Your World Tonight - Trump’s expansionism includes Canada, Liberals plan leadership, tuberculosis in Montreal, and more

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump says he is prepared to use economic force to take over Canada. He says the U.S. is spending billions a year to protect Canada, and it would make sense to make it the 51st state. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted on X: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.” Trump also wouldn’t rule out using the military to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal.And: The federal Liberals are setting the rules for a leadership race, now that Justin Trudeau is stepping down. We’ll have a look at who might run, and what’s ahead for the party. The Conservatives are taking the opportunity to say that no matter who runs for Liberal leader, the ideas will be the same, and it’s time for change.Also: Tuberculosis cases are on the rise in some Canadian cities. Health researchers say TB is affecting newcomers because of lower vaccination rates and wider infection rates in their home countries.Plus: Earthquake in Tibet kills more than 120, Saskatchewan goes after wild pigs, and more.

Mama, look at me. Brum, brum. I'm going really fast. I just got my license. Can I borrow the car, please, Mom? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time. You'll be relieved they have 24-7 roadside assistance with intact insurance. This is a CBC Podcast. Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like. Donald Trump suggests that drawn line, the border, could be erased with what he calls economic force, putting the brakes on the sale of Canadian-made cars, milk, lumber. And Trump repeated his view that Wayne Gretzky would make a great Prime Minister

or Governor. The current PM, Justin Trudeau, has responded saying, there's a snowball's chance in hell of Canada becoming part of the U.S. Welcome to Your World Tonight. It's Tuesday, December 7th, just before 6 p.m. Eastern. I'm Susan Bonner. Speaking of that current p.m., the race is now on to replace him. Canadians didn't get tired of looking at Justin Trudeau's face. It's not like they got sick of his voice. They're suffering under his policies.

The Conservatives are ripping into anyone who's worked with or for the outgoing PM, trying to head off any roadblocks to Pierre Poliev's path to the job. The Liberals say they'll stick to their tried and true process for picking a new leader, despite worries of foreign interference. And of course any candidate will have to state their response to the latest rhetoric from the incoming US president. US President-elect Donald Trump ramped up his economic threats against Canada, voicing his plans for US expansion. Trump says he's prepared to use economic force to effectively turn Canada into a 51st state.

And he doubled down on his plans to impose punishing tariffs as soon as he's inaugurated later this month. Katie Simpson has the story from Washington. This will be the golden age of America. In Donald Trump's vision of this new golden age, the United States will expand to include Canada and Greenland. The Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America and the US will take ownership of the Panama Canal. All remarkable statements in their own right made during a lengthy news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Canada and the United States that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like.

Trump said he would consider using economic force rather than the military to merge Canada and the U.S., also confirming he will go ahead with his plan to impose tariffs on Canadian imports. In another blow to the Canadian economy, he threatened to completely upend supply chains, saying the U.S. doesn't need Canadian automobiles, Canadian dairy or Canadian lumber. We don't need anything they have. But his harshest language involved complaints

about defence spending, how much it costs to protect Canada, and about the trade deficit. Using exaggerated numbers, he described both as subsidies. But why are we supporting a country, 200 billion plus a year, our military is at their disposal, all of these other things, they should be a state. That's what I told Trudeau when he came down. And I said that's okay to have if you're a state,

but if you're another country, we don't want to have it. This puts to bed any question about whether Trump is joking about making Canada the 51st state, crossing the threshold from humiliating joke to what's widely seen as an unwelcome claim. He says he's also serious about annexing Greenland and taking control of the Panama Canal, refusing to rule out using military force to make it happen.

I'm not going to commit to that now. It might be that you'll have to do something. Trump sent his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory, on a fact-finding mission. His plane landing just hours before the president-elect made his renewed threat. People really don't even know if Denmark has an illegal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world.

Trump said so many things at this news conference that on any given day would completely upend the news cycle. A mix of policy changes to exaggerated and false claims. It's a return to the firehose spray of information and misinformation that will set the pace and tone for his second term in office, forcing Canadian officials in Ottawa to scramble to respond. Katie Simpson, CBC News, Washington. The statements from Donald Trump and the force of them took many Canadians by surprise.

