Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Are you ready for little Raj Russo there weekly or biweekly or every second week notebook? It's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Rob Russo from The Economist, Al Theorage from the Toronto Star.
You know, I was, whenever I get up in the morning, I flip through all the different news channels, the Canadian ones, the American ones, and try to find something that I find interesting to watch, something that's current. And this morning I landed on MSNOW, which is the old MSNBC station. Warning Joe, Joe Scarborough and his panel.
I never got over Joe Scarborough sucking up to Trump the day after the election. But still, it's a pretty good discussion.
Chapter 2: How does the European summit influence Canada's role in a post-America world?
Anyway, to the point of today. They were discussing the post-America world. which they're convinced we are now in, and they're not alone in thinking that. A lot of people think that. But what did they use to kind of visualize the post-America world on this week?
They used the summit that was going on in Armenia yesterday that Mark Carney was at, a number of European leaders, and there are still meetings going on this week elsewhere in Europe.
Chapter 3: What are the risks and rewards for Canada in the current international landscape?
But this was the image they portrayed of the post-America world. And the image they used was Mark Carney and Vladimir Zelensky. Vladimir Zelensky from Ukraine. Which put Canada in the forefront. And they kept mentioning Canada. And we're talking about a panel that included Richard Haass, who's no lightweight on the foreign affairs scene.
So I guess my question is, given that, and given this discussion of a post-America world, and Canada's dominance seemingly in it, what are the risks and rewards for Canada, and for Mark Carney in particular? And Rob, why don't you start us on this?
Well, I don't know that he has much choice to do what he's doing. The Prime Minister is trying, in effect, to fashion a garment, almost like an economic tailor. A fine garment, stitching together, creating blocks in Europe, in the Pacific, and in South America, in Mercosur.
Chapter 4: How does Prime Minister Carney navigate relationships with Europe and the US?
He might as well also be stitching a red handkerchief right in the middle of that garment because he's waving a red handkerchief in the face of Donald Trump when he says that the new international order will be built out of Europe. And I think he's quite fine with waving that red handkerchief in front of Trump. I don't think he does it deliberately, but it does not perturb him to do it.
So, sure, he has to do it. But if we're talking about Europe being the future, the foundation of this new international order, then they got some leaks in their foundation. They've got some cracks in their foundation. They have some real problems. I mean, and you mentioned Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of time. Both Europe and Mr. Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, demonstrate, I think,
that despite how many of us feel about the United States right now, that the United States remains indispensable to them. I'll come back to that in a second. But first, let me deal with Europe. The Prime Minister is fond of saying that Canada is the most European of non-European nations.
I think what he means by that is he means we have a mixed economy and a social safety net, unlike the kind of cowboy capitalism that
of the united states but they also have right-wing populist parties in europe that are poised to take control uh if polls are to be believed uh there's going to be a right-wing populist take control in the united kingdom uh another one in france they're on the march uh in germany holland uh i know everybody points to hungary uh peter magyar as as of sort of progress in Europe.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Europe face in asserting its global leadership?
Yes, it's true, the new leader of Hungary has turned towards Europe and away from Putin, but he's also a right-winger who is anti-immigration, like many of the other right-wingers in Europe, and also skeptical of Ukraine. He's very anti-Putin, but skeptical of some of the aid that's given to Ukraine, so I'm not sure if Canadians would be comfortable with all of that.
Europe, 450 million people, a great idea to try to get to them, but they have sclerotic growth in terms of their economies. They're growing at a much weaker, more pallid pace than Canada. They've been left behind technologically, they've been left behind militarily, they've been left behind economically by the United States and China, which enjoy the greatest growth
both economic growth, military prowess, technological prowess. And before we get too excited about joining forces with Europe, I don't think anybody's talking about us becoming the But before we even consider that, I think we should ask the Europeans to ratify our trade deal with them, which was signed nine years ago in 2017, the CETA, Canada-Europe Trade Agreement.
And it's still not been ratified by 10 of the 27 countries. 17 have ratified, 10 have said no. So there are a lot of, I would say, cracks in that foundation.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement (CETA)?
It's unstable at times. People within the trading block say that there are all kinds of obstacles to growth and to prosperity there as well.
All right. Rob has set the table completely. Every seating has been filled in that opening shot and good for him. Althea, we should give Althea a little bit of an excuse here. She's fighting a cold and a I'm going to sound sick. I'm sick. Yeah, well, you're not alone. There's a lot of people who seem to be facing that right now. But what's your sense of this story?
