Sleazy politics amid US tariffs & annexation threats (Uncut) 03-28-2025

Canada’s Trump election: Sleazy politics amid US tariffs & annexation threats

What we are suffering from right now is too much financialization. We need to shift our policies towards a more productive economy and so on, which bankers of the ilk of Mark Carney are not going to be able to do. The Western world is becoming dominated by bankers.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, is a banker and the man is fabulously unpopular. The prime minister of Greece, Kiriakos Mitsotakis, is a banker. In Italy, they had two bankers.

They had Mario Monti and then they had Mario Draghi, Goldman Sachs bankers. How is that country faring nowadays? And then they brought in this guy, Friedrich Merz in Germany, who was the chairman of Germany’s BlackRock operations. We are becoming completely dominated by the banking industry at the political level.

Hello and welcome to the 43rd Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our times. I’m your host, Radhika Desai. Since Donald Trump’s re-election, the world has been on a geopolitical rollercoaster, and Canada in particular has gone from being a nice, boring country that’s on nobody’s radar to being in the eye of the Trump storm.

And it’s been a hair-raising ride so far. Trump’s election has already had many effects on Canadian politics. He prompted Prime Minister Trudeau’s visit to Mar-a-Lago in an unprecedented visit to a president-elect to avert dangers of tariffs.

And once he got there, it was only to suffer the insult of being told that Canada should consider becoming the US’s 51st state to avoid tariffs and later being called Governor Trudeau. Trump has also precipitated a party leadership election challenge, citing Trudeau’s challenge from Trudeau’s most senior minister, Chrystia Freeland. On the one hand, the challenge ratcheted up pressure from his own party on Trudeau to resign that had been building up for the past year and more.

On the other, Chrystia Freeland cited Trump and the dangers he represented as her reason. And resigned Trudeau did, saying that he could not lead a party in the election that was due in 2025 with so much internal opposition to him. So that’s how Canada began 2025 with a leadership election in the ruling party that did not end until the 9th of March.

And as the election neared, the party establishment went to work recruiting an apparently impeccable candidate, former governor of the banks of Canada and England, and is totally a part of the globalist World Economic Forum style elite, namely Mark Carney. And Mark Carney’s candidature, the mere fact that he was running to lead the Liberal Party, he had not won yet, but the mere fact that he was running completely transformed the fortunes of the Liberal Party. As late as the ninth or week or so after Trudeau’s resignation, the Liberals, which are the red line and dots here, they were really at the lowest level possible that they had been in ever in their history.

And the Conservatives had about a 20 plus point lead over them. And within as soon as it became clear that Mark Carney was going to be the leader or likely to be the leader of the party, the fortunes of the Liberals shot up. And today it’s essentially not even neck and neck.

There are many polls predicting that there’s going to be a conservative, sorry, a liberal majority. That is to say the Liberal Party has gone from being the most unpopular party to actually beating the Conservatives who were until recently so popular. And of course, all of this is taking place while the Canadian media and social media are awash with stories about how Canadians are falling over themselves to boycott American products.

So it’s supposed to be an election about Trump. But is it? Because if all the parties are equally agreed, as they say they are, that Trump’s tariffs and aggression are unacceptable and that everyone, including themselves, are going to stand up for Canadian sovereignty, why isn’t Trump a non-issue? With me to unpick all this is Dimitri Lascaris. Dimitri is a much widely respected observer of Canadian politics and even a participant in it.

He’s a prominent lawyer and a journalist, and some of you will know him from his YouTube channel, Reason to Resist. And quite simply, Dimitri is one of the most widely respected public figures in Canada. So welcome back to Geopolitical Economy, our Dimitri.

Thank you for your kind words, Radhika. Always a pleasure to join you. Thank you.

Great. So Dimitri, why don’t you start us off by saying exactly what you find most remarkable about this election? Everyone agrees that it’s a historic election, but I’m not sure people really can agree on why it’s a historic election. So tell us.

I think you’ve nailed it on the head. It is historic in one sense, and that is the circumstances in which the election is occurring are historic. We’re witnessing rapid, traumatic, profound changes, not only internally in our societies in the West and beyond the West.

We are witnessing a rapid redistribution of power politically, economically, and militarily from the West to the East. It’s happening at breathtaking speed. So in that sense, it is unquestionably historic.

What is completely non-historic about the Canadian election, as far as I can tell, Radhika, is that nobody in the parties that currently have a presence in Parliament seems to understand the extraordinary nature of the circumstances, and they’re continuing to put forward the same failed, mediocre, thoughtless policies as they were putting forward before. So they seem to be living in a bubble. They are completely and utterly unaware, as far as I can tell, of the historic nature of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

So just to give you one quick example, you know, it’s quite clear that Europe politically, economically, and militarily is on decline, and that the states of the non-Western world, the leading states, principally China, Russia, India, Brazil, are accumulating at a rapid pace, dramatic economic, military, and political power. And what is the prescription that they’re coming up with, these traditional mainstream parties in Canada, to deal with this? They want to bring Canada closer to the European Union, which is in rapid decline and has effectively become a vassal of the United States. This is exactly not what the doctor ordered, and it was entirely predictable.