Responses have been coming in bits and spurts. Some see the rhetoric as classic Trump negotiating tactic. Others are firing back. Evan Dyer has more. Foreign Minister Melanie Jolie was the first member of the government to respond. In a tweet she said Trump showed a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted shortly afterward that

there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States. Let me be very clear. Canadians do not want to be a part of the United States. New Democrat Judd Meetsingh was in the middle of recording a US podcast when Trump made his remarks. We are proud of our country and if you want to pick a fight with us, it's going to hurt you as well. We don't want that. We want to build a strong relationship where we work together, but I want to send a clear message, if you want to pick a fight with Canada,

we're going to fight back. He later tweeted, cut the crap Donald no Canadian wants to join you. By late afternoon, conservative leader Pierre Poliev also responded, saying Canada will never be the 51st state period. We are a great and independent country. Diplomats and trade experts also weighed in, with some insisting it's all just a tactic to advance Trump's true intentions. Threatening Canada, I guess it sounded like that, but in the final analysis I think it's all about economic. Former U.S. Ambassador Gordon Giffin is in the camp that believes Trump is just trying to extract concessions on trade. It's his way of accelerating or elevating his claims of economic disproportionate benefit in the relationship. But given Conceits, it's not really clear what Trump wants, and he may not know himself. Trade lawyer Martha Harrison.

To me, what he's saying is economically, Canada would be not able to survive without the U.S. and he wants us to react to that and to respond to that. But is that response just giving him some concessions on trade or is the message that the only way Canada can sell into U.S. markets is by joining the U.S.? The date is fast approaching where Canadians will find out just how serious Trump's threats really are. Evan Dyer, CBC News, Ottawa. Coming up on the podcast, the politics of replacing a prime minister, the machinations go well beyond the liberals, a major earthquake in Tibet and the plan to deal with Saskatchewan's wild pig problem.

Donald Trump's comments changed the focus in Ottawa today, but there is still the burning question of who will be the Prime Minister. Parliament is prorogued until late March to buy the Liberals some time to pick a new leader. Tom Perry has more on some of the possible candidates to replace Justin Trudeau. I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister. The process to replace Justin Trudeau is still in its early stages, but a few names have consistently been mentioned as possible successors. Christia Freeland, the former Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolie,

Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, who says he's looking at his options. There's still a lot of things to be considered, the rules that will govern the leadership rights, but it's also time to listen. All these would-be candidates are well known inside Ottawa, but pollster Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, says outside the capital most are not household names,

though all are connected to a liberal government that remains deeply unpopular. The challenge for a lot of these insider candidates is that they will have to overcome the struggle to explain how they are different when they have spent the last so many years very much inside the tent. But Dan Arnold, who oversaw polling for Justin Trudeau's liberals in the past three elections, sees hope. I think anybody who's new is going to be changed. And that gives you a potential to turn things around.

Arnold acknowledges there are no guarantees. He points out in the U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris saw a surge in support when she became the Democratic nominee, then lost the election to Donald Trump. In Canada, John Turner replaced Pierre Elliott Trudeau as Prime Minister in 1984, and was swept out of office that same year by Brian Mulroney. Though to Arnold, today's Liberals have a chance to avoid repeating that history.

A new leader will probably get a look from Canadians and there will be a bit of initial excitement as people look at them. But if they can't sustain that, if they can actually show a positive vision that connects with people liberals will be right back to where they are today under a new leader. Arnold says some potential contenders for the liberal leadership may decide those odds are too long that it may be wiser to wait to see if the Conservatives do win this next election for a moment when voters may get tired of them and decide once again, it's time for a change.

Tom Perry, CBC News, Ottawa. While the Liberals try to refocus, the Conservatives are finessing their aim. The new target? Any Liberal with designs on replacing Trudeau. The new message? It's about the policies, not the person. Catherine Cullen has details. Canadians don't need this uncertainty and chaos.

This was not how Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer had planned to spend his day. His party had intended to use a committee meeting today to try to force a confidence motion to topple the Trudeau government. Instead Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament and kicked off the race to replace him as Liberal leader. We're about to have a leadership race where all the candidates have either voted for or been the chief architects of Justin Trudeau's terrible policies that have inflicted so much misery. And so Scheer says the conservative message won't really change that much. We're going to continue to highlight that regardless of who the Liberal leader happens to be. They are

zeroing in on some potential opponents. They revived references to former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, calling him carbon tax Carney, despite the fact Carney has suggested that policy may have outlived its usefulness. Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland grabbed headlines with her dramatic resignation from cabinet calling out some of Trudeau's policies, but the Conservatives are still keen to tie the two. They took note on Monday when Trudeau said this. Chrystia has been by my side for close to 10 years now. She has been an incredible political partner

through just about everything we have done. Words the Conservatives could try to use against her if she were to be named the next leader. Would they have liked to run against Justin Trudeau? Of course. Gary Keller was chief of staff to former Conservative cabinet minister John Baird and interim leader Ronna Ambrose. He says Trudeau's low poll numbers did make him an ideal opponent. But he says without parliament in session, Pierre Poliev will start his election campaign early. It's a great opportunity to get out, meet voters, communicate that message, and really crisscross the country, courtesy of the government's prerogation.

