Monday, May 19, 2025

How Did Trump Impact the Canadian Election? | Brian Lee Crowley

https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/how-did-trump-impact-the-canadian-election-brian-lee-crowley/

,

 This is the full version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Brian Lee Crowley. The interview was originally released on Epoch TV on March 10, 2025. “Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now,” says Brian Lee Crowley. “And I have seen a lot of my compatriots running around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying, ‘Oh my God, Donald Trump is a mad man. You can’t understand what he’s doing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’ And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing, and I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t have to like it. That’s a separate question. But if the question is, ’Can I understand it?' The answer is yes.” Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think tank whose work is often cited by the Canadian Parliament. “What exactly is the difference between Canada and America, or Canadians and Americans? It’s not that it’s difficult to answer because there aren’t differences. It’s difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express,” says Crowley. “Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution from the crown and the United Kingdom—from Great Britain. Canadians never experienced that.” In this episode, Brian Lee Crowley and Jan Jekielek discuss the recent election in Canada, Trump’s comments about Canada as America’s 51st state, and what the future of United States–Canada relations may look like. “Canada exports 50 percent of everything made in the private sector, and the vast bulk of that, like 90 percent, goes to the United States. But [in] the United States, by contrast, foreign trade, or international trade, only represents barely 25 percent of the amount of the American economy, and that’s diversified across all of its trade partners. So, while for Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential, for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient, nice—not existential.” CHAPTER TITLES 0:00:00 - Introduction to Canadian Consciousness and Trump's Influence 0:00:34 - The Subtle Differences Between Canada and the United States 0:01:36 - Canadian Election and Trump's Impact 0:04:45 - Polling Shifts and Election Dynamics 0:06:55 - Canadian Identity and Oppositional Nationalism 0:10:45 - Understanding Trump's Strategic Approach 0:21:09 - Trump's Negotiation Tactics and Deal-Making 0:22:35 - Canada-US Relations and the China Factor 0:27:50 - Economic Integration of North America 0:35:12 - Canada's Security Challenges and NATO Obligations 0:40:25 - US-Canada Defense Relationship 0:45:49 - Gardeners vs. Designers: A Philosophical Perspective 0:51:06 - COVID-19 and the Role of Experts 0:55:35 - The McDonald Laurier Institute: Origins and Impact 0:59:18 - Concluding Thoughts on Canada-US Relations

 

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction to Canadian Consciousness and Trump's Influence

 

donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now i have seen a lot of my compatriots you know
running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying "Oh my god Donald Trump is a mad man you can't understand
what he's doing there's no rhyme or reason to it." I looked at what Donald Trump was doing and I thought "Okay I
don't have to like it." But if the question is can I understand it the answer is yes brian Lee Crowley is the
founder and managing director of the McDonald Laurier Institute a major Canadian think tank whose work is often
cited by the Canadian Parliament what exactly is the difference between Canada and America it's not that it's difficult
to answer because there aren't differences it's difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express in this episode we dive
into the recent election in Canada Trump's comments about Canada as America's 51st state and what the future
of US Canada relations may look like canada exports 50% of everything made in the private sector uh and the vast bulk
of that like 90% goes to the United States by contrast you know foreign trade or international trade only
represents barely 25% of the the American economy so while for Canada the
relationship with the United States is existential for America the relationship with Canada is convenient
nice not existential this is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yan
Kelly brian Lee Crowley such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders yeah and thanks so much for having me i
suppose I should call it Canadian thought leaders well that that'd be a good that'd be a good choice but so so
what happened with the Canadian election and what did uh US President Donald Trump have to do with it very
interesting question y several things happened to change politics in Canada quite radically in a very short time one
was that uh uh Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who had become deeply unpopular
suddenly left he was basically forced out by his party second Donald Trump came to power in Washington uh
and as a result of these changes uh the the assumption that everybody had made
that Pierre Palev and the Conservative Party were going to waltz into power
sort of uh unopposed suddenly came crashing down partly because uh there
was a now a new leader of the Liberal Party he had a completely different profile than Justin Trudeau Mark Carney
former governor of the Bank of Canada Governor of the Bank of England uh someone who seemed to be to a lot of
people uh you know a calm competent technocratic kind of leader
and that seemed to I think a number of Canadians the perfect response to Donald
Trump who started talking about Canada's the 51st state and uh how how happy
America would be to annex Canada and and this this makes Canadians deeply nervous
you know the whole one of the important reasons why Canada exists as a country is because at several points in our
history we kind of asked ourselves do we want to be Americans and the answer was no we want to yes we're we're a new
world country uh you know we share many characteristics with America but we're
not Americans we want to have our own model of a new world society that's
different from Europe different from the old countries uh but that has the same you know values freedom and enterprise
and all those other things just as much as America does uh but comes to
different conclusions about the role of government pursuit of the common good etc etc so in that context uh Donald
Trump's musings about making Canada the 51st state and so on and how Canada has
nothing constructive or useful to offer the United States made many Canadians
deeply anxious and I think Mark Carney stepped into that situation and said
"I'm the guy who can represent Canada in an effective way visa v Donald Trump."
