The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Mark Carney gets a Boomer boost and Trump wants a nuclear deal

Episode Date: May 2, 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 with their key takeaway from the Canadian election: Mark Carney's functional minority was delivered to him by the Boomers who want to protect their assets and wealth accumulation, often at the expense of the younger generation who are faced with poor job prospects and an inflated housing market. Governments need to address these conflicting demographic interests and provide a pathway to financial security for our young people. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to the ongoing nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran. The new agreement being discussed is very similar to Obama's JCPOA, a deal that Trump backed out of in his first term in office.  Why does Trump want to pursue a deal with Iran at the expense of the security of their close ally Israel? How are the Saudis influencing Trump's foreign policy in the Middle East? And will Israel be forced to go against Trump and strike Iran's nuclear facilities on their own? 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.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website.

Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 2nd of May. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the chair of the Monk Debates. I'm joined in studio by my co-host, Janice Gross Stein. Good morning to you, Rudyard. Happy belated May Day.

It is not warm enough for May Day. I am sorry. This does not feel like spring. I have three embattled daffodils on my front lawn. I fear how long they'll last. This is this horrible time of year. We call it euphemistically the shoulder season where we get bombarded here in Toronto, Canada, and much of the country with this revenge of,

winter that can arrive unexpectedly between now and, I don't know, July 1st? I think so. I can tell you last night, I was walking in the driving rain and I had my winter coat on. Let's Janice recognize a whole bunch of fantastic donors that have come on board to support the monk debates and its mission to bring civility and substance to the public square. So our new curators, Sharon L. L. Lidie T. Judith S. and Mark H. Thank you so much for your generous support and a whole bunch of supporters. Also, these are $99 a year members who get front row access to the best tickets at the Monk debates and, of course, the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast. So thank you, Karina P, Rafe B, Anthony B, Melissa H, Johannes V, Rosemary B, Lynn P, Hilton B, Mayor R, Pascal D,

and Carl C.L. Thank you all greatly. Appreciate it. We're getting a lot of donors coming on board, Janet. This is terrific. Really great. The list seems to get longer every week, Richard. It does. We have a big debate coming up at the end of the month on Trump's America. It is completely sold out, but we will have a live stream available to our donors. You can become a donor for as little as $25 a year and get access to that live stream. So go to our website now, triple W monk debates.com and find out how you can tune into this big monk debate in person and virtually at Roy Thompson Hall at the end of May. Janice, we've got to begin by focusing on the Canadian election, both for our Canadian viewers and listeners, but also all of our friends in the

United States who tune in regularly to this program to find out what the heck's going on north of the border. It was, I don't know, Janice, my feeling it was a kind of, um, A big mac of an election. Lots of stuff packed in there. Ultimately, maybe not as substantial and, I don't know, filling, healthy, nutritious. I don't know. You characterized the election that we had. Did we discuss and debate the issues that the country needed to resolve? Do we have a mandate now conferred on Mark Carney to lead this country through a period of considerable uncertainty and risk? I found an absolutely fascinating result, Reddard, because in many ways both parties could claim victory. And that's an unusual election result.

The NDP disappeared into oblivion. It is a long way back. We are restructuring our party system. And I think that's something that we will talk a lot about in the future what that means for our politics. Mark Carney is inches away from a majority and has a functional majority because the NDP MPs would have to be suicidal to bring down this government in the foreseeable future. So he's got himself a functional majority. He won that majority because Canadians are overwhelmingly angry, preoccupied, worried about Donald Trump and his plans for. Canada. So there's no question he has a mandate to deal with Donald Trump. But the conservatives

did better than they thought they would and better than they would have even 10 days ago. And I think that's an important point to stop over because those are what you call quality of life issues, although I hate that term. It's about I can't afford a house. I don't see how I'll ever afford a house. It is about job opportunities. It is about an economy that has to come to grips with what a 21st century economy looks like. That dissatisfaction with the fundamentals of Canadian life has not gone away. That's what Pierre Paulyev tapped into when he talked about his change agenda.

