At Issue | Canada scrambles to bridge U.S. trade divide

At issue tonight, Canada -US trade talks.Donald Trump is casting doubt on the future of Kusma ahead of the review deadline.

I don't know that I'm going to renew it, because to be honest with you, the United States does much better.

The Minister for Canada -U .S.Trade, Dominic LeBlanc, says they are making progress, but the opening of the long -awaited Gordie Howe Bridge is again being delayed.

The bridge has been an issue for the President for some time.to delay the opening and take the necessary time to resolve outstanding issues.There's not great drama here.We're going to work through some issues that have come up.

So, what's been made of Trump's commitments to Kuzma?What could it mean for the long -awaited review deadline?That's July 1st.And what about that bridge?I'm Rosemary Barden here to break it all down tonight.Chantelle Hubert, Andrew Coyne, Althea Raj.

Lots of interesting threads on this file over the course of the week, the bridge being one of them.And maybe we'll come back to that.But Chantelle, I'll start with you just on the comments directly from the president saying he's not sure he wants to renew.Just usual bluster?Is it a sign that maybe there are some things getting done at the table?as Dominic LeBlanc seems to be suggesting.

How do you take those comments?

I take them with the same grain of salt as the announcement that the U .S.is going to bomb Iran out of existence, and then the U .S.has a deal that it's about to sign with Iran.Even on serious things, you can't take any statement that's at face value.

We should be careful not to present July 1st as the day when Kuzma turns into a pumpkin.Even in the worst -case scenario, that does require a six -month notice with reaction which would not be positive in the U .S.if the U .S.wants to go there, the Trump administration.

But what it does tell you is thatover a year and some months now, nothing has moved.in a positive sense.And Canada has made moves on the digital tax, more recently on the CRTC, on some of the counter tariffs, and none of those moves has been followed by some change in the, we don't need anything from you.Worse, if you listen to the US ambassador to Canada, he's actually today saying the opposite, that this statement is meant as an overture to deal.So go figure.

Well, Dominic LeBlanc, to be fair, Andrew, did say that when he was down there last week that there were about 12 issues where, I don't know if they had resolved them, but there was some progress.And his impression from Ambassador Greer was, oh, OK, you're actually dealing with some of the things.I don't know what to make of that, because as we've talked about, we don't know what's going on behind closed doors.But if you take that with what Trump said, what do you understand of it?

Very little, but look, there's so many complicated factors, more so than in any previous administration.When we ask, is Trump bluffing, for example, it's a bit like asking, is Trump lying?And the answer is, it's hard to tell with him because he doesn't know the difference himself, I don't think, oftentimes, between truth and falsehood.So yeah, it would be certainly within his playbook to be bluffing.We've seen that before.He's not a particularly good bluffer, as Iran has shown us.

But it's also entirely possible that when he says, we don't need anything from Canada, which is a ridiculous statement.Of course, you don't need things.You can be completely autarkic if you want to be.but it's just not really smart economics.But when he says it, he could entirely believe it.So that bedevils everybody.

It bedevils the people around him who are trying to interpret what he means.It bedevils anybody trying to deal with the people around him, because no one is sure at any given moment who speaks for the president, who has his ear, who's likely to have his ear.down the road.Then you add in all the many different issues that are on the table with differing statements coming from different people in the administration.So anybody trying to negotiate with this administration at this point would be tearing their hair out.On top of which, as we've said many times in this forum, if you do negotiate, you do make concessions, the United States nominally makes concessions in return.

What guarantee do you have that anything that they say will actually be upheld?So when you're dealing with somebody as unpredictable as a kind word as Trump, it's like no negotiation that any of us have seen before.

And it does seem, Althea, as though the government understands that.I mean, there was nobody freaking out when Donald Trump said those things yesterday because they've seen these kinds of things before.

Sorry, is that a question?Yes, I agree with you.I actually think, I mean, I disagree with the prime minister's categorization as like no great drama.I think this is a great drama.I think we would all love to be a fly on the wall and know what's going on.I, to Chantal's point, I'm not sure that there haven't been concessions.

I mean, a month and a half ago.

No, no, no, there have been.But there were no, they did, they opened no door.

Well, I don't know that they didn't open any doors.Sorry, that's where I was going with that.Because we had the Prime Minister a month and a half ago suggest that he was not going to concede anything to get to the negotiating table because he wanted, you know, the Americans were not abiding by the agreement themselves because of all these Section 232 tariffs.And now we have a very different tone.Now, we have Dominic LeBlanc telling the Eurasia Group today, for example, that he's had two one -hour conversations with Ambassador Greer.And again, obviously, there's not going to be an announcement on July 1st about

renegotiation.We should not panic.In fact, Mexico has scheduled negotiations for after July 1st.So there should not be an announcement on July 1st.But there seems to be more traction, that it goes against perhaps the partisan dialogue that we heard earlier in the fall, earlier in the year, that is about to use Doug Ford's words, building fortress North America.And so on the one hand, of course, the ambassador is wrong and Donald Trump is wrong when he says that the US doesn't need anything.