And Canadians not not in large numbers but
enough Canadians accepted that argument that he just squeaked past the
Conservatives you know 43% of the popular vote for the Liberals almost 42
for the Conservatives not much in the difference uh but uh enough to win
enough seats to form a government for a while it seemed like it was almost based
on the polling right it seemed like it would almost be a blowout for the Liberals but then that shifted too and I
find that really interesting uh do you have thoughts on that yes
so I I think the early stages of the campaign uh Donald Trump I think drove
the anxiety levels of Canadians who cared about these issues to
unprecedented heights and uh the issues that had previously been the ones that
we thought were going to dominate in the election campaign in Canada um cost of
living um efficiency of government and so on levels of
taxation these things started to come back to the four ultimately what happened was the liberals went from
being just streets ahead in the polls to almost level pegging with the
conservatives and um it was in that state of public opinion that the voting actually happened i've spent the last
however many months explaining to Americans uh in Washington DC that
Canadians have this kind of oppositional identity and I think what you said kind of explains it a little bit like they
there's an element of the Canadian identity which is clearly I am not American and I remember that growing up
uh in Canada as well was it was very distinctive and very important actually and I and and later only later did I
realize that that seemed odd to have an oppositional identity but but that you
know Prime Minister Trudeau famously described Canada as a postnational state
but I and I wonder I guess seeing what we saw I guess that kind of proves that
it's not because whatever those embers of of of of Canadian nationalism that
that that existed still they came drawaring back in the last few months right even as it was even as it is this
kind of oppositional identity it's a very difficult question to answer what exactly is the difference between Canada
and America or Canadians and Americans uh and that's it it's not that it's
difficult to answer because there aren't differences it's difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and
hard to press i always like to go back to the difference
between the founding documents of Canada and the United States in the United States you have a society uh in which in
this wonderful immortal phrase people are free to pursue life liberty and
happiness life liberty and the pursuit of happiness um those were not the values that we
chose to highlight when we wrote down in our constitution what it was that we
were about we talk we chose to talk instead about peace order and good
government and you see I think those phrases actually summarize in a shorthand
way some some slightly different angles
on you know what's the purpose of government what how do people fit into a larger society what are we trying to do
together uh remember that America broke away through a a a violent revolution
from uh from the crown and the United Kingdom from Great Britain canadians
never experienced that in fact people often talk about the 13 colonies
forgetting that there were actually 16 colonies 13 of whom rebelled and three
of whom remained loyal to the crown so even back at the time of the revolution
there were parts of what became Canada who said "Yeah that's not the route we want to
go." We tend to be uh people who believe more in uh the the quiet thoughtful
evolution of institutions rather than like liking this idea of oh you know if you don't like what you got now a
radical break start again reinvent um that that seems to us a very American
way of thinking about things i don't say that in a critical way i'm I'm a great admirer of American but um Canada has
chosen an evolutionary path uh in which we put a little more
emphasis on the idea of the common good a little less emphasis on the idea of
individual liberty as the beall and endall we're great believers in individual freedom uh but we don't think
that individual freedom is the entire answer to the purpose of Canada uh we
think individual freedom in the context of uh an ordered society that believes
that we collectively can do things together that individually we would find difficult
from the outside those differences don't appear very great you know uh Europeans
come to Canada they say "Why are you so fussed about not being thought
Americans?" Um but from the inside the differences to us
are quite obvious and without in any way feeling that it
means that we're superior to to America uh it does make us feel that we've
chosen a slightly different path in North America uh and it's one you know
that our ancestors fought and suffered and paid for and that we have inherited
and it's ours and that matters to us you in some
of your recent writings you've gone to great pains to try to explain
um I guess the way of thinking or the approach of
US President Trump and the Trump administration and I thought you know reading this I I thought to myself I
think you understand it better than probably a lot of a lot of Americans not
you know obviously not a majority of Americans but as some and maybe I I
wanted you to kind of reprise that for me a little bit here one of the reasons I've been thinking about this is because
uh precisely because uh Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian
consciousness right now um and I I have seen a lot of my
compatriots you know running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying "Oh my god Donald Trump is a mad man you
can't understand what he's doing there's no rhyme or reason to it." And I I
looked at what Donald Trump was doing and I thought "Okay I I don't have to like it that's a that's a that's a
separate question." But if the question is can I understand it the answer is yes there were there were three sort of
major themes that kind of leapt out at me uh one is that Donald Trump believes
in his guts that America is the top nation in the world it's the most
important country it's the one that sets the stage for almost every other
important relationship alliance you know trading relationship and so uh
and he feels that America has gone through a period of decline has lost
