The Munk Debates Podcast - Putin's hold over Trump and Pierre Poilievre makes a stunning accusation

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

To listen to the full episode 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. Rudyard and Andrew begin with the war in Ukraine and Trump denying Zelensky's request for Tomahawk long range missiles. Russia has suffered mass casualties - more than 400,000 dead and many more wounded - and shows no signs of weakening Ukraine's resolve, and yet all it takes is one phone call from Putin for Trump to reverse track and breathe new life into Russia's war effort. Trump's fickle support begs an important question: What can we do to strengthen ties with allies and even adversaries to protect ourselves from instability south of the border? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Andrew turn to a bombshell accusation from Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre that the RCMP covered up crimes committed by Justin Trudeau. This is an irresponsible accusation that suggests Poilievre is not leadership material. And while his behaviour plays well to the party's base, it spooks moderate Conservatives. How can any leader straddle this cultural divide?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.

Can we say with any confidence that by the end of the century, we'll still control all of our territory? And I think it's very worrying. I think I don't worry about people invading Toronto tomorrow, but I really worry, and a lot of other people do, that some power or other is going to set up shop in the north just to see what we do. And what would we do? Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. I'm Roger Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates. A real pleasure to welcome back into the studio, Andrew Coyne, columnist with the Globe of Mail. We've been having these weekly conversations, Andrew, getting a great response from our membership.

So thank you again for being here in person and having these chats about everything that's going on in this crazy world. I enjoy them. Let's start on the international front. You've been following the war in Ukraine closely. You're someone I would give kudos to seeing this war in broader strokes than just simply a conflict over territory. In some ways, it's a verdict to judgment on the future of the West. as much as anything else. We saw, in a sense, a pretrial hearing. Another one in that regard in the White House this week. It's supposedly tempestuous meeting between the president and Zelensky around the issue of

Tomahawk missiles. This follows the president's pattern of a conversation with Vladimir Putin and then attack back towards the Kremlin and towards Russia's interests in this conflict. What do you make of this? And where do you think this is going to land if it can land anywhere under the supposed leadership of Donald J. Trump? Well, let's just stop and take stock of what you've just recounted. The president of the United States is a man of such a, let's say, variable disposition that on one day he can be more or less promising, certainly giving the indication that he'd be willing to give Tom Oaks to the Ukrainians, was talking in terms of Russia being a paper

Tiger. This time we mean it. This time we're in favor. We're actually going to line up behind Ukraine. I think Pete Hegseth made some remarkable statements to that effect. And then it only takes his one phone call from Vladimir Putin to change that. There's a couple of theories about what's going on. One is, if you were of a mind to, you might say, if it was another president, he might say, oh, he's playing a game here. He's seeming to give aid and comfort to the Ukrainians, but it's all just a game. And then he pulls the rug away. And he's playing some kind of mind. game or torture on them. I've seen some versions of that. Or there's the more persuasive one, it seems to me, which is he'd literally be tugged back and forth depending on who talked to him

last. But his default is certainly to favor the dictator, to favor the stronger partner as he sees them, stronger an antagonist as he sees them. What seemed to push him, if at all, towards the Ukraine's front is the idea that Ukraine was actually starting to win. They're doing a lot of damage to the Russian economy. that remarkable thing where they let off all those drones from inside Russian territory was a master stroke, not just militarily, but in terms of changing the narrative that the Russians were going to inevitably win. Certainly when you look at the conduct of the war over the last few months, the economist

just did an estimate where they now, the top end estimate is now that the Russians have suffered casualties of 1.4 million men, of which about 400,000, uh, kitchens, uh, koreau, killed. And just to put that in perspective, the Russians were, the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan having lost, I think it was 18,000 killed. So this is just a catastrophe on World War 1 scale. So how anybody could look at that and say, oh, the Russians are the stronger antagonist. But I've now formed a theory of Trump. Okay. Another theory of Trump. You know the movie, the Manchurian candidate. There's a common mistake where people think that the Manchurian candidate was the Raymond Shaw

character. The GI, the P.O.W. comes back who's been brainwashed to program to kill, et cetera. It's not, of course, the Manchurian candidate in that film, the candidate that is favored is the, is the blowhard senator John Iceland, who's a kind of a McCarthyite type, who is sort of manipulated by his wife. And with Trump, I think he's kind of a combination of the two, right? He's the blowhard idiot. But he also seems to be weirdly programmed on remote. by Putin, all it takes is one phone call. Yes. Why don't you take some time to play some solitaire, Raymond, you know?

