The Ben Mulroney Show - What's the actual appetite to stop money laundering in Canada?

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Canadian governments fail to stop money laundering because they want the cash: Law prof with Guest: Sanaa Ahmed, Law Professor at the University of Calgary -An American Perspective on the tariff war with Guest: Andrea Shalal, White House Correspondent at Reuters 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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And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending time with us. We're living in Trump world, which means every day in politics feels like a week. It can be pretty exhausting. And we try our best not to chase our tails. We try our best to cut through what people say is the noise and focus on the signal.

But sometimes the noise itself is the signal. For example, the way that Donald Trump and his team speak about any number of people demonstrates a lack of respect on a really visceral level. Whether or not you like Justin Trudeau, I find it offensive that Donald Trump refers to him or referred to him as Governor Trudeau. The fact that he constantly calls Canada the 51st state, the fact that he trolls us. At the beginning when I thought it was a joke, I took it as such. But now I'm seeing this is the MO of this administration. They denigrate and they demean. To what end? I don't know. But U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

was asked by a reporter about the lack of respect in the language being used. Here's what he said. You talk about respect, but here's what the president said just this morning about our closest trading partner. He said that he's going to impose tariffs that will permanently shut down the Canadian car industry. Why is it in America's interest to destroy one of Canada's biggest industries? Okay, so let's go back a little. Number one, the Ontario Premier threatened energy

against America. You can't threaten an American. But he was responding to what you did. No, no, no, no, no, no. He wasn't and he knows he wasn't and he knows he made a mistake and he withdrew it. The president gave us MCA the agreement with us MCA. He said, I'll let that remain tariff free. But anybody who's not in us MCA is going to pay a tariff until fentanyl deaths and in America, try not to forget, March is about fentanyl deaths in

America, we've got to end it. Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Saying something doesn't make it so. That's just a fact. And you do not be get you do not get to begin history when it suits you. Like, if there's a video of me punching you in the face, but there is footage prior to that, of you kicking me in the back of the head, well, the story begins with the kick, not with the punch, and you don't get to start the clock whenever it suits you. And when Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary, says this is all about fentanyl, are you telling me based on what you said that it is incumbent upon Canada to ensure that

there are zero fentanyl deaths in the United States? That is an impossible bar to clear, impossible. So there is so much bluster and blarney coming from Howard Lutnick. My hope is that when Ontario Premier Doug Ford and federal finance minister, Daniel LeBlanc, sit down behind closed doors with Howard Lutnick, hopefully to hash out a path forward in this self-inflicted upside down that we're living in, created entirely by Donald Trump and his

administration. My hope is without the cameras on, this man who is acting more like P.T. Barnum than a Commerce Secretary, I'm hoping he'll turn the volume down and actually get to work and actually deal with the facts on the ground, not the fiction in his head. But we'll have to see. Very disappointed, but not surprised to read today in the Globe and Mail that Ottawa, since 2017, has failed to collect almost 40% of all

the fines that they have levied on companies that violate the temporary foreign worker rules. So since 2017 federal inspectors have penalized nearly a thousand companies that rely on foreign workers. That sounds good. You break the rules, there are fines. However, they've imposed more than 11 million dollars in fines for workplace infractions, but almost 5 million remains outstanding. And this to me is disappointing, but in no way surprising. For the past 10 years, we have watched time and time again,

this government making a bold pronouncement, making a bold announcement, creating a bold program, and stopping short of giving that program the tools to enforce itself, enforce the rules. We saw with Serb, with the billions upon billions upon billions of dollars going out the door, and no way to ensure that there wasn't fraud, that the right people were getting the money.

