253. Joseph Steinberg: U.S. vs. Canada — Economist Explains the Trade War

Economist Joseph Steinberg explains the U.S.–Canada trade war, Trump’s tariffs, Mark Carney’s strategy, CUSMA, Canadian jobs, the auto sector, China, and why Canada’s domestic economic policies may be the bigger threat with host Aaron Pete.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Has Canada already lost this trade war?

SPEAKER_01 0:02

We're certainly behind. We're on the back foot. There's no denying that. Did Canada blink first? When it comes to the DST, I would say that Canada probably blinked first.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Are the challenges Canadians experiencing more domestic policy, like our own policy around how we're managing our own economy, or is it the United States? It's definitely the domestic policy factors.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

It's not the trade policy stuff.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

There's a fear by many Canadians that Mark Kearney is still technically invested in Brookfield. And that that puts him in many people's eyes in a conflict of interest.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

When you take a person with the level of wealth that the Prime Minister has, what does it mean to I I would ask you, what does it mean to divest?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Can Canada realistically keep its auto sector?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

I think that we can keep an auto sector. I think the question is what the auto sector will look like in the future.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

What leverage does Canada actually have from your perspective? Joseph, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a privilege to have you on the show. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot for having me, by the way, Erin. It's a pleasure for me as well. So I'm a professor of economics at the University of Toronto. Uh I've been doing that for almost 15 years at this point. Uh I study and teach uh about macroeconomics and international trade and issues kind of at the intersection of those two uh those two big topics.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

To start off, I'm just curious, has Canada already lost this trade war?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

I think we're we're certainly behind. Uh we're on the back foot. There's no denying that. Um, I don't think we've lost it quite yet. Uh, although I think one thing I think that's really important to keep in mind here as we go forward and talk about these issues is that I don't really look at international trade as a zero-sum game. And I think that's really one of the big mistakes that people are making in thinking about these issues in that way. And that includes both President Donald Trump, but also I think many people here in Canada as well. You know, international trade is a positive sum thing, it's good for both parties. Uh, and so with all the things that are going on on both sides of the border, my view is that it's mostly just losers all the way around.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Fascinating. There's been much made about what Mark Carney said before the election and his decision since then. Uh supporters will say he looked at the changing circumstances. He got more into the books and said, we've got a pivot. I don't think he's correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think he's formally said that. And then critics will say he's he lied to us during the election and he completely uh is pandering to him now. Did Mark Carney change his strategy to the United States?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

I mean, I think if you look at what he said, you know, during the election campaign last year and in the weeks, you know, thereafter, there was a lot of messaging about getting, you know, a good deal with the United States for Canadians. And I think people maybe read more into that than perhaps they should have. I mean, I think a lot of people are still of the mind that we're going back to, and we should be able to go back to where things were, you know, at the end of 2024, before Donald Trump's second presidency began, go back to completely zero tariffs with the United States. And I think many people are judging, you know, uh the prime minister's, you know, successes and or failures, or whatever you want to call them up to this point, based on that benchmark that we haven't gone back to, you know, 2024 completely free trade. From everybody that I've talked to, uh, both you know, in the Canadian policy space, but also policymakers in the US, um I think that that's just unrealistic, to be honest. We're not going back to zero tariffs in 2024, like we had in 2024 anytime soon. The US is not going to give up on its um sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and autos anytime soon. Realistically, the best that we could ever have hoped for is some partial relief on that front. And yet we haven't we haven't gotten it yet. That's true. Um, and so maybe you could judge that as a failure, I guess. But at the same time, I think the people that are saying, you know, Carney should have been able to, you know, get a deal that just reverts everything back to the way it was, I just don't think that that's was ever in you know on the table.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

You you raised this. There were retaliatory tariffs. There was the digital services uh tax that was going to be to come into fruition and it didn't. Did Canada blink first?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Uh when it comes to the DST, uh, I would say that Canada probably blinked first. Uh that said, I never thought the DST was a particularly good idea. Um, one of the themes that maybe we'll, you know, we'll return to, uh, but that I probably hinted at in my response to your first question is that in general, I don't think tariffs are all that great. Um, in most cases, they just make you know consumers worse off in the country that is levying those tariffs. And the digital services tax is a tariff. That's what it is. Uh that's what we should call it. And so I thought that it was good that they, you know, uh that they went back on that. Uh, but I do think, you know, uh from the political perspective, you could probably read that as um maybe giving in to U.S. demands on that. When it comes to the broader uh slate of retaliatory tariffs that were put in place in the immediate aftermath of the US implementing tariffs at the beginning of 2025. So the first US tariffs on Canada went into force on March 4th, 2025. We put in place a pretty broad slate of retaliatory tariffs in response, you know, almost immediately thereafter. We did end up reversing the vast majority of those retaliatory tariffs. But I don't necessarily view that as uh, you know, the primary reason for that as giving into the US. I view that uh in, you know, that was a reasonable, rational thing to do in two ways. Number one, uh, those retaliatory tariffs, as I wrote about last year uh on in a couple of different spaces, I mean, the the main effect of that was just to make things even worse for us here at home. They're gonna make things even more expensive. They're not gonna help our economy out. They're gonna make our economy uh struggle even harder than it was struggling in the face of those in kind of initial Trump tariffs. But then on top of that, it's important to recognize that the vast majority of uh US tariffs on Canadian products ended only a couple of days after they began, when the U.S. granted an exemption uh March 9th, 2025, I believe, for all uh Canadian exports to the United States that complied with all the different very rules of our free trade agreement, CUSMA, which still exists. And so it was in the aftermath of that that we ended up, I think, reversing most of our retaliatory tariffs in recognition of the fact that that retaliation was, you know, now like quite asymmetric. We still have in place some retaliatory, if you want to call them retaliatory tariffs uh on steel, on cars. Um, but you know, you can think about those as symmetric responses to protect our own industries in, you know, there uh in the face of the fact that the US and other countries around the world are also now kind of moving forward with protecting their own uh industries in that area.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

I'm wondering if we can first just put our shoes in, like understand the United States perspective. From from what I can see as a layman who doesn't have a deep understanding the way you do, I look at what the frustrations of the US were. And it's basically, and I know a lot of people aren't going to love hearing this, but it was basically that Canada got a very good deal historically through having our auto sector and having this free trade agreement. It allowed us to participate in the largest market in the world with very limited restrictions on that. And so Canada enjoyed that for a very long time. And then you have this US president come in and go, what are we, what are the Americans benefiting from this? Like, what is the value add for the auto sector, which saw jobs go to China and other countries? What's the benefit for our industry? How is this all benefiting us? And basically made the calculation it's beneficial to put these tariffs in place. And now you're seeing companies like Stellantis and others kind of going, okay, we need to have a foothold in the US. This going through Canada and flowing through the US is disappearing. And so we need to move money and move money quickly. Uh, I think uh the Jap a Japanese ambassador just came forward and said they're expanding their operations in the United States because there's there's not a lot of benefit to investing in the Canadian market because they need that American market, which is much larger. That's my very low-level understanding of this. Can you also help steel man the argument? What is the United States thinking with these tariffs?

