The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Important lessons from Mamdani's victory and a U.S. government shutdown holds the public hostage

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

This special episode of Friday Focus was recorded in front of a live audience at the Hot Docs Curious Minds Festival and the full length edition being made available to all paying and non-paying subscribers To find out how to purchase tickets to the Munk Debate on the Two-State Solution (or to access the livestream) go to www.munkdebates.com Rudyard and Janice start today's show unpacking Zohran Mamdani's mayoral victory in New York City. How did this young and inexperienced politician build such a broad coalition? What is the message we should take away from his big win? Janice argues that this race is not the only one that matters; Democratic wins in Virginia and New Jersey with more moderate candidates offer an important lesson that in order to win you need a big tent with a wide variety of voices. What role did technology play in these elections, and should we be worried about how it is affecting the democratic process? Rudyard and Janice then turn to the US government shutdown which is being weaponized by both parties. Unfortunately neither side will negotiate without concessions and the public is being held hostage. In the remaining moments Rudyard and Janice offer their analysis of Mark Carney's first federal budget as Prime Minister. Both agree that the budget did not live up to expectations; the government needed to make some big cuts and ask Canadians to sacrifice to get our economy back on track. As Janice puts it, the biggest problem we have in this country is we think being nice is the most important value. It's not.   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.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.

Hello, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hot Docs. My name is Diana Sanchez. I am the executive director, and it's a pleasure to welcome you all this morning. I love doing events in the morning. To our second event here at Curious Minds, we are going to be listening to the Friday Focus podcast with the Monk debates, which is very exciting. So to kick things off, I want to start by really thanking the staff and volunteers here. at hot dogs. They do incredible work. We couldn't do this without you. And to all of you, our audiences that keep coming back. Curious Minds is a four-day festival. It's about ideas. We're going to have panels, author talks. We're even having an astrologist do a live birth chart reading here on Sunday. So it's an opportunity to discuss lots and lots of topics, listen to a lot of thinkers and to engage, engage in community, have a chance to be together and talk. So big thank you to our government sponsor through Fed Dev, Ontario.

They have generously sponsored the Curious Minds Festival. And yes, and I'm very excited about today's event. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what we're going to be seeing. It's called Monk Debates Friday Focus. It's a live podcast. After the podcast, we're going to about have half an hour for the Q&A. Since 2008, Monk Debates events have helped the world rediscovered the art of civil, of substantive public debate by convening the brightest thinkers of our time to weigh in on the big issues of the day.

Through the Friday Focus podcast, Monk Debates offers listeners a weekly half-hour masterclass on current events. So we're thrilled to be able to listen in today as they share this master class with us live on stage. So I'm really excited to invite our guest to the stage. Please welcome Janice Stein. Welcome, Janice. She really needs no intro, but I will share some of her bio with you. Renowned is one of Canada's most respected national and international experts on world politics.

Janice Stein is the Belsberg Professor of Conflict Management and the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. She is an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and an inaugural Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molesome Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She has been awarded honorary doctorate of laws by five universities around the world. old. In 1996, Janice became a university professor, the highest honor the university accords its faculty. Welcome, Janice. Thanks for

being with us. And I'd also like to welcome Rudyard Griffiths. Welcome. Rudyard is the co-founder and chair of the Monk Debates, Canada's premier international debate series. He is the executive Director of the Hub, an independent charitable initiative dedicated to reporting on and analyzing policy issues for the broader public. He is the past president and founder of his own think tank, the Dominion Institute, and currently advises some of Canada's leading private foundations. So welcome to you both. Thanks so much for being with us. And so excited to listen to this podcast. Yeah. Thank you so much. Janice, isn't this great to be here? I can smell the popcorn.

It's the first time we've recorded a podcast and I can smell butter and popcorn, and I don't have any popcorn. You know, and if I can make one personal comment, I don't usually see Rogers' socks, but Rogers' socks match my shoes. So something going to happen today. Yeah.