And once they got the money, and we realized, there's a bunch of people who got the money that didn't deserve the money, there's no way for us to go get it back. We saw it with the gun ban. The hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of guns that have been banned in this country by this liberal government to keep our streets safe. And not a single gun has been has been taken back by the government because there are not boots on the ground to do that so consequently these guns that are apparently terrorizing our streets and making life

unsafe for Canadians are still in the hands of the people who bought them because we stop short because we love making the announcement and we do nothing to make sure that that announcement turns in to policy that is enforceable It happens time and time and time again This is par for the course for this liberal government that they are and this is money that should be in our coffers I know that four point five million dollars doesn't sound like a lot and it's not a lot when you compare it to the billions upon billions of dollars that seems to be spent every day as a

knee-jerk reaction by this government, but if you watch the pennies the the dollars take care of themselves or in the case of the liberal government if they were to watch the millions maybe the trillions would take care of themselves. Call me crazy, but show me that you can take care of a small budget and I might trust you with a bigger one. But if you don't care about the money, well, it tells me a lot about where your priorities are. All right, let's talk about my priorities. Cause you know me, you know that I have some very bad taste

in a lot of stuff. You know that if I could very bad taste in a lot of stuff. You know that if I could, I would eat American cereal. You know the sugary stuff that's just not good. I would eat that every second of every day. I would eat Froot Loops and I would eat Corn Pops and I would eat Cap'n Crunch, or I actually prefer Oops All Berries, the All Berries version of Cap'n Crunch,

because I'm a child and my stomach wants what it wants and I am unabashedly proud of that. I also love terrible movies. One of the most terrible but also one of the most awesome that is in my top 10 of favorite movies of all time, not best movies, favorite movies all time is Armageddon. Yes, the Ben Affleck movie, the Michael Bay massive destruction film where NASA trains oil drillers to become astronauts so they can blow up an asteroid that is going to hit Earth and destroy all life on the planet. They decide that it is easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts rather than teach astronauts how to drill a hole.

And this video has been circulating for a long time, but I want to share a little bit of it with you. Ben Affleck going through some of the plot holes in Armageddon on, I believe, like the audio commentary of the DVD. Let's listen. I asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers And he told me to shut shut shut the fuck up

So that was the end of that talk. You know Ben just shut up. Okay. You know this is real plan all right I Was like you mean it's a real plan at NASA to train oil drillers. He was just shut your mouth See here's where we demonstrate that because Bruce Bruce is going to tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. He did a pissy, he's a salt of the earth guy. And the NASA nerdanauts don't understand his salt of the earth ways, his rough and tumble ways. Yeah, that's right.

Well, that's because your cans are old. Like, somehow they can build rocket ships, but they don't understand like what makes a good tranny. He continued to make some very good points. Like eight whole months, as if that's not enough time to learn how to drill a hole. But in a week, we're going to learn how to be astronauts. One whole week? Now you know how to fly into space? I need my guys.

Why do you need them? They're the best. Everyone's the best. Why are they the best? I don't know. They just are. I'm only the best because I work with the best. If you don't trust the men you're working with, you're as good as dead. You want to send these boys into space? Fine. I'm sure they'll make good astronauts. They don't know jack about drilling. I mean, this is a little bit of a logic stretch. They don't know Jack about drilling. How hard can it be in the drill at the ground and turn it on? Listen, I'm going to tell you, this makes me love Armageddon even more. Thank you, Ben Affleck.

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Donald Trump laid bare a lot of issues that we have in this country. When he first threatened tariffs, he and his administration, I think, rightly pointed to a few failures that successive governments have just let fester, specifically how cavalier we are with the border and how porous it is, but he also talked about money laundering, specifically in the drug trade, and there is a piece in the Toronto Sun that says Canadian governments fail to stop money laundering because they want the cash,

and that is such a shocking headline that I need to drill down into it. And so let's welcome Sana Ahmed, law professor at the University of Calgary to the conversation. Professor, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Thanks for having me, Ben. I mean, that is a bold statement.

Can you tell me where, you know, where the fact, how the facts would suggest that? Yeah, so Ben, I mean, I've been looking at money laundering in Canada for a while, and it's super interesting that when we start drilling down on the instances of money laundering that have been taking place, I mean, this is an issue that, as you rightly said in your intro, it's come up far more recently

in the public discourse in the sense that more people are finding out about it through the media and stuff. So I'd say roughly about 10 years, we've gotten a lot of media attention on this. And bear in mind, we are also thinking about the Panama and the Paradise paper disclosures. So, you know, those kinds of things, they added to it. But if you think more specifically to the emergence of the Vancouver model, so in 2017 when we discovered most of us, the rest of us in Canada discovered that there was this vibrant snow washing operation that was taking place in Vancouver through the casinos.