some of that top nation status it's being challenged by uh some other countries uh
and I believe that he sees it as his role as president to restore America to
this top nation status now I mentioned that so that's number one i mentioned that there are countries that are
challenging America in in this top nation status and of course the the one that comes immediately to mind uh is
China and I believe that uh Donald Trump has in the back of his mind in almost
every issue that he wrestles with whether it's trade or defense or
national security or even the drug trade fentinel etc etc he has in the back of
his mind China is our great rival china is our competitor and China is using
many of these issues that America must wrestle with uh as sticks to beat
America with um I mentioned the drug trade i think it's a beautiful example
of that clearly uh China has a political strategy behind its trading relationship
with the United States in a way that uh you know most other Western countries
would not they don't mix trade and politics the way that China does
uh and so given his preoccupation with
returning America to the top nation status to removing any ambiguity about that
uh and to his sense that top nation
status must mean a muscular response to China the third thing I add to that is
that Trump believes that as America has failed to live up to
its responsibilities to be top nation there are certain parts of American
society that have suffered as a result and uh you know the the kind of people we're talking about of course are are
the ones who were immortalized in JD Vance's book uh Hillbilly Elegy the kind
of people he grew up with the communities that he knew sometimes referred to as the rust belt uh or the
flyover states or however you like to think about it um I I I believe that uh
Donald Trump thinks that these people who form a I think the
bedrock of his political support are people who have been forgotten and left behind by an America u abandoning its
vocation to be top nation refusing to uh stand up to China etc etc etc and Donald
Trump wants to be the tribune of these people he wants to be their champion think about a very famous phrase widely
associated with Donald Trump drill baby drill okay people think that this is just you know Trump in one of his macho
moods saying you know oh uh uh uh you know I'm I'm going to preside over you
know huge expansion of the oil and gas industry and so it's it's much more than that you see I think Trump has come to
understand the extent to which energy and particularly oil and gas
uh are tremendously powerful tools and
back to this theme of restoring America's greatness returning it to top
nation status he would look back at the 1970s for example when uh uh America
went through two oil crises one caused by OPEC the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries putting a an embargo on exports to the United States uh which
caused I I remember it well it caused huge cues around gas stations you
know states brought in 50 m an hour speed limits uh in order to make people
drive slower and use less gas um and then there was the Iranian
revolution which again later in the 70s terribly disrupted the world oil supply
and caused another energy crisis in the United States and you might recall that uh as a result America had rules about
uh you know you couldn't export oil from the United States uh America was a was
very dependent on oil from the Middle East in particular uh and this uh was a
a source of great weakness for the United States and Donald Trump then sees
how uh you know the fracking revolution the huge increase in uh uh uh the amount
of oil being produced by the United States and America's transformation from a net oil consumer to a net oil exporter
uh in fact the largest exporter in the world bigger than anybody else uh has
fundamentally changed the American economy American national security uh
and he wants to push that even further and he thinks that drill baby drill is
in part an industrial strategy it's the idea that uh America should double down
on its abil on its incredible technological pro prowess and its
ability to produce vast quantities of energy in a cost effective way and uh
not only improve America's national security but unlock uh a lot of economic
activity that requires access to cheap reliable energy so I I think all of
these things actually uh can he's woven them
together in a strategy for America um and
again you know agree disagree if if you want to understand anything that Donald Trump does I think if you refer back to
these these four things top nation challenge of China uh uh you know
recovering the promise of America for the people who were left behind and um
uh you know cheap plentiful energy is the bedrock of a of of an American
economic renaissance you will understand almost everything that Donald Trump does why is it lost on so many people see I
think it's because people get distracted by Donald Trump's tactics and they
forget to think about strategy donald Trump is is the inheritor of a great tradition
great American tradition of um showman you know he's a kind of a
Barnaman Bailey figure isn't he and part of what he wants to do and this goes
right back to um the art of the deal you know I I've often believed if people
tell you who they are you should believe them and I I think Donald Trump has been quite open about who he is donald Trump
conceives himself as a great dealmaker you know all of the things that I've described you know the relationship with
China the uh the the energy renaissance uh America's top nation uh restoring uh
it's trading dominance all of these things uh he sees them all as deals that
he can strike if you sort of inquire into Donald Trump's personality his
character how he goes about making deals one of the things that comes through crystal clear is he says the my starting
point for any major negotiation is I convince the people I'm negotiating with that I am the craziest man in the room
if they don't do what I want them to do I will bring everything crashing
down and people listen to him they say "Oh my
god he's going to tear everything down he's a crazy man." Um I I actually think what he's doing is he's saying "Look up
here at this shiny frightening object I'm waving in your face." When he's
actually busy doing something quite different uh you know tariffs would be a