It obviously does.Potash, for example, Ambassador Hoekstra has talked about.Canadian tourists, please come back and also please include our alcohol on your shelves.But I do think that there is a change in tone and I don't know if the concession of the Online News Act, for example, led to that change in tone or helped.kind of show some goodwill.

All the things that Alvea lists are demands for more concessions.Please organize group tourists so they are forced to come to the U .S.Put booze on the shelves.I'm not hearing anything that talks about the U .S.

openness.But can we remind ourselves because at some point one needs to take to keep score.that at this point last year, the prime minister believed that he would have resolved some of the main issues on the trade front.And then when that didn't happen, it was supposed to happen on July 21st, and then it was going to happen on August 1st.So can we keep track of reality a year ago?optimism had deadlines.

Today, it's got, wow, it's going well.We spoke for an hour.

Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.I mean, and a bridge that we have paid for, that is ready to go, that we are not allowed to open, apparently, because of whatever's going on behind the scenes, because nobodywill explain how those two things are related either, Andrew.

Yeah, and whether it's related in some broad sense that Trump wants to use this as a negotiating tantrum, whether it's just to do with the individual owner of the other bridge and all the local politics, I do think we should avoid looking for a foolish consistency, if I can put it that way.And we should look at positions in the round over time.What I mean by that is the sum total of the Canadian negotiating position, like the sum total of the Mexican position, is going to be a mixture of different messages at different times.That's how you try to find the right balance, the right fix.Any negotiation is going to be a mixture of hard lines and then concessions, et cetera.So people jumped up and down because previously the prime minister was saying, elbows up, we're going to diversify to other countries.

And now he's saying, oh, on some things we could have Fortress North America.I think it's probably prudent that you'd have some combination of the two.You're trying to diversify as much as you can as fast as you can.but you're faced with the reality that you're not going to be able to just weep at one go from American trade to other countries.So you're forced to have a kind of a nuanced position.And similarly with Mexico.

We were hearing all about how Mexico had a very conciliatory position earlier on, and maybe they were stealing a march on us.Now you hear Mexico taking a rather tougher stand.I think both countries are trying to sort of, as I say, find the right mix that can turn the key in the lock of these negotiations.

Last thought to you, Althea.how to survive under the weight of the enormous American giant.Yes, I do think that there's been somewhat of a tone shift in our coverage of the discussions with Mexico, but I'm not sure in the kind of American and Mexican coverage of what's actually going there, because we haven't really focused on the enormous pressure that she's been under from a national security perspective with Americans wanting to like root out, get rid of,their own without talking to the government or warning them.And we, thankfully, don't have that problem on this side of the border.I hope for an agreement.

I do think there is a tonal shift.I do wonder what other concessions we're going to see.It's interesting to me, and I know we'll talk about this, but the social media ban.includes a lot of the previous ideology of the Trudeau era that has been conceded to the Donald Trump administration.So it's interesting to me that they're still going down one road, yet they've conceded on these others, so they clearly don't think there are problems, or maybe they've gotten okay, or they're just hoping, I don't know.I feel like there's so many more questions about what's going on, so I would love it to be a drama so we could know what's going on behind the scenes.

The Liberals plan to try and protect kids online.

We're failing our children.Enough is enough.Our parents cannot face these challenges alone.The safety of children can't be an afterthought.

Is the government's plan to ban social media for kids under 16 the right move?Does it do enough to protect children?How does it balance protection with freedom?All of that next.At issue, the Safe Social Media Act.The Liberals have unveiled legislation they say will protect children online, including banning social media for anyone under the age of 16.

The Act will establish a minimum age of 16 to have a social media account.The Act will require social media platforms and AI chatbot services to do more to protect children and make their platforms safe by design.

So what will this legislation mean for Canadians?Does it do enough to address concerns?safety online?Let's bring everyone back.Chantal, Andrew and Althea.Andrew, why don't you start us off on this.

This is the third attempt to try and make this legislation make sense.It is very complicated to try and regulate tech giants, to try and enforce rules, and to try and find a way to control what kids are seeing online.What did you make of this attempt this time?

