The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: China's tax on Canadian canola and TIFF abandons the principles of free speech

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard and Janice open today's show reacting to China's 75% tariff on Canada's canola seed, a retaliation against our government's decision to impose duties on Chinese electric vehicles. Is the Trump administration ultimately to blame for the retaliatory tariff climate we now find ourselves in? And as the weakest G7 country, why are we fighting two superpowers at the same time? Is it time to reset our relationship with China? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to the controversy from TIFF this week following the removal of a documentary about October 7th from the festival's lineup, which was ultimately reversed after a public outcry. Rudyard and Janice agree that the reasons cited by TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey for this decision lacked both merit and conviction. This was a blatant display of a Canadian institution embracing the abandonment of the best principles of free speech, and it is a sobering reminder that we must include diverse voices in our cultural spaces. Furthermore, TIFF is a publicly funded institution, and as stakeholders we should demand that its leadership be held accountable for this unfortunate episode. To support the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.wmunkdebates.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Welcome to the Friday Focus Podcast for the 15th of August. I'm Roger Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined by Janice Gros Stina. And she, thankfully, is not in studio today.

And I'll tell you why in a moment. How are you feeling, Janice? Well, I have a little granddaughter. And she had a small cold, but she gave me the mother of all colds. There's nothing worse. It's a good thing. Today is Friday, and we didn't have to do this yesterday. Yeah, exactly.

I'm very happy that we're doing this through Zoom, because I for me like the summer cold in life's cruelties ranks like nine out of ten there's something about the summer colds in winter are bad enough but colds in the summer jannis I feel for you our audience does also let me just tell you about you on the scale of 10 this is an 11 out okay well you take care of yourself we are recording uh this janis uh before noon on Friday. So we are not going to talk about the big Trump-Puton summit. We will do that later, either through a special episode, a Friday focus, if we think the news coming out of the summit warrants a special episode or obviously on next week's program, because anything we say now,

it would just be purely conjection. We'd much prefer to give our audience some thoughts and ideas and debate and discussion around known facts as opposed to known unknowns. Does that sound good to you, Janice? It sure does. Well, let's talk about a known fact. This week, China hit back hard against Canada, levying what can only be described as punitive tariffs on canola, a major agricultural export from Canada to China and to the world. Many listeners, and viewers might say to themselves, well, hey, what is canola? I'm sure maybe buy a canola field once in my life. Why is this a big deal?

Well, up to 200,000 jobs are connected with the canola industry in Canada. It's effectively as large or larger than the auto sector than a lot of the other steel and aluminum producers that we seem, Janice, to be really keen to protect and to, you know, stand up for. And I'm wondering, Janice, if we're starting to see both two concerning developments. One, Canada getting wedged now between China and the United States. And second, some kind of regional tensions emerging where central Canada sure likes to protect its industries. Western Canada, though, is exposed also. And maybe those of us here in the east don't understand the extent to which these are major exports that have large economic impacts inside the country and large job and employment implications also.

And just because their natural resources, just because their agriculture doesn't mean they're not as important as some of these industries that are getting a lot of the headlines like auto, steel, and aluminum. I couldn't agree with you more, Roger. This is canola seat. There's a whole bunch of canola products that we export. And China's a huge market for us. Now, you're right to call these punitive. What did this come out of? This came out, this latest round, of Canada's decision to impose very high tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

So we did this for two reasons. The less important reason is we're probably swamp. If Chinese EVs came into Canada, it would probably swamp our own car manufacturing because these Chinese cars are cheaper and they're cleaner than most of what we're making. But the big incentive here, Red Year, was the United States that did this before us, turned around, kind of growled in expectation that we were going to do it because we have an integrated market in cars and car parts. So if you're a Westerner, right, you're saying,