good example you know people say "Oh you know Trump blinked over the tariffs and you know he one day he's saying there's
going to be 100% tariffs the next day it's 150% tariffs on China and then something else the next day and then
it's suspended." And so and they think "Well he doesn't know what he's doing." Oh I think I I think he knows exactly
what he's doing i think he's scaring the pants off the people that he wants to make deals with and bringing them to the
table now you can like it or not like it but I I actually find all these people
running around saying "Oh my god he's a crazy man you can't understand what he's doing he's a he's he's a
maniac." They're actually playing his game they're letting him distract them with the shiny object up here and and
and and getting caught up in his tactics and forgetting to think about his strategy and I think his strategy is
quite clear it's very very interesting to me um at the moment that
um Prime Minister Carney um of the two candidates um at least all the reports
that I've seen would is the one that's more uh more positively inclined towards
communist China than Pivvier you've argued that it's through President
Donald Trump's rhetoric you know it was almost intentional i think you believe it was intentional he wanted to see
Carney elected um but given what you just told me about his you know priorities visa v
China that that those two things seem at odds or do they for what it's worth my
view is that uh Donald Trump looks at the rest of the
world through an American lens he the question he asks himself is not how
should I understand Mark Carney as a Canadian but what is the significance of
Mark Carney to me as the leader of America when he looks at Mark Carney
he's going to see a guy with a a you know a big degree from a fancy university you know he's an
international technocrat he's been central bank governor in both Canada and
the United Kingdom He's the quintessential Davos man i I'm here to tell you he is everything Donald Trump
despises uh and on top of that he is as you have
properly pointed out um close to China the party who represents has been uh
uh an an active promoter of China as an important party partner for for Canada
for many years um and I I I I think that
Donald Trump sees Mark Carney as the kind of
negotiating partner he can get the better of i I think Donald Trump is going to say behind closed doors "Look
buddy uh there is no alternative for Canada to its relationship with the United States
uh but America doesn't need Canada very much canada really needs America you're
going to do what I'm going to tell you or I am really going to put the boots to you uh and I think that Mark Carney as
some of his own advisers have written uh is now that the election is out of the
way and now that he's reaped the political benefits of presenting himself as the guy who can most effectively
represent Canada he's going to make a quiet deal with Donald Trump which gives Donald Trump pretty much everything he
wants because he doesn't have much alternative and I don't think he's going to be very successful in standing up to
Donald Trump i know he'd like to think he he can and I don't think he's got a
lot of cards in his hand and I think Donald Trump likes it
just fine that way um see I believe uh there many people
who don't like this but I believe it's a a profound truth about North America is
that there is a single North American economy there are not two national
economies in North America an American and a Canadian that somehow you know trade
finished products with each other uh there is a single North
American economy deeply integrated uh which happens to fall
under the jurisdiction of two separate nation states Canada and the United States there are bits of it that fall
under the government of Canada and bits of it that fall under the government of the of the United States but that
political jurisdiction doesn't make two separate economies we have one uh you
know they but you know what they say that you know the average uh North American car for example crosses the
border something like five or six times as it moves through the production process and goes to different plants in
either Canada or the United States because the industry is so integrated the the industry doesn't think of itself
as an American industry and a Canadian industry uh they think of themselves as a single uh uh um uh combined uh um uh
continental industry um think about uh think about the oil industry um you know
America likes to boast about the fact quite properly likes to boast about the fact that it's now exporting 10 million
barrels of oil a day largest oil exporter in the world what they often forget to mention is that almost half of
that is made possible by over 4 million barrels of oil that they import every day from
Canada if they didn't have access to Canadian oil they wouldn't be nearly the energy overachiever that they think they
are canada's the fourth largest oil producer in the world and literally 90%
of that production goes to the United States uh and in fact you know the
entire refinery complex on the on the US Gulf Coast uh is toolled up to to
process the kind of oil that Canada exports and can't process much of the oil that is produced by fracking in the
United States so America fracks exports that oil brings oil in from Canada
processes it and uh serves American consumers so and I could multiply the
examples over and over the point is that Canada is one of the most export
dependent countries in the world this is a huge degree of trade reliance uh um
and literally 85 to 90% of that goes to the United States again because we don't
exist as a separate economy that only sends finished products to the United States we are deeply intertwined in
these complex production processes i I'll just add I I have a particular example because in in my LinkedIn feeds
uh an old classmate of mine from high school uh represents uh the Canadian
auto parts makers and he's scored some wins because these Canadian auto parts
are very important to American manufacturing of autos is this Flavio that's right you see most people
in their minds that when they think about trade they think okay France
produces wine and Japan produces cars and France sends wine to Japan in