One phone call from Putin, and he just reverses track. It's just an extraordinary statement of where we are. Fortunately, I think Ukraine is in strong enough position that they are not beholden to Donald Trump. They obviously would like his help, would like the Tomok missiles, et cetera. the Europeans, it's taken them maybe 20 tries, but they do seem to be slowly figuring out that they cannot shove this off on the American, certainly not on Trump. And you are seeing the Europeans stepping up gradually. The most promising development recently was the, I think it was England, Britain, France, and a couple other countries coming around to the idea of let's use the money from frozen Russian assets to support the Ukrainian war effort.

But they've had to be sort of tugged slowly into making that decision. But that is very, very promising. So if you step back from it, this is such a disaster militarily for the Russians. They are so no sign whatsoever of weakening Ukraine's resolve or its military capacity. That is ominous for the Russian cause. The problem is it's been such a disaster for Putin that he cannot agree to a peace deal. Yeah. There's not going to be, in my opinion, a negotiated settlement of this.

Yeah. Too much blood and treasure. You know, there's precedent in Russia for what happens when you lose a disastrous war. And you think about those troops returning from the front line in Ukraine, who many of them will be deeply, deeply embittered. And there's real echoes of 1917 there. So that's a, you know, you don't want to have to put it that way. But you just cannot see any way this ends except with the defeat of one side or the other. Yeah. It's interesting if you think of those numbers of the economists, 400,000 war dead, 1.4 million injured.

That's a ratio of fatalities to casualties that exceeds the First World War. I believe the First World War was 1 in 6. World War II was 1 in 10. So the lethality of that battlefield must just be. Well, and it's partly in the nature of Russian military tactics and Russian military code of how much priority do you put on saving human life. And so, yeah, it's not surprising to see a higher. I think it's 1.4 million combined killed and wounded of which 400,000 dead. That is a higher ratio, if it's true.

And I think it's, it very much speaks to the Russian military code and military culture. The key issue that seemed to come up in the White House, again, we're getting this all secondhand, but it seemed to be as if Trump was saying that Ukraine should give up the land that Russia has illegally, conquered and appropriated. In effect, awarding the victor in the framework of the post-World War II order of respect for sovereignty and territorial borders, as in a sense one of the Secresect building blocks of the modern world that we live in. I don't assume that the president necessarily has any understanding of just how radical a precedent that would be and what it might set with regards to Taiwan or maybe what it might set in the president's mind with regards to Greenland, Canada,

or Panama. But around the president, there is an American security establishment that consists of the U.S. Senate, that consists of the U.S. military, the State Department, the intelligence agency. Surely, Andrew, there is a sense that what's at stake here is significant. And if Putin walks away with Donetsk, Le Hans, these provinces, and keeps them as Russian territory indefinitely for now an all-time forward. That is a huge shame on the West. Of course it is, but it doesn't matter in this White House. First of all, you've got not only Trump, but you've got Steve Whitkoff, who is just to figure out

a fiction. You cannot believe the stuff that comes out of his notes. So if you thought Trump was a unique, naive, if that's the right word, when it comes to dealing with Putin, Wittkoff. just absolutely credulously reports back every Russian talking about. And then Trump then repeats them back to Zelensky, which is also remarkable. If there was another president, I could imagine another president very short-sightedly, but thinking he was being very, you know, this is the way of the world,

face it Zelensky, you can't win and, you know, trying to impose some deal. As I say, out of a kind of a short-sighted feeling like he was being very hard-headed and realistic. And in fact, as you say, just entirely giving away the game. I could imagine some kind of president doing something as stupid as that. In Trump's case, he's not just doing that. He is citing Putin's talking points back to Zelensky. We've talked about this before. This isn't just Trump doing these things for public relations purposes, whatever perverted public relations purpose that might serve. This is in private conversations, and they've been reported out by the financial times, et cetera, basically screaming at him. Yeah. Things like,

they've put the two provinces in their constitution. And as Zelensky said, so if I put two parts of the Russian Federation in my constitution, do they have to give them up to me? If I put New Jersey in my constitution, are you handing it over? So that's what's, again, we talk about this so often. You can analyze Trump on various levels, and the mistake is to analyze it as being merely cynical. It's way worse than that. Putin exercises some kind of mind control on them.