my canola see, which is a sophisticated product, is now being hit because we protected the auto sector in Ontario. The government has to take this just as seriously as it does, protecting jobs in the auto sector. Yeah, well said. And look, you know, you can never tell the future, but more and more, our decision both to enact large-scale tariffs to protect our auto industry from Chinese EVs combined with pledges of tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to support the construction of battery plants by a variety of different auto manufacturers around the world, primarily in Ontario, has spectacularly blown up in our face. Not only are these battery plants and the whole EV market collapsed in Canada,

we now have the Trump administration effectively walking away from what are called CAFE standards. Those are the California emissions guidelines for cars that really determine the efficiency of the fleets of the auto manufacturers. And they've effectively stripped out both a lot of the goods. green credits for EV vehicles in the United States, but even more of a threat to, you know, EVs in North America and the industry as a whole is the extent to which auto manufacturers will no longer in a sense be forced or required to have a greater and greater portion of their fleet, their product, at least in the United States, be green electric cars. So I don't know, Janice, I look at all this and I kind of wonder, have we, I don't know, been too certain, too

confident about some of these big industrial bets that we made under the Trudeau government because the world changes. And we had that kind of disruptor in chief in the White House. And this whole strategy now, again, is not only failing on its own terms and criteria, i.e. how many EV cars are being made and sold in North America. It's now having national unity implications. It's spilling over into other industries like agriculture. And it's putting us in the crosshairs of China at a time when we've got a heck of a fight on our hands already with the United States. So I'm going to be a bit contrarian here, Roger. I'd say if we can stay the course over the long, term. This has to be a good bet. I don't think there's a single Canadian this year who

experienced probably the hottest summer that many of us can remember right across the country. In our cities, especially, it was steaming. This, these investments now, and you're right to say they've gone sour, they have, but they've gone sour largely because of the Trump administration. and step back. Well, and consumer demand, Janice. To be fair, a lot of these battery plants are not going forward because people don't want to buy these cars. And, you know, we're trying in Canada to force people to have a, to have a green car and an inability to buy, I think, a combustion engine is it by 2035? Well, good luck with that. But I don't know, Jess. I don't think we can lay this all at Trump's feats. This has to do with consumer preferences. It has to do with. the expense of these vehicles. It has to do with how they function, especially in a colder climate like Canada, issues around reliability and distance, fueling, charging stations, the absence

of a big infrastructure in Canada to support, you know, the charging at scale that you would need to completely green your automobile fleet. Yeah. But, Rod, if you think out 10 years, The Europeans, interestingly enough, are buying EVs. So the only major, and China, that's all there is, are EVs. And Chinese EVs are selling in countries like Brazil. And Europeans have allowed Chinese EVs into Europe. So again, I just wonder why this absolutist position in Canada, if you care about the environment, I care about the environment,

I care about the wildfires that we've seen this summer. why not give people cheaper EVs, better EVs, EVs made by the Chinese, just like the Europeans seem to have found a way to walk and chew gum at the same time, to have a domestic European auto industry, but allow a certain number portion of these cheaper, very well-made, supposedly,

excellent electric vehicles that are coming out of China that are really the best in class in the world. So I'm going to give you an answer, and you can chuckle. Roger. But you're allowed. But the answer is, again, because of U.S. pressure on us over security issues. So what does that mean? If you, you need charging stations, all right? And these charging stations, Chinese make cars will, they'll be whatever, you know, how many miles apart. But they will dot our landscape and Chinese cars will plug in Chinese

EVs because we're way behind. We'll catch up eventually and it would actually be good to have a quota of Chinese EVs in Canada because it would you know it would ramp up the competition frankly but the issue is they're going to plug in drivers are going to download data they're going to have Wi-Fi in their car they're going to do all these things all that data is going to go to China. So it comes at us, and this pressure came from the Senate. It comes

at us as a security issue in a way that it doesn't to the Europeans because they don't live next door to the United States. Sounds like a sovereignty issue also. I mean, that's a different way to look at it. Do we want to choose the cars that we drive or do want the U.S. Senate choosing them for us? I guess the other dimension of this that concerns me, Janice, is that understandably the Mark Carney government under political attack this week rushed out a pledge to guess what, announce a whole big new list of subsidies for the canola industry. They've had a big set of subsidies for the steel industry, for the aluminum industry, for the auto industry. Every industry that gets tariffed gets subsidies.