You see Mark Carney running off to England, you know, meeting with the king, going and, you know, having a bromance with Macron and Starmer. These are failed leaders whose countries are in serious trouble. This is no way to protect Canada from the vagaries and irrationality and aggression of the Trump administration.

Well, exactly. I mean, the thing is that not only are they talking about, you know, not considering, for example, developing closer links with China and so on, which you’d think would be logical, China is already Canada’s second largest trading partner. And so it would make sense that, you know, if your largest trading partner is no longer trading with you, then you try to develop your links with other trading partners, beginning with your second largest.

But not only is this not being mentioned, but Carney has actively rejected the idea of getting closer to Canada and instead essentially is trying to say, you know, talking about moving closer to Europe and so on. And I think underlying all this, I wonder if what’s really going on, because what strikes me as really interesting is that the policies that they are putting forward are essentially policies that move Canada to the right. Now, if you think about it, when the Trump administration really and Trump himself began spewing out all this nonsense about, you know, making Canada the 51st state and Governor Trudeau and imposing tariffs and what have you, when all of these things began to happen, practically everybody in Canada, it seemed to me, seemed to be agreed that what needed to happen was that some kind of left nationalist project, which would protect workers, which would expand Canada’s economy, which would reduce the terrible inequality that has crept into Canada and all of these things, so that there was a huge groundswell of support for such a progressive project.

And instead, what we see is that, first of all, Pierre Polyevre, who had essentially been driving the sort of policy electoral platform wagon, if we may put it that way, and essentially putting all sorts of things like tax cuts and what have you on the agenda. Mark Carney has essentially taken over all of his agenda. In a sense, you know, he was against the carbon tax, he was going to axe the carbon tax.

Polyevre wanted to cut taxes, Mark Carney wants to cut taxes. So in all of these ways, Mark Carney has become really close to the agenda of the Conservative Party. So the entire political discussion has already moved to the right, rather than what we really need to tackle the threats that Trump represents, which is a progressive agenda.

But there is none of that. So and on top of that, there’s a third factor, and I just like to share this with you. So you have, for example, the Globe and Mail, which is the leading political newspaper in the country, which says, you know, what’s missing is a real vision.

So you think, oh, wonderful Globe and Mail stands for a real vision for Canada. But then if you look at what they really want, and remember, the Globe and Mail speaks for Canada’s elite. What you read about what, you know, what a real vision would look like, you read this.

You read that voters understand that the best way to beat Mr. Trump is to reduce the country’s reliance on the U.S. for trade and defense, so that his crude threats or those of his successor no longer carry the same existential power. So far, so good. But then what do you read? Doing so will mean exploiting its natural resources by building pipelines and speeding up the approvals process, making Canada more inviting to investors by lowering taxes, removing interprovincial trade barriers, which, by the way, is essentially a code word for more neoliberalism, more deregulation, balancing the books, fiscal conservatism, so no spending, no great government initiative to revive Canada’s economy or anything, and rebuilding the military and forging new alliances.

So essentially, and we know that both the major parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, serve the same political elite in Canada, and this political elite is essentially also setting the agenda, isn’t it? Absolutely, and this is precisely the prescription one would expect from the elite. Why would one build pipelines? There’s no need of pipelines to facilitate the movement of oil from one Canadian province to another. This is for exportation.

And where is it going to go? They’re not going to be, I think, sending their oil to China because the Canadian government has adopted a belligerent attitude towards China. They’re planning on sending that oil, I would think, to Europe. That is going to be the primary destination.

At the end of the day, what we have, what we, the fundamental problem that they are not wanting to address is that Canada should be increasing its self-sufficiency. Pipelines have nothing to do with increasing the self-sufficiency of Canada. Canada needs to rebuild its industrial base.

It needs to ensure that it has the agricultural products available to feed the population, to keep the population healthy. It needs to increase its spending on healthcare, which will, by the way, be a stimulant for the economy. All of this will increase the country’s, you know, the pharmaceutical industry.

We used to have a world-class pharmaceutical manufacturer, Conat Labs in Canada. It was privatized. And now we rely entirely upon European and American pharmaceutical companies for essential medicines.

So what they should be prescribing is Canada’s investment, massive amounts of social investment in creating self-sufficiency. Instead, what they’re doing is simply urging that we switch from reliance upon the American market to the European market at a time when both of these economies are in rapid decline. It makes absolutely no sense.