I really think it's the most plausible explanation is some combination of he just digs Putin personally and or. Compromon. Well, the compromise thing I think is the least persuasive. It's possible. I'm not saying it's not possible. It may well be that the Russians have whatever it is in the Epstein files. I'd be surprised if they didn't. And maybe that's somewhere in the background as an additional factor.

But when you see how many times Trump talks about other dictators besides Putin, in admiring an admiring way sometimes bordering on the homoerotic he seems to have a particular like he'll talk about how good they look physically you know I just think he is he wants to be a dictator

on that scale anyway he admires that kind of show of force he'll talk often about I know he loves Gis parade they're tough they're smart he'll use these kinds of language and so it wouldn't wouldn't be that hard and you know who was it

The former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, talked about how Trump around Putin is like a schoolboy around his, you know, athlete idol, like, you know, the star baseball player or something. Like he talks to him in a very deferential way. And you can see how it really literally in this case seems to have been one phone call that turned around what had been about a week of a month or more of just sharply deteriorating relationship between the White House and Kremlin. And pro-Ukrainian rhetoric. Yeah.

And people were cautioning people, I think quite rightly, you know, people who are quite savvy about this were saying, okay, wait for it. You know, yeah, he's talking pretty good about Ukraine now. But if you think he's fundamentally changed his mind, you know, dream on. Yeah. The land part of this, as Canadians, should we take maybe some special attention and concern about this, the extent to which if the president is urging a concession, the pernament expunging of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of Ukraine permanently into Russian hands, to what extent is that part, again, of some kind of psychology of the strong man, that the ultimate kind of sign of membership in the strong man's club

is this act, this very particular act of conquest. And to what extent does Trump fantasize about replicating that very specific act? We know how he mused about Greenland. We know how he talked about the Panama Canal. We know how he initially talked about Canada. That seemed to peter out a bit over the summer. But one has to wonder if there's something lurking here. Well, we have to be very concerned, whether you're specifically concerned about Trump himself.

And I forget whether we've talked about this, but we've had a 150 year run in this country where we control the second largest land mass in the world with originally with 4 million people in 1867, now with 40 million, but it's still fairly ludicrous, right? We cannot defend all that landmass by ourselves. And we didn't think we needed to for 150 years because we had oceans on three sides and we had the frozen tundra that nobody wanted to venture into. And as the ultimate backstop, we had the Monroe Doctrine. The United States would not tolerate foreign powers setting foot on North American soil.

Well, we can't count on any of those things anymore. The ocean's not the barrier that they were 100 years ago. The frozen tundra is not so frozen. You have the additional factor that there are extremely valuable resources up there. And I think it is a very, open and disturbing question as we go forward. Let's leave aside, you know, immediate threats. But this century, can we say with any confidence that by the end of this century we'll still control all of our territory? And I think it's very worrying. I think I don't worry about people

invading Toronto tomorrow, but I really worry and a lot of other people do that some power or other is going to set up shop in the north just to see what we do. And what would we do? And we didn't have to answer that question in the past because if anybody did that, they'd have to deal with the United States. In the current situation, you would absolutely say, what bet would you have that Trump wouldn't say, give me a piece of the action? Well, let's run that scenario. The Russians have a very large Arctic force, significant submarine, but more importantly, land forces that are specifically trained largely because of Finland. But generally, they have forces deployed, Archangel, these historic former Soviet cities that are right up against the Arctic Circle.