exchange for cars this is not at all the relationship that Canada and the United States have there's nothing like it
roughly 60% of the trade across the border is actually what they call intrafirm trade in other words it's
taking place between parts of the same company they they do some part of their
production process in Canada then they send that to another part of their production process in the United States
and it may come back as back to this idea that cars cross the border four five six times while they're being made
and and you can multiply this across many sectors so the idea that you know I
I I hear this rubbish all the time about Canadians say oh you know we should uncouple from the United States and we
should you know we shouldn't give up our sovereignty uh a as if oh instead of sending our car
parts to the United States we're going to send them to Europe or Japan or whatever and I you know my reaction to
that is you obviously know nothing about how cars are made you know the idea that
I hear sometimes people say "Oh well you know we should we should reduce our dependence on the United States and join the European Union." I think what what
like are you seriously suggesting that this deep economic integration between
Canada and the United States that has been built up literally over centuries can overnight somehow be cut apart with
a pair of scissors and and will have exactly the same relationship tomorrow with the European Union this is just
this is just nonsensical so the the reason we're having this conversation is you said so why is it
that that Donald Trump has all the cards right right because so far we've been talking about how Canada is actually
kind of important to the US yes in all these ways right so here what about this
other the the the other side the big piece I guess right so so but so I' I've talked about the fact that okay Canada
exports 50% of everything made in the private sector uh and the vast bulk of that like 90% goes to the United States
but the United States by contrast you know foreign trade or international trade only represents barely 25% of the
the American economy and that's diversified across all of its trade partners so while for Canada the
relationship with the United States is existential for America the relationship with Canada
is convenient nice not existential
not existential uh so
when Donald Trump says we don't get anything useful from Canada he's talking
rubbish if he had said instead um we like our relationship with Canada
and we get some nice things from Canada but you know we could get them from somewhere else and um uh it would be
slightly inconvenient for us to have to do that but we could do it if he'd said
that he would have been saying the truth but then again that that's but but isn't he starting at his ne with his
negotiating position here that you described earlier right with the sort of the the extreme negotiating position oh
of course i I I I I I didn't mean to say you know that somehow it was surprising that Donald Trump was not saying the
truth this is part of his negotiating tactic right he he he
knows Canada's vulnerability to the United States and he knows that for
Canada there is no realistic alternative uh
and he's basically signaling to Canadians he knows this
uh and uh he's going to have high expectations of any
negotiations that will take place between Canada and the United States over you know the nature of our trade
and other relationships let me let me put it a different way canada has I think it is fair to say been failing to
keep up its end of the bargain with the United States uh its end of the bargain being you know we will be a reliable
ally on defense we have not been a reliable ally on defense that we will be
the country that will look after the Arctic flank of North America we have
not been looking after the Arctic flank of North America that we will be uh you know enforcing the rule of law in Canada
and ensuring that Canada cannot be used as a launching pad for uh you know uh
drug trade with the United States i think he exaggerates to some extent the degree to which this happens but uh
there's no doubt that uh Canada is part of the international network that is uh
flooding the United States with fentanyl and by the way uh the I think the biggest role that we play in that is
that we have become a haven for moneyaundering for the people who are actually behind the drug trade which is
mostly China um and uh uh so those are just a few
examples of ways in which I I I think America is entitled to say to Canada
you've not been holding up your end of the bargain and that's one of the reasons why I have been uh urging uh
people on both sides of the border to think about what I call a grand bargain between Canada and the United States
let's not let's not get caught in the weeds on the trade relationship it's very important let's make sure we get
that right but you know there's border management issues there's defense issues there's national security issues uh you
know drug trade issues uh organized crime issues all of which touch on the Canada US relationship and we should sit
down with Donald Trump he's the great dealmaker say to him Mr trump uh we are
prepared to negotiate across this whole range of issues and to help define a a a
grand bargain that will be in Canada's interest we're not here to sell out Canada's interest but that you will be
able to sell to Americans as a great deal that you have negotiated on their behalf and that is in their interest and
I think I I think there's a lot of scope to do that you know I'm just thinking to myself this morning Sam Cooper uh has an
article talking about how uh the Canadian authorities are refusing or did
at one point refuse to cooperate with the DEA around carfentinyl
uh production cleo Pascal on this show some time ago a fellow Canadian over at
FDD she's described Canada as a kind of a net security detractor for the United
States at the moment as you alluded to and so Canada is essentially deeply
reliant on the US for its security at the moment so like like in in my in my
view this is something that the current administration in the US wants to get in order for that for
those relationships to make sense i'm curious about your thoughts on this yeah well so look Canada was a founding
member of NATO the North American Treaty Organization uh the the purpose of NATO was to