Vladimir Putin just gave a very interesting speech to a group of powerful industrialists in Russia, notwithstanding all of the talk about detente and normalization of relations between the United States and Russia. And he said, look, the sanctions are here to stay. The old order of free trade, so-called free trade and global movement of goods is gone.

What we should be doing is first and foremost promoting the self-sufficiency of the Russian people. And to the extent we rely upon trade, we should rely upon trade with our partners in the BRICS. That is a rational policy for Canada to pursue.

It’s not even on the radar, Radhika. And what I found most remarkable in the last two weeks, I don’t know if you saw it, the Chinese embassy put out a statement in Canada. They put out a statement in which they said, we stand ready to improve our relations with Canada.

They were hoping that somebody in Ottawa has a functioning brain, but apparently none of them do. And so they want to hitch the Canadian boat from one Titanic, the American, to another, the European Union, rather than accept an open invitation from the most powerful country in the world economically and politically. That’s what China has become today, an open invitation to improve relations.

And, you know, that’s also very remarkable because, you know, right now we are in, we are facing a major reversal by the United States of the traditionally close relationship that Canada has enjoyed with the United States now. And so this reversal, you’d think should be matched by a reversal on our side, but there is no reversal. I mean, if you think about it, Canada was in fact developing good relations with China throughout the 2010s, up until about 2017, 2018, there was all sorts of, there was even a talk about a free trade deal with China and so on.

And then in the midst of Trump’s, in Trump’s first term, in the midst of Trump’s essentially, this sort of Trump mark one threat, you know, tearing up NAFTA and then forcing Canada to renegotiate the deal, the free trade deal, you had essentially pressure being put on Canada to arrest Meng Wanzhou, which happened in December of 2018. And since that time, Chinese-Canadian relations have really sort of declined precipitously. And part of this has also been more recent developments.

So even after the Meng Wanzhou affair was resolved and everything and the two Michaels were released and what have you, Canada still towed the US line in imposing under the Biden administration tariffs on Canadian, Chinese automobiles. And the Chinese, of course, in retaliation have imposed tariffs on Canadian agricultural exports and other things besides. So the relations have been bad because Canada has been essentially pursuing a pro-US line.

Now there is no need for a pro-US line. And here’s something else, Dmitry, you know, for all the posturing, you know, Carney saying that, you know, Canada will not be owned by the United States and Polyer talking about, you know, putting Canada first and what have you. It seems to me that whatever else may have changed and however much Canadians, ordinary Canadians may have become disillusioned with the Trump administration and possibly even with the United States, Canada’s ruling elite, which has spent three decades plus from 1988 onwards, deepening its connection with the US economy is not going to stand for any major break with the Americans.

So I wonder how you think this is going to unfold, because it seems to me that there is no, after all this, as soon as the election is over, this posturing will stop and all sorts of compromises will begin. What do you think? I think we’re going down with the ship, Radhika. We’ve hitched our boat to the American Titanic and we’re going down with the ship.

Unless there’s a dramatic change in course, you know, Carney is, he put out a statement in the last 48 hours, which with which I’m sure Polyer is in total agreement. In fact, if anything, Polyer’s approach is going to be even more aggressive with respect to military spending. And Carney said, we’re going to increase military spending to 2% of GDP, which is insane.

Already our military spending, which is not at 2% of GDP is way too high. This is music to the Trump administration’s ears, music to their ears. You know, Carney is talking about lowering taxes.

He scrapped the capital gains tax, the very, very modest proposal for an increase in the proportion of capital gains that is brought into taxable income that was supposed to come into effect in June of last year and was delayed. He’s scrapping that. You know, he’s scrapping the carbon tax.

This is again, all music to the ears of the Americans. What is Carney actually proposing or what is Polyer actually proposing that is antithetical to the agenda of the Trump administration? They’re maintaining their hostility towards China. They’re maintaining their support for the wars in West Asia, including the genocide in Palestine.

They’re increasing dramatically their military spending. They’re decreasing taxes. They’re maintaining their belligerence towards China and Russia.

This is all business as usual, which is the point that I really can’t stress enough. The people in this country who are running the show, whether they be economic elites, political elites, media elites, do not understand or refuse to acknowledge that we are living in a dramatically evolving world and that the old ways of doing business are profoundly contrary to the interests of Canadians. I don’t see any, you know, this clown every time you see an image on social media is wrapped in the Canadian flag.

Basically, his campaign up until now consisted of two things. I’m going to make Canada great again, where we heard that before. And secondly, Trudeau sucks.

That was it. That was his campaign, because it was such a shallow campaign. As soon as the liberals, whose policies have not changed, altered the face of the party from Justin Trudeau to the banker, Mark Carney, you know, all of a sudden, the strategy proved the strategy of the conservatives proved to be a miserable failure.