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Okay, so I'm gonna I'm gonna start from kind of the beginning of that. There's a number of different kinds of threads there to kind of untangle. Um, so I'll kind of give you my own big picture perspective on these issues. So uh please feel free to jump in and stop me and redirect me because I, you know, I got a lot of different things that I could that I could say. I'm gonna try to get to all of them here. Um I think it's first and foremost really important to distinguish between the different goals, at least as as they have been articulated by the Trump administration in imposing tariffs. And in doing that, I think it's also really important to recognize that Canada is not the primary target of the Trump tariff agenda. It's just not. Um, you know, as the prime minister has said a number of times, Canada still enjoys far and away the best tariff deal with the United States, all things considered, of any country around the world. And that's true. We still face the lowest effective tariff rate of any country. So, what were the main reasons that the US wanted to put tariffs in place? There's a couple different ones. And to some degree, these different reasons, by the way, are kind of internally contradictory in that you can't have all of them simultaneously. Um, one reason was, of course, the U.S. wanted to raise revenue. The U.S. has been struggling with large government deficits for you know decades at this point. Uh, and you know, President Trump had some other policies in mind that were only going to exacerbate that issue. Uh, his big tax reform, signature tax reform in his first administration, the follow-up to that, uh, the one big beautiful bill act. You know, that was putting a great deal of strain on uh the U.S. government's fiscal position. And so extra revenues are something that it kind of needs to find somewhere. And tariffs are one way to do that. The second thing is national security. So the US has been, I think, and many other countries, by the way, as well, have grown increasingly concerned about the fragility of the global economy and their own positions in that global economy in the aftermath of the supply chain disruptions uh during the COVID pandemic, right? A lot of different supply chains got disrupted, struggled to get access to certain goods that we've thought about as being pretty important for our everyday lives, at least for a little while. And things got better. But I think the US government is worried that it is, you know, the US economy is overly reliant on imports in certain products that it views as you know being potentially important if it ever got into a big you know military conflagration, right? So China is the big player here, by the way. You know, cars and you know, heavy manufacturing more broadly are one of the uh sectors that the US is concerned about. Steel, aluminum, you know, it has raised big concerns about its ability to produce those things, uh, critical minerals, semiconductors. You know, these are all things that the US, the Trump administration at least, has been arguing that the US needs to be more self-sufficient at producing in case something bad happens. So that's a second reason. Uh now, the third big reason that President Trump wanted to put tariffs in place was due to trade deficits. Okay, and I think that's kind of the one that you may have been alluding to uh when we're talking about Canada specifically. So President Trump says trade deficits are bad. The US, you know, runs has been running a big trade deficit for a long time. Uh, putting tariffs in place is going to correct that trade deficit. I think that that's misguided for a number of reasons, but you know, that's something that President Trump sincerely believes, and some of his advisors sincerely believe as well. They're wrong, but you know, it's pretty hard to shake them of that belief. I've trialed. Um, and so they look at the U.S. trade deficits and they say we can use tariffs to correct that. That trade deficit is mostly with with China, it's the one that they're primarily worried about. The trade deficits with Canada and also with Mexico have been raised repeatedly, but I'll say I don't think that those are anything, those are really not, when you actually look at the facts, something that the US has a valid concern about. When you look at the Canadian the deficit with Canada specifically, historically, what has been the way that trade with Canada and the US has been balanced or close to balanced? And I'll say, by the way, relative to the gross flows going back and forth across the border, the net imbalance is very, very small. And it actually, you know, it fluctuates from year to year, primarily as a result of oil prices. But when you actually dig a little bit deeper, what you find is that the US has most of the time actually run a surplus, a trade surplus with Canada when it comes to goods. Right? That's essentially everything other than oil. And so the US does not have a trade deficit with Canada when it comes to all these products that President Trump is worried about for you know national security uh reasons or what have you. Uh the deficit is really just made up of the fact that Canada exports a lot of oil to the United States. But as you may know, uh Canada sells its oil to the United States at kind of a discount, historically speaking, at least. And part of the reason for that is that we've really not had any other options for places to sell our oil because of the nature of the infrastructure that we've got in place in North America. And so, while it's true that Canada has run a large trade surplus in oil with the United States, I don't think that there's any way that you can look at that and say that the U.S. has lost out as a result of that. This is, in a way, the U.S. being able to buy this oil more cheaply than it otherwise would have, because of the, I would, I would say, uh, you know, the technological and infrastructure nature of kind of the uh the prevailing paradigm in in North America. On everything else, the US actually runs a trade surplus with Canada. So there's really not much to complain about there uh from their perspective.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Fascinating. Can you walk me through what is Mark Carney's strategy with the US currently?

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Well, I you know, I am not in, I'm not privy to any of the ongoing, you know, behind closed doors discussions uh that the government is having either, you know, with itself or you know, that uh Carney and his ministers are having with the Trump administration. So I guess I can't really say for sure. Um my sense is that the Prime Minister is uh trying to walk a very, very fine line. He he faces kind of a uh the big challenge that I think the prime minister faces, in my view, and I, you know, he's not we're not gonna hear him say this again, because I think it's you know a politically contentious issue. But uh my belief is that the prime minister recognizes quite rightly that US trade is really important for the Canadian economy. Um, and that while diversification of our trade with other countries, you know, is certainly a good thing that we should be pursuing, the reality is it's not going to move the needle quantitatively very much. You know, we talk about doubling trade with, you know, the Philippines or Indonesia. I think that's great. But the reality is that our trade with countries like that is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to when it compares to the trade that we do uh with the United States. And so, you know, on the margin diversification is good. But the reality is we have to fix uh and improve our relationship with the US. I mean, that's that's the primary goal. That's the the you know, the prime minister's single biggest challenge at this point when it comes to trade policy, anyway. But I think my perspective on the domestic pol politics angle is that you know, Canadians are really riled up. And you know, they're riled up for you know a number of very valid reasons about what the US has done uh over the past couple of years. While I think it's true that we shouldn't look at the president's tariff policy as something that is, you know, directed primarily at Canada as much as we do. Um, you know, I think many Canadians believe that, you know, the president initiated a trade war specifically with Canada. I don't think that that's the right perspective to have. I don't think that the president is thinking about Canada most of the time, to be quite honest. But at the same time, there have been lots of other things, you know, the 51st state stuff. Um you know, the ambassador, I think Pete Hoekstra, has, you know, said a number of things that have gotten people pretty mad. Uh, you know, the Gordy Howe bridge, debacle. You know, we could come up with a whole wide range of things that Canadians are right to be pissed off about. When you combine that anger with, I think this the sluggishness of I think the the Canadian body of politics to come to the realization that we're not going back to the 2024 status quo on trade. Um, and that, you know, I think many people still believe, again, that that's where we ought we we should be able to get back to, and that's you know, where we're ultimately going to go back to. Um, and that we shouldn't accept anything better, anything less than that, is I think the perspective that a lot of Canadians have. And so when you kind of combine that anger and this strong feeling that we ought to be able to make things, you know, go back to the way that they were, I think the prime minister faces a real challenge, right? He he knows that he needs to, there's there has to be some give and take in the relationship with the US and the negotiations around Cuzma trying to get some tariff relief, you know, us on steel, aluminum, and autos is going to require us to, you know, make some concessions. And we're not going to get full tariff relief on those sectors. We're going to go down, we're going to get the tariffs cut in half, or we're going to get a quota, you know, for some limited quantities of tariff-free exports to the United States of these types of goods. We're not going back to zero tariffs, you know, on an unlimited quantity. It's just not going to happen.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