Most of us were shocked. But except as it turns out, the people who were responsible for the regulation of that industry in DC, they had known about it for seven, eight years. When you think about the uncovering of the Toronto method of having mortgage fraud, which was discovered in Toronto, and HSBC Canada was accused of doing it. Again, we found out that the bank had known about it for another bunch of years, eight, nine years. So each time, and this is something that we've seen even with the recent TD case, people

had known about it. It's just not flagged. But wouldn't these banks and these governments have a moral, legal, ethical obligation to flag this stuff that's rooted out and ensure that it is no longer part of the system? Theoretically, but we've seen that they choose not to, which makes us think why are they not flagging it? And so then from there, you assume that it is because what they rely on these funds? I mean, and I appreciate, if money is laundered properly, once it's in the system,

it behaves just like clean money. So how much money are we talking about? How much money that is... I would try to figure out... Yeah, because I'm trying to figure out what sum is so big that it would put people in a moral gray area at best? See, the thing is, when we start talking money laundering, we are not talking about something that's easily quantifiable.

It's not a bag of donuts that we are picking up, right? So nobody can say that these are six donuts or these are 12 donuts. On the other hand, when we start looking at the fact that whether it's Vancouver, whether it's other parts of the country, when we see that entire economy, the political economy of a town or a city or a province are being shored up by this business, because again, thinking back to Vancouver, if you're having hockey bags full of cash being brought into a casino, obviously it's going to have some sort of trickle down effect when you look at the economy of the city. You're not just bringing a hockey bag to the casino. Obviously you're going to park yourself in some Airbnb, some hotel, you're going to eat a couple of meals. There's

a services and hospitality. Yes, but the professor, the that's one side of the equation, you'd have to, we have to look at the other side and recognize that that money is coming most, you know, primarily from ill gotten gains. I'm thinking that the drug trade, the assumption, right? Yeah. flight from China is not considered an offense in Canada just because you wanted to run away with from China with a bag of hockey bag full of cash doesn't automatically make you an offender in Canada. Oh my goodness this is so so what's what's the path forward how do we how do we put pressure on these governments to do the right thing? We have to stop pretending that they want to do the right thing because there's just too

much involved over here because when I when we were talking earlier about how money laundering can prop up the industry we also need to bear in mind that the government stands to make a bunch of revenue from this all right because obviously casinos pay their taxes. We also know that the Crown Corporation are part of, part owners of the casinos. So we need to recognize that the government has a sizable incentive to encourage and facilitate this business. So unless we recognize that, we are not really going to recognize.

And this is, I mean, a bunch of my research also looks at the other government policies that helped do this. So whether we are looking at business investment and whether it's a real requirement when you're bringing in business investment into Canada, is there a real inquiry into the sources of your funding? Is there a cleanliness requirement? If there isn't, then what are we meant to conclude? That the government is truly fussed about whether I'm a kleptocrat immigrating to Canada or whether I'm just bringing in proper business investment? Well, unless the government substantiates that business requirement. I am not presuming in this. Professor Ahmed, we're going to leave it there. But thank you. This is a, you know,

I expect more from my governments. I call me crazy, but I kind of want them to have clean hands in a world of dirty money thank you so much have a great day hey before the break I want to highlight something you know we've been talking over the course of the Ben Mulroney show today about this parliamentary budget office study that is suggesting that Mark Carney's vision for an oil and gas cap would cost the government, would cost the economy about $20 billion in GDP, as well as a loss of almost 55,000 jobs. Well, Jonathan Wilkinson,

who is the Minister of Natural Resources, tweeted, Unfortunately, the PBO wasted their time and taxpayer dollars by analyzing a made-up scenario that the Government of Canada is not even remotely proposing. By suggesting the only way to achieve emission reduction in the oil and gas industries to cut production, the PBO is once again misleading the public and ignoring reality. He goes on. But then a response that I absolutely loved was, S&P Global, Deloitte, CBOC, and now PBO have all said the emissions caps will cost tens of billions in GDP and tens of thousands of jobs.