And now Palliat is floundering. He doesn’t know what to do. It all hinged upon patriotism and more than anything, the unpopularity of Justin Trudeau.

And one thing I must say, Radhika, about the polling data that I find most disappointing as a Canadian, if you look at the policies of Mark Carney, and you compare them to those of Justin Trudeau, there really is no material difference. And yet you’ve seen this dramatic change in the fortunes of the Liberal Party, simply because they’ve gone from a drama teacher to a banker. The policies are what should matter to Canadian voters.

That’s what’s going to determine their fate. They have not changed. So why have the fortunes of the Liberal Party improved so dramatically? What that says to me is there are millions of Canadians who are making voting decisions on the basis of superficialities.

And it’s time for us, if we want to live in a democracy, it’s not enough simply to complain about the corporate media, which is entirely justified. You actually have to invest the time and energy to inform yourself and go outside of the corporate media propaganda system, and figure out what is going on in this country. And if you’re not prepared to do that, then don’t be surprised when you find yourself living in a totalitarian fascist regime one day, because that’s exactly where we’re heading.

You know, what you say reminds me of another point I wanted to make. And let me just share these three maps with you. So these are on the left, you have a map of the Canadian election result in 2015.

And then on the right, the 2019 and 2021 election results. And what you see on the left here is that in 2015, the Liberals literally coloured Canada red, as you can see, practically every province, you have support for the Liberals being quite massive, and they’ve literally swept the country. And why did this happen? It would seem there are two reasons.

I mean, obviously, there was the background of the deep unpopularity of the right-wing Harper government. But at the same time, a small coterie of Liberals, the sort of great, the great and good in the Liberal Party, essentially proposed a set of policies which rhetorically were opposed to the Harper Conservatives, and, you know, talked about spending and not worrying about, you know, deficits and so on and so forth, and really caught the Canadian imagination. And the second thing they did is, of course, they installed Justin Trudeau as, you know, so that people would recall his father, who was still a widely respected figure in Canada.

And she, on the basis of personality and just sort of rhetorical differences with Conservatives, won this election. But just how disappointing they were can be seen on the two other maps, which is that by the time his first term was over, Trudeau lost his majority. He tried, on the basis of generous Covid support schemes and so on, tried to win back his majority in the 2021 Covid election and failed, after which he had to resort to a supply and confidence agreement with the NDP.

And so this really tells you, and again, the Liberal, great and the good have done the same thing. They have installed Mark Carney. What does Mark Carney have? Mark Carney has no serious experience in Canadian politics, but what they can do is they can say, here is this man, he has international experience, and of course, internationally, and in the international politics that are playing out, you know, that are emerging from domestic politics into the international plane, he’s opposed to the Trumpists.

So as part of the globalist elite, he is opposed to the Trumpists. So they are essentially foregrounding him as the man who can take on Trump. And only on the basis of the image of Mark Carney, they’re essentially selling Canadians the same old policies that have brought, and that has been a continuation since the Harper days and even before, essentially, ever more neoliberal policies, which is essentially what we are going to get.

Yes, that map you just showed, I think, is a perfect demonstration of the point that I was trying to make, that Canadians are making decisions on the basis of superficialities. The reason why they switched from Justin Trudeau, you know, from Harper, en masse to Justin Trudeau, was not because Justin Trudeau’s policies were radically different from those of Harper. He was just a different figure, a different face.

You know, he exuberant, he exuded youth, he proclaimed proudly that Canada was back at the Paris climate summit. This was all nonsense, of course. And then, you know, nine years later, Canadians have decided that, in fact, he did not represent, they might not articulate it this way, but fundamentally, I think what’s going on in the minds and the hearts of Canadian voters is they’ve come to understand that he did not represent a dramatic break with the neoliberalism of the Harper era.

And so, no, what are they doing? They’re falling for the same shtick, Radhika. They’ve just brought in a different face, but the policies are effectively the same. And what I find particularly distressing is that he’s a banker.

I mean, you know, the Western world is becoming dominated by bankers. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, is a banker, and the man is fabulously unpopular. The president, the prime minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is a banker.

You know, in Italy, they had two bankers. They had Mario Monti, and then they had Mario Draghi, you know, Goldman Sachs bankers. How’s that country faring nowadays? And then they brought in this guy, Friedrich Merz in Germany, who was the chairman of Germany’s BlackRock operations.

We are becoming completely dominated by the banking industry at the political level, and Canada is making a mistake, which others have made before us. And how can we not see how that has ended up in disaster for the countries where they put the banking elite in power? How have we not appreciated that? It’s stunning to me. Absolutely.