What makes you so sure of that? Just out of curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

That's a fair question. Um, what makes me so sure of that is that this is what I've heard from everybody that I've talked to in the truth, you know, that have, you know, that are connected to the Trump administration in some way, from people in the State Department, uh to people that I know who uh have, you know, at some points in time been involved directly in the Trump administration. Um, and to being, you know, just kind of privy to some of the ongoing conversations here. Um, you know, uh, I'm not necessarily here hearing things directly, but you know, hearing maybe what you could describe as, you know, secondhand, but not, you know, secondhand is still pretty close. You know, I'm it's we're not playing this, it's just, you know, maybe one degree of separation away from some of these conversations. Just everything that I've heard suggests that uh the US is not going back to zero tariffs on on any of these goods. I also think it's really important to go back and look at what happened with the first Biden administration, right? And I actually wrote a research paper about this. So it during the first Trump administration, this huge slate of tariffs went in on China. Many people viewed this as largely as a surprise, at least in terms of the magnitude of this uh, these new tariffs. You know, my research shows that it was a surprise. But what my research mainly shows is that when these tariffs initially went on China, most people thought that they were going to go away pretty quickly. Nobody viewed this as a permanent policy at the time that it you know actually went on. But those tariffs remained throughout the Trump administration. And then when President Biden came in and replaced him, what did he do? He didn't get rid of any of the tariffs on China. They're all still in force today. All the new tariffs that the president has put in place, President Trump has put in place on China in his second administration, have been stacked on top of the tariffs that he put in place during his first administration. And so the precedent is, and I think this is just very much where US politics seems to be going. Um this is true both for Democrats and Republicans. I think there's kind of an increasing economic nationalism, you know, increasing resurgence of populism. These forces are going to make it even more difficult this time around, after, say, President Trump's second term ends, if then all these tariffs are still in place then, which I think many of them will be. These things are going to make it even more difficult than it was during the Biden administration to kind of get things back to the pre-Trump 1.0 status quo of, you know, more or less free trade everywhere, if you will. I just don't think that there's any evidence that these tariffs aren't largely going to stick around.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Where does Canada US trade talk stand right now as we record this?

SPEAKER_01 22:46

And again, you know, I'm not privy to anything, you know, that's directly going on on the ground, but my sense is that uh there are some, you know, there are conversations going on. We've not entered formal negotiations around Cuzma modification and renewal, uh, like the United States has with Mexico. I think there are conversations about starting those kinds of formal negotiations. But at this point, I think where we're at is the US has put out a list of things that it would like us to concede. Um, we have stated that we have received that list of things uh and that we've not yet decided uh what to do with that. And that we've not decided to list, broadly speaking. Yeah, so that list consists of things like uh, you know, ensuring that something like the DST doesn't come back in. Uh it consists of things like uh requesting modifications to the way that dairy trade happens. Um, you know, many people think that the US wants us to just completely dismantle the supply management system, and I think it would. They would like us to do that if we if they could get us to do that. But the ask has actually been, I think at this point, much more modest. The ask around supply management is really to modify the way that we allocate import quotas uh in a way that they view is a little bit more fair. Personally, I think that that's a pretty reasonable request, by the way. Um, they are asking us to, and you know, this is something that the ambassador has raised repeatedly, they are asking us to put American alcohol back uh on the shelves in the LCBO uh and in other provincial liquor stores. Um those are all kind of the things that get a lot of attention. I think in the background, though, probably the biggest issue is our stance towards China, particularly when it comes to EVs and importing Chinese EVs. I think the US is worried. The US perspective is that that is a signaling a worrying shift in our openness towards, you know, importing Chinese EVs and cars in general, that will kind of undermine what they're trying to go for uh with uh, you know, their vision of what the North American auto supply chain ought to look like. What they're asking for in their negotiations with Mexico, we've already seen this, you know, the the more formal negotiations that they've kickstarted with Mexico, the primary thing that they're talking about is actually strengthening these what are called rules of origin in the auto sector. Basically, the things that these rules say if you want to get free trade treatment on uh, you know, a shipment of cars, say, from Mexico to the United States, those cars need to consist of a certain fraction of parts made within North America. And so those rules of origin are already pretty strong under Cusma. The US is asking to make them substantially stronger so that there really can be very little to no Chinese content. Um I'm really conflicted on this one, to be honest. And so I I would look at my my perspective on this is that if we weren't under the gun with negotiating with the president on trying to you know get a better deal for say steel, aluminum, and our own auto sector, if it was if I was just looking at this in isolation, uh, I would say, you know what, I'm all for importing more Chinese EVs. You know, my perspective is my default perspective when I think about these issues is mostly uh to look at this from the perspective of the Canadian consumer, who I think gets short shrift in a lot of these, you know, the um, you know, policy debates in this country, uh, and in you know, in the US as well, and maybe you know in the world more broadly. Um, Canadian consumers would benefit greatly from having access to Chinese EVs, which are relatively cheap. Uh you know, I've not driven one myself, but I've ridden in one. There, you know, many of them appear to be pretty high quality. Um, there's certainly a great deal of innovation that has gone into these things. I think consumers would benefit a lot. I think, you know, increasing trying to force the North American uh auto industry to get off the back foot when it comes to innovation and you know, um, you know, try to force it to become more innovative and competitive, I think would be a good thing as well. But of course, I also look at this as a, you know, there's a cost to be paid, and that cost is, you know, potentially sacrificing, you know, uh maybe tariff reductions that we could get from the US. Um, you know, maybe even just a renewal, and out, you know, if we could get an outright renewal of Cusma, you know. And I'll be more let me let me make that even more concrete. If you were to give me two options, if you could say, you know, ban the Chinese imports of Chinese EVs in exchange for just an outright renewal of CUSMA as it stands right now, we could go back to July 1st, and the US would say, you know what, guys, I know we have our issues, but we're happy to renew things for another 16 years, as long as you just ban the Chinese EVs. I think on balance, that probably would be a good decision.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