What do you make of it, especially in terms of what the risks and the rewards are for Canada as we get seemingly deeper into this relationship with Europe?
Yeah, I think there's several ways of looking at it. The first is obviously Prime Minister Kearney is somebody who is close to Europe, you know, like led the Bank of England, has a lot of affinity towards Europe and has nurtured a Rolodex of contacts in Europe.
Chapter 7: How is Mark Carney perceived by progressives in Canada?
So there's, I think, a natural personal affinity towards Europe that perhaps we didn't have in other prime ministers. That's one angle, obviously, to the story. The other angle is, of course, what it means for the KUSMA or the USMCA-related talks.
The prime minister has to walk a very fine line between telling Donald Trump that Canada has other options and we're not beholden to whatever strongman will he wants to impose on us, but at the same time also not annoy him to the point that he completely decides to rip the steel apart and walks away from the table. So I think there's a little bit of both camps happening.
I thought what was interesting in his opening remarks at the European political community meeting that he was invited to by Macron from France was he said two things I thought were interesting. One is what the Europeans want from us. often in this country, we talk about energy. He said, no, no, no. We go there saying we will offer you energy, but what they really want is critical minerals.
So to Rob's point, the Europeans, if they do want to lead the world, have a lot of their own affairs to sort out continentally, notably on defense and security, especially if the Americans walk away. And that is something that we can say, hey, we want to be a partnership with Europe.
The other thing I thought was interesting was he talked about some of the key themes from the Davos speech, one of which being we take the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. But in a way, he is wishing it to be something. And perhaps for all the reasons that Rob outlined, all the challenges that Europe already itself faces, right?
you have a prime minister saying, you know, these, the ideals of freedom of democracy, rule of law, these are the human rights. These are the things that we want to work on together. These are the things that we share with you, you know, like please continue to work on these things so that we can be partners together.
Um, because at the moment, I don't know that you could really argue that Europe is fit to lead the world at the moment.
You know, back up, both of you, because I think the issue here seems to boil, as much as there are things on the table between us and Europe, and I appreciate that, and there are difficulties in trying to work some of these things out, as you both explained.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of recent cuts to social programs under Carney's leadership?
But the issue always comes back to what's Trump going to make of this? And how much should we care about what Trump makes of this? I mean, depending on who you read right now, But Kuzma stuff's dead in the water. It's just not going anywhere. Now, I don't know whether that's just the kind of stuff you expect to read when you don't really know what's going on.
But if it is dead in the water right now, this is not going to suddenly put it back, you know, afloat in terms of a possibility. These kind of stuff and that kind of discussion going on in American television is The appearance that Canada is somehow leading the way.
I don't know that it's helpful, but I guess it depends what you mean by dead in the water. Like the government has made it clear that for the first time, actually, I think it was two weeks ago that there are no negotiations happening. You know, we had our ambassador to the U.S. say very plainly that, you know, we're open and willing to negotiate whenever they are willing to call us to the table.
And we have the prime minister say we don't have the starter pistols. The starter pistol belongs to the Americans. We're waiting for them to tell us to come to the table. And we don't want to come to the table on the terms that they've outlined at the moment, basically. We're not ready to pre-negotiate against ourselves. But is dead in the water just that it's status quo?
Because one of the other things that emerged over the last two weeks of April was Janice Charette, who's our lead trade negotiator on the Canada-US file, outline what her mandate has been. which is to safeguard preferential market access to the United States, to get tariff relief on steel, aluminum, lumber, copper.
She also talked about how this has been the Canadian government's line since even under Justin Trudeau when they thought that a Democrat was going to win like Werner. not renegotiating. This is just like a temperature check. We're just kind of sorting out some housekeeping issues. We're not like totally re-upping this.
But at the same time, you know, like 20 minutes later in her remarks, they do acknowledge it's going to be a tough slog. It's quite possible that we don't have a tariff-free environment with the United States. That is a possibility. I think that there's two things to take comfort in, and I think that we have seen Canadian officials take comfort in that.
One is the July 1st deadline, which now they're saying, don't worry if there's no deal by July 1st. It's, I think, which Jenna said, it's like it's not a cliff. The actual agreement says that the leader of the countries will have to decide on July they will meet and they have to decide if they want to renegotiate or renew, sorry, Kuzma for another 16 years.
But if they don't say, yes, I want to renew it for another 16 years, the deal still continues on. And we just have one year reviews. At the moment, the current deal says that you can pull out. You can pull out. You just need to give a six months notice and you can pull out. You can also amend it. If Mexico and the United States and Canada want to amend the deal at any time, they can amend it.
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