And Poliev has already been campaigning hard. In a recent interview, he said he did 600 events last year, sometimes 9 or 10 a day on weekends. The Conservatives also have millions more in fundraising. Keller says he'll be watching to see how they deploy that money on ads during award show season and the Super Bowl in February. Conservatives have to be really excited about the opportunity to have this bit of an open goal to try to score as many points.

All while the Liberals try to sort out their own team. Catherine Cullen, CBC News, Ottawa. The company that owns Facebook, Instagram and threads is making dramatic changes to its content moderation. Meta is eliminating its independent fact-checking program in the United States. It's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to explain the decision. In it he says users will be able to call out posts that are potentially misleading or need

more context. He says automated systems will still scan for severe or illegal content such as terrorism or illicit drugs. But hate speech and other types of rule breaking will only be reviewed if someone complains. Zuckerberg says the fact checking system was originally set up after Donald Trump was first elected. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. We're also going to tune our content filters

to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but will also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. Fact-checking groups that work with Metta say the accusation of bias is false. They say they did not remove content that decision is up to Metta. More than 3 billion people use the social media platforms worldwide. Data from just last year shows tuberculosis cases are on the rise in some urban areas,

Toronto and especially Montreal. Jennifer Yoon on what's behind the spread and the risks for Canadians. I had tuberculosis. Ashen skin and bloody handkerchiefs. Tuberculosis may conjure up images of a historical disease, but new data suggests it's very much a modern problem here in Canada. Toronto saw over 350 confirmed cases last year, a slight uptick from the previous year, while Montreal saw a sharp increase from previous years, around 200 cases. The city typically averages around 120 per year. The majority of cases are among individuals exposed abroad.

This is really how TB has spread historically. Many start showing symptoms months or years after arriving in Canada, says Dr. Dick Menzies, the director of the McGill International TB Centre. I think this reflects really large numbers of people who've come in, particularly as refugees or refugee claimants in the last couple of years. TB is an airborne disease. It can live in a person's body for years, even decades, without causing any symptoms. But when the bacteria wakes up, symptoms can include a bloody, hacking cough and weight loss.

Worldwide, TB is the top infectious disease killer, though TB-related deaths are rare in Canada. TB likes crowding, TB likes food insecurity, TB likes poverty. Dr. Ryan Miley is a TB consultant in northern Saskatchewan. He says where he practices, there have been several outbreaks among those staying in homeless shelters or living in crowded situations. The people who are most likely to get sick with TB are the people who are refugees and asylum seekers or people living in inner cities in shelters, etc. Another group with high rates of TB in Canada, Inuit communities up north. Between the 40s and

the 60s, many families were forcibly separated and taken south for TB treatment. And rebuilding trust in public health officials can be challenging, especially when there are record numbers of cases in the northern Quebec region of Nunavik. Dr.assan Cholokov is the clinical lead for infectious diseases in the region. It's about a hundred times the average of other regions in Quebec and if we compare to certain kinds of populations for instance non-indigenous Canadian born now we're talking about a thousand times. And while there's work to do to combat TB like improving detection methods or supporting countries with high incidence rates, doctors say it's important to remember the disease is curable through antibiotics, preventable

through vaccines, and can be eradicated. Jennifer Yoon, CBC News, Montreal. A rescue effort is underway around the foothills of the Himalayas tonight. A deadly earthquake rattled the region. Its epicentre struck near one of Tibet's holiest cities. Tremors were also felt in neighbouring Nepal, Bhutan and India. The full extent of the damage is still coming into focus, Karen Pauls reports. The 7.1 magnitude earthquake captured on surveillance video was in a remote and sparsely populated area in Tibet, close to the border with Nepal, about 80 kilometers north of Mount Everest.

More than 125 are dead, many more are injured. The quake flattened buildings and disrupted power and water, adding to the misery for those left homeless. Temperatures are dropping. This woman says she woke up when her bed started shaking. She and her child left their house for open ground. I am still shaking out of fear and I'm in shock she said. German climber Joost Kobusch was 5700 meters up, Everest, when the earthquake struck. And I saw many avalanches coming down, big chunks of glacier like exploding and a pressure wave hitting my tent.

