The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Moore-Butts Encore Episode: Is Trump's America Any Different Than Germany in the Mid-Thirties?

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Encore Episode. Calling Trump a "fascist" or a "Nazi" has become far more commonplace in the past few months. But is it correct? That's the question for the opening segment of the latest Moore Butts conversation with former Stephen Harper cabinet minister James Moore and former senior aide to Justin Trudeau, Gerald Butts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to the summer of 2026. With the bridge taking a break for the summer on hiatus, as we say, each Wednesday we will be airing an encore episode of our very popular Moore-Buts conversations with former Stephen Harper Cabinet Minister, James Moore, and former Justin Trudeau-Aid, Jerry Butts. The idea of these chats is not to have a partisan bun fight, but to give us a sense of what has,

happens behind the closed doors in Canadian politics. So throughout this summer, some of the best from the 25-26 season. Hope you enjoy. And hello there, Peter Bansbridge here. Welcome to Tuesday. Welcome to the latest Moore-Butz conversation. Jerry Butz, the former senior aide to Justin Trudeau, and James Moore, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister for Stephen Harper. Their conversations over these last couple of years on the bridge have become a popular program for many Canadians. And not just Canadians. We have a lot of American listeners too. And listeners around the world because of the great extension and listening scope of podcasts. And we're glad to have you with us. Okay, as I said, today's conversation is, well, it's a difficult one,

but it's one that many of you have said you wanted to hear. And when I announced yesterday, we're going to do it today. There's been quite a bit of mail from people overwhelmingly saying, thank you for having this conversation. I'm looking forward to seeing it and hearing it. And you will in just a few moments. It's time. Okay.

Just a quick advisory about your turn this week. We like to do this. Give you a little bit of warning. You don't need to write anything this week. We have lots and lots of mail left over from last week. And so we're going to keep it going. It's an Ask Me Anything program on this Thursday. Many of your questions were very popular last week.

We didn't get to a lot of them because they all need answers. so the time was kind of taken up. And that's one of the reasons we have a lot left over. I don't think we'll get to all of them this week either. But we'll keep it going, see what happens. And because this has been such a popular idea, we'll keep it going for the future as well. I'm not sure how often, maybe once a month,

once every six weeks, something like that. So that's your little advisory for the week. ahead. So let's get to our latest conversation with Moore and Butts. As I said, it's a challenging conversation to have, but it's an important one to have. And we're going to give it a go and see, well, I'm looking forward to seeing how you react to this, as I'm sure many of you will. So let's get started. James Moore, Jerry Butts. the more butts conversation. So I never thought I'd have to ask this question,

but I do feel that it's important to ask it now because a lot of people are talking this way. And the question is, is Trump's America comparable to what Germany was in the 1930s, given the things we've been witnessing, especially in the last little while? James, why don't you start? no but there are elements of it that are enormously troubling problematic and ring echoes of the past of lessons not learned

what what i think makes would i mean what distinguishes it from the 1930s would be at least in trump 45 most of trump 47 is the clear use of physical violence for territorial aggression and retention. It doesn't feel like that's going to be something that's going to be avoided from time to time. And it's really discomforting obviously what we see. I think Donald Trump is playing with matches. He doesn't understand the kindling that's at his feet. And I don't think he understands the lessons of history and how fragile things can be and how quickly things can spiral out of control with enormous consequences painted in blood. That's the danger, the scary part. I mean, another distinguishing feature for the 1930s is that

this seems to be more about grift, territorial ambition, the desire to have the Gulf of America, the desire to have a big physical map so that American can be, have Napoleonic-like reach and scope so that you can imagine Donald Trump sitting at his gold-laced table in Mara Lago and holding up this map of

this is how big America was before I was president. Look at how big America is now. And so to me, it's about, it doesn't make it any more virtuous in a lot of ways, right? And it doesn't make it any less devastating and consequential and problematic for a whole bunch of reasons. But there's not a, there's not a racial component about this. There's not a vengeful component, as we saw in the 1930s from, you know, the Third Reich coming out of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, and the, and the, and the, and the core of it being, you know, anti-Semitic and all that. So those pieces are not there.