And, you know, this is especially ironical because what we are suffering from right now is too much financialization. We need to shift our policies towards a more productive economy and so on, which bankers of the ilk of Mark Carney are not going to be able to do. What we need are people who have serious experience in, essentially, planning and industry and so on.

And, you know, you were talking about superficial issues. You know, one of the things that, you know, has not changed, you know, we may say this election is about Trump, but in reality, the same old election is being played out, but with the liberals now having the advantage and the liberals using Pierre Poliev’s unfortunate or original, you know, the similarities with Trump that he was originally emphasizing as a stick with which to beat him, which I think he entirely deserves the beating. But it’s not like Mark Carney is that much better.

So what we have now is all these allegations, for example, about Chinese and Indian interference in Canadian elections. So these superficial issues. So you have here supposedly CISA saying that India organized support for Pierre Poliev’s 2022 conservative leadership election and so on.

So and Poliev in return is returning the compliment by saying that Carney is benefiting from Chinese influence. And meanwhile, of course, there are other issues which are not necessarily non-superficial. You talked about Carney being a banker, and of course, the conservatives are rightly, this is from the conservative website, rightly raising the issue of Mark Carney not disclosing his assets, issues about Carney’s, you know, investments in China and elsewhere, which is, of course, a red flag.

But the fact that Carney is essentially will be making decisions which his company will be benefiting from, to which he could return in a few years. So all of these are real questions. And of course, meanwhile, the liberals are shooting back at Poliev talking about why he did not take security clearance in order to be informed about meddling in the leadership election and so on.

And Poliev here, I would say, has rightly said, look, if you think there’s something I should know, tell me about it. I don’t need to take security clearance because that prevents me from campaigning and speaking openly about issues that matter, etc. So the mudslinging and the superficiality are totally there.

You wouldn’t imagine that this is an election about resisting an existential threat to Canada. Yes. And, you know, again, I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but superficiality really is, I think, the hallmark of the current election up until now.

And hopefully that will change. But let’s take the example of the conservatives trying to exploit, you know, the banker pedigree of Mark Carney and his ties to a big business. So it has been pointed out, Radhika, that Carney held $6.8 million of stock options in the asset manager Brookfield just before he quit to run for political office.

He’s never held political office, as you’ve pointed out. So the man is grossly unqualified experientially to lead a government. But let’s put that aside.

He was the chairman of Brookfield. Brookfield, a major investment of Brookfield, is a company called Westinghouse, which has entered into a deal with Ukraine to manage its nuclear power facilities, which are going to be extraordinarily important to Ukraine in the years to come because of the damage that their energy infrastructure has sustained. If the value of Westinghouse’s business increases, the value of Mark Carney’s stock options will increase, whether or not he puts them in a blind trust, which is what he’s proposing to do.

That’s what’s going to happen, and he knows it. So he has an interest, a personal financial interest, in ensuring that Westinghouse is enabled to operate and profit from the nuclear power facilities in Ukraine, which of course will affect, if he’s thinking in a self-interested sort of way, may very well affect his judgments about how to deal with the negotiations in Ukraine between Russia and the United States. If we are to believe Trump, he wants to normalize.

I personally don’t believe it, but that’s another question. If we’re to believe Trump, he’s trying to normalize relations with Russia. That will require him and Ukraine to make concessions about territory, about, for example, control over the Zaporozhian nuclear power plant.

Mark Carney has a personal financial stake in ensuring that that peace deal doesn’t happen. He won’t admit it, but what I find most ridiculous is that not even the conservatives are pointing this out. It should be obvious to them.

They don’t want to touch that with a 10-foot pole, because they support the belligerence towards Russia. They support the prolongation of this proxy war. So that’s not what they’re going to highlight, but that’s what they should be highlighting.

Why isn’t anybody in the corporate media talking about the fact that Brookfield has a major stake, a 51 percent stake in Westinghouse, which could profit enormously from control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants? This is just an example of how superficial the political discourse is in Canada. Canadian voters—I can’t stress this enough—need to wake up and start assessing people on the basis of their policies, not on the basis of their faces or their pedigree or their youth. These are, relatively speaking, irrelevancies.

The core question is, what are your policies? The policies of Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre are not fundamentally different from those of the Trudeau government or from the Harper government. And so, again, exactly where we are going to end up, exactly in all of this Trump roller coaster that we are all on, it’s not clear as yet. But I wouldn’t at all be surprised if, at the end of all this, just as Trump’s first term was followed by a Biden term, during which policies did not change very much, essentially, I wouldn’t be surprised if, after all this kerfuffle about tariffs and insulting Europeans and Canadians and other traditional allies of the United States, Trump will not essentially reconcile with all of these forces, because at the end of the day, American economy is more deeply integrated with that of the allies than anybody else is.