But I'm curious. Are you able, like, do you factor in? Like, I've had Sam Cooper, who's an investigative journalist uh for the Bureau, and he talks about how China is uh influencing First Nation communities and encouraging them to stop mining and stop these projects because it it slows our economy. He's he's shared how China uh is starting to infiltrate. I'm sure you've heard about the concerns around Chinese EVs and their ability to do mass surveillance potentially. And from Sam Cooper and his sources, he says the US is very concerned about our relationship with China. Um Sam Cooper's talked a bit about the Michael Maffloor Crossing and the questions surrounding that. There's a lot of tension in the air. And I don't think that's surprising when you have a global superpower and potentially the next global superpower or the equivalent global superpower, just in different ways, um, both looking to get footholds in different regions. And there's a broader concern around China in their United Front Work Department and how they're operating uh in our real estate industry and all of these things. And then in speaking with him, I just start to look at like, okay, like China's billionaires and very wealthy have pushed up the value of homes in British Columbia, according to Sam Cooper and his reporting. And then now we can't go back because people's homes have gone up in value, so they don't want to lose the value. So we're almost like making these deals, like not with the devil, but like with these superpowers, and everyday Canadians don't realize how much we're influenced by that and how much the US influences us. And so we're being, we're almost just caught in the middle of two superpowers kind of battling it out. How much do the security risks of China weigh into your perspective on the EVs?

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Yeah. I mean, I'm, you know, I am much less informed about this stuff as I think even you are. You know, I'm aware of, you know, Sam Cooper's reporting on some of these things, you know, but I'm not, yeah, I'm not at all an expert on this stuff. I'm just as much of a layman as anybody else when it comes to a lot of that that's the non-economic uh stuff that's related to the these security issues. But I do think, I mean, I think there's a lot of validity to the point that you just made, which is that we're kind of caught in between these two superpowers, right? I mean, the world at this point is, you know, becoming multipolar. This is something that we're not going to be able to change. It's and those two poles are right now China and the United States. Right. And I think that's that multipolarity is probably going to continue to get stronger, uh, at least in the near term. Um and I think you really have to ask yourself, you know, I my my preference would be that we don't have to choose. You know, if you were to kind of just be a geopolitical naive and just say we can be kind of the happy free trading Canadians and derive a benefit from you know open trade uh with both, you know, of the world's great powers. Uh, you know, I'm all for that. But I understand that the reality is that that's probably not the way things are going to work. Both of these great powers are undeniably meddling with our own domestic politics. I mean, you, you know, you allude to China meddling with our politics. I have no doubt that they do. At the same time, the US, of course, has also been, you know, has been meddling in Canadian politics for pretty much her entire existence. Nothing we can really do about that. They do it pretty openly most of the time. Um, but I think if you are, if you force me to say Canada really has to make a choice in allegiance between one great power or the other, I think you'd be hard pressed to explain why picking the US is not the right decision there, from my perspective. And a lot of that comes down to just the, you know, for me, a lot of that comes down to the economic angle. And it's, you know, there's only so much trade that we're going to be able to do with China for the following reason. You know, this is something I like to, I like to mention, by the way, uh, in, you know, whenever I do this kind of thing, that I think doesn't come up enough, which is the tariffs are really only part of the story in terms of, you know, the trade costs that influence, you know, the, you know, where our, you know, where we source our goods from and who we get to export to. Canada and the United States have, I think, what is really kind of a unique uh non-tariff trade barrier situation, which is, and I like to call it the technological trade barriers or even the topographical trade barriers, right? It's the shape of that border. There's no other two countries that really share a border that looks like the one that we do, where it's a hell of a lot cheaper leaving tariffs aside for us over here in Toronto and people in Quebec to trade with the East Coast of the United States than it is for us to trade, you know, with you guys over in BC, right? It's a lot more expensive if you just set tariffs aside and all those non-tariff, you know, interprovincial barriers that we have in this country as well, throw those, throw those aside as well. But if you just think about the cost of shipping stuff, right, it's much more expensive for me to trade with you than it is for me to trade with somebody who lives in New York City. And that's true, by the way, for the US as well, right? For the US economy, the East Coast of Canada, uh, you know, Toronto, Ontario, Quebec, that is a much more logical technological trade bar for the East Coast of the US than say California is. Right. And so both countries have this kind of unique, you know, uh non-tariff trade relationship where we're just made for each other in that sense. And there's nothing we can really do about that, right? You know, this is just geographic fate. And that geographic fate is just inevitably going to play a huge role in you know what our economies look like. We're never going to be able to disentangle ourselves from the US. We're always going to be trading a ton with them just because of that. And so I think that we have to recognize that that is that that relationship, especially for a country like Canada that's small, that is, you know, one of the biggest, you know, I think, you know, economic endowments that we have. We're lucky in a purely economic sense to be to be right up, you know, right to the north of the United States. We'd be worse off if we were uh kind of floating in, you know, floating in the middle of the ocean like Australia. Now, by the way, when you look at Australia how the Australian economy has done over the last couple of decades in comparison to Canada, it's done quite a bit better. It should make you quite angry uh that somehow we haven't managed, despite this kind of natural endowment that we have, uh, we still have somehow managed to find ourselves uh growing more and more slowly uh every year. But that's you know, I think that's largely a different issue. But in any event, I'm rambling a little bit. But, you know, if you were to to come back to where I was starting, if you were to force me to make a choice between China and the United States, the choice is clear.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Interesting. As a an economist whose leading work is on the economy and uh more more reaching towards international trade, I'm curious: are the challenges Canadians experiencing more domestic policy, like our own policy around how we're managing our own economy, or is it the United States?