It was a spicy moment. Kobusch knew there would be aftershocks, so he decided to return to base camp. When I descended, there were some certain sections where I had to walk through that debris. The earthquake was felt hundreds of kilometres away in neighbouring countries, including Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. Yeah, I felt it, yeah. Swetha Sijapati is with Geohazards International, an NGO working to mitigate earthquake, tsunami and landslide risks

in the world's poorest and most at-risk regions. They're retrofitting schools and hospitals in the area, which has frequent seismic activity because it lies near a major fault line of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. Because there are a lot of aftershocks, there can be more potential damage as well. In Canada, the Tibetan and Nepali communities

are watching for news. I have a lot of immediate families and friends there who I'm trying to reach out and try to find out what's happening and how are things there. Ashish Mishra was in Kathmandu in 2015 when an earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people. He moved to Winnipeg four years later. We're keeping our fingers crossed. We don't want a lot of casualties, but I think that's inevitable.

Tibet is administered as an autonomous region within China. From his exile in India, Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, said he is deeply saddened, offering his prayers for those who died and extending his wishes for a swift recovery to the injured. The main Everest climbing season doesn't start for a few months, but Beijing has closed the area and sent in 1,500 first responders. As search and rescue efforts and aftershocks continue. Karen Pauls, CBC News, Winnipeg. For decades, Saskatchewan has been grappling with a feral pig problem.

Now they're hoping to nip it in the snout. The animal can damage crops and spread disease. New rules are in place to control the population, but some critics say those measures are simply hogwash. Alexander Silberman explains. There's a whole bunch of pigs right there. Wild boar roamed the woods on Kelly Redmond's game farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, weighing up to 300 pounds or more than 130 kilograms with tusks, dark hair and barrel-like bodies. The pigs are popular with hunters but outside

the fence they're invasive animals that damage crops and rapidly reproduce. The Saskatchewan government is now cracking down on operations like Redmond's, placing a moratorium on new wild boar farms, adding additional inspections to the more than a dozen that currently exist, and new funding for surveillance. It's like eradicating mosquitoes at this point. Ryan Brook is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and leads the Canadian wild pig research project. He's been charting sightings across Canada for more than a decade and says the new regulations come far too late. Saskatchewan could easily host a million wild pigs and we could and certainly may at some point have more wild pigs than people in Saskatchewan could easily host a million wild pigs and we could and

certainly may at some point have more wild pigs than people in Saskatchewan. In the 1980s the boars were introduced on prairie farms for their meat but some broke free and others were released after the market cooled off. While the Canadian population is unknown the majority of feral swine have been reported in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. South of the border there's an estimated 6 million pigs on the loose, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In Texas, home to the largest population, they're even spreading to urban areas and attacking humans. We certainly don't want to see happen in Canada to what's happened down in places like Texas.

Megan Evans is executive director of the Alberta Invasive Species Council. She says the pigs are harmful beyond crops, ripping up grasslands and killing nesting birds. But the biggest risk... They can host reportable diseases and therefore they could spread them which would be very, very devastating. One of those diseases African swine fever which has spread through wild pigs in several countries. The epidemic that they've been putting out is absolutely false.

At his pig farm Redmond says he doesn't believe the narrative of pigs running wild and questions the need for new regulations. He says his farm already had regular inspections, a license and standards for fencing. You can poll the entire province and ask how many people have seen a boar or hit a boar. You'll get a solid answer that nobody is seeing anything, very, very few. Few sightings, researchers like Brooks say, because feral pigs are nocturnal and good at hiding. He warns better tracking and a national strategy are needed before the population becomes impossible to contain. Alexander Silberman, CBC News, Regina.

Finally, when Margaret and Barry Sharman got married, they hired a photographer and posed for pictures. The date? July 20th, 1968 1968 in Enderby, British Columbia. Times were tight for the young couple, so the photos stayed on the photographer's shelf. They moved away, raised a family. Then just before this past Christmas, Margaret Sharman got a text from a friend. And she said in the text, Margie, have you got your original wedding pictures? And I said, no, Sandy. I said we were never ever able to pick them up

because we didn't have any money. She says, well, I'm looking at them. Someone had bought a box of pictures at a garage sale, then donated them to the local museum in Enderby where the friend works. That friend was also a bridesmaid and knew right away what she was looking at. She got the pictures blown up including one of the whole wedding party, then sent them to the Charmin's. And this past Christmas Eve they saw their wedding

photos for the very first time. She cried a lot of happy tears. Because number one my mother made all the dresses and two, my sister was the maid of honour and she passed away just last year. So that picture was so emotional to see. We're going to have them trained properly and put them where we can see them because we haven't seen them for over 56 years. Thank you for joining us. This has been Your World Tonight for January 7th.

I'm Susan Boner. Talk to you again. [♪ music playing, fades out.