Imagine the Russians started one of their little green men type, you know, movie, Saturday movie specials that they played successfully in Crimea, that they seem to be playing with drones right now over a number of European northern countries. How would Canada react to them? Who can say? I mean, what would we threaten them with? Or, you know, one step back from that, Supposing they just, you know, set up a mineral extraction facility of some kind.

Right. You know, it... Or started deep sea mining inside our territory. That's right. I mean, we'd probably start with water. I mean, we've already had fights with the Americans over the Northwest Passage. And frankly, we don't necessarily have the strongest legal case there. But we have a pretty strong legal case to the territory.

But it might start with offshore things, again, just to rattle us, to see what we do. to see what the Americans do. I mean, the Chinese are doing this in the South China Sea with the Philippines, Monday through Sunday. Exactly. So, you know, it would probably start with low-scale things that you then escalate, and you just keep pushing, keep pushing to see whether anybody pushes back. So this is deeply disturbing.

And I'll give you another scenario, which is in terms of territorial integrity. We are about to deal with at least one, maybe two secessionist questions. None of this is guaranteed, but if you had to bet if there was an election tomorrow, the PQ would probably win in Quebec. And the vote is so split in Quebec. You've got to vote, I think you have five different parties with more than 10% of the vote, that you could see the PQ winning a majority with 30% of the vote or something insane. But a majority is a majority, you know, and they may, if they feel they can, he certainly talked about in the past about holding a referendum by the year 2030. So supposing that at least gets revved up as a question. And supposing simultaneously we're dealing with something in Alberta,

maybe not of that scale, but it's certainly something that's feeding into the debates about pipelines, et cetera. In the past, we would have counted on the Americans to be at worst neutral. You know, this is for Canadians to decide. At best, a la Bill Clinton in 1994, sending a pretty strong signal.

They prefer a much prefer a United Canada. Would you bet on that with Trump? Right. Where'd you bet he'd give aid and comfort to one or both of these things just to show his mastery or to be mischievous or what have you. We have these stories about these separatist cooks in Alberta going down and meeting with their fellow. They claim meeting with cabinet officials. Fellow cooks in Washington.

Any previous administration it was said they're fantasizing. Right. I can't say that with certainty at all about this. So that's another territorial question that you might have been more sanguine about in the past, but with the current occupant in the White House, you cannot be. Final question before we segue to the back half of the show, exclusive for monk donors. What does Canada do about this?

We are obviously continuing to support Ukraine to the extent we can with some ornaments, but more importantly, $8. We're going to see in this budget, November 4th, most likely probably a significant increase in defense expenditures. Is there anything else that we should be? be thinking about, are there other allies we should be courting? I note that, you know, the Carney government seems to have opened up, at least the beginnings of a conversation with China for the first time. We'll see where that goes. If the threats are as multi-layered as they are

and are in a sense historically radical as they are, that primarily the United States has emerged as a threat to us, maybe it seems as if our response right now is still fairly conventional. It's a response that is probably ultimately wishing this all away, as opposed to maybe being a little bit more forward-leaning, a little more pessimistic, maybe a little more realistic about what the 21st century is going to look like. Yeah, I mean, and there's no simple solution to this. You know, let's tilt towards China. Well, you know, the Chinese are not our friends. The Chinese are, you know, interfering in our elections, kidnapping our citizens, intimidating the diaspora, probably involved in some way in disinformation campaigns.

Tariffing us? Putting, slapping tariffs on our exports, you know, and a hundred other things besides. And profess to be an Arctic power also. Well, that's right. And at some point before long, may be involved in a hot war in Taiwan. They're foolish enough to take that on. You talked about how the Ukraine war is about the whole future of the West. It's also about the future of the East.

And one of the many things the Ukrainians are doing for the world is demonstrating how hard it is to take territory that is fiercely defended by people defending their homeland. And you best believe the Taiwanese would be every bit as tough to take over as Ukraine is with the addition of whatever it is 100 miles of water in between them. So, you know, tilting towards China is not. not only supposedly we're going to just forgive and forget everything that's happened in the past, but it's also setting us up for future trouble, both because we're going to say we may find ourselves on the opposite sides of a war, but also, you know, surely one of the things we've learned is that trade with China becomes a weapon against us. The more that we are exposed to China, the more that we depend upon sales to China. First of all, that gives them something to blackmail us

with, as they've been doing with canola. But also, some of the things they want to export to us are frankly things that could be used against us as well. You know, remember the whole thing with the phone company, Huawei, the phone company. Yeah, Huawei. And, you know, and our cell phone networks. So not to say we shouldn't trade with them at all, but let's just be realistic about what's involved there.