The federal government insists they are all wrong. They can clear it up by releasing the ECCC model. I don't know what that is, which taxpayers haven't been able to scrutinize yet. And just not for nothing, this government extols the integrity of the PBO whenever it suits their purposes. They will cherry pick data and say, oh, the PBO report proves that eight out of 10 Canadians

have more money in their pocket because of the consumer carbon tax. You remember that old chestnut? Well, now all of a sudden they are wasting taxpayer dollars on a made up scenario that the government of Canada is not even remotely proposing. I find that rich, something that we as a nation are no longer.

Radio Canada CBC is reporting that environment minister, Stephen Gilbo, is out as a minister of the environment and climate change of Canada. So it does sound like Mark Carney might be trying to distance himself from the extremists on climate in the liberal party, even though Stephen Gilbo, I have no idea how he even uttered these words given how single minded he is about environmental causes.

But he said, yes, it will be, if we have to get rid of the carbon tax, the consumer facing carbon tax, we can do that. But he is, look, that will make a lot of people feel good until they realize that this entire cabinet is made up of people who signed on and endorsed and voted for the carbon tax time and time and time again. We're also hearing rumors that this could be the smallest cabinet under 20 cabinet ministers that

Canada has had since the 1950s. What that signals is, I don't know, but I can promise you that if Mark Carney gets elected prime minister, he will have a far bigger cabinet. But look, as somebody said, and I said it before, this is like pooping your pants and changing your shirt. This is, I think, Michelle Garner, Rempel said that Justin Trudeau was the icing on a terrible cake and Mark Carney was the cake itself. So we'll have to see if these changes are performative or whether they do enough to really allow Carney to differentiate himself from Prime Minister number 23. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And you know, we spend a lot of time on this show trying to get in the heads of our American analogs as it relates to this tariff war. What is,

you know, what is the government thinking? What are the officials thinking? What is the cabinet thinking? What are business and members of the press thinking? And rather than speculate any further, we're joined by somebody who will be able to provide a little bit of that insight for us. Please welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show, Andrea Shalall, White House correspondent at Reuters. Andrea, thank you for being here. Hey, thanks so much for having me. So give us a big picture overview. You know, I'm watching the stock market. It doesn't look good these days for the president who used to say any president who witnesses a two-day, a thousand point drop of the Dow Jones should immediately step down.

I think we're at a 3000 point drop over the past month. So are Americans feeling the effects of these tariffs and at the very least of the uncertainty that comes from the threat of tariffs? Yeah, I think we're starting to see that happen. You know, we have a new poll out, had a new poll out yesterday at rotaries that said that a majority of Americans believe Trump is being too erratic in his move to shake up the US economy. There's a lot

of concern, including one in three Republicans who say that Trump's policies have been unsteady as these terrorist threats kind of unsettled the markets and create a lot of uncertainty not just for consumers about the cost of things going forward, but for investors. And so we're, we're seeing implications, although from the perspective of the folks at the White House, they are busy touting all of the investments that they say companies are planning to make. But I would just caution that those are pledges. That is not actual money on the table yet. And chances are, they're probably not going to want to put that money in the market until

there's more certainty in trade policy coming out of the administration. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because forever, really, Trump has been very focused and concerned about the stock market. It was something that was during the Biden administration where President Biden would often say, you know, Donald Trump is looking at the stock market, we're looking at Main Street. Now, Trump has, the White House has adopted a lot of that kind of language and talking about Main Street and the importance of Main Street, but the net effect of what he's trying to do.