I think both parties. Pierre Bolliev, going forward, has to broaden his tent and has to pay attention to what it means to live in North America. Mark Carney has to pay attention to those dissatisfied voters who voted for change. I think it's the first election since 1930 that two parties received over 40% of the vote. And normally the Conservative Party, at these numbers under Stephen Harper, say, only a decade ago would have formed a majority government. I think the story of this election, Janice,

maybe this is why I feel that it was insubstantial or maybe even, frankly, and a missed opportunity to surface some of the bigger kind of contentious issues that we need to resolve in Canadian society right now, issues of region, issues of intergenerational fairness, issues related to, as you say, a whole swath of the public who's interested in change because they have experienced materially something that has been characterized as a lost decade in Canada and a whole other cohort who really did not experience a lost decade.

And I know this is going to annoy some of our listeners who are of the baby boom generation. But Mark Carney's large minority really wants. was delivered to him by the boomers. The polls show that older boomers split in a way that it was an anomaly in this election. Normally, they vote conservative. Normally, the conservative party, especially amongst boomer men, can count on a fairly large cohort. And in fact, because they vote at much higher rates than younger people, their votes are

influential. They're important. disproportionate effect on the overall electorate. We had decent turnout, but we didn't have runaway turnout at 68%, only 5% or 7% over recent elections, which were at historical lows. So I think those boomers statistically were very significant, and boomer men broke for Mark Carney. And I just think all of us should just reflect on a moment what that meant. That meant an influential cohort put their thumb on the scale because of feelings of insecurity, insecurity related to Donald Trump in security about, frankly, protecting a lot of their benefits and gains and

wealth accumulation. Because if you are a boomer, you've enjoyed the last 15 years since the great financial crisis as an unprecedented period of home asset appreciation, of market stock, equity, growth, because you had capital. You were at a stage late enough in your life that you actually had some capital to either buy a home, to afford a mortgage, to purchase an ETF or to have your pension plan benefit because you were, in a sense, fully invested. That is a tale of two cities, a tale of two countries. Younger people are increasingly having to delay family formation. They feel that there is no hope of home ownership.

They feel that they have to become educated even more than previous generations with even worse job prospects. There's a report out this week that young people come. out of your universities and other universities are facing unemployment rates as high as 10 to 12 percent across the country. One in 10 of them is now unemployed. I don't know, Janice, these are not simply fault lines of region. I guess what I worry coming out of this election is a country that is demographically divided, that demographically has fundamentally different interests and a fundamentally different theory of the case of what needs to be done to write these wrongs. With Boomer's, frankly, if we want to be honest about it,

relatively happy with the status quo, not particularly interested in change. And I feel for younger people because I don't think that they got the election that they deserved. Yeah. So you're absolutely right about this demographic divide. I think there's two important points really to make here. First of all, that demographic divide is not going away, because we are at the leading edge now of boomers becoming, frankly, in plain English, old. We might call them elderly Canadians or wise Canadians, but there are years ahead where boomers

will continue to vote in large numbers. So this demographic divide is not going away. And so for the conservatives, they have to take that on board. And here's why I think this matters. If you have a two-party system, playing to your base doesn't work. You have to grow beyond your base. So you're right. Stephen Harper could get a majority government with 40% of the vote.

Why? Because you had a thriving NDP as well as Liberal Party. The game's changed now for the conservative party. it has to move beyond its base. It has to go to the boomers, frankly, if it wants to win. The second argument is, and I think this is really important here, there are not easy fixes to issues like housing and employment. This requires investment in the economy.

And why this is so hard, frankly, Roger, is the next generation of productive jobs in this country are going to be much fewer because manufacturing is shrinking. So to actually move the needle on the issues that you just talked about is very hard unless you're willing to tax and to redistribute. And that is not something that Pierre Pollyev and the people around him, they don't want to go there. And so, yes, he campaigned on change,

but the problems are tougher than his campaign suggested. frankly. Look, a married, retired couple receives up to $18,000 of OAS with a combined income of $180,000 a year. One fifth of the entire federal budget of the government of Canada is spent on income supports for seniors. And that's before you get to the transfer costs on health care and other, frankly burdens that our increasingly elderly population imposes on the country. And again, I know boomers don't want to hear this and I know they don't like being guilted out. But the fact is they are literally borrowing their children's future to pay for their entitlements in this moment. And they're doing it at a level which just frankly is unfair. There should be no reason that there

are not clawbacks on OAS that let's say are equivalent to the clawbacks that are imposed on young families related to the access of daycare and daycare benefits or other family benefits. And those usually kick in at around $75,000 of combined income. Less than half of what the cutoff is for the boomers. So I don't know, Janice. I agree with you, by the way. Let me just interrupt. I feel slightly, I feel like a scold here.