Well, let's talk first of all about what's not in it, which was in previous attempts, which were criminal code provisions, life sentences for certain types of behavior.People could take each other to the Human Rights Commission for speech that they didn't like.A lot of that stuff was quite extraneous and over -the -top, and mercifully, they do seem to have pared this down to what I think most people are actually concerned about, which is online harms.That said, as you say, there are so many moving pieces to this, whether you're talking about the under -16 social media ban, whether you're talking about the duty of responsibility for AI chats, whether you're talking about the many powers of this Digital Safety Commission.Making sense of this would be hard enough, except that also so much of it has been pushed off into regulations.I think Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa professor said there's 51 different provisions that have been left to the regulations.

So it'll be very hard at this point to know exactly what to make of it.There'll have to be a lot of search and scrutiny of this.I will say, make one prediction, that a lot of the people who've been squawking the most about the courts overriding Parliament and messing with the democratic will of the people, are going to be the people most relieved to see the courts giving searching scrutiny to this one on charter grounds.There's real potential here.I'm not saying it's reality, but there's real potential for overkill on free expression.And I am personally thankful that somebody will be looking at that from our charter grounds.

Althea, what did you make of this attempt to try and regulate this piece of the internet, particularly in relation to kids?

Yeah, I mean, Andrew's right that the basic ideaparts that were gutted from the old version of the bill were the parts that the liberals put in, frankly, for partisan reasons that had nothing to do with kids or social media or online media.And most of the good part, actually, the stuff that had been heavily consulted with, that is in this bill.The new parts of this bill, though, I think deserve some scrutiny.The social media ban, and Andrew mentioned Michael Geist at the University of Ottawa, You know, he makes a really good point, and others have made this point as well.But so much is undefined.

And it's not just the details that's undefined.It's like, who will this apply?What tools will you use to test or to prove somebody's age?What privacy safeguards do you have in mind?All of this, basically, the government is asking parliamentarians you know, this is no longer your responsibility, give it to us.We are going, so like, tell us that you agree with the ambitious scope, but then we will define what this legislation actually ends up looking like, because so much has not been colored in, it's not even sure that we know what the actual picture looks like.

So, it will be, hopefully, Parliament and the House, like, MPs will have a chance to ask some really pointed questions.I also am troubled by the charter implications, like, 16, Whose voices are you trying to mute as well from the public space?When you think about Greta Thunberg, for example, she was 15 years old when she started using social media for her kind of global populist outcry on climate change and the school protests.I think there are some really valid questions about privacy and speech rights that the government has yet to talk about.I'll leave it there because I feel like I saw your mouth open.

Yeah, I wonder though if like it starts as a band but there is the possibility right for the

for the social media companies to put measures in place to protect the children But we don't know what those are right, but there is a way for them to still be a part of the problem Which is I think it is a big leap to ask parliamentarians to pass a law like this right right Chantal let's hear from you Well, if you look at the timeline of previous bills that addressed issues that were related to social media or platforms, I think most 14 -year -olds can expect to be able to be on social media because they'll be over 16 by the time this ever becomes legislation.First point.Second, I'm curious about some of...I'm a practical person.who was carded until she was 25 whenever I wanted to buy some alcohol.So how are we going?

What mechanism is going to verify age?I'm curious about that.Face recognition, sure.Can you tell the difference between a 16 and a 17 year old?But beyond that?The track record of this government on anything related to framing the digital world is frankly not particularly convincing.

It either died on the order paper or they backed off over the past two years because of pressures from the US.This bill literally asks the same companies to be responsible and accept guidelines that they would put in place so that there is no ban on people using the platforms.I don't believe that the government has demonstrated that it has the stomach to follow through on its own legislation when it comes to those issues.

I take that point, Andrew, but there is a political appetite, a public appetite for some sort of action from the government.Whether or not it happens, I don't know, but there is some leeway there, I would think.

The difference between this bill and the other fumbled bills is that there's an actual legitimate concern that needs to be addressed here.The Online News Act was based on the idea that Facebook and Google were stealing newspapers' content by linking to it, which was ridiculous.The Online Streaming Act is based on this outmoded idea that we still need to cross -subsidize CanCon out of broadcast.So that stuff really didn't make any sense.But here, there's real concerns, legitimate concerns, new concerns around what social media and now what AI can do, particularly to children, but also to adults in some cases as well.You're dealing with expression, so you've got to tread really lightly and really carefully.

But for once, there's really a serious concern here that can't be left unaddressed.We've seen the consequences.We've seen, both for individuals and in some ways for society at large, what social media has done to our brains, if nothing else.And so they're right to be getting into it.The question is, are they doing it in the right way?

Quickly, last word to you there, Chantal.

Yes, except it's a new area and the only country that has tried it, Australia, has so far not come up with convincing results.We have all been teenagers and most teenagers are liable to rise to the challenge of getting around forbidden fruit legislation.So I'm curious to see where that takes us.But I have to say, as a parent and as someone who covers this parliament, I'm dubious about this being more than sending a message that makes people feel better because we're talking about an issue that is real and of concern.