protect uh the liberal democracies from external threats in the post-war world
where you know Germany and France were a smoking ruin Britain had been destroyed
by the war effort uh America was rich and powerful uh and was willing to put
that wealth and power on the line to make sure that uh you know the the the
liberal democracies particularly in Europe could not be bullied and um uh
and taken over by particularly the Soviet Union
uh now that was a long time ago nato was uh founded I think I'm right in saying
in 49 uh [Music] and part of Donald Trump's uh whole
approach to the rest of the world is to say look uh all of our so-called allies
and I'm using his language uh have been free riding on America's defense effort
you know 70 years after the the founding of NATO basically they're still
contributing only a fraction to their collective defense that America is contributing uh and Canada uh one of
those founding members of NATO is one of the worst lagards you know we sign up
for a treaty that in article 5 commits all the members of the alliance to the
proposition that if a member of the alliance is invaded by another country
it will be regarded as an attack on all of those countries and everyone will come to the defense of the um of the
country so attacked uh Article 5 by the way has only been invoked once and that was um uh when America asked its allies
to help them invade Afghanistan because they had been the um the uh the launching pad for 9/11 um back to uh
Canada uh you know NATO several years ago said look you know we America is
correct that uh uh you know the other allies are you know not living up to
their obligations and uh we need to fix this and so uh NATO made a formal
uh declaration that uh the the target for all the NATO members uh in terms of
defense spending that all of them were expected to spend a minimum of 2% of
their GDP so 2% of their national wealth generated every year should should be spent on defense canada is like down
around 1.3 we're we're one of the two or three worst performing members of the
NATO alliance and in private meetings you know our previous prime minister Justin Trudeau said explicitly it's been
reported uh in the media uh said explicitly to his NATO partners we're
never going to reach 2% don't don't expect us to do this you know he gives he paid lip service to it in public but
uh he made it very clear that u Canada had other things to do with its money uh
well George W bush uh and Barack Obama
and Trump won and Joe Biden all of them Democrat Republican doesn't matter they
all said to the NATO alliance "You guys have got to do a better job on defense
spending." Almost everybody else in the alliance has made some progress some
some countries have done really way more than was asked for and they're mostly
countries close to Russia because they're frightened to death of Russia poland and the Baltic republics and so
on um and Canada has just stood back and
said "Sorry we're you know we have we we have other things we want to do with that money." Uh so they wanted all the
benefits of being a member of the NATO club but they didn't want to pay the due the US needs to protect Canada from my
and from my viewpoint even if there was no NATO it would it wouldn't Well this is a fair point i mean you know uh uh
America would never allow another country to invade Canada because next stop would be America wouldn't it so can
I can I just build on that just for a sec so you know to me this extensive
deep infiltration of Canada by the Chinese Communist Party I think is part
of this discussion that the US is trying to to this this negotiation right that's
not just about tariffs i guess that's what I'm saying well no no i completely agree and and uh while I personally am
skeptical that uh the current government of Canada will take a hard line on China
uh I am very hopeful that that America should I think quite properly say and by
the way you cannot be a backdoor of access for the Chinese to America
this is a perfectly legitimate thing for America to ask for uh that will be a
tough pill for the uh for the Liberal Party of Canada to uh to swallow because
they have you know to to a considerable extent hitched their wagon to uh to
China as a as a rising power uh but I really think for all the
reasons that we've talked about uh Canada's profound vulnerability to hostility from America
China's complete inability to step in and be for us what America is terms of a
trade partner security partner a defense partner well and and also I might add being a totalitarian state that is
actively eradicating entire groups of its own people on almost every level China is a
in my view a poor partner for for Canada and you know it it wants Canada's
resources but is not the least bit interested in uh any kind of more
serious uh you know Canadian in manufacturers or processed uh goods um
you know people complain about our relationship with the United States because they think it's all about natural resources i don't think that's
correct but people say it uh uh if if we were to deepen our relationship with
China I'm here to tell you that China would only care about us as a storehouse of natural resources that they would be
able to dominate so uh in in every way China is a poor uh it in indeed not just
a poor substitute a a a completely impossible substitute for our
relationship with the United States and if the United States puts it in the starkkest possible terms look you can
either have uh a close relationship with the United States which seems to be something you want and is clearly in
your interest or whether you want to have a closer relationship with China because the two are not compatible what
do you think about this interest that the US administration has in Greenland
well this is a very interesting uh example of I think people
[Music] being distracted by Trumpian tactics and
not thinking carefully enough about Trumpian strategy you know Trump makes a
lot of noise about uh annexing Greenland or buying it from Denmark uh just like he makes a lot of
noise about Canada the 51st state what he is doing in my view is he is
softening up both the Danes and the Greenlanders uh for a negotiation over what it is
that Donald Trump really needs from Greenland america's had a relationship with Greenland for years they've got a