There's things we can do to try to expand our alliances, et cetera, but nobody's going to go to war for us against the United States of America. I never came to that. But what we can do is things on our own. So sign up. every free treaty we can, be as responsible, a military allies we can, especially to our NATO partners as distinct from NATO itself, which is a, you know, that's a very weird organization

right now with the United States being a lead partner and having very different agenda than the rest of NATO. But we can absolutely build up our military. We can absolutely build up our intelligence assets. So why do we not have an external intelligence agency like most world powers do. You know, what can we do to buttress our national police force, which is a mess, and it's particularly a mess in the nexus between policing and intelligence, which keeps giving us fits where things fall in between them and nothing gets done about either from either side. So there's things we can do to bulk ourselves up there. There's things we can do to bulk up our economy, both in terms of just increasing national productivity, and there's a whole suite

of policies that are involved there so that we can afford this. military buildup, but also specifically making ourselves so attracted to foreign investment that even with the imposition of tariffs, people will still want to invest here and locate a plant here because it'll still pay them to locate in Canada. So there's a bunch of things we can do basically on our own for ourselves that can at least make us more resilient, make us less blackmailable. But are we going to be able to make Donald Trump not put tariffs on us, make the Chinese go away. No, these are things that are going to continue to plague us.

And they're not necessarily things we can assault, but there may be things we can endure. Yeah. Just finally, because it was the subject of your new book, A Crisis of Canadian Democracy. Is our democracy and institutions part of this response? I don't think we're thinking that way, though. I think we've set it aside.

It's something that people go up to Ottawa, they do things or they don't. And we don't think of, of our democracy as a kind of a strategic asset in this very uncertain century. Well, and thank you for raising that because it's 100% of the case. Democracy is a national unity policy. Democracy is a national security policy because both of those things require a nation that thinks of itself as a nation, a polity that thinks of itself as a polity, people who feel

that they are in it together, even if they have fights and arguments that ultimately they are in it together. If you want people to make sacrifices for the common good, they have to feel like they're being heard. They have to feel like even if the decision goes there doesn't go their way, that they'll they'll be at least be heard or in some cases compensated or their grievances addressed in some way. We don't have a democratic set of democratic institutions that really does that. We have an electoral system that basically encourages the country to divide into regional blocks, encourages the politics to match. We have a parliament that does not, people across the country do

not view as a meaningful institution in which they are meaningfully represented and therefore do not view the government as being really accountable to that parliament. And therefore, it's very easy for them to say, I didn't vote for this. Why are you doing this to us? And this comes up time and time again. So what tends to happen or has happened in decades past is one of two things, when we have big national challenges, as we do now, is either we ignore them because we don't want to get into the unity fights that might come up. So we just push it off and punt it. Or when governments do address it, not necessarily with the right policies, but policies that they think are addressed to these big national challenges, they get elected with 37% of the vote from

one part of the country, mostly, ram it through, and then, you know, the mayhem that ensues. And of course, the example par eminence would be the national energy policy. You know, the liberals had two seats west of Ontario at the time. They had 74 seats in Quebec. If we had an electoral system where they had to win seats across the country and where they therefore had many more seats from the west and many fewer seats from Quebec,

would they have ever tried such a policy? Probably not. But isn't what's different now, though, Andrew, is that China and Russia, for example, are out there with crowbars looking for the cracks. And they're looking for it in our democracy. It's not necessarily our economy right now or the military or some land incursion.

It is literally the focus of their efforts is our democracy. And if that wasn't assigned to all of us, that this is what we should be focusing on. What we should be trying to shore up is what they're attacking because they're attacking it because they see a value in that assault. And we're treating the assault as if it's, I don't know, some kind of sideshow to what your title of your book is, the crisis of Canadian democracy. This is such a good point. The Russians in particular have been geniuses at this. Using on digital. Across the Western world.