But the point is that if we don't address these issues, we are literally allocating scarce public dollars to a cohort in society who, understandably no fault of their own, are demonstrably unproductive because they're not working, who aren't particularly active consumers because they've left their income growing family formation years. we are we are burying ourselves in a in a demographic cohort that is literally smothering the the optimism and potential of the very young people that politicians and that very same cohort professed to be so committed to and dedicated to advancing the interests of younger Canadians it's all just frankly bull s h-i-t okay Yeah. So look, I think you've given us a great story here. We should be calling back at the same income level for seniors as we are for daycare. In fact, you could argue that daycare ceiling should be hired because young families have more expenses than seniors. They figured out their housing

by now one way or the other. So some of that you can fix if there was really transparency about fairness. But there's a much bigger problem coming down the road, Rudyard. What is a 21st century economy in which AI has reshaped entirely the workforce and robots are in factories? You know what we see it best, by the way, in China? China has more robots in its factories than all the rest of the world combined. What's here with unemployment in China? Through the roof. So we have a bigger issue here as Canada has to move away from the economy we've had and invest in the economy we need to build for the 21st century. How do we create employment for young people so that they can actually own a house and say you can't fix that through government policy? You can't.

It's not entitlement. One thing you don't do is you don't engage in mass migration and bring in millions of foreign students under visas who then compete directly with both, you know, Canadian-born citizens and Canadian citizens who have immigrated to Canada through the point system and other means that have assessed either their or their family skills. So that's another factor here, that another burden that young people are carrying right now, which is the complete mismanagement of our immigration system over the last half decade. And, you know, a flux of migration into the country, which has flooded the job market with a lot of supply. And what happens when you have a lot of supply?

Demand goes down. Corporations don't have to invest in productivity because they substitute expensive productivity investments with cheaper labor. So, you know, young people were locked up during COVID to protect older people when, frankly, we know that their health risks during COVID were very low to zero in terms of, so they, they're education. were disrupted, their careers were disrupted, and now, wow, we just had an election where, I don't know, if I'm 55, so I'm kind of out of the- At the leading edge of the boomers. Yeah, I mean, I'm not part of this cohort, so I'm speaking for a group that I don't belong to, but I really, I have a lot of them that I work with, that I'm just amazed at their smartness,

their skills, their dedication, and I just consistently worry about the type of society, and this is both political parties in this election, awarded more money to older Canadians by enhancing benefits, both the liberals and the conservative to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. We should not do that. And what would be a really great challenge

to the two parties as they unroll over the next three or four years? What does the youth agenda really look like? What does it really mean to invest? best in young people and to build a kind of economy which will enable young people to thrive. We have to change the dial on this. And let me just say, we have to focus our immigration system on attracting the highest skilled people that we need to build that economy for the next 40 years. I think our biggest challenge, the biggest challenge that Canada faces is to retool its economy.

Let me rant from one minute here, Richard. You know, we're talking a lot about the auto sector right now. Well, President Trump is causing untold damage with tariffs to save auto sector jobs that will be gone in 10 years. Let's just understand. There will be 3D printers and robots riveting these parts together. And look at the way he's twisting the U.S. economy out of shape to save jobs. They won't be here. What are we doing in Canada in response to those tariffs?

We're doubling down on a sector that will be changed beyond recognition and will not provide those kinds of jobs for young people. So I look at all this and I say, we're not living in the real world. frankly. Yeah. Well, we are in the real world here at Friday Focus as we are each and every Friday for you. And if you enjoy this program, please consider becoming a donor for as little as $25 a year. You get the entire back half of each and every episode.

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