Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: the Canada-US trade deadline looms and Iran calls Trump's bluff

The thing that, uh, that the, the Canadians always have to be bearing in mind is, first of all, do conse- if you make concessions in this, in the face of this threat, does it actually alleviate the threat, or does it just incentivize further threats? Secondly, uh, if you get a deal, uh, by making the concessions, does this de- deal actually stick, or does he just renege on it and impose tariffs later with some new demand?

[upbeat music] Welcome to our regular Friday Monk Dialogues with Globe and Mail journalist Andrew Coyne. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. Dog days of summer. You're just back from walking your, uh, pooches in the park, so we appreciate you finding some time with us on this Friday afternoon, uh, the 14th of August. Let's catch up on the trade file, Andrew. We had a lot of interest in your comments last week, over 80,000 views of, uh, your video with us on YouTube, so clearly Canadians are anxious about this deadline, the 19th of August, next week. Andrew, do deadlines matter to this president? How should the Canadian government think about a deadline? Um, what's going on?

Well, do deadlines ever matter? Uh, uh, you know, I remember, uh, uh, when I was just starting out as a journalist writing about a, a, a labor negotiation, and, you know, the union leaders, the management, they all said, "You know, if we don't get a deal by midnight tonight, we're going out on strike. We're locking them out," whatever. And credulously, you know, I wrote down, you know, "It looks like they're going out on strike." And of course, two minutes to midnight, they get a deal. Um, so there's always a lot of posturing in these things. Uh, people are always threatening doomsday and, you know, it's never really clear that that's necessarily going to happen. Um, there's a lot of negotiating through the media that goes on in any negotiating like... negotiation like this where politics is involved particularly. Uh, and oftentimes not only do they... Either they strike a deal when it, when they were both vowing and there's no deal to be had, uh, or they just agree to keep talking and they go, they blow through the deadline. They've done this already. Remember July 1st was supposed to be a deadline of some kind. Um, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if, you know, come August 19th, there's some kind of ag- agreement to keep talking but no actual agreement. Uh, um, so that's one, certainly one possible outcome. Now, it's also possible that things fall off a cliff, uh, and, uh, um, you know, we, we get no deal, and in fact everything falls apart. That's not inconceivable. Uh, and the third possibility obviously is that we actually get some kind of deal, although as I think you're suggesting, a deal with Donald Trump is never necessarily a deal or probably is necessarily never a deal.

Yeah.

Um, so y- and you've seen varieties of these messages all being leaked to the press. So there was a story c- came out that said, uh, yeah, the Canadian government is really looking seriously at walking away from the table and letting the whole thing collapse, and you also saw a story or stories saying, um, the Canadian government's prepared to make all kinds of