And I get that. This is part of how you respond to a threat. and you could say a crisis that's not you're making. But when you're not collecting countervailing duties on American imports, when you've chosen to be elbows down for some reason, a very interesting kind of change from the tone, the elbows uptone of Mark Carney during the election, if you're elbows down now and you're not really collecting much

in the way of any retaliatory tariffs, then you're having to fund all of these new subsidies for even more industries in Canada. We already got banking telcos, the entire cultural sector. I could go on and on subsidized to the Gills, and we're now adding whole big new industries to that growing list, again, funded by taxpayers, funded by debt and deficits. Yeah, there's no question that this is a problem, Richard,

and ultimately it's not sustainable. So let's think about subsidies, the way Donald Trump, Trump should think about tariffs, but does it? Tariffs are a perfectly reasonable economic instrument if they're time limit, and they're there to achieve a specific objective. You can, you know, you can use tariffs to grow in an infant industry and let it get on its feet before it competes globally, or you can use tariffs to really compel somebody else

to change their unfair training practices. That's not much evident in Donald Trump's thinking. And we have to be very careful that we use subsidies the same way. We can't have a subsidized car industry in Canada forever. We can't have subsidized aluminum or steel forever in this country. And we can't do it with our agri-food industry either. So my question really is not what do we have. the subsidies. Of course we do when we're trying now to renegotiate

QSMA, that's USMCA, that's not the two, that's coming right at us, and we don't want to provoke the U.S. president. It's much more, what's the economic plan for Canada to transition to much more competitive sectors? That's really what I'm waiting to see. Yeah, did it. Well, we may see some nods in that direction, the upcoming federal budget or not. We may see, see more subsidies for for more industries because that is a playbook unfortunately that we're very familiar with for the last number of decades again with whole sectors and swathes of our economies telcos to banking to culture to the health care industries you know education the list goes goes on

and on i guess i wonder what's what's left what is the what is the part of the economy that's actually subject to real market forces, real competition dynamics that we know are leading indicators for future productivity growth, for wealth creation, for the very tax revenues the government is going to want to fund all of our social programs. But let's just wrap up to the section of show by going back to China because I agree with you, Janice. We need a long-term strategy. You can't just subsidize your way out of a tariff war with the United States, especially when you're not, again, collecting reciprocal retaliatory tariff revenue, should we be thinking about, as difficult it is after the two Michaels, about resetting with China, about acknowledging

that we do not have a bright future if we are fighting simultaneously the world's two great superpowers who perceive Canada, unfortunately, and I think correctly, as the weakest member of the G7, the weakest militarily, one of the weakest economically. You could even argue a country that often seems very divided about what it believes, what it stands for, what its purposes, both regional divisions but also cultural and other divisions inside our country. I mean, is this sustainable for us to be picking trade wars and trade fights or having to respond to trade wars and trade fights from both superpowers at once? So I think we already are Richard. I think the government is already quietly exploring a shift. Let's talk for a second about what happened in the United States

over the last two months between the United States and China. China rolled the United States on trade. It did it because it has a stranglehold right now on critical minerals, which the United States needs to boost its manufacturing sector. That is Donald Trump's mantra, bring manufacturing back to the United States. Well, if you don't have access to critical minerals, not only can you bring manufacturing back, you're actually going to diminish the manufacturing sector.

So the Chinese stared him down and Donald Trump blinked. And that's why China got another 90-day extension. One was not blind to this, Roger. They're seeing what's happening. The all-out competition through export controls, not through tariffs, of the Obama-Biden teams, frankly, is going. And we would be absolutely foolish. and not to be doing the same thing at the same time.

Okay, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. Thanks for tuning into the first half of Friday Focus. You want to get the back half of the show where we're going to talk about a big blow-up at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. An acute case of foot and mouth disease will give you all the gory details, and that's exclusively for our monk donors after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program,

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