But the other elements of it ring as though people have not learned the lessons of history. You know, government militia who are masked with automatic weapons going through the streets of Minneapolis, going up to visible minorities and threatening them, shooting people in the head without any kind of accountability of, and all of these things are incredibly dark. And them happening day after day after day after day is emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Okay. I want to challenge you on a couple of those things, but we'll get to that, but I want to hear Jerry's opening thoughts on this first. Sure. Well, I don't think we're there yet, but the trajectory is not good at all. And when the big, beautiful bill came out and it included that massive run-up in ICE's budget, right, which was basically a federal administrative force to,

find people who were in the country illegally. It was pretty clear when it went from $2 to $45 billion in annual funding that they had plans for it that were much darker than that. I think eight people have been killed by ICE in the last, maybe four, sorry, I don't want to get that number wrong, but it's multiple people. and the last one that we all know about because that young mother in Minnesota happened to be,

it happened to be caught on an iPhone camera or a phone camera. It was, I mean, we see a lot of crazy stuff these days, but it was beyond disturbing. Just the absolute impunity with which those officers were acting. And then perhaps even more alarmingly, the way both the vice president of the United States and the Homeland Security Secretary immediately afterward, it was almost like they were inviting people to recall that line for more well that the party told you not to believe your eyes and ears, right? And it was disturbing.

So I actually think we're in a period where there may be no bottom in the United States. and while I think it is inaccurate so far to describe or to analogize the what happened in Germany in the 1930s for a lot of the reasons that James described, although I do think there is a dark racial element to all of this. I think there's a white supremacy thread that goes through it all. Man, it's scary times out there. Well, I mean, on the dark ethnic side, I mean, you know, ICE is deployed, apparently only in blue states. Apparently there are no immigration issues in Arizona.

Apparently there are no immigration issues in Texas. It's only in the northern, like, it's nonsense, where the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party is the governor. That's where ICE's dominant presence is. Like, it's so nonsensical. But the other, and of course, they're going up to people who are ethnic minorities. They're not going up to people who have an Irish accent or a Scottish accent. That's problematic.

And another thing that comes very close to the water's edge, Peter, and, you know, invite you to disagree with my first intervention, right, is the Groypers and Nick Fuentes. I mean, this guy was a joke and a clown and just, but now he gets platformed, he's mainstreamed by Tucker Carlson and revisionist history about the Second World War and, you know, and the role of Israel in contemporary politics and that, and Epstein and Weinstein and the over-emphas, like, this is not by accident. And Nick Fuentes is, out there is a massive following and Charlie Kirk was supposed to be some kind of a firewall against him and this growing anti-Semitic movement in the Republican Party and all that.

And then Tucker Carlson comes along and platforms Nick Fuentes and just two days ago, Tucker Carlson was sitting in front of the Resilu desk in the Oval Office with the President of the United States. And Tucker Carlson is an ally of an open neo-Nazi white supremacist anti-Semite. And Donald Trump is sitting with his apparent colleague in Tucker, Carlson. This is very, very dark stuff. All right. Well, this is where I was getting at. And that's why I know the hesitation for all of us to say, hey, this is a lot like the 1930s. But gradually, it seems to have

been getting closer and closer to it on most scores. I mean, I haven't heard somebody the other say, at least the Gestapo didn't wear masks. I mean, you think about that at first as, you know, that's kind of bit dark humor. But in fact, the more you look at it and listen to it, you go, you're right. They didn't. These guys are. And these guys, a lot of whom, I mean, I don't know what the registration was in DeWICE, but there's a lot of new people in ICE.

and you seem to, you know, it's easy to assume that some of those new people in ICE are the people who got pardoned on for January 6th. Well, that's, that's been documented. That is absolutely true. And they act like it, like the guy who shot the woman in Minneapolis. Anyway, let me get back to one of the things you mentioned,

James, because this is something that I always believed in, but I'm doubting myself now, which is this sense that Trump really doesn't know what he's doing. I think he does know exactly what he's doing. The story is unfolding exactly the way he's wanted it to and believes is the right way for things to unfold. Why do you hesitate that he doesn't know what he's doing?

Because it's really stupid. Like the Greenland Gambit is just fundamentally stupid. If he's doing it on purpose, it's hard to imagine somebody being that stupid. If the argument is we need Greenland for security purposes, and that's what he's putting in the window. Okay. Well, you already have a security agreement with Greenland. Greenland had 17 American bases at the end of the Second World War.