So I think that this is quite possible. And I think that the negotiations with Russia could be a very important pedestal on which this pivot could take place. What do I mean by that? Because essentially, Russia has certain conditions which it cannot give up.

And on the one hand, of course, some Trump administration officials are sounding very sympathetic to those concerns. But on the other hand, it seems to me that Trump could very well turn around and say, well, the Russians are not agreeing, they’re not negotiating. So we are going to continue to fund and continue the war.

And this will become the way in which Trump then reconciles with the European elites, like Metz and Starmer and so on and so forth. We’ll have to see what happens during Trump’s second state visit to the United Kingdom, where there’s all this talk about the United States joining the Commonwealth of all things. But but be that aside, let me also say to further underline something you were saying is that, you know, this Kani is essentially projecting himself, you know, he’s using his banker status, his status as a former central banker.

You know, he certainly has a unique distinction of having been governor of two central banks. This is quite interesting. But let’s look at this a little bit closely.

Kani is supposed to have saved Canada in the throes of, you know, in the 2008 financial crisis, a very North Atlantic financial crisis. It was not a global one. And Kani takes the credit for saving it.

But the fact of the matter is that this was not at all Kani’s doing. So the reason why Canada was relatively unaffected by the 2008 crisis is because thanks to legislation from the past, regulations from the past, which the Canadian banking sector was trying to overturn, but had not yet succeeded in doing so. Canadian financial institutions had not really bought into what the toxic securities being generated by the US financial system to any significant degree.

That is why they got off lightly. Exactly. I just want to add, sorry to interrupt.

Those regulations, I believe, were in place for decades prior to Mark Kani ascending to the governorship of the Bank of Canada. And indeed, Dimitri, you’d know something about this because, of course, you have worked in the United States. You were working in the United States during this very fateful period.

Correct. Absolutely. And basically, what happened was that the Clinton administration took a wrecking ball.

This is one of the things it did, which led to the financial crisis, to something called the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking operations from highly risky investment banking operations. So Canada did not follow that path to the same degree. And you’re absolutely correct to point out, Radhika, that that is what prevented us from having the level of financial stress that the United States experienced during that period.

It has really nothing to do with Mark Kani at all. And despite that, the Bank of England then essentially chose him to be the governor of the Bank of England, claiming that it was because of Mark Kani’s fantastic expertise. But I’m sure that the real reason had nothing to do with any expertise, but to do with the fact that Kani is a fully paid up member of the financial elite that is committed to ever further financialising our economies, which makes them less productive, which de-industrialises them, which removes good jobs, which increases inequality to today’s obscene levels.

So this is the guy who is, so these are his real credentials, but they are being, you know, from essentially a stinking pie, they are being transformed into something that is, they’re being gilded into something that looks and smells really good. But it isn’t. And this is what Canadians are going to find out if, as it now seems, we will have a Kani-led liberal government.

This is going to be really, really a hard lesson for Canadians to learn. And it will be really interesting because, you know, again, Harper was elected in his time because they were, Canadians were tired of the liberals, particularly under Martin, who was, you know, going gung-ho neoliberal. But then they got more neoliberalism.

Trudeau promised something else. Trudeau promised not to be neoliberal and be, you know, have a cabinet that looks like Canada and all of that claptrap. But in the end, Trudeau pursued the same policies, neoliberal policies, and proved very disappointing to Canadians.

And now we are going to have another iteration of the same. Let me just say one thing about his crisis management skills. Mark Carney, you know, I recently interviewed Professor Kostas Lapavits as an economist at the University of London, who has been, he was a former Syriza MP, you know, in the 2015 period.

He lived through the horrors that were inflicted on Greece by its troika of creditors. So Kostas, you know, who’s very familiar with Mark Carney’s record because he was a professor in England at the time of his tenure as governor of the Bank of England, said there are really two things that stand out for him about Mark Carney’s, you know, governorship. First of all, that he was completely unremarkable.

He did nothing original, nothing new, nothing creative. He simply was a governor of the status quo. And the second thing was that he opposed Brexit quite publicly.

Well, how did that work out? You know, ultimately, his voice did not carry the day. The British opted for Brexit, whether you agree with it or don’t agree with it. Personally, I would love to see, you know, the EU obliterated and all of the countries who’ve covered their national sovereignty, and then they rebuild some kind of an economic cooperation arrangement that makes sense and that is oriented towards the interests of ordinary Europeans.

That’s what I would like to see. The EU is an absolute disaster. So whatever I may think of the people who are advocating for Brexit, whatever one may think of Brexit itself, the fact of the matter is that Mark Carney in his position of governor of Bank of England did absolutely nothing to stop that from happening.