So a reminder to our listening audience is tuning in right now. We are at the Hot Dogs Festival, downtown Toronto on Bloor Street, for a live taping of our program with a number of fans of this festival, members of the Monk Debates. So thank you so much for your generous support. It's been essential to our efforts over the last 15 years, Janice,

to try to build spaces for civil and substantive public conversation and debate. We've done that on main stage debates that many of you may be familiar with here in Toronto. But more importantly, Janice, we've been at this podcast now for, what is it, five and a half years. Yeah. Yeah, what is that? That's more than 250 episodes. Yeah. And it's been a fantastic learning for me, and I think for all of our audience to be able to hear from Janice and get her kind of insights on the news that is shaping our world. So each week we go through basically a list of what we think are the most important stories that hopefully can help inform your thinking. So let's do that now, Janice.

Let's dive into the show and begin by talking about a wild week in the U.S. This has been a theme of the program, unfortunately now, for a period of time. But this last week was especially one of kind of turmoil change and maybe a little bit of hope. Maybe let's start with the Mandami election in New York City. this come behind social democrat surprised the ultimate establishment city by winning Janice a very commanding victory over Como, the former governor. What do you think this victory signifies? What does it say about the state in shape of American politics?

You know, it's a really important phenomenon that this young, frankly, inexperienced politician could build the kind of coalition in New York. 50% of the vote in New York City is a significant achievement and swamped one of the most experienced political dynasties in democratic history. I think there's a bigger message here, Roger, which is really important. If you look at those three Virginia, New Jersey and New York City, very different messages. They all won. So for the Democratic Party, you take away, not everybody has to sing from the same songbook.

It is not, should we go left? Should we go right? Should we do this? It has to be a big tent as it used to be in which it accommodates a really broad spectrum of perspectives. That's the Democrats' best hope to take on Donald Trump. Just to focus a little bit more on Zoran, Montana. He led a campaign that touches on a lot of themes that we've seen here in Canadian politics, really since the big inflation crisis of a few years ago, issues around affordability, as we like to call it, euphemistically.

This is often people lining up at food banks, people unable to pay their rent. New York City, much like Toronto, where we are here today, is in a cost of living crisis. to what extent are these convulsions that we're seeing most recently in this in this Merrill church election in New York the results of an underlying economic phenomenon or as some would argue maybe that's an older school of analysis that we should push aside that there were some novel uses of technology in this campaign we're seeing the rise of a kind of TikTok generation coming into their own kind of political activism and these new platforms are providing kind of leverage and fuel to unorthodox candidates like Zoran. Where do you come down on that debate?

Economics at the core versus maybe something new contributing to what we're seeing. So, look, I think it's both. And you think that's a call-out answer. But it really isn't because if we look at the technology, which is really, really important in elections, you know, going back to JFK and which next. and television matters. But the message really matters as well. And I think it was just extremely skilled

that using short, really creative, snappy videos. People haven't seen them. She'll go look. They are really, really good. But the message was economic, right? You're over and over and over. Free buses. People love that.

They didn't really still have to think, how's it going to work? in a city that is more congested than Toronto. What are you going to do? And buses are extremely slow in New York. It's an experience to be on a bus in New York and Rush Hour. How's this all going to work? Nobody really asked that.

He wasn't challenged seriously about the numbers in the promises he made. But most politicians are not. He got at the sense. Life is not affordable for me and my kids' food costs more. I can't rent, much less I can't buy. The system is not working for me. You know, paradoxically, that's Donald Trump's message too. Let's talk.

Very different solutions. Yeah, as we do on the Friday focus, we like to kind of follow different tangents of an issue or conversation. So let's stick on the tangent of technology for a moment because TikTok has recently been sold, at least the American operations. from ByteDance, its original Chinese creator and owner, to Larry Ellison and his son, who themselves are now amassing a large media empire. To what extent, Janice, is this a kind of new threat that is emerging, that we are seeing

these powerful algorithmic tools being acquired and used, in some cases for disruption in the case of Mandami, but also now they're seen as powerful. X. Elon Musk, his presence in the White House probably had much to do with Twitter as with whatever hundreds of millions of dollars and donations he gave to the Trump campaign. Are we losing sight maybe about how technology is not simply changing our democracy, but possibly threatening it? I think it's a huge issue. I think you're right, Richard, that we're not paying enough attention. So let's take these two issues separately. Each new wave of technology advantages people who are really good at it.