you know military bases and all uh if Trump wants more of that which I believe
he does um I think Greenland is perfectly willing to give him that
uh what what he's doing is he's softening them up with the threat of annexation uh back
to this idea that he loves to scare his negotiating partners before they ever get to the table uh and and so when he
gets to the table and he says "Well actually what I really want is I want five," I'm just picking numbers out of there "i want five military bases in
Greenland i want you to cut all ties with China i want uh Greenland to be uh
you know sort of an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a in a critical passage
connecting the Arctic to uh uh the Atlantic etc etc etc." Uh and the
Greenlanders will say "Yes where do we sign i think that's what he's after in
his uh uh in his meanderings about Greenland." And uh I think he'll get it
um you know is it necessary for him to go through all this stuff about you know I'm going to buy Greenland um this is
how Trump does business i want to talk before we before we actually finish a little bit about your book yes gardeners
versus designers so tell me about that well you know I I don't want to talk
about it in the abstract let me let me talk about uh something quite concrete because you know the idea behind
gardeners versus designers is there's two ways to think about the world there's two ways to organize ourselves
as communities that organize ourselves uh you know to to
to achieve our our our goals um one way
of doing it is is to put the technocrats in charge you know the the civil servants the the the people who have
fancy university degrees and who study things you know as a as as a guy once
knew he said uh you're one of these people who knows everything about the left side of the titly and nothing about
the right side of the titly so you know uh all these people who have all these fancy degrees and study the world and
know everything about all the statistical uh representations you can make of economic activity and so on so
that that that that's one way of you know organizing you put those people in
charge and say okay you tell us what to do because you're the smart people you
know how to organize things um and a lot of people think that you see there's no alternative to that
uh but what I was trying to get at in gardeners versus designers is there's
actually a far better alternative a far far more effective one and let me let me give you a a concrete
example uh fellow I I I knew um late
professor of uh political uh thought at university in the UK
Norman Barry he said "Look there were two universities in the Midwest in the United States founded at about the same
time." And at one of them you know these these kind of designer people you know
the the the smart people with university degrees that I talked about uh they designed the campus so that it
looked beautiful from 30,000 ft all these fancy symmetrical pathways and
everything the only problem was that these fancy symmetrical pathways didn't lead
students to the places they needed to go and so they were always tramping across the lawn to get to where they wanted to
go and and this made ugly pathways in the in the lawn and so the students and
the and the administrators were always fighting over this um he said at the
other university they did something completely different they said "hm why don't we
find out where people actually want to go first and then we'll landscape around
that?" That's exactly what they did they they just they didn't bother landscaping for a couple of years they just let
people go where they needed to go you know and so people in their walking around the
campus marked out those pathways that were most effective in getting them from the university residence to the
bookstore to their classroom and to the student union and so on and then the you know the admin university administrators
came along afterwards and simply paved over the pathways that the students had
designed for themselves they they didn't need some fancy uh authority with university degrees and
reams of statistics uh to tell them what they wanted to do and how to do it and so in that
university the the students and the administration at least on this question
uh coexisted quite happily you know believe me social order is necessary for all of us to succeed you know if if you
don't have police and courts and contracts and all these other things you
know you you you won't have economic success you won't be able to own a house
and not have it you know vandalized and you won't you won't be able to have a car because it'll be stolen so you need
all of these things absolutely the question is uh are we going to be the
kind of society in which people at the top tell us how to
behave tell us where to invest our money tell us what kind of jobs we want tell us what kind of university degrees we
should have tell us you know what kind of uh cities we want to live in etc etc are we going to be the kind of society
in which people make those decisions for themselves and then the the role of you
know the people in charge is to come along and say okay how can we support you in the decisions that you've made
and this is the that's that's really the essence of this contrast I'm drawing between gardeners and designers i mean
it's such a foundational issue and I think you know this is this question is
really what I've been I don't know looking at from all sorts of different vantage points over
the last you know five six years and you know co the whole way that we responded
to it as various societies or elements of society was the kind of the case in point yes um I completely agree i
thought co was the was the the high watermark of of
designer the the designer approach to things people sort of handed over to these
uh smart people you know with their briefcases and reams of statistics and
so on huge amount of control over their lives and I I was quite fascinated to
see how many people were willing to hand over control of their lives to these
people and it don't get me wrong it's not that uh it's not that I thought that
uh you know we shouldn't have had public health experts and we shouldn't have been debating what the right answer or
how we as a society should organize ourselves in response to CO is not that uh the the the the what what I'm saying