And he was predicting that it was going to be an economic catastrophe for Britain, but it actually wasn’t. The problems that afflict Britain’s economy today are not fundamentally Brexit. They are far deeper and have really little to do with Brexit.

I mean, I modify that a little bit, you know, I mean, I completely agree with you that the European Union, which has a tremendous democratic deficit, it’s essentially an unelected body, the European Commission, which is then essentially dragoons, you know, governments into implementing neoliberal policies in one way or another. It is definitely a structure which imposes very problematic neoliberal austerity policies on the European countries. Having said that, dealing with this problem requires the solution that you last just said, that you need to reform the European Union and turn it into something quite different.

But Brexit involved essentially, you know, cutting off your arm. I mean, if you suddenly stop, you know, your connection with one part of what is organically part of your body as the European Union is part of Britain, was part of the European economy, then you are bound to suffer. So there is definitely Brexit related damage to the British economy.

Of course, having said that, and here’s the thing I want to say, because it really has connections and resonances with Canada today. The real issue was that Britain’s economic problems were largely homegrown. Britain always had a one foot in, one foot out relationship with the European Union anyway.

They didn’t accept the social reforms and so on and accepted only the neoliberal versions and even exacerbated them further. So Britain’s problems were homegrown, but resentment against, but just as Trump redirected anger or popular anger against the miserable conditions of the British, against the European Union and against immigrants, just as Trump has directed Americans’ anger, legitimate anger against their sad situation, against trade agreements and China and so on, and against immigrants. So also, I think in Canada, we are seeing something very similar.

There is no doubt that there are deep economic problems. Let me just show a couple of pictures that show this. So you see here, you have a chart with Canada compared to all its peer G7 economies, excepting the United States.

So you see that Canada’s blue line, the amount of growth Canada has experienced since 1980, is the lowest in comparison with all the other economies. And funnily enough, Japan, which is said to have been in secular stagnation all this time, has actually grown the best out of them all. That’s really quite interesting.

This is in PPP terms, but nevertheless, this is quite interesting. So Canada is essentially a laggard in terms of growth, and there is absolutely no reason why Canada cannot grow much better. If the Canadian economy were managed to have an orientation towards production and towards expanding the domestic market, including by reducing inequality, putting more money into the pockets of ordinary Canadians, improving their productivity, and so on.

Another really interesting picture is this one. Canada’s housing shortage is the worst of all other countries. That is, if you take 2000 as the point zero for every country, you can see that Canada’s housing market has risen higher even than Japan’s or the UK’s or the US’s.

Canada has experienced a huge surge in house prices. And finally, of course, this is the point I was trying to make earlier. In fact, everybody is now using it.

But it is quite interesting that Canada over the last several decades, certainly since 2000, but actually since 1988, has been trading more with the United States than within itself. And of course, in 1988, already Canada exported some 70 percent of its exports to the United States. Now, it has only increased to 90 percent.

So that’s where we are. And these are the underlying problems of the Canadian economy that need to be resolved. But rather than resolving them, what we hear from both the parties, where Pierre Pogliever essentially was already gunning for more right-wing neoliberal policies, Mark Carney has moved closer to him than any other liberal leader so as to essentially benefit from the anger that Pierre Pogliever has harnessed against things like carbon tax and taxes in general and so on, which is again misdirected anger.

These policies are not going to solve the problems of ordinary Canadians. But nevertheless, Carney, rather than rectifying this, is harnessing essentially this and then essentially selling himself as the guy who can manage a crisis and can and deal with Trump and so on. So again, we are looking at the irony of what everybody agrees is an existential election being transformed into a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives.

I mean, this is kind of what it boils down to. And unfortunately, the other parties are not presenting an attractive alternative. Radhika, I’m just going to highlight in that regard the tax proposals of both the NDP and the Greens, which are supposed to be to the left of the liberals.

The Greens are proposing to raise the federal basic personal amount of income that’s exempt from tax from 15,705 to $40,000, which they call a bold tax reform. They say it will benefit 78% of taxpayers earning less than $100,000 by delivering up to a maximum of $3,700 approximately in annual tax relief. Most people aren’t going to get that much.

Most people who are in this income bracket, they’re going to get less than that amount. But even at that amount, $3,700, this is not… And by the way, I am not at all opposed to this proposal. Let me be very clear about that.

I have no problem, and I encourage the government to decrease the tax burden of low-income earning Canadians. The problem is that this is not going to come remotely close to dealing with the fundamental problem of growing inequality in this country. Where in the Green Party’s tax proposal are they talking about raising the tax rates on high-income earners in this country? They want to restore the corporate tax rate to the pre-Harper era level, which would be better than doing nothing with the corporate tax rate.

But where are their proposals to increase the tax rates on high-income earners, individuals? I don’t see any. And as you and I discussed on a prior program, Radhika, back in the 1950s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate in Canada was in the range of 90%, and in the United States. And that endured.