A lot of that core infrastructure is still there. Greenlanders, I'm sure, would welcome to have, up until now, would welcome to have back an American presence of 5, 10, 15,000 American troops who'd be coming and spending money and buying food and, you know, populating the economy and all that. So the security question is nonsense. And also, you might have a physical toehold in Greenland that you can have anyway. And in exchange for that, you're going to blow up NATO? You're going to give a gift to Russia. You're going to give it, and you're going to blow up these security alliances. So you'll station a few more troops in Greenland

in the exchange of getting American troops thrown out of NATO countries across the rest of Europe and other places in the world, that's not security. And I mean, my son is 13. He can figure that out. So if this is by design, I mean, some design. So I really do think that this is Occam's razor, and it's the most simple explanation that Donald Trump is a real estate guy who wants to have gold everywhere in the White House,

and he wants to have a big ballroom, and he has the biggest crowds on nomination day, and he's got a bigger American presence in the world. Look at all this territory I gained. It's Napoleonic, it's Imperial. and it's childish and it's really stupid. I don't think it's a, there's a, he has a, any kind of geopolitical logic.

He was just gifted the physical Nobel prize. And he couldn't remember her name. Like, this is not a guy who is dealing, I think, in a substantive understanding of, you know, gives and puts when it comes to to geopolitics. Yeah, I'm not sure what, which scenario

frightens me more, Peter, to be honest, whether Trump is this movement's leader or its mascot. I'm not really sure anymore. And I do agree with James that Trump looks at the Greenland situation as an opportunity to be the first U.S. president to expand, materially expand U.S. territory in 100 years. And he thinks that's his ticket to political immortality. And if he can make it all happen in time for the U.S.'s 250th birthday, all the better. I really do think that's what he's thinking about.

He thinks it gets on Mount Rushmore figuratively or maybe even literally. But I do think one of the, I think how both these seemingly contradictory things can be true is I do think Trump's first term was the kind of chaotic mess that it looked from the outside because I saw it from the inside, right? there were a couple of people around him who had strategies Bob Leidheiser chief amongst them but I think there are far too many people around him now who have strategies and they're all dark strategies which is why I raise JD Vance because Donald Trump may not be with us much longer but J.D. Vance is a young man who seems to believe these things with more fervor even than Trump does. And the point that James made, I agree that it's a stupid strategy, but there is a deep strain in the United States that the country is a republic, not an empire, and that all of this

foreign adventurism and fashioning of the post-war rules-based international order actually ended up screwing over regular Americans. And I think that's absurd, but I do know how deeply the people who believe in it, believe in it. And they're all, the second Trump administration is lousy with those people. So we can sit here and, I think, say rightly and obviously that the dismemberment of NATO over something so stupid as Greenland, it's hard to believe it's happening, but it's happening. And for a lot of the people who are egging it on around the president,

the loss of NATO would be a bonus, not a downside. Why, I mean, you know some of these people. You both do that are, you know, in the Republican Party and at a senior level of the Republican Party. And yet it seems to be that nobody's saying anything, nobody's doing anything, nobody's standing up. I mean, there's been a few more in the last month than there have been in the last number of years.

But not to the level where it seems to be making any kind of a difference. So here's, this has all been very dark. So here's my Mr. Brightside. You've found a bright side in all this? Well, tell me what you think. So Jerry just talked about, about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. And, you know, Donald Trump, he is turning 80. You know, nature has its timelines.

So whatever. Donald Trump era will end. Ronald Reagan was a powerful force in American politics, and a lot of people after he left office tried to replicate him and be like him. Jack Kemp did, you know, Vin Weber and George H.W., like other people tried to be Ronald Reagan. You can't be Ronald Reagan. He's his own unique thing.

After Barack Obama eight years and, you know, celebrity and all that stuff, two big mandates, a lot of people tried to be like Barack Obama and present like him and talk like him. You can't replicate it and roll it forward. And I think that's even more true with Donald Trump. I think a lot of people will try to be this. We'll try to keep it rolling forward. We'll try with the bravado. You'll see people doing a lot of stuff that will kind of look like sound like.