So somebody who can make a really cool equivalent in politics to a cat video is going to do very well, right? That wasn't true five years ago. And so that really matters. You need a difference of skills. The bigger issue is the one that you raised, that we're seeing a consolidation of media. You know, the Ellison Empire, what the Allison family owns, there's a concentration of ownership in big media. The New York Times had just looked at the numbers yesterday,

and, you know, that's a surprise too. It's revenues through the ceiling. Its numbers grew by 25%. I mean, that's a big revenue gain, and it has global subscribers. You know, Jeff Beatt. from Amazon owns the Washington Post. So you're seeing, that's, you know, that is not consistent with a functioning, high functioning democracy.

When you had the Kansas reporter and the Omaha Onion or whatever the equivalent was, but there were local news and local candidates, much easier to have a vibrant democracy when you have three, four, five, frankly, extremely wealthy families that control content like this. In the case of TikTok, though, it was effectively given by the Trump administration. The sale of it was forced, and it was given to Ellison, who is seen as sympathetic and friendly to the president and to the administration. So what does it mean when you have a democracy like the United States, where media assets are being awarded, literally stripped from a foreign owner, hands? handed over, not through some kind of open auction or transparent process, but through to someone

who I assume is now going to weaponize the algorithm in the same way that Americans were claiming that the Chinese were weaponizing the algorithm, which they may have been to so and promote division in American society. Now what? Larry Ellison will use it to support political ideas, candidates, the president himself. At what point? are we so far down the rabbit hole that we've kind of lost sight of what reality is? Because this is manufactured, Janice. These algorithms are highly manipulable. Elon Musk does this all the time now on X.

I've thankfully been off X for three years, and I do not miss a single day of being on that platform. It's a complete and utter waste of your time. If you're on X, get off. I mean that. because you can see how he is elevating bizarre issues like a supposed program against white South Africans, which has now reflected in Trump's immigration policy where total refugee admittances have been turned down to a paltry 7,000 people for the entire United States every year with a predominance being, guess who, white South Africans. In other words, Janice, I just use that as one example where this online torched media-controlled, politicized social media that we are consuming is now literally manufacturing a reality in terms of government policy and public perception.

Yeah, look, I don't think you're over-exaggerating at all. If you look at the two biggest of these in digital media, it's at. And it's TikTok, right? Both of those are now owned by people who are broadly supportive of Trump. And we've already seen what Elon Musk has done to X, frankly. That is not a landscape which makes it possible for insurgents. And that's what Man Dami really is to do well. A little bit more because it's in support of xenophobic, anti-Semitic,

Yeah. Misogynist, ideas, tropes, policies. I mean, this is more sinister than just while they're in service of a political party or a political movement. This is something more, and I guess it gets at, you know, what we've been all worrying about on our podcast now since the re-election of Donald Trump, the metamorphosis of the United States into something that looks more and more like Putin, with each and every passing day. I mean, is that a fair comparison that we're starting to see that that crystallists happen? It's just happening in ways that are different instead of TAS or Pravda or whatever kind of Soviet. Those were very boring.

People didn't read them, Roger. They knew they were, they were the fake news. And people knew that. But instead, it's much more sophisticated in the United States. It's a simulacra, a simulation of. democracy, a range of ideas, debate and contestation, when in fact, maybe it's not. Yeah. So look, I think there's two very different issues here. And in a funny way, the second issue, which is content moderation, right, in which you said, this is, this is for the politest word we could use is slop.

All right, that's polite. For what you described, it's much worse. An untrue slop that anybody who was interested in fact could verify. Well, what happened? We had a period where these big companies who were investing in content moderation. Every single one of them cut it out. In the name of what? Free speech.

In the name of not having a government involved in regulating content. That struck a chord with many, many people. And if we probably asked people in the room how many of us would want government to regulate, the content on any media, I would say no, right? Because there's a big, we know the story. That's not a good story either.