It was well above the current level up until, I think, the 70s or early 80s. And did you want to show the NDP one as well? Yes. So that’s their proposal.

I don’t see anything in here about increasing the capital gains tax rate, which is a boon to the wealthy. Nothing about increasing individual tax rates on the affluent. So the NDP proposal is they’re going to raise the amount of income that is exempt from tax.

Remember, the Greens are proposing $40,000. They are proposing $19,500, which they say will put $505 back in the pockets. Again, this is all for decreasing the tax burden on low-income earners.

But $505 per year is not going to have a dramatic impact on their life. Permanently removing the GST from essentials like grocery store meals, diapers, and strollers. They want to preserve the extremely modest and, frankly, inadequate capital gains increase that the Liberals were supposed to implement.

And again, here, there’s nothing, nothing about increasing tax rates on the wealthy. And the capital gains tax proposal that they are favoring is grossly inadequate. So what you have here is exactly what you and I were talking about the last time we had a discussion about Canadian politics on this program, which is to say that what they do is they try to position themselves slightly to the left of the Liberals.

But that is not going to cut it. That is not going to address those problems with the charts you showed about the fundamental issues confronting the Canadian economy. None of this is going to address that, not even remotely.

So at the end of the day, we’re going to end up finding ourselves in four years’ time, five years’ time, whether it’s the Liberals or the Conservatives, or even if by some miracle the NDP wins, in essentially the same dilemma that we find ourselves today. Perhaps with some, it’ll be mitigated slightly if you get a more progressive party, but these parties are all committed ideologically to remaining to varying degrees on the same trajectory that we are currently on. And I urge Canadians, I cannot stress this enough, I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, stop voting for these people.

Stop believing this nonsense that they represent real change. They do not represent real change. You need to break out of the mold of supporting the traditional political parties and start looking at some other options.

And I hope that you and I can have a discussion about what those other options might be one day soon, maybe before the election. Maybe we could offer some thoughts to our fellow Canadians about something different, something truly different, what that might look like. It’s not, yeah, and it’s not just fellow Canadians.

I mean, exactly, you’ve said exactly, underlined exactly the point I wanted to also underline in a slightly different way. I mean, first of all, let me go back to the taxation that you mentioned that, you know, in the 50s and 60s, you had a top marginal tax bracket, tax rates of 90% and so on. Of course, and that’s true.

And that was when pre-tax income inequality was already a fraction of what it is today. Today, the income inequality before taxes is sky high. And you need, in order to deal with them, to mitigate this inequality, you need even a harsher, even higher rates of taxation on those with a higher income.

But you don’t hear that. In fact, you know, it’s so interesting. I’ve just, this morning, I was at a think tank meeting.

And then, as you know, people may know, I’m sitting in London here. And yesterday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Finance Minister, Rachel Reeves, released a short financial statement in which she is promising, on the one hand, to essentially, she’s not going to tax the rich. She’s actually going to generate debt, which will make them richer, because Britain’s borrowing costs are now very high.

And all of this is to be paid for by cutting social benefits. This is going to have a tragic effect on the already low living standards of working people in the UK. So essentially, everywhere you look, whether it’s in Canada, in Europe, in the United States, everywhere you look, you have, you know, Trump sounds like a great, you know, like he’s totally opposed to the Biden, to the Democrats and the Biden administration.

And in many ways, it is, you know, I think Kissinger used to say that the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the fight, or something like that. So, you know, they’re really having an ugly fight over next to nothing, because both the Bidenites and the Trumpites are equally neoliberal. And we have that equivalence in practically every country now.

So it’s really a question of rejecting both of these. And it’s not going to be easy. You have to build a groundswell popular movement.

People have to understand that the existing form of politics is only going to get them more of the same. And so we are going to see this in coming years. I think, Dimitri, we should definitely have a discussion on what sort of policy alternatives we need, perhaps, beginning with economic, but also going on to other issues and, or other social, other sectors of policy, so to speak.

But also, let me say that we have promised also to have an analysis of this election as soon as it’s over. The election will take place on the 28th. So soon after the 28th of April, rather, and soon thereafter, Dimitri and I will dissect the election results together.

So I hope you’ll join us then. And I think we should draw this conversation together. So, Dimitri, if you have any last points to make, please go ahead.

None whatsoever. I look forward to having that discussion. And I’m going to be proposing, if you afford me the opportunity, Radhika, some fairly radical approaches to voting this year.

OK, wonderful. Great. Thank you.

And see you again next time. I think the next show, immediately next show that we are going to do is I’m going to discuss the condition of the dollar, about which much has been said in the media these days with Michael Hudson, hopefully next week. So see you then.

And until then, goodbye.