So the intention of President Trump in pursuing these tariffs is to rebalance what he said are just massive imbalances in trade. And, uh, those have obviously built up over many decades. And, um, you know, as companies have moved offshore to manufacture in other countries where labor is cheaper, environmental laws are less, uh, onerous. And, you know, for a long time, we all moved along this globalization effort, but then COVID came along, right? And showed the vulnerability of having supply chains that are almost exclusively in China. But Andrea, I've got to go back to the beginning of these threats, where Donald Trump made it all

about the Canadian border and the fentanyl crisis and likening the drugs pouring over the Canadian border to the crisis at the southern border. It had a whole lot of us up here shaking our heads, not really believing that that was the case. And now, every now and then, Howard Lutnick will throw out that he wants zero deaths from fentanyl until these tariffs get lifted, which is an insane bar to cross. But none of us up here believe that that was ever the reason, the

actual reason. Is that a doubt that is shared south of the border? I, you know, I hesitate to say yes because I have to cover the White House. So my, I'm gonna take them at their word that fentanyl is the primary driver. I think a lot of people are skeptical, honestly. I think we have seen different responses from the Canadians than from the Mexicans and, but I think on both sides of the border or both, uh, both border countries, I, you know, there is a lot of concern about this move, which upends the U S Mexico, Canada, Canada trade agreement. And um, you know, initially when they tariffs were first announced, um, trade agreement and you know initially when they tariffs were first announced trade analysts

and experts and former government officials told me they thought it was all a ploy to get to an early renegotiation of USMCA. I know I think you use different initials up there but the you know that the Trump administration has now denied that and said, no, it's really about fentanyl. Yeah, it's hard to know how to negotiate when you don't necessarily believe the person telling you the reasons for the negotiation. And today, famously, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, as well as federal finance minister Dominique LeBlanc, are in Washington for a sit down with Howard Lutnick.

And, you know, a lot of, there are critics and advocates towards what Canada's policy has been. You know, a lot of people don't like that Ontario, which is, you know, Canada's already a very small player vis-a-vis the US economy, Ontario even smaller than that. And yet Doug Ford took it upon himself to put a 25% exit tax on the electricity going south to three border states

that got the attention of Howard Lutnick. And a lot of people are saying, like what's gonna go on in this room? And it reminded me of a quote from the office when Michael Scott left Dunder Mifflin and he started his own paper company going about undercutting Dunder Mifflin's costs and stealing their clients to the point that Dunder Mifflin reached out, called them to see for a sit down and Michael Scott said, I don't need to wait out Dunder Mifflin.

I think I just need to wait out you pointing out that they have the pressure of a Shareholder meeting coming up where they're gonna have to explain how their most profitable branch was bleeding clients And I'm likening that to the pressure that this administration is probably feeling with relation to the stock market and their desire to hold on to the House and Senate in the midterms and market and their desire to hold on to the House and Senate in the midterms. And I wonder if they're truly feeling that pressure. Do you think they're looking for an off ramp? Do you think that they're realizing they may have bitten off more than they can chew and

that countries like Canada, provinces like Ontario are simply leaning into the chaos that they've created? I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that there is a lot happening all at once. And that's very much the playbook that the Trump administration brought into office. There has been a deliberate effort to kind of overwhelm the system.

So you have massive efforts underway to dismantle the significant parts of the US government. Thousands of federal workers, tens of thousands of federal workers are being let go. You have, I just went to the post office here, the clerk behind the counter said, well, I don't know how long we're going to be here. You know, there's all that federal attack. Then you have the tariffs, which are coming hot and heavy. But also, you know, yesterday, President Trump

told reporters, as he sat down to meet with the Irish prime minister, he was asked about flexibility. And he said, I'm always going to be flexible. So you know, it's this unsettledness of keeping your, your person on the other side of the negotiation unsettled enough to not know what's going to happen. And I think some people were really rooting for Doug Ford to turn off the electricity just to see what happened. But see, that's another thing.

It's about the level set that's happened with our respective populations. Canada is prepared for things to get very, very bad. We were not going to be treated this way. Donald Trump, on the other hand, promised, vote for me and sunny days abound. It's going to be rainbow and sunshine and unicorns and America will be great. And, and so I just think that it is not going to be as simple as David versus Goliath. I think it's more like the US military and the Viet Cong. And Andrea Shalal for White House correspondent Reuters. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your insights.

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