But people know the real deal and they will not be Donald Trump. And they won't succeed in carrying this momentum forward. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going necessarily in a better way. But Marco Rubio is not Donald Trump. And I actually do think in spite of all the disappointment that I have and the way in which he's approached things, the way that he's swallowed himself whole and all of that, if he is the inheritor of this party and he is the standard bearer in the future, that gives me more hope than J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance doesn't have the charisma and the capacity and the communication strength and depth in order to do. So I do think this cracks up. I do think it falls apart. I don't think it sustains itself because none of them are billionaires with the bravado and all that. So I do see some light on the horizon. The Democratic Party still has to get up off the mat and nominate people who are credible and see.

serious and substantive and all that. That still has to happen. But I don't think that this is sustainable. And I do think that the plurality of Americans, not enough, but a plurality of Americans are exhausted by all this drama and don't want this clown show. And they don't want this drama. And I think most Americans are sickened by what they see in Minnesota. Yeah, that is the good news. The good news is, and it's really worth remembering that Donald Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular president by historical standards. His only really real competition for this point in his mandate is himself, right? So it, and when you start to look at the individual aspects of his agenda, they're even more

unpopular. It was quite alarming that people were saying that the coup in Venezuela, let's call it what it was, was unpopular until it happened. And then Republicans, as they seem to have found a way to do with just about everything Donald Trump is done. They marshaled. They'd like line up right behind them and suddenly 75% of Republicans were in favor of it. We'll see if it lasts. I think that this, I think that ICE, the way this issue has developed and I use this term deliberately, the terror it is reeking on the streets of urban America is going to leave a deep mark and it's going to make that kind of activity really

unpopular. What I'm worried about though, and I agree, James, that Donald Trump is like he is sui generis. Nobody's going to come along and be able to hold together the same kind of coalition that he was able to hold together by sheer force of personality and the fact that he's a household brand and has been for 50 years in the United States. All of this stuff. I remember talking to Democratic friends who were kind of pulling their hair out in 2016 election campaign. And I thought strategically they were making one mistake after another because they assumed that the American, they could teach the American people something they didn't already know about Donald Trump, right, because he was on the front page of the National Enquirer when Bill Clinton

was in grade school. You know, well, not Bill Clinton. They're the same age. But you get my point. But what I really worry about is these dark, strains in American life, the imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine, the monkeying around in Latin America and South America, the extraterritorial ambitions to influence politics and other places. These are things that were part of American, the dark side of American foreign policy for a

long, long time, arguably from the beginning of the country. And it's in particular in this hemisphere, it's always been. stained with that creepy racial overtone where the and even presidents I like and admire like Teddy Roosevelt. He was all over this. You know, there was a whole strain of his movement that wanted to create a slaveholding, recreate a slaveholding state, super state in Latin America. And I guess people like Roosevelt were always able to keep a lid on it.

But man, it's that great line. from Shakespeare that hell is empty because all the demons are here. It feels like that's what's happened to the United States. Like all of the worst instincts in American history are now reborn in this Trump movement. Let me ask you this is a last thing before we take our break. Jerry, you just came back from Europe in Scandinavia. This whole Greenland thing has been. you know, bubbling away and over the weekend,

Trump made it even worse. If I, if that question that I asked the two of you at the beginning of this discussion was a question I asked Europeans who were much closer to the 30s and the sense of what they went through, what do you think the answer would be now? I think they think he's an autocrat.

I think that they think he's, trying to turn the United States into a totalitarian state. But I think the person I hear him compared to amongst Europeans and private way more frequently than a Nazi is Vladimir Putin. Yeah. Just the craven self-dealing, the enrichment, the intimidation of enemies. And in fact, this is what the skirm. Scandinavians are pulling their hair out about it right now.

Putin, he's the lucky, not the luckiest, because he's playing a role in it. But this is such a great development from Vladimir Putin that NATO is suddenly talking nonstop about Greenland and nobody is talking about Ukraine. Yeah. It's such a strategic gift to him. I would add as well further to that point, though, that I think for a lot of people, I would imagine it's true in Scandinavia and across Europe, because I know it's true in Canada as well,

that I find myself increasingly, Trump is Trump, it is what it is, we all have our daily reaction, it's all very exhausting, but still 35 to 42% of Americans think he's doing a great job. Yeah, great job. And I think the lasting damage is almost less about Donald Trump as an actor as those who tolerate support, condone, and celebrate this behavior. It was said about Trump 45 that he was a great stress test against American institutions and they withstood and they weathered the storm.

