The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump cancels trade talks with Canada and targets Russia with sanctions

Episode Date: October 24, 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 start the show with the big news stories coming out of Gaza this week: the public executions Hamas is conducting in the Gaza strip in order to terrorize and intimidate civilians, and the Israeli government's growing concern that Hamas is breaking the ceasefire deal by not returning all of the dead hostages as agreed upon. How will rival Gaza clans thwart Hamas's attempt to cling to power? Could Gaza be on the verge of a civil war? How fast can you get a rudimentary police force to make Hamas pull back? And perhaps most importantly, who would want to go in there? Janice is optimistic that this time, at least, the Arab world is taking ownership over this problem in a way they never have before. In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to an important phone call that took place this week between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin just ahead of Zelensky's visit today to Washington, where the Ukrainian President intends to make the case for long-range Tomahawk missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia. The transfer of these weapons, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned this week, could lead to nuclear war. Meanwhile, Europeans have never been more scared, interpreting Russia's drone excursions into NATO territory as preparation for a larger war with the continent. Are weak European governments using the bogeyman of Russia to rally their public to distract from domestic problems and rising populism? Everybody is rolling the dice here, and when you do that there is always a chance that someone will miscalculate, and everyone will pay the heavy price. 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 24th of October 2025. I'm Richard Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined by... by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Well, Janice, I was going to give you a hard time for not being in the studio this week. But given the news of this morning, it's kind of cool that we actually have you coming to us from Washington, D.C., because that is the epicenter of Canadians' news feeds this morning as the president cancels trade talks with Canada.

Why don't you explain to our audience what the latest news is and why we're? we're hearing a supposed suspension in trade negotiations between Canada and the United States. This is frankly registered one of the more bizarre episodes that you could imagine. Doug Ford ran a video of Ronald Reagan in which the Great Reaper explained why tariffs are not a smart strategy that they may be appealing. But then he went on to say in his unique way, that actually they backfire, that over time they hurt the economy, they hurt growth, they raise prices and they hurt consumers. Now, what makes this story, I have to say, really bizarre is apparently Donald Trump saw

that video a few days ago, but did not react in this virulent way. Something must have happened again. Somebody must have brought it to his attention and really jabbed at him because last night in a tweet, all trade talks are off with Canada. Doesn't distinguish between Ontario, between the Premier of Ontario and the Prime Minister of Canada, and soft trade talks that allegedly were going very well and there are, we're rumors flying everywhere that a deal was coming next week. Yeah, so just to add some detail to this, just to catch our listening audience up. And by the time people are tuning into this, the Ontario government may obviously have back flipped, pulled the ad, apologized profusely to the president and launched a new ad series,

lotting Donald Trump's, you know, amazing accomplishments as a transformative leader, to quote Mark Carney's words when he visited the president in the White House. I digress. But we can get into what this says about the trade negotiations. It is important to note this was not an insignificant ad buy. It was $75 million across a variety of media markets in the United States, a lot of them in swing states, and supposedly ad purchases in Washington, D.C., including during game seven of whatever DC station was showing the World Series

with the Dodger, with the Mariners and the Blue Jays, sorry, the run-up to the World Series that's now happening. So you have to wonder if maybe the president tuned into the ball game and not only saw his beloved American team go down to defeat, he also saw this ad. It is not an AI ad. It is, it's not a deep fake, as the president seems to somehow

allude to in his tweet, it is in fact the words of the Gipper. And Janice, I'm sure this is like the digital services tax like retaliatory tariffs, there will be a flurry, a scramble this morning and Canadian officials again will kind of come on bended knee and genuflect to try to appease Trump's anger. Let's set that aside for a moment.

I would say what this suggests is just how utterly impossible it is to negotiate with this president. And the extent to which something I think that we all fear, but maybe didn't want to say the quiet part out loud, is that you simply cannot trust his word. We have no idea what could set him off at any time in the future after any type of agreement, whether it be a sectoral agreement, or 12, 18 months from now, some larger agreement around whatever comes after, NAFTA and Kuzma. This is an erratic, volatile, possibly unhinged person who presents, does it not yet, as you someone who thought about negotiating a lot in your career in different scenarios and situations, presents today an object lesson, an example of just how,

impossible he is to deal with. You're absolutely right. Look, the prime minister cannot control what ad by any premier in this country makes. You know, you may pick up the phone and you might want to say, this is we're in the final week here, Lalo brother, until we get this over the line. but ultimately, you and I both know at your premiers are going to do, what premiers are going to do,

and sometimes some premiers, not Duck Ford actually, but some premiers relish making statements that get picked up elsewhere that Prime Ministers of Canada wish they wouldn't say. So the fact that an ad buy,

I understand it's a significant ad buy, And it was funny because I am in Washington, D.C., so it was late at night, and I took the opportunity to watch that Game 7 series again between the Blue Jays and the Mariners. When I was relaxed and wasn't worried about the outcome, and there was a fair audience for that game in the Washington D.C. area. So you may well be right. But it all doesn't matter, because when you're official, are inches away from signing a sectoral agreement, which is what is coming. It's limited. It's not by any means the whole bell of wax, but it is something. And, you know, hundreds of hours of effort have been, you know, but both teams has been put in. And then he blows it up in a moment of peak and anger. There's a schedule meeting between,

Prime Minister Carney and President Trump in Korea, within a few days at the APEC summit where both of them are going. And they were scheduled to sign the deal. So how, you know, I'm frankly at a loss. Janice, let's just talk about this because again, we don't know, but there could be a different story to tell here.