So we actually have not solved the problem of who and how should monitor the standards of what is okay speech in the public arena. I would say we have, yeah, we have speed limits on highways because we don't let people drive at 200 kilometers an hour. You can't smoke. And you're supposed to wear a seatbelt. And if you don't, you get fine. There's all kinds of ways that we allow government to restrict our movements, restrict our freedoms, restrict our choices. But there often seems to be this strange carve out,

that these platforms are somehow this mysterious space in which free speech is happening. It's actually not free speech. It's manufactured speech. It's controlled speech. It's algorithmic speech. So I don't really buy the argument that these things can't or shouldn't be regulated. I think the reason they're not being regulated and why content moderation has gone out the window

was that Trump won a second term. All the major platforms from Facebook to X to... Caved. Well, they didn't simply cave. They saw a convenient bottom line profit motive to strip out of the costs of their businesses the act of content moderation. So, you know, let's take a second.

Just look at the UK. Because in the United Kingdom, they have very different, You know, is very easy to get sued for libel in the United States. And it's much harder to get sued in Canada or the United States. So the rule set a higher bar, but you look at the content of social media that's operating in the United Kingdom. It's no better. It's not the same platforms.

Elon Musk is regulated there is created, is purposely amplifying horrible. narratives and stories about Muslim men, you know, prostituting young English girls, some of which, you know, there's a kernel of truth there. There was a scandal. It was investigated. But this has been blown into because the algorithm is preferencing these stories and it's dumping it into millions of people's feeds. But why don't they sue then? So if we think it's a problem, and that's what I think the problem is much deeper than regulation. If somebody posts a story like that out on X or in the United Kingdom, you go to court, you sue for libel.

And there's a chilling effect when that happens, as you know, it's called libel chill. But remarkably, a much stronger regulation set of regulations is not doing what you and I think has to happen so that we can have a truly independent press as part of our democracy. So it's tough this problem. It is a very tough problem. And I think sometimes, you know, you lose the rights to do certain things when you're behaving so badly. And the standards have fallen to such an extent. I think let's shift, though, to the other big story that we're seeing in the United States this week, which is the continuing of this government shutdown.

And it's not only a shutdown of the bureaucracy. Let's remind ourselves, it's a shutdown of Congress. So there is no legislature sitting. there's literally no accountability that is being levied or happened. It has gone on much longer than people think. It's now, I think, the longest government shut down in U.S. history. What do we make of this? Is this a sign of something, again,

that we've been talking on the podcast for a number of months now, which was the United States approaching some crisis point, some inflection point, where the polarization has become so acute, the, you know, the politics infested with so much rancor that literally the institutions are, not simply, right, they have failed, they are now failing to function. The patient is having a heart attack. It's a really, first of all, let's just stop for a second and say how terrible this is, right?

People are not getting their food stamps. That's number one. You would have thought they would have carved that out, right? So it is really hurting the poorest people in America for a very long time. Then there's the winery winty whineers like me. I have an airline. I have a flight next week. What's going to happen, right?

Because the air controllers are understaffed and they're canceling flights right and left. And you know when you cancel flights? 10 days afterwards, there's a huge disruption. The third thing is Trump. loves this because he's firing civil servants. He's not paying them. And under cover of the shutdown, he's able to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy. You know, many Canadians, that's their favorite fantasy that will somehow get it done. We never seem to get it done. But what's at the core here, the Republicans and the Democrats have both weaponized the shutdown. And I say both. For the Democrats,

Obamacare is there one big issue. Obamacare has huge support across the country. Donald Trump wants to cut accessibility to it. And for the Democrats, they're treating this as a live or die issue. And yes, it's true that Trump is not negotiating. But honestly, the Democrats are not negotiating either until the Republicans make concessions on Obamacare. Who's held hostage here? the public. Yeah, I would note that the Republicans have a, a, a, a bare majority in both houses.