I don't know that you can say that now. I don't know that you can say that now. Yeah, I agree with that entirely. I think that the sentiment that will never trust the Americans again is pretty ubiquitous across European capitals. And it seems to be, you know, across our country to a decree as well. very heavy. It's interesting because even a couple of months ago, the question was sort of,

do you trust Trump? And most people said no. The question now is, do you trust Americans in America? And the answer is becoming overwhelmingly no. Yeah. That shift is a terrible shift to have to, you know, discuss and report on,

and comment on. For sure. And it's related, It's related to the unsatisfactory answer that you received when you asked, where the hell are the Republicans to stand up to the guy, let alone the Democrats. So, you know, when you see a movement relative like this, relatively unopposed, right? And I don't want to downplay. I mean, the scenes from Minneapolis this week are nothing short of heroic, in my view.

All these citizens who are, you know, they're out there defending each other in the public square and recording what they think are, and they're probably right, nine times out of ten are crimes that need to be, need to have evidence established for them for some future date when crimes become, you know, prosecutable in the United States when they're perpetrated by an agent of the state. So I really don't want to downplay all of these people who are risking real physical harm to go out and protect each other in their communities. But man, where the heck are the American, where is the American political leadership to act as a counterbalance to this?

Nationally. Yeah. And it just doesn't feel like it's going to end well. No. At all. Anyway, let's take a break. We're going to switch topics. And we'll see how far we get on Canada and China.

We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the latest of our Moore-Buts conversations, James Moore, the former conservative cabinet minister in the Stephen Harper era, and Gerald Butz, the former principal secretary to Justin Trudeau after his election victory in 2015. You're listening on Series XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform.

And starting with our next edition of the Moore-Buts conversations, you'll also be able to watch us on YouTube. Not yet, but in two weeks' time, you will be. Okay. Our second conversation for today revolves around the prime minister's seeming success in Beijing over the last few days with a variety of different trade arrangements. So it's time to assess that, not from the individual deals,

necessarily, but from the question of risk and reward, there's always a lot of nervousness around, no matter your political stripe, about dealing with China. And some of that has come up in the last few days. I want to get your perspective on that. James, why don't you start? Yeah, China is Canada's second largest trading partner, but the province of Ontario in a year does more than just the province of Ontario in one year does more than five times the amount of trade with the United States than all of Canada does with China in a year. So it's our second largest trading partner, but much smaller, but the opportunities are there. I think we're back actually into and sort of liberals who may hear this or partisan liberals who hear this, but I actually think we're

back into a Harper dynamic with China that is kind of a trust but verify on a commodity by commodity basis. In the nine, almost 10 years that Stephen Harper was prime minister, we did spend a lot of time in China. We had tensions between the countries, but it was a focused engagement on things around commodities on which we thought, and I think it was proven to be true, commodities and exchange and economic opportunities around which there was some Canadian understanding, fighting really hard to get into China so we can sell more pork and more agricultural. products, fighting so that China would give Canada approved destination status. So we could have more Chinese tourists coming into Canada and filling hotels and ski resorts

and those types of things. Like stuff that is kind of low-hanging fruit for good engagement that could pave the way for maybe more liberalization when time is right. But easy stuff. And I know it's true that in the whole time that Stephen Harper was prime minister, the one minister who spent more time in China than any other cabinet minister was Jerry Ritz, our agriculture minister, going to China and talking about pork products, and beef products and pulses, like all these things, and canola and some of the stuff that

still hangs over today. Because for most Canadians, we understand that, frankly, that the soil in China has been farmed for literally centuries longer than our soil has. So we have opportunities to sell products to them and to nourish a country and to provide food and things to parts of the country that are growing in ways that are not sustainable. And that's a massive opportunity. And everybody's okay with that. But when you get into technologies and stuff, it's harder. So I think we went through that. And then in the early years of Prime Minister Trudeau's government, I know that there was a real effort to possibly go down the road of having a free trade agreement with China

along the lines of what was done in Australia, which was a slow decades-long walk. It was literally a 10-year process in Australia to bring the public along to get to a trade arrangement that was assailable and understood and comforted by the Australian public. And of course, all that was blown apart by the two Michaels, Menguangzhou, Huawei, way and that whole dynamic. Well, here we are now. Prime Minister Carney is going back and he's basically bringing Canada back up to where we were under Stephen Harper. I mean, I only say that because of the continuum of time. But he's chosen specific commodities and he's chosen specific actress. He goes to Beijing and who is in the camera shot. Specifically, you see the Premier of Saskatchewan. So there's some politics