SPEAKER_01 35:59

That is a great question, and I think you've hit you've kind of gotten right to the heart of one of you know, one of the big issues that we're facing right now. And I think one of the big issues that um Canadians haven't yet come to grapple with, and I think are kind of in a way distracted by um the trade stuff going on, right? If you you know, the Canada has a number of long-standing issues that have, again, as I was alluding to a moment ago, just made us grow, you know, more and more slowly every year, it seems like. These are issues that go back at least a decade. You talked to uh, you know, my colleague Mikhail Scuterud about the some of these immigration-related issues a little while ago. Some of those issues I think are you know play a part of this as he was talking about. But now we're faced with this kind of what many of us perceive as this kind of existential threat coming from the south on the trade file. And I think that has sucked up a lot of the air in the room around economic policy reform. You know, we've seen some discussion at the federal and, you know, interprovincial level about how we need to do the things that we can control. You know, there was some discussion a year ago about eliminating all interprovincial trade barriers. Uh, this is not something that has really come to fruition whatsoever. Um, there's some nice talk about it, but we've not seen any meaningful, uh, anything meaningful come uh come about as a result of those discussions. But I think what we're seeing is that people are distracted by this trade trade issue. And I don't see that as actually, as much as trade is the focus of much of my research, it's something that I think about every day. Uh, and I've written a lot about it over the last year or so in response to all the different things that have been happening. But if you if you were to ask me, do I think the Trump tariffs or our domestic policies are you know the primary drivers of the poor performance of the Canadian economy over the last decade? It's definitely the domestic policy factors. It's not the trade policy stuff. There are numbers there there are so many different things that we could be doing better uh that we should have fixed a long time ago. And I was hopeful at the outset of the current trade tensions that we're living through that this moment would give politicians like, you know, like Prime Minister Carney, kind of some ammunition, some breathing room to say, you know what, there are these hard choices that we have to make. You know, they're gonna piss some people off who have been kind of benefiting from some of these status quo policies for the last decade or so. But these are things that are in the long-term best interest of our economy, and we need to do them now. Otherwise, we're never gonna get out get out from under this hole. I was kind of hopeful that this moment would be the moment where, you know, people would have the guts and maybe even just kind of the political breathing room to do what needed to be done on other files. I've not really seen that happen yet. Uh, I've not really seen any meaningful action on things like corporate income taxes, uh, on, you know, even on immigration, as you guys, as we were talking about, and you talked about a couple of weeks ago, um on you know, policies to stimulate innovation. I've not seen anything that I look at as you know the serious reform that we need on those fronts. And you know, we still have a while to go. Uh, we certainly could see those things happen, but I've not yet really seen the kind of uh you know policy reform that I think this these trade tensions opened up uh opened up some room for, in a sense, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Joseph, there's been a criticism. I would be surprised if you hadn't heard it. There's a fear by many Canadians that Mark Carney is still technically invested in Brookfield, and that that puts him in many people's eyes in a conflict of interest because his business is based in the United States. Um, because the growth that the United States is seeing benefits Brookfield, and that that factors in. Pierre Polyev has posted the comparison of uh Canada's growth and Brookfield's growth, and you see immense growth amongst Brookfield. And there's there's I've spoken to Trevor Toom, who's another economist, who talked about how he was expecting Mark Carney said he was going to look at tax reform and changing some of our tax policies to make us more competitive, and he has not seen that action yet. You're talking about the inaction. And there's this looming fear about what his priorities as a prime minister are and whether or not he would go all in for Canada when he has investments in a company that is not solely based in Canada. How do you digest that? Is that just noise? Is that just internet trolls from your perspective? How do you digest that that fear and that criticism?

SPEAKER_01 41:18

I know people talk a lot about this issue. I I personally view it largely as noise, if only because I try to put myself in his shoes when I think about this thing. I try to put myself in his shoes and I say, look, if I was a super rich guy, I'd made more than enough of a fortune uh, you know, for myself and my family uh to, you know, enjoy, you know, extremely great living standards for a very long time. And moreover, I'm a guy like the prime minister. You know, the prime minister has a PhD in economics like I do. So I have to imagine that his, you know, he has some of the same kind of predilections, you know, that I do in terms of enjoying, you know, making good policy and getting a great deal of satisfaction out of that and out of, you know, uh non-monetary accomplishments. You know, I I have to imagine that this, his primary, I I really do like to think that his, you know, primary motivation is not just improving Brookfield's rate of return. I I could be wrong, and I obviously have no evidence to support that. But I really would personally be surprised if that's his angle here. I think the prime minister saw, you know, uh he saw an o you know an opening. And you know, you have to go back and look as well. I mean, he has not worked in the private sector for his entire life, right? I mean, he has, I think his overall career record aligns with what I was just saying a moment ago, which is that a lot of his career was, you know, working not in the private sector, but in central banking, right? And we're in in the policy, in the policy arena. When he was working at the Bank of England, um, I actually remember that time because I was researching Brexit, you know, and this is at you know, at the time that the Brexit vote happened and we were going forward towards, you know, uh a Brexit that nobody had any really clear picture of what it was going to look like. You know, the prime minister was running the Bank of England, and he was really doing, I think, quite a good job of, you know, communicating and being to the public and being very clear about, you know, what this would mean for the UK economy, and you know, despite, I'll think a lot of the political backlash that he was receiving for that. It was a pretty thankless job at the time. Um, and I, you know, I look at that record as a whole, and I do see a person who is personally, I see a person who is motivated, you know, not primarily by by money, who is motivated by the you know, academic and um maybe not academic, but I would say, you know. Motivated by the goal of you know doing right by uh you know by people in terms of making good policy, and someone who derives a great deal of satisfaction from doing that, like I do. Um but I could be wrong. I have no evidence to support that. Uh, you know, I don't know exactly what Mark Carney's, you know, personal financial situation looks like in the degree to which, you know, the the degree to which he truly has separated from the decision making at Brookfield. But personally, I don't look at this as something that Canadians ought to be too concerned about. Certainly, we're in great, you know, I think much better hands when it comes to issues like that than our neighbors are to the South. Um, you know, President Trump is openly benefiting financially from his presidency, and he has no problem admitting that, to be honest. Uh, and his family really has no real issue being quite upfront about that. Um I don't think we have anything that looks like that. Maybe I'll just say I don't think that we have anything that looks like that situation here in Canada, maybe, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

I that does make sense. I guess, and I I'm lingering on this a little bit because it's a portion of our society. And I think Mark Carney made the decision not to divest, and so it leaves the question on the table. Had he completely divested, we wouldn't have an opportunity to discuss this because there would be no controversy. But I guess I uh to push back a bit, I would say who's he in a room with on a regular basis? Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, uh maybe not as much Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump. When you when you describe the idea that he's sitting across from Donald Trump, if I put myself in Mark Carney's shoes, it's like, yeah, I am not being anywhere near as bad as Donald Trump. But maybe I'm benefiting a little bit, but he's benefiting a lot. Maybe everybody, all the energy and all the focus is so on Trump and and his um misattributions of wealth, uh, some of the corrupt things he's done around crypto, all of these things. That the idea that he just didn't divest is such a small point. And the way that I don't know if you saw the Rosemary Barton clip where she had asked him, like, why not just give Canadians the reassurance they're looking for? And he goes, Well, like, look, I'm like, I'm a good guy. You, you know me, I'm I'm Mr. Good Guy. Like, this is not convincing to a portion. And I'm a firm believer that we should not trust our politicians, that we should be very skeptical when money and power mix, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. So I'm always skeptical of people in positions of power. When you're at the central bank, you're influencing how global economies move, right? Like very much away from the public eye. He's in the public eye now, but he chose not to divest. And it's left so many questions for people. I just wonder if the juice was worth the squeeze if he really is only acting in Canada's interest. Look, I see where you're I see totally where you're coming from.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