You know, prior to this bizarre bleat by the president, president, Mark Carney said three things in the preceding 24 hours. He gave a speech in Ottawa, a primetime televised address that I think many people commented on was strangely absent significant news that would warrant a primetime television address by a prime minister. In that address, he reiterated once again that the relationship with Ottawa and Washington was changed forever and effectively the United States for now and for the foreseeable future were not a reliable partner then the next day in comments to the media he made two more statements one he poured cold water on the idea that a sectoral deal was

imminent he said things still need to be you know worked out I'd kind of hold your horses on that and then he added to that in a separate interview with the Toronto Star that that autos were not part of any deal foreseeable at any time in the near to mid future, and that basically everything outside of possibly some very narrow sectoral considerations on aluminum steel would have to be taken up by the renegotiation of NAFTA. So if I try to put these these different dots together and draw my own with my own little etcher sketch, maybe this week was not a good week for the conversations going on between Washington and Ottawa. Maybe when it came down to either the concessions that the Americans were asking to give some sectoral relief,

supposedly relief that was only going to be based on a quota system, not free, tariff-free sale of aluminum or steel. Maybe Canada balked. Maybe rightly so what the Americans were asking. Maybe the Americans weren't happy with what we were willing to give. Maybe this bleat by the president, in fact, is the papering over, as he often does, of his own failures by blaming other people. I mean, this is classic Donald Trump. if there was not going to be an agreement and he got frustrated, it's never his fault,

it's always someone else's fault, and he seized on this ad as the excuse. Look, that's entirely possible. You know, I think Donald Trump, who knows, Russia, this is, you know, so unconventional, so outside the box, frankly, that I really don't know. In the past, when deals have blown up, Donald Trump usually comes out in a fairly aggressive, swinging. This is pretty aggressive. This is pretty swinging.

Well, no, he just had all right dogs are off. Usually he blames it on the other side, right? He says, and the language gets more and more colorful. He didn't do that this time. He certainly all Drake talks are rough, but over and that's not even a good look for him, Reddard. So, you know, I think what it, I think, you know, you're onto something here when you talk about this. This was a narrow deal.

And it actually, I think, would have been tough for the prime minister and the prime minister's team. the best part of the deal was going to be on aluminum, which the Americans really need from us. But then there was certainly a quota system going in for steel. That's not new. We've had quotas. We have quotas in the dairy sector that we've lived with. And there was something on energy there.

But this was far from the expectations of a comprehensive deal that would get us. out the other side of the renewal, which is itself a question, right, of the renewal of Cosma. So this is relatively speaking for the steel and aluminum sectors. This really mattered.

But it was an aerial deal. It wasn't a big win for the prime minister either. So there was a tone of dissatisfaction. There's no question in what he did this week. Was that enough to question? Any coincidence? that today we're also hearing from the federal government in Canada that it is reimposing a 25% retaliatory tariffs on Canadian firms American-owned like Stalantis,

but based in Canada, who are bringing auto parts over the border from the United States into Canada. Why would you do that if you were close? close to, you know, some kind of sectoral deal. Wouldn't that similarly suggest Janice the possibility that, for whatever set of reasons, the conversations were not progressing in the way that either party wanted? You know, the Stalantis issue, you know, Richard, is a big deal because Stalantis announced that they were going to be moving some of their manufacturing from Canada's United States, Minister

Lee held a press conference, and it was a very irritated tone in her voice, and as you said, there's no deal on auto. So the Solanta story, I think, to me, isn't

a leading indicator that things have gone off the rails on steel and aluminum. But I think the bigger points is the one you made right at the beginning. This is the most volatile president. How How do you negotiate with somebody like this? Where you put in months and months of effort and then on a tweet on true social.

You know, I don't know what time this came out last night. It's all off. It's almost impossible. And look, one of the consequences here, Richard, it's not so much that the deal didn't get done. Who knows, frankly, whether it will get done or not. it might well get done. It's the uncertainty premium for our businesses in this country. There is a deal coming.

No, there's not a deal coming. There is a deal coming. All talks are off. If you're a CEO in this country and you're trying to make investment decisions that are longer-term investment decisions and you're dealing with this kind of uncertainty, there is a real premium attached to that, frankly. And it's not in any of these sectors. it's a look at the broader economic climate.

Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. Is this all another tackle by the president as he tried to use this as a tool to extract more concessions like he did with the digital services tax and there were talatory tariffs. Those were preconditions for reopening negotiations. Are we back in a negotiation to reopen negotiations?

or is it as simple as pulling this at and tucking our elbows down firmly to, you know, the sides of our increasingly skinny ribs as the economy is hollowed out by the, as you say, the instability and certainty of these tariffs. Well, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers, Janus, because we've got to dig into some other international news on the back half of the show. that's exclusive to donors to the monk debates. You can become a donor for as little as $25 a year. You get a charitable tax receipt.

If you're a Canadian resident, you can do that right now at triple-w.munk debates. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Back in a moment with our monk donors. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com.

Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode, and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now, by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates at Triple W. Monk Debates, MUNK, Debates with an S.com.