in this, right? There's some divisions between Saskatchewan and Ontario and Saskatchewan and the federal and provincial party and like all that stuff. A little bit of politics in this. But I think it's good for the country that we have a liberal prime minister and a conservative premier of Alberta working on an MOU and a conservative premier in Saskatchew and working on getting canola access. These are good things net net for the country. But I think with China, I think it's slow and go on a commodity by commodity basis. We're never going to have full trust and full engagement and a sweeping open bilateral FTA. But I think on a commodity by commodity basis, I think this is exactly what diversification looks like.

Sure. Yeah, look, my perspective on this, and obviously I'm a supporter of the prime ministers, and I feel like I should do a disclosure that I worked on as campaign,

blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows that. I think that this is what people voted for. I think that not necessarily any given engagement, but Mark Kearney's vivid description

of how our excessive dependence on the United States from an economic and a lot of other perspectives had made us extremely vulnerable to someone like Trump and that it could only be countered, not just vulnerable to someone like Trump, but vulnerable at this moment in history, when the United States has taken the dark turn we described in the first half of the show. And I think that the public, I'm firmly in the people are not stupid school of politics. I think that they are giving the prime minister a lot of leeway. And even people who voted for them don't like Daniel Smith or Scott Moe probably feel exactly the same way the three of us do about it, I would suspect, which is that we've all got to put our petty differences aside because the country's prosperity and even its sovereignty is at stake.

So I think that this was a logical extension of what the Prime Minister campaigned on. I think you can agree or disagree with the specifics of what's in the deal. I think that Premier Ford vastly overreacted on the EV front. I think we're allowing into the country cars that really have no domestic competitor at that of that technology and that price point. And if anybody should be worried about it, it should be Elon Musk because everywhere B.YD goes, Tesla gets its ass handed to it.

And I expect that will happen in Canada too. So I hope that the Ontario thing is a blip. I start to worry when you see like a disagreement over an ad and then this happens. and he's fighting with Wab Canoe over where whiskey's or Crown Royal is produced. And I hope this doesn't become a trend. And Doug Ford starts to see a political advantage in stepping aside from Team Canada. I really hope they're not thinking that way.

And I suspect that the public reaction to the prime minister's success in Asia will probably trim their sales a little bit. but look, if anybody's, there's nobody whose eyes are more open about the nature of the Chinese government, probably, than Mark Carney. And I thought what he said in his wrap-up press conference was extremely telling, you know, the point that we're going to deal with the world as we find it, not as we wish it were. I think that is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the times in Canada, that we are in the age of making the best of a, bunch of bad situations. And overall, I think that's what we've done really well throughout our history, as we've discussed at length on this podcast before. We've been neighbors to the United States for a long time.

And they've gone through some crazy stuff over that period of time. And we always figure out a way to negotiate it, not with them entirely, but amongst ourselves. And I think that, again, I, I. that I would not I would give the prime minister a lot of leeway to manage these relationships in the national interest

and if I hope the premiers continue to show a spirit of bipartisanship. If you move it to the global level, when Carney spoke of this is the new world order. Yeah. Is it? Yeah.

It's what we saw last week, representative of a new world order. James, let James in here for a moment because he doesn't look convinced. Yeah, it's some of it, but it's not really that new. I think it's actually the rubber hitting the road on a lot of the framework that's been in place for a while, but it just was never really exercised. It was just, you know, 15 years ago, Canada had free trade agreements with just a handful of countries. United States, Mexico, Israel, Chile, I think that was it. And now we have free trade agreements with more than half the global economy.

