. Pierre Poliev is not in the House of Commons and so we don't get as many clips from him on a daily basis as we used to. He used to be a star in Question Period and so a lot of content would come our way. We've got to wait for press conferences that happen either before or after in the halls of parliament. And yesterday, he stood before the microphones and he called on what he said was, quote, severe limits on Canadian population growth. And given the fact that

the only population growth we're getting these days is through immigration, that's what he's talking about. Now for context, under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, the liberal government said it would reduce the number of permanent residents admitted annually by 21% from a really high number of 500,000 down to 395 in 2025, and then falling to 380,000 by 2026,

down to 365,000 by 2027. The Trudeau liberals also promised to cap the number of temporary residents admitted from 6.5% to 5% of the total population by the end of 2026, essentially fixing, trying to fix a problem of their own creation. And we'll want we listen in to peer in his own words. Well, we support a stronger border.

We want severe limits on population growth to reverse the damage the liberals did to our system. The population has been growing out of control. Our borders have been left wide open. This has caused the free flow of drugs, human trafficking, illegal migration, and much worse. And that is why we want a stronger border. We want to crack down on abuses in the immigration system. And we want to ensure that any frauds in the refugee system are reversed. Yeah, so it's not, listen, the consensus on immigration has been broken.

I think if he had said something like that 10 years ago, we would be calling him a regressive xenophobe, afraid of anybody who doesn't look like him. That dog don't hunt anymore. That dog don't hunt. The liberals made sure of it. They broke our trust in the immigration system that has now caused myriad problems from a Canadian, young Canadians not being able to get a summer job, to people coming here on a student visa and when it expires, they make a refugee claim to disappearing

into the dark economy when it's time for them to leave. And we don't have the manpower or the budgets or the technology to go find them, even if we wanted to get rid of them. And so we don't even know who is in this country at this point. And I wanna hear from you, I'd like for you to call into the Ben Mulroney show

and let me know, do you agree with Pierre Poliev? I think there's a couple of issues that he's talking about here. And one of them, we want a strong border, I do think at least it looks like the liberals are taking border security more seriously than the Trudeau government did. And so I think I think on that front, I'm going to wait and, but I'm giving them a check mark in pencil at this point, that it looks like they are taking that seriously. But when it comes to immigration,

I mean, when you hear the 817,000 people came into Canada in the first quarter, or first four months of this year, that to me does not seem like a reduction in numbers, that seems like an acceleration. And I get that Canadians aren't having babies and we need to figure out how to keep the economy growing and keep the population growing.

But this has been unchecked for far too long. So give us a call here on the Ben Mulroney show and let's talk immigration. Let's talk Pierre Poliev's call for, quote, severe limits. Look, it's not an expression that I like. And I do know that a lot of his opponents are taking that expression and running with it. But what does he mean? I mean, we have a serious crisis in terms of the number of people that we're bringing in the types of people that we're bringing in and the effects that that is having on our social safety net. Our hospitals are stretched beyond comprehension.

A lot of these people are ending up on the streets because they can't get jobs so that is putting pressure on municipal governments in terms of housing the unhoused. You've got a crisis in our emergency rooms that's not due to simply because that's due to the number of people that are availing themselves of these services. A lot of those people, new Canadians. We have a social cohesion issue that's causing us to a rupture in just basic civil society. This is all, this all stems from a number of key decisions made by the liberals. So yeah, when Pierre says severe limits, it's because we have severe problems. I wouldn't clutch my pearls and say,

oh my God, look at what he's talking about. These are real problems. And I mean, I hate to go back to what an expression that Donald Trump used in his first term. But we need to turn on the taps until we can figure out what the hell's going on. It's an inelegant way of really getting to the point and getting to the problem. Let's welcome Peg to the conversation. Peg, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show.

Thank you. I just wanted to state that we as Canadians, taxing Canadians, we work our lives to retire, to live that dream of retirement after helping to build Canada. We can't have non-Canadians being let in legally, illegally, any way that they can, they have gone through our system and they're working it. When they arrive in Canada, they are given lifelong retirement. They don't have to do anything to help us. And I just wanted to note, I am child of immigrants who came here and my parents had to build it brick by brick every single week and we helped. My parents said, we're here for a better life for you. So assimilate, be Canadian. And we have, my children are university educated. They contribute. We mow our grass. We recycle,

we pay our taxes and everyone else is coming in here and they're not following the rules and that's why we're broken. Well Peg, thank you so much for that and listen, I don't want to prosecute the years of the Justin Trudeau liberals. I mean, we had an election on it and enough Canadians said we don't care about that because we still like this team. So, you know, my side lost. That being said, when you have a leader and a government for 10 years beating the drum that Canada has no core values, no core, nothing that really makes us we're a post national state, whatever the hell that means, it's hard then to bring people in and justify telling them you have to assimilate assimilate into what our prime minister says we have nothing that binds us

together. You do that for 10 years, you end up with the mess that we have. But Peg, thank you so much for the call. Can I ask one more thing? Yeah. Yes. Why come here if you don't want to follow our culture, our lifestyles, our religions? You can't come here and say, well, we don't want to do that. And yet we're paying them.

Listen, for years, Peg, thank you very much for the call. For decades, we had people coming here of various religions, and we all worked well together. So I don't want to bring religion into it. I don't think it's religion that broke this up, although we may be bringing in too many people from one particular part of the world. It's the fact that we are not giving them an identity to rally around the

fact for 10 years we were this amorphous blob at the north of North America that that our prime minister said there is nothing about us that is identifiably Canadian and when the guy at the top tells you that then what the heck do we have to rally around of course you're going to come here and do your own thing. Nobody gave you any direction. We had citizenship ceremonies that you could do remotely. Oh, let's we got a few calls. Let's get back to them. What are we doing? Eddie, welcome to the show. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Very well. Thanks. Good. See, this poly of has no idea what he's talking about when he talks about a population explosion. What in the world is he talking about? We have our replacement rate is well

below the 2.1 necessary to keep a country going. I think we're at 1.6. It represents one of the lowest replacement rates in the Western. Oh, yeah, the Western world. So what is he even talking about? This guy makes no sense. No, no, no, hold on. Just because Canadians aren't having babies doesn't mean the way that we're bringing people in has been even remotely productive.

I would argue that the way the liberals have done it has made matters worse. I'd rather have a declining population than bringing in the wrong people. And by the way, we can do two things at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can bring people in, and we can incentivize Canadians to have babies.

Hungary has a great idea, lowering the income tax rate for people to have one kid, two kids, three kids. Hey, thank you for the calls. We really appreciate it. To celebrate the days of our lives Lives 60th anniversary, W Network and Stack TV invite you to enter for a chance to win the ultimate fan experience. By watching new episodes of Days of Our Lives, you and a guest could win a three-night stay in Los Angeles, a VIP Days of Our Lives set tour, a helicopter ride over LA, and so much

more. Watch weekdays at one and look for the weekly code word to enter. Days of our lives, all new Weekdays at One, only on W. Stream on Stack TV.