And therefore, if they didn't have their own internal problems and the defection of specific senators or congressmen and women, they, they could do whatever they wanted to do. They can't do it because they're divided. Right. So I don't know if it's up to the Democrats to save the Republicans from their own, you know, stupid, stupid divisions that they've. created within their party because they've radicalized the Republican Party and turned it into something completely different. But you've just said something really important there too, because when we talk about polarization, we do extreme right, extreme left, right? But the Republican Party is internally divided, right? The Democrats are deeply divided internally and clawing at each other, frankly.

So part of what we're seeing is deeper than this extreme. extreme left division. The two political parties, and you know, I'm one of those who believes, I'm going to get you going here, Richard. I'm one of those beliefs that political parties really matter. And what's their fundamental job? Their job is to bridge divides. Biggest single mistake we made in the United States and Canada was the whole primaries for

leaders. We never should have done it. Why is that a terrible thing? It was all done in the name of democracy. democratization, get the smoke-filled rooms and the elites out of there, wrong. Wrong because when you have primaries, you appeal to your base. And you elect leaders that are really skilled at appealing to their base and not that good at bridging differences. And in the United States, you're seeing the result, frankly.

Now, Donald Trump's approval ratings this week have hit all-time lows. those in the mid-30s. Simultaneously, though, we've seen a complete reluctance on the part of the President and the White House to acknowledge that reality. Instead, he is barreling forward with the shutdown. Flights are getting canceled, as you said. And now we saw this week the Supreme Court take up a lower appeals court ruling against the president on his emergency trade and tariff powers. That's a big, big one for us in Canada.

It seemed, Janice, as if the questioning, including by some of the Republican, in fact, even Trump first term appointees to the court, were highly critical of the Solicitor General's arguments about why those tariff powers of the president had been used legally and legitimately. we've often surmised or wondered if the Supreme Court ruling against the president on the tariff powers would be the trigger for some kind of bigger act of rebellion on the president's part and the administration's part and basically noncompliance in the face of a court order. Do you feel that's more or less likely? And how are we to interpret that risk against the backdrop? Again, of a Congress that's closed, a government that's shut down. National Guard in the Streets.

National Guard in the Streets. And yet in America, that seems to continue to go on. I guess that's what has surprised me over the last number of weeks is that as these rolling crises have thundered out, it still happens. You know, 33 million people get up every day. They go to work. The country isn't, I mean, it's breaking down in some ways, but it's not fundamentally off the rails. What do we make of that dichotomy between how big these log jams and shocks are that going through the system and the risks that the system is entertaining versus the simple momentum of the American economy, American society, and Americans' willingness almost to look through this? Yeah.

You know, it's very worrying. If you think back to the first Trump administration, people were in the streets. And, you know, my colleague Timothy Snyder at the Monk School has said that one of the words, and I completely agree with him, one of the worst mistakes that we make is what he calls anticipatory compliance. We comply in advance even before we need to because we sense where it's going and we don't want to expose ourselves to sanctions. And so there's a there's a, there's a. high level of fear in the United States, frankly, where people are reluctant to go out into

the streets because they know they're going to be photographed, there will be facial identification, you will be on a list, ICE behaves with very few constraints. And I think, you know, American citizens are less vulnerable, but they're not completely invulnerable. And so I think it's the fear that is so surprising. How, even, you know, even, you know, American citizens are less vulnerable, but they're not completely invulnerable. And so I think it's the fear that is so surprising how easy it is to induce fear. You know, somebody just made a comment to me, which was quite interesting. I hadn't really thought about it.

Because in Israel right now, very similar dynamics, judicial reform, which is just euphemism for judicial coup, right? But people aren't streets. There is not the fear of arbitrary arrest and consequence that there is in the United States. So the more optimistic view of it, and I think it's fear, the more optimistic view is people are holding their fire because they think the big showdown is coming. And what's the showdown going to come on?