They have been basically driving half the population crazy. Putting people at each other's throats. Encouraging a belief that nothing is true and everything is true at the same time. In some cases, setting up paid assets to run in elections. You know, my line, you should never believe in conspiracy theories unless they involve Russia in which case you should believe all of them. Because time and again, it turns out that that person you suspected of being on the Russian dime is on the Russian dime.

So they have been using our liberal democracy, you know, against ourselves, using social media in particular as a vehicle for this. And that is crucial to this country because, you know, I talk a lot in the book about the failings of our institutions. What I don't perhaps give enough emphasis to is that we've had an offsetting strength in our democratic culture in this country. There's a basic decency, a basic willingness to talk to each other, accommodate each other that is part of our DNA. And in the people we elect, you know, it's dependent upon decent chaps running things far too much because sometimes you're not going to get decent chaps. Up till now, we've had people who, you know, we can talk about it as we will in a bit that haven't always been.

fundamentally decent, but we, you know, we've had by world standards, reasonably non-corrupt politics. But can you can't hold on all that continuing as we go forward when you've got people trying to poison the political culture. And at that point, the weaknesses in your political institutions that you've been able to get away with until now really start to tell. At that point, some of the worst case scenario has become possible. So again, we've had a good run where we didn't have to have very strong political institutions because we had a reasonably healthy political culture. If that culture is decaying and eroding under pressure, still, you know, that's still to be played for. But if that's one of the challenges, then, and I'll

give you another example. You know, we have a long history of quote-unquote shenanigans in our party races, in our nomination races, in our leadership races, busloads of instant members, the names of the dead being added to the voter, all kinds of things that, you know, in years past, we would have had a good laugh about, ha, ha, you know, don't do that, you naughty people. Now there's a troll farm in Bulgaria that's using weaponizing this content. And now you've got those instant members

have been signed up by China. And used to decide nomination races, which have turned out to be the vulnerability point in our democracy. Nobody's going to mess with our paper balloting system in the general election. That's pretty tamper-proof. But the nomination races, it's as easy as pawn.

And have we fixed that yet, Andrew? Are we done anything substantive of the nominations? No. It's been talked about. It was certainly talked about in the report of the public inquiry into the foreign interference. But the parties have resolutely taken the stand that this is an internal matter. Right. We're a private organization.

Funded by tax firms. They're not exactly. They're not private organizations. Not only are they public and funded, but they are machines for seeking power over the rest of us. Yes. This isn't the chess club that just wants to play. play chess and be left alone, right? These are power-seeking organizations, and it's preposterous. But Catch 22, how do you legislate regulations on party races unless the parties who control

legislation unless they agree? Yeah. And so, you know, very little, if anything has been done. Yeah. The parties generally insist that either there's no problem or that they will deal with it, and then they don't. But it hasn't just been nomination races. We've also had stories about foreign interference in recent leadership races. Have they determined the result? No. But were they trying to get the margins? Of course they were.

Andrew, I love these conversations with you. We go off in interesting directions, but they're all consequential, each and every one of them. So we're going to say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. Stick around, though, if you're a monk donor for a little bonus episode. We're going to talk about Pure Polly up, getting a little trumpy kind of chance of lock, not her up, but lock him up. What's going on is the populist

mind virus taken over our Conservative Party here in Canada? We'll get into that. After the short break, for our monk donors, you can become a monk donor and get the back half of this show as a podcast or a video for only 50 cents a week. Do that now at

triple-w.the-munk debates.com. Thank you for listening to the first half of this monk dialogue with Andrew coin. To access the episode, consider becoming a monk donor. For just $25 a year, you get exclusive access to all of our full-length podcasts in video and audio and all kinds of special offers, perks, and updates, including for upcoming live in-person monk debate events. Simply go to our website, triple-w.munkdebates.com. Click on the join button on the top right-hand corner of the website.

Again, that website is www.munkdebates.com.