I am forever grateful to have lived with a rotary phone growing up.Thank you all for that.We're going to take a short break here.When we come back, we'll look at Pierre Poiliev's message to Alberta.how he's been making the case for the Federation.That's next.

At issue, Pierre Poilievre's national unity message.The Conservative leader first acknowledged the real frustrations of Albertans.

The problem lately has been that the federal government has been terrible at the things that are its job while sticking its nose in things that are not its job.

and then pointed to this government as part of the problem.

Locking arms with other provinces is a practical, realistic path to a stronger Alberta within a united Canada.We don't need a different country in Alberta.We need different government policies in Ottawa.

So what's been made of Pierre Poilievre's message of unity to Alberta?What could the Alberta MP bring to the debate?Let's bring everyone back.Chantal, Andrea, Althea.Althea, I'll start with you.I thought parts of the speech were good, made sense.

I thought parts of the speech were quite partisan.And I wondered if blaming the government would contribute to some of the frustrations that he was trying to address.But give me your sense whether you think he hit the mark there or not.

Well, if he was trying to do a national unity speech, I don't think he succeeded.He delivered a partisan speech.Perhaps I heard it as you did, Rosie.This was basically almost an electoral speech.Some of the wording actually hearkened back to his conservative leadership days, where he talked about the government being big and bossy.And his vision of the Canadian Federation is interesting.

I mean, we are a very decentralized federation when looking at other federal states, for example.But actually, when it was struck, the federal government was quite powerful when you look at powers of disallowance, for example, powers of reservation.And I don't think that perhaps some of the thingshe said were historically sound, but they represented a vision that he has tried to sell ever since he has been in politics, and especially since he has been the leader.And some of the things that he has said have not turned out to be true.For example, the Trudeau government did buy a pipeline.

It certainly did nothing to calm separatism.Separatism also did not start with the Trudeau government.So I'm not sure that it won over any person that was sitting on the fence.And frankly, I'm not sure if Pierre Polyev, if he was trying to, pitched himself as the great voice of unity for the referendum in the fall.

Yeah, I mean, Chantal, he wasn't talking to me, obviously.He wasn't talking to any of us.He was talking to people in Alberta.And so I don't know how that message resonated in Alberta.But as a federal leader trying to start this campaign over the course of the summer, what did you make of the way he addressed these issues?

I thought he avoided, of course, the underlining team was, if only we could change governments, all these problems would go away.But once you move beyond that, I don't think it works.And that's been my experience in Quebec, to come to a conversation like that by telling people who don't think the way you think, that they're just stupid or wrong and they need to get their heads looked at.And it totally avoided that.I also thought that there is a danger in the calendar and in the way that this is happening that people the Alberta talk, the rhetoric, starts resonating negatively in Quebec, the opposition between the two, because when you go to Alberta, you hear it a lot.We're doing this to get all the things that Quebec got by doing this.

I thought it was a smart move totalk about actually making an alliance with other provinces, including Quebec, rather than focusing on, yeah, you didn't get what they got.As for the decentralized vision of Canada, I don't think Pierre Poilievre is inventing it.It is the vision that the Conservative Party, from Joe Clark on, has been pushing forward.Joe Clark used to call it a community of communities.And you could hear Stephen Harper in some of the lines that you played on air.

It is just a speech.which avoided having Mr. Poydiev having to sit through the installation of the new governor general, by the way.But I did not find it off base.Right.OK.

Last word to you, Andrew, your take on it.

Well, I'll just pause on the concept of Pierre Poirier asking for people not to be so demonizing of each other and softer language, et cetera.Look, I share some of his critiques of federal policy over the years, including current federal policy, and certainly many Albertans do.But where I think it goes astray is connecting that to the unity question.It's one thing to be discontented with federal policy.It's another to say, I want to separate and have my own country.And I don't think he established the link between the two.

And supposing there were a link, the implication of his comments is, if the answer to separatism is to change policies and to adopt conservative policies, then what happens if those policies aren't adopted?Does that mean, therefore, separation is justified?I think he's playing with fire by making those kinds of connections.He's also This is often the case in these kinds of discussions, painting everybody in Alberta with the same brush, as if everybody in Alberta was a small C or a large C conservative.Now, a lot of them are, but right now the polls are showing 40 to 50 %% of Albertans supporting either the Liberals, the NDP, or the Greens.

So where are they in this discussion?So it was needlessly narrow, somewhat self -serving, and not terribly helpful.

Okay, I'm going to leave it there.That is that issue for this week.Thank you all very much.Thank you for watching.I'm Rosemary Barton.