I don't think it's going to be over tariffs. There's a lot of things Donald Trump can do if he loses and he can do them legally. They're very technical. They're boring. So any Canadian who's holding out hope that this story is over, if the court rules against the president, there are five other legal mechanisms that. he has to use. But the big issue is the elections, the midterm elections. And the really alarmist view of life and the super alarmist view. And who knows? Nobody knows. Nobody's in the president's head. And I bet he doesn't know. I bet he doesn't know in advance, right? He's

not that kind of thinker, is that he declares a national emergency and doesn't hold the midterm elections. Because what's the pattern? One national emergency after the other, national emergency in Chicago and national emergency in Washington, a national emergency to invoke these tariffs, that's the default place where he goes. I think that's where the organizing is happening, is happening around that issue. And that's just a year away. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how these timelines are going to soon get very impressed. I agree with you that, you know, probably the terrorists in a Supreme Court ruling doesn't become the moment that the president goes full kind of Vladimir Putin on us. It probably is something related to maybe even not the run-up to

election, but let's say the election results and not using state legislatures and there's a whole bunch of gerrymandering. This is where they go into Republican states and literally redraw the boundaries of different congressional districts to ensure more Republicans are elected. Democrats are now re-gerimandering their districts. California just passed a referendum this week to do just that. So before we move on to our final topic, because I want to bring the show back to Canada for our last conversation,

and then we'll go to questions from the audience here at Hot Docs on Bloor Street in Toronto. What do you think, Janice, could be the, yeah, just the, the trigger. event because this level of dysfunction and discord. Again, let's just summarize what it is. The government is shut down. Congress is not sitting. Planes are starting literally not to fly. Payments are not going out.

Payments are not going out to hundreds of thousands of public service workers in the United States for almost a month now. The food program, the SNAP program. that feeds upwards of 40 million poor Americans, while a judge initially overturned the government's attempts to cancel the program. It's literally, it's like something out of a Dickensian novel. These people are now going on half rations because the government has deemed that the Trump administration has deemed that this is what they're required to do under the ruling. There's a real sense of kind of cruelty to that. And as you say, the ICE issues, the departments, deportations continue. Does this just go on? Or is there, you're a political scientist, you've studied

societies in crisis. America is in crisis. We can say that. Is it wrong for us to think? Because maybe again, it's when you read history, you're always reading for like the spikes in the graph, not not necessarily the valleys. Are we wrong to think that these things do spike and there is a crisis and an inflection point? Or is it possible that this is just simply the new normal? America is now a dysfunctional democracy, and that is just the reality of the country for now and possibly for many years to come. But ultimately, there's a muddling through of that dysfunctionality. I'm torn between this idea of crisis and inflection versus just dysfunction and muddling. You know, one of the really scary things to me is how you, it's the slow creeping death of democracy, right?

You don't notice it. And, okay, this one is not the big issue. We're going to wait. Oh, okay. We can get around this one. We'll manage this one. And then when you finally realize how damage the institutions are, it's too late. And that's why.

Do you think it's too late now? I mean, the damage is immense, Janet. If you think at the extent to which Congress has seemingly lost its ability to be a co-equal power in government and to check an executive, that's a pretty three, four alarm fire when it comes to any democracy. And let me just add one other damage we don't talk about because you have to be wonky. but it's the damage to all the national security institutions in the United States, which will take a decade to repair, right? The departure of almost all the senior leaders in the CIA. And then also the kleptocracy, the large-scale looting of the state

by a coterie of friends and supporters of the president, and by the president himself and by his family. What norms have been shattered there? Yeah, which we, you know, unbelievable. And a ruling by the Supreme Court that anything the president does while he's president, he does with impunity. Right. You can't prosecute. So the picture is very grim already.

And there's, you know, some of my colleagues who are serious scholars in this area say the United States is already an authoritarian society. It's already passed the watermark. For me, I think there are what we call these focal points, something galvanizes, right? and the light goes off for most people. I mean, the Democratic victories, these three victories would suggest that there is a backlash. People are beginning. That's right.