is you know the fact that there were experts uh doesn't mean that the that
the experiences that the rest of us had uh and and the knowledge we had about
our own lives and how we could organize ourselves to carry out our activities and still protect ourselves with co all
of that was treated as irrelevant and useless and the only thing that mattered was these you know high-powered people
with fancy degrees and Um what's what's interesting is you know we were told
well we must defer to the experts uh uh in in public health because
otherwise we'll be endangering everybody but then you surely
people realize that well okay but then all these people in different countries
who supposedly were the great experts actually recommended different things in different places and at different times
at one point you know oh masks are completely useless they won't they won't do anything for you and then you know a
couple of weeks later oh my god everybody's got to wear a mask or they should be arrested i mean the idea that there was some
obvious expert single answer to what we should do about CO was completely
disproven by the CO experience a friend of mine uh is uh the head of a very
large car parts manufacturer in Canada and he said you know the thing was we
understood in our particular industry how to protect our workers from the
danger of catching CO and we could have still carried on our economic activities
but nobody was interested nobody wanted to go to the trouble of saying to us
"Okay show us how you can protect your workers we're not going to tell you how to do it you show us that you can do it
effectively and we won't interfere with you you carry on doing your thing during CO." But no we couldn't we couldn't do
that we couldn't trust anybody to take the knowledge that was obvious to us all
about the dangers of CO and how it was transmitted and how you protected yourself we couldn't trust people to
organize themselves intelligently uh in order to be able to carry on their activities and protect themselves from
no we all had to be locked in our houses for months at a time and
forbidden in some cases you know from going to the park uh uh um because you know these these
experts uh knew everything and we knew nothing and I I I I hope in
retrospect that people have come to understand that while expertise has its
place and I'm not in any way saying that we should ignore experts and that they have nothing to teach us i'm saying that
uh uh we must still retain the ability to apply our own intelligence and
experience to what experts want to tell us and we are the ones who should have the final say about how we live our
lives and not the experts um as we finish up um the McDonald
Laurier Institute is probably one of my favorite think tanks um I've over the
years keep coming across reports coming out of it uh speakers I see it on
people's resumes who I'm interested in and who who I admire um just very
briefly as we actually finish just tell me a little bit about it well you know I I I had a fancy job here
in Ottawa a few years ago as the uh what's called the Clifford Clark visiting economist at uh at the Ministry
of Finance and it so that that's that that person is brought in from the outside as the sort of one man or one
woman in-house economic policy think tank and and gadfly for the entire
federal government it's quite an interesting position and a after I'd been in this job for two years and it's
a limited appointment two years so I was about to go home and I said "Well what
have I learned from my experience here?" And I uh answer number one I learned
that Ottawa is in a terrible mess uh it you know spending out of control
programs that don't achieve anything uh nobody in charge uh and I said "Okay so
but but what can I do about that?" Uh and it occurred to me that Ottawa was
the only G7 capital that didn't have a national think tank in the capital
talking about national policy issues to national policy makers the national media and the national electorate i
thought this was a huge hole in our democratic infrastructure and I set out to fill it because I'm a think tanker so
that that's kind of shocking given where I come from where there's a lot of think tanks oh there the last at last count in
Washington there were 400 think tanks uh and and I'm glad you mentioned
Washington because um uh in setting out to do this I was inspired by what I what
I call the full service think tanks in Washington you know there's there's there's a bunch of very specialized
think tanks think about healthcare defense policy national security but there's a there's a handful of them that
try to think about everything Washington does heritage Ko Brookings Woodro
Wilson AEI um and I was inspired by them
uh to try and create something analogous in Ottawa and the McDonald Lori
Institute is that creation it is a gardener creation by the way uh it it it it grew
out of uh our experience uh with uh you know the the problems of the
federal government what was going on in other countries uh and
um you know we're we just a few weeks ago celebrated our 15th anniversary um
we're the most mentioned think tank in the Canadian Parliament uh we've been blacklisted by the Kremlin uh I think a
dozen of our senior fellows have been sanctioned by the Kremlin we've been denounced by Beijing uh the the
ambassador from China here regularly tells everybody not to pay any attention to us uh which I regard as a
great badge of honor um so uh it has
grown uh enormously in a what I think of as a
relatively short period of time and become rather a fixture uh not only in
Canada but we've now opened uh our own uh branch office in Washington to talk
about the Canada US relationship the center for North American prosperity and security which is a long ugly name which
gives the fabulous acronym of Syninnapse uh and um
uh I think that this has really proven uh the the concept that I had at the
very beginning that uh there was this big hole in Ottawa that needed filling
wonderful well uh Brian Lee Crowley it's such a pleasure to have had you on all
the pleasure was mine thank you all for joining Brian Lee Crowley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders i'm
your host Yana Kellik [Music]

 

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)