I guess what I would say is when you take a person with the level of wealth that the prime minister has, what does it mean to? I would ask you, what does it mean to divest? In the sense that the prime minister could sell all of his shares in Brookfield and just go off and have, you know, a normally diversified stock portfolio like I have. But the reality is then he's still, you know, his portfolio is sizable enough that whatever policy decisions Canada makes, they're going to affect his fortunes one way or the other. There's no way that he can really like completely insulate himself financially from the fortunes of the country. If he were to sell everything off and just put all of his money in Canadian bonds, then he would be heavily financially interested in the decisions of the Bank of Canada, right? If he were to sell off everything and only by Canadian stocks, right, then he would be again heavily in heavily, you know, kind of uh implicated in a way, uh maybe that's not the right word, but heavily invested uh or you know, affected by, again, you know, the Bank of Canada's decisions with interest rates, which affect equities just as much as they do bond markets. You know, if he goes all in on the American stock market, well, then of course he's again, he cares a lot about the Canadian exchange rate, right? That's going to make the U.S. stock market performance look better or worse in terms of Canadian dollars. I don't really know that there's anything that he could have done to kind of completely hedge himself against the effects of all of the political decisions, that you know, the economic decisions that he is faced with making. Maybe, you know, he it probably would have looked better if he had just said, I'm gonna divest from Brookfield, uh, and you know, put everything in just kind of a blind trust. Although at the same time, you know, a blind trust, it's they're not blind. And again, in the sense that if you're just gonna invest in, say, you know, shares of the SP 500 index fund and the TSX and what typical people do, there's nothing blind about that. You know exactly what's in there, you know how your fortunes are gonna be tied to the decisions that you're making. I think when it comes to rich people being involved in politics, I'm not sure that that's you know the best idea in general. But if we're gonna have really rich people running our countries and running our economies, if these are the people that we're gonna vote for as voters, I think we have to recognize that their fortunes are going to be affected by the decisions that they're making. And there's really no way to undo that.

SPEAKER_00 49:36

That was well said. I appreciate that. I lean towards um everyday people being in these slots because that's who they're supposed to be representing. How many jobs do you think have been lost as a consequence of this trade war?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

So that's a really good question. Uh, you know, we were uh people have been talking just this week about it, you know, the latest jobs report showing actually a little bit of uh, you know, a little bit more job growth than we were expecting. I think on the whole, if you look at the overall economy, things have done, you know, the employment numbers look pretty okay. Uh employment is actually up, not down since Donald Trump took over the presidency and you know a little bit more than a year ago, year and a half ago. Um, I know many people in you know, kind of liberal circles like to tout the fact that per capita we've seen more job growth here in Canada than we've seen in the United States over that same time period. That said, if you look at the manufacturing sector, which has been, I think, the you know, the most heavily affected by the tariffs, we have seen steady job growth declines. I think we're down roughly around 3% in terms of manufacturing employment since Trump took office. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's about what the way the numbers stand. That said, I think it's also really important to ask yourself how much of that is due to uh Trump's tariffs on us versus, you know, just kind of what's other factors that contribute there. Um if you look at the U.S., manufacturing employment is also down. Uh manufacturing employment is down across all, you know, pretty much all sectors. Uh it's down in many sectors that have received some of the most the heaviest tariff protection, if you will. Uh, there doesn't really look to be any relationship in U.S. labor markets between uh President Trump's tariffs and job gains. You know, there are job losses in manufacturing there as well. And so it's really tough when you look at the data to try to attribute the job losses that we have had in the tariff-affected sectors to tariffs on their own. It may be that the the biggest effect of tariffs is actually just uh not the direct effect uh on our own sectors, but actually the indirect effect that they're having on the US manufacturing sector, raising costs in the US manufacturing sector, shrinking the U.S. manufacturing sector in many industries. Uh, and that may be the primary reason that orders for our products, our own manufactured products, are falling rather than, you know, just the tariffs that have been levied on these products themselves. Undeniably, the tariffs have played a role, uh, especially when it comes to the auto sector. You know, we see plants shutting down and moving across the border. That's obviously about tariffs. Um, but I think when you look at kind of the big picture at the macro at the macroeconomic level, I don't think it's so obvious that we can attribute a large number of job losses to to the Trump tariffs. On the whole, again, we've seen job gains in the aggregate, uh, although many of those gains have been in the you know part-time work in the public sector. So, you know, hey, there's some intention there to ward off the you know, the public sector's uh public sector employment's a lever that we can pull uh to perhaps you know fight against tariff-caused uh declines in the private sector. But even in the private sector, I I don't see there being huge numbers of job losses outside of the sectors that have been the hardest hit.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Can Canada realistically keep its auto sector? This is a tough one.

SPEAKER_01 53:28

Uh and I, you know, I think that we can keep an auto sector. I think the question is what the auto sector will look like in the future. I think you need to draw a distinction between parts and finished vehicles. I think you also need to look back over the last couple of decades and ask yourself to what extent is the current state of the Canadian car industry a result of the tariffs that the president, the President Trump has put on that industry over the past year and a half, versus other factors that have been contributing to a much longer-term decline. If you go back a couple of decades, you'll see that the number of vehicles that we produce today, especially when it comes to passenger vehicles, it's less than half of what our economy used to produce at its peak. And almost all of that decline happened before the beginning of 2025. And so there are a lot of other headwinds that our auto industry has been facing over the last couple of decades that are largely unrelated to the tariff situation. Yes, the tariffs are a big problem. Uh, I think US protectionism in autos and US industrial policy more broadly to try to encourage uh, you know, plants to set up shop in the US instead. You know, this is a you know what looks to be an existential problem at the moment, especially when it comes to finished vehicles. But my own personal perspective is that there's absolutely a future, at least for producing car parts. Um when it comes to finished vehicles, the Canadian market is just simply not large enough to sustain itself on its own. We can't just produce vehicles for the Canadian market and only the Canadian market at a cost that Canadian consumers are going to tolerate or be able to live with. That's just not going to happen. The auto industry is one where the, you know, there are very large economies of scale and very large fixed costs of production, which means that the costs of production decline with the scale of the industry. It's just simply too costly for us to have our own kind of uh domestic auto sector just for us. That's not going to happen. But we can contribute, you know, there's I still absolutely see a future for the Canadian auto sector more broadly when you at least include car parts. What the future looks like for uh assembly, uh it is more uncertain. I don't know the answers there. Um, I do think, though, again, you have to ask the question to what extent has the decline in auto assembly in Canada been driven by tariffs versus other policies? I think you also need to look at what's been going on in the US itself. The US itself over the last few decades, at the same time we've seen a decline in Canadian vehicle assembly, we've seen a big decline in auto assembly in the Great Lakes region in the US. US auto production has shifted to the south and the southeast, right, for a variety of reasons. Part of it is the entry of foreign multinationals, you know, the Japanese brands, the Korean brands, and the German brands are, you know, largely setting up shop outside of the Great Lakes region. Uh, and so that's kind of a reallocation away from the big five towards you know, foreign multinationals, even within the United States, taking greater and greater market shares. Um, but you know, whatever the reason, I kind of just view it as like um for me, the best way to look at this, at least when it comes to the non-tariff stuff, is to kind of think about the Great Lakes auto industry, both the US and Canada, together as one, and to recognize that we have seen a big reallocation away from that uh broader Great Lakes auto industry towards other regions in the United States. And I think we need to ask ourselves, what are the main reasons for that? And I don't think the main reason, at least going back a couple of decades, is tariffs, personally. Tariffs, you know, big issue now. Undeniably, they're making things even worse. But I don't, I think we would still be asking ourselves if those tariffs had never come in. Uh, I think we'd still be kind of asking ourselves, you know, a decade from now, what the future of the Canadian auto industry, at least when it comes to assembly, looks like.