Now, all you know about off-year elections. It's like in a by-election and never take what happens in a by-election as a leading indicator of what's going to happen in the national election. But I think the real issue is the mid-term elections. If there's interference with those elections, And anyway, that's so fundamental to who Americans think they are and what they think they are, that that to me, and it could have come in two ways, the interference, they're not held, which is the worst story, but not impossible. Or afterwards, if the results, if he loses control, house, because that, and that would have a significant impact, that there was an interference after the election, that I think would be.

be the moment for people who have, say, we're going to live through this, we're going to survive like somebody else in 28, it'll all be okay. You won't be able to say that to yourself anymore. Just conscious, we've got about half an hour left. So let's do one more topic and then we'll open it up for questions. So let's bring it back to Canada and talk wonderfully, prosaically, about the big news of this country, which was a federal budget. This was a much-ballahued budget. The prime minister in the government used language that it would be a generational budget, a budget of kind of historic proportions and its ambition and scale. It did have a very large deficit in excess of spending over revenues of some $78 billion.

Top line thoughts on the budget. What was it? What did it do? I have to say that I felt that the reaction to the budget afterwards was, Yeah, kind of down. I mean, that people felt that it was short of expectations. But you feel that way? Do I feel that way?

I think in some ways I do. Yes, I think there's a, if the rhetoric was that Canada is a once in a generation crisis and that elements of that crisis started before Trump, especially related to the economy and the underperformance of our economy, the budget predicts very low economic growth. for the country over the next few years, then why not try to tackle those questions head on when there is momentum in the country or concern about Trump and try to use that the conversation that we just had, which is a scary conversation, to galvanize, create permission for the

federal government to act in ways that would be a benefit the country. And I'll pass it to you with just one last example. We were promised free trade in Canada during the federal election. We were then said that this was going to happen on the 1st of July. Free trade would be something that we could control. It would add to economic growth. It's low cost. It challenges a lot of vested interests in the country. We're really not that much closer to free trade some nine months later. And there's nothing in the budget about that fundamental issue and that fundamental promise and the fundamental potential of a policy like that. I think there were so many missed opportunities of that type.

And I'm just curious as to why you think that was the case. You know, look, I think we have a severe crisis in our economy. And if you have anything but an optimistic outlook about which way the United States is going to go, it's going to get more acute, right? You're not less acute, right? So this was a unique opportunity. I agree with you. I agree with you.

I would just rephrase it a little bit and see if you could live with this. The budget set direction. It didn't live up to the moment. There were a whole series of issues where really hard decisions have to be made. I mean, to me, that's the key message for Canadians. We have to make some very hard decisions. We have to give up some things, okay? And what the budget didn't do, it didn't push right in front of our eyes.

Here's what you're going to have to sacrifice. Here's some things that I know you love, but you can't have anymore because of the situation that we face in this country. If you take one example, I think, you gave one. Let me give another. I think everyone knows that we have a federal bureaucracy that grew by 40% over the last 10 years and is frankly not more efficient. It is not delivering additional. And if you think that doesn't matter, that's an Ottawa problem.

You're just wrong, and I'll tell you what, you're wrong, because governments in this country are 40% of our GDP. It's astounding. And if you have governments that are too large and not working up to the maximum capacity, does the drag on the economy? Well, what do we get? we got in the budget

or we're going to cut 40,000 jobs, which doesn't address the growth. But leave aside, it's the how that drove me crazy. It's going to happen through attrition. And it's going to happen through early biopackages.

And it's going to happen through retirement. Let me translate that into English. The very best people are going to leave. Because when you're 50 now, you can access your full pension and you're going to go. So entrepreneurial people with high ambition are going to leave, who's going to stay? If you really believe this is a crisis, you don't do it that way.

You have a strategy, you have a plant. You say, we're going to double down, for example, on critical minerals. Oh, boy, we better build up the Department of Mining. But what are we going to cut? You make hard decisions, which Canadians have a horrible time doing, generally, Because we think we're so nice. And nice people don't want to be me. Well, I actually think the biggest challenge we have in this country is that we think being nice is the most important value.