We're the only country in the world that has binding tariff-free access to, well, for the most part, you know, all of North America, Europe, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Canada, South Korea Free Trade Agreement, Canada, Israel, like we, Chile, we have South America, we're part of the ASEO. We're the only country in the world that's a member of the Francophonie and the Commonwealth. Like, we have a massive global footprint. And diaspora politics, we always talk about the negative side about. but the positive side of it is that it creates two-way relationships that could be leveraged for trade and opportunities. So the global reach of Canada has been on paper now for a good decade. And, you know, as Stephen Harper that did the Canada Air Free Trade, we negotiated with Ambassador Hillman. It was Kristen Hillman, who was our chief negotiator for the Transficit Partnership,

which earned her, you know, such great respect amongst all parties and, I think, thought leadership in the country, such that she went to Washington and did her work there. So we've had that capacity on the table. And I know it's true because when I was Minister of Industry, Stephen Harper, we had a really aggressive plan to start going into markets and to start selling. We had a road trip we were going to do into Germany and to Poland and Italy because we had certain commodities and some MOUs and some existing commercial agreements that were going to be signing. We were going to leverage those and showcase them, like that stuff.

And then the 2015 election came around. We did some of it. And then, you know, Justin Trudeau's government picked up that torch and carried it forward, finished the work on the, on the CETPP, and they did some other stuff as well. So I think this has been there for a while. Then other things happened, right? We had COVID. We had the closure and closing of the world.

We had, you know, Donald Trump 1.0. And then we had to focus back on North America. And then the Biden era and then elections and minority parliaments and then Donald Trump 2.0. So there's a lot of history has a tendency to sort of broadside your. best intentions. And these events have come along and broadside. Well, now the events are colliding with, I think, our ultimate destiny, which is to be a country that creates Canadian jobs through world sales. We exploit all of these agreements that we have. And Mark Carney is doing some of that now. That was going to be done 10 years ago, but things happened like a change in government and Meng

Zhou and the Huawei scandal and Trump 1.0 and the Kuzma stuff. And COVID happened. And now we're back into a zone where we can have an opening in a window and we need to drive through. wouldn't be aggressive about it. And that's what the dynamic has presented. And I think the prime minister is doing the right thing. All right. Jerry, I interrupted you there,

but you get the closing. No, it's okay. We're all polite Canadians on this podcast. I apologize. Apologize for interruptions. I do think the point James is making about the trajectory of all of this is really important. And as you know,

Peter, to put a plug in for my day job, every January, we do our top risks report. This is the Eurasia group. The Eurasian group. And from our perspective, this world order or disorder is characterized by, we call it the G0 world, right? It is the post-stable equilibrium where power is shared through multilateral institutions that enjoy broad support in all of the major powers.

That world is dead and gone. and we're back into a world of spheres of influence, which Donald Trump, he, it was like he wanted to take on China this year, right? I think that last year in 2025, he wanted to pick up the torch from his first term, and his raison debt economically was going to be to him in Chinese threat everywhere, where it was gaining ground on telecommunications and energy.

and autos and soft power in Africa and Latin America. And then a funny thing happened last April when he was, the puck was about to drop on the next round of the candidate does the China U.S. fight. And the Chinese said, you know what, we're going to restrict access to critical minerals. And the Pentagon went to the White House and said, do you know, do you? guys realize what our stuff is made of and where our stuff comes from and trump capitulated completely there were two two things that trump capitulated too completely in the uh the only two three things that don't want to have a fight with last year were the bond market and the chinese those were the two things so why is that right in the year 2000 at the beginning of the century you know when we were all worried

about Y2K. It's a joke for a certain segment of your audience. The Chinese economy was smaller than Canada's. Wow. They produced less than 1% of the world's automobiles. And now they produce 25% of the world's automobiles. And by some measures, their economy is larger than the United States. So if you don't have an economic strategy that includes China,

you don't have an economic strategy. And of course, that would occur to the most decorated economists we've ever put in the prime minister's office. So you couple the geopolitical pincer movement he's getting from the United States with the change in the nature of the global economy over those 25 years. And you're just ignoring the obvious if you don't have a strategy. Okay. Well, we're all going to have a strategy after listening to the last 40 minutes because so much wisdom in all of that. Gentlemen, it's been another great conversation. I appreciate your time, as always, and look forward to talking to you on camera in two weeks. Run away. Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. Take care. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks.

All right. That was an encore episode. of a Moore-Buts conversation from the 25-26 season. By the way, we'll have two new Friday episodes of Good Talk this summer to keep you up to date with things going on in the world of politics. June 17th and August 28th, Chantelle-Bear, Bruce Anderson, Peter Mansbridge, all with you. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Have a great summer. And see you back with all new episodes right here after Labor Day. today.