SPEAKER_00 57:47

I have a few more questions. Thank you so much for giving so much of your time. Absolutely. What leverage does Canada actually have from your perspective?

SPEAKER_01 57:59

So, what leverage does Canada have when it comes to negotiations with the United States? I think it is important, number one, to recognize, and this is something that I've, you know, this is kind of the opposite of leverage, but I still think it's important to say, which it is really important to recognize for us that uh for us, trade with the United States is far more important than trade with Canada is for them. It just is what it is. Uh, you know, we do about the same amount of trade with each other in aggregate. You know, I said earlier at the beginning of this conversation that our trade is roughly balanced.

unknown 58:32

Right?

SPEAKER_01 58:32

We do have this trade deficit that the President Trump likes to talk about, but the reality is trade is roughly balanced. But then when you recognize that the US economy is more than 10 times larger than ours, it becomes immediately clear that that trade, you know, is much more important as a percentage of our economy than it is as a percentage of theirs. And so the macroeconomic picture doesn't really look good for us in terms of leverage. That's the reality, right? Whatever damage the president does to our economy with tariffs, we can't possibly do the same kind of damage to the US economy with tariffs in the same way. It's just impossible. And so we have to look elsewhere. So we have a couple of points of leverage. So, number one, I look at the I look at the energy sector broadly as a point of leverage, right? I mean, right now the US benefits tremendously from the discount that it gets in purchasing our oil and the access that it has to our oil. Right? The US produces a ton of oil itself. We produce, you know, quite different variety of oil, if you will, uh, much heavier uh than the Canadian than the US oil fields produce. Uh and so US refineries really do rely a lot on our oil to make a variety of products. Uh and I think we have some leverage. And we're, you know, one of the things, if you were to look, it's you know, the most if you were to ask me what's the most promising thing that I've seen out of the you know the Carney administration so far in terms of economic policy, it would be the efforts that they are making on the infrastructure front. Now, I know we haven't seen any, you know, any actual construction start physic in a physical sense, but the signals at least look reasonably promising to me. The more oil, the more capacity we have to export our oil to the rest of the world, outside of the United States and more oil, not just oil, but also natural gas and things like that. I do view that as a point of leverage. You know, we can say, look, we can continue to offer you preferential access to our own oil. But that's something that that's a choice that we're making rather than something that we're just kind of forced to do by virtue of our historical infrastructure. So that's a potential point of leverage. Critical minerals, another big one. Uh, Canada has, you know, an absolutely vast endowment of critical minerals that the US economy needs uh for military applications. Uh, it's worried about national security. You know, we've got a lot of what you know the US military uh industry needs when it comes to the critical minerals there. The same and lots of critical minerals are super important for the AI build out. Um, I look at those critical minerals as another potential point of leverage. Of course, we haven't exploited them nearly to the degree that we have historically. I've seen some of the signals there as well that look promising. Maybe we're not quite as far along in uh making it clear that we're gonna do a better job of exploiting those in the future, but it's something that we can certainly offer the U.S. preferential access to. Right? We're gonna build these things out. We're gonna offer you some preferential access and maybe first, you know, first bitter access uh to these minerals. I look at our electricity sector, our electricity generation as another obvious uh leverage point. Um, historically, that has been something that has worked in our favor in terms of producing aluminum. It's why the US buys so much of its aluminum from Canada. We're good at producing aluminum because of our cheap, the fact that we produce a ton of cheap electricity. But increasingly, I'm looking at, and we're seeing now just this week with the announcement of uh Meta's data center in Alberta, I'm looking at that, you know, uh our grid, our electrical system, as you know, a leverage point and a point of comparative advantage that can help serve US interests and at least the interests of US firms in their AI build out. They're increasingly facing pushback and building data centers in the United States. We are innately good. I think we ought to be innately good at doing those exact types of things at, you know, building data centers, processing data. This is something I think you're gonna, you're we're gonna see more and more of. Those are big investments. These are big investments that US firms are gonna want to make. These are things that they're gonna want, um, you know, that they're gonna want to lobby, I think the the Trump administration to be able to try to, you know, let us let them do. And so, you know, that's another leverage point that we have. At the same time, I would caution you to, you know, I think we should be cautious and look at all these things as largely economic opportunities for us, first and foremost. Again, just to come back kind of full circle to the point I made at the very beginning of the conversation, that all of this stuff, we are making all of this stuff way more zero sum than it ought to be. And that is in large part Donald Trump's fault. But we play right into that here in Canada, I believe. We're making all of these issues far more zero sum than they have to be. All of these things in reality are positive sum. The more critical minerals we produce, the more data centers we build, the better that is for us, the better it is for the US. Right. I mean, that's the way that I view things. And I really think more than anything, that is the perspective that I think we need to try to inculcate, you know, in our media ecosystem, if you will. I think, and push back against this pervasive and I think even going even more pervasive view that economic policy, especially when it comes to trade policy, but economic policy more broadly, is all just zero-sum stuff and reshuffling and punishing people and retaliating. That's just not what you know economic policy is about. It's not what trade is about. It is really all about positive sum interactions. And I think that's that's where the attention needs to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:19

My final question is just around the impact for everyday Canadians. As I'm sure you're well aware, they are up against it. We have a cost of living crisis in our country. Uh, young people can't buy homes. The the future does not look bright for a lot of Canadians right now. And this trade war is, as you've as you described, is kind of a flashpoint for that feeling that everything is working against us right now. Based on your understanding, because I want to bring this back for people to actually be able to make more informed decisions, what do you think everyday Canadians should be doing if we're not going to see the tariffs go back to zero from your perspective? What does that actually mean? Should people be rethinking the jobs they're looking for? How do they actually take real action based on your insights? How do they actually apply that to their own lives in a useful way?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:15