It's not. Yeah, well said. And another metric in that regard was that we were told before the budget that there would be sacrifices. But the total cuts over the next three years to program. spending is $13 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, but it's a $500 billion federal budget. So you're effectively over three years, you're cutting 3%. I mean, where was, and I guess this is something we've talked about on the show for a while,

is we all acknowledge this is a moment of vulnerability for the country, that the historic relationship with the United States has broken down. The steps need to be taken to address that, to assert our own. sovereignty and chart our own future, why can't we have politicians not simply talk to us about sacrifice, but actually lead when it comes to doing what has to be done, which is taking a government, which functioned in a pre-Donald Trump world in a certain kind of way with certain things that did for better or worse, and understanding that that all needs to be refashioned, repackaged, reallocated to a different set of spending and priorities

that addresses the world that we're in now, not the world that we were in 5, 10 or 15 years ago. The defense spending, the increases of defense spending, are acknowledgement to that new world. But there was so much else in this budget that just seemed to glide over that. And I guess I'll pass it back to you for the last remark before we go to questions.

I guess my only hope is that we acknowledge that this is a minority parliament. Yeah. The government is still short too soon. of a majority. Yeah. And maybe this is like the 94 budget before the 95 budget, which was, unfortunately, because of a debt crisis, the big kind of structural budget that Canada had to go through to do

some painful things, to sacrifice, to not be nice. That's my note of hope to end on, but let's have you talk about this dichotomy between the rhetoric of sacrifice that we seem to like to hear. We all like to think we're Winston Churchill and the, you know, the Battle of Britain is ahead of us, but then we're not really behaving that way, are we when it comes to the... Look, I want to end on an optimistic note, too, Roger.

It was just a defection. A conservative MP crossed the line. I think the expectation is that there are more. And once that happens, the government is freer. And so the more optimistic note is we're going to get through this budget, but then we're actually going to do things inside in a much more strategic way. Is what one senior deputy told me. We'll see.

We'll see soon enough, I think, if that doesn't happen, because that's a segue to the larger point that I think you and are both making in very different ways. We can't continue to do things the way we do them. We can't in where I work. We can't work the way we've been working for the last 10 years. because the revenues to support that are not there, either from the private sector or from the public sector. We have to change the way we work in every level of our society. And that's hard.

That is really hard. That's what disruptive. Yeah. But the reason it's crucial is the generation, and I'm looking at one or two of you in the room right now, the younger people who are going to come into this economy need the opportunity for this economy to grow. So if we don't make sacrifices and make some tough decisions, the people who are going to bear the costs are the 25 to 35-year-olds. And that's just simply not fair from those of us who live through the easy, good times and had all the fun. It's not fair.

Yeah, well said. And I've got $78 billion this year alone of more debt to pay off for us in the years to come. It really is not fair. We've got 18 minutes or so left on the clock. So Ricky Gerwitz, the managing director of the Monk Debates, is going to come up and manage a microphone on the floor here to take questions from the audience. And then, Ricky, I believe later we're going to go up. There will be someone up at the balcony upstairs. to take if you've got any questions up there, too.

We'll get to those before the top of the hour. Ricky, thanks for joining us. Why don't we tell the audience about the amazing debate that we have set up that you've programmed for us for this December 4th? Yep. We are convening a debate on whether, you know, we at the monk debates don't shy away from controversial topics. So it's a debate about whether it is in Israel's interest to,

pursue the two-state solution. We thought it was kind of a different take on the usual debate. It was more about an inter-Israel debate about their future and how they can continue to exist as a liberal democracy. And we have some heavy hitters joining us on stage. We have a former prime minister, Ehudu Olmart. We have two former justice ministers and a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. So if you are interested, in joining us. Tickets are on sale right now for curators and supporters and get your tickets before they sell out. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Friday Focus podcast. I'm Roger Griffith, the chair of the Monk Debates. I'm joined on this program each week by Janice

Gros Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Janice and I would love to hear your reactions on what you've just heard on today's program and also your thoughts and suggestions about future topics and ideas that we should be covering on Friday Focus. Please send us your suggestions now to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK, Debateswithan S.com. This podcast is generously underwritten by the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. Visit our website, Triplew, monkdebates.com to access hundreds of podcasts, dialogues, and debates on all the big issues and ideas shaping our world and drive. the public conversation. While you're there, consider upgrading your membership for extra perks

like ticketing privileges to our live debates and gift memberships for friends and family. We'll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye for now.