So I think the first thing that I would say is that I think Canadians need to push their policymakers to make better decisions on the things that we can control. That's what I think. And I think again, this this zero sum versus positive sum idea is a big, is really important when it comes to all of our domestic political decisions. I also think at the same time, there's another kind of angle to that that's similar, but also quite different in a way, which is that we view a lot of political, you know, economic decisions, economic policy decisions through this lens of focusing on the loudest people that are the most affected. Right. But the reality is. Is that everybody else, the you know, the vast majority of costs and benefits of economic policies are borne by consumer, everyday consumers that are being kind of a little bit hurt by this policy, a little bit hurt by that policy, maybe a little bit benefited by this other policy individually. But when you aggregate up those gains and losses, they're far larger than the effects on kind of the loudest parties that are the most invested in our decisions. So, you know, supply management is a great example. Right. What is what does supply management do? Right? It makes dairy products a little bit more expensive for everyday consumers, although there's some research that says that this is you know particularly painful for low-income Canadians, that low-income Canadians are actually really burdened by by this system. And it benefit confers great benefits on a very narrow tranche of Canadian dairy farmers. Right? In the aggregate, Canadians are losing out as a result of this. And I think they're not, you know, they're not persuaded by of this by by our media ecosystem. You know, that's that's another discussion that we shouldn't get into today. But it's an example of a policy. I like it because it's an example to me, a very clear example of a policy where we have these kind of narrow, very concentrated benefits that accrue to a small portion of people, and very broad but shallow losses that are hitting everybody else. But in the aggregate, those losses are huge. And so I look at economic policy as you know, the goal of economic policy to me, in most cases, you know, kind of the first order goal that we should be working towards is eliminating things like that. Working to eliminate things like that, where we push, we, you know, make some headway on supply management. Yes, that's gonna benefit you a little bit, but it's gonna benefit everybody in the aggregate a lot. And then we work on this next policy, right? And it's gonna be exactly the same thing. And the critical point that I want to mention is that with when it comes to each of these policies that maybe confer very small, uh very concentrated benefits or losses on certain individuals and very broad effects on everybody else, the individual affected parties that are getting those narrow, concentrated benefits and losses are different each time. Right? But everyday Canadians benefit from every single one of those policy changes that we could make, and they stack, right? And so that's really you know, it's not sexy, it's not uh the you know, there's not just one lever to pull and that's gonna fix everything. The reality is that it's just kind of this everyday work of making policy a little bit better everywhere, but in a way that is oriented towards making individual consumers' lives better, and trying to ignore the loud voices in the room that are you know the ones who are the most invested. We've got to find a way to ignore them and drown out their voices a little bit and let the you know the voices of kind of everyday Canadian consumers be heard a little bit more. And I think we need to find a way to get individual get Canadians invested as a group in that in that paradigm, if you will. And I I think that's gonna be at the end of the day the thing that is gonna move the needle the most. That's gonna be the thing that's gonna make individual Canadians' lives better. You know, it's gonna make our economy grow faster, it's gonna make us more competitive and more innovative. You know, it's it's hard, it's not easy. There's not one single, you know, uh golden, one single silver bullet that's gonna fix everything. But that's for me, that's I think like the most important work uh that policymakers should be focusing on.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:42

I couldn't agree more with that. I think the only change, and you're an economist, so instead of saying consumers, I would say citizens. Um, and the reason I would say citizens is is purely because there's a lot of people who want to be a part of solutions right now. There's a lot of people who I'm sure reach out to you and are following this who are not economists. We're very passionate about what does this all mean? What do we do? And it it kind of feels like mom and dad are in the other room and we're waiting for the decision to be made on where we're going next, rather than like what I would do in that situation is sit down with people like you, come up with a list of the top 100 things we could start working on today, do public consultation, have you speaking on these issues, breaking them down. If people want to attend, they can attend. If they don't want to attend, they don't have to attend. But then you start having these conversations and it reaches the grassroots. It allows people at the very front end who are being impacted to have a voice. And I feel like there's just such a pent-up frustration with where we are. And nobody in Ottawa is really listening to people like yourself from from what I see, broadly speaking, from the experts. Like I hear from Trevor Toom, I hear from you, I hear from Mikhail who who wrote a report, who submitted it, who did not have that read by the people making the decisions. We have these people here ready to help inform tax reform policy, helping understand the productivity issue. And they're all just like coming to me, offering me tremendous insights on what's going on. And I just want them to go speak to the people in control and who are in power and at least signal to us. Like you've described, like Trevor Toom's described, like we just need to know something's coming. Like if they said we're gonna do tax reform in year three, that would make everybody a lot more sympathetic to the situation we're in. But it's the fact that they said they were gonna do it and we have no results on that that just leaves us kind of stressed out, like concerned, fearful of where we're going. Are we gonna get out of these problems? And so I'm so grateful to have you on because you just lay it out. It's like everything you said at the end there was like, that's just good governance. Yes, it's not sexy, yes, it's not dramatic, yes, it's not shocking, but it's you look at the problem, you go, how do we make sure these trade-offs benefit the most with harming the least amount of people? How do we do a transition that doesn't hurt? As you've described, some of those people who've been benefiting for a long time. We don't want to ruin their lives, take all their wealth. We don't want to do something so we'll transition away from supply management in a in a thoughtful way that makes sure that we we maintain support for our farmers while also making sure that low-income Canadians succeed. Like this all just seems so possible. And I think Canadians want exactly that. They don't want the dramatic. They'd really appreciate just some good governance and good policy led by people like yourself. Would you mind telling people how they can follow your work?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:28

Uh, you can follow my work, uh, my academic work on my website, josteinberg.com. Uh, I post on Twitter, or as it's called, X now, uh, at JB Steinberg. Uh, you can see me there. I write occasionally for the hub uh and some other outlets. Um, but I I I think the easiest way is to probably find me on Twitter and go from there.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your thoughtful breakdown on this. Uh, as issues continue to arise, as I'm sure they will as we go through this, I hope to have you back on so we can dive into more of the specifics and and who's hearing what. And I just appreciate your honesty about kind of the things you're hearing secondhand because I do think that helps just people know where the wind is blowing. And it's not rock solid, none of this is financial advice, but it helps us kind of understand where the winds are blowing on these issues.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:18

Yeah, absolutely. You're very you're very welcome. I thought it was, you know, I had a great time talking with you. I'm happy to come back and chat about uh about anything else, you know, if we ever get any kind of more concrete uh outcomes on the trade file or you know, any other kind of big policy files. But yeah, it's it's a lot of fun.