Carney score: last days of Canada’s campaign

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right.

Now Mint Mobile is offering you the.

Gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.

Yeah.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com.

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

America is determined to counter China's commercial and military capabilities. But in some respects, like building ships, it has fallen far behind. Now it faces a relaunch, an industry that's been treading water for decades. Or trust its allies in East Asia to help.

And the next installment of our series, Archive 1945, which combs through the economist's back catalog and retraces day by day, the beginning of the end of the Second World War. First up, though.

Canada is just days away now from its national election.

Sarah Larnyuk is an audio correspondent for the Economist.

In early voting last weekend, a record number of Canadians turned out to cast their ballots. Threats from Canada's southern neighbour have people fired up for politics, whether it's coming out to vote or showing up and volunteering with various candidates.

Campaigns for weekday morning, having a crowd like this come out to knock on doors and to spread the word.

In Oakville, Ontario, which is just outside of Toronto, I stopped by incumbent Liberal candidate Anita Annan's campaign office and even on a Tuesday morning, it was completely packed with two dozen people ready to hand out flyers and go knock on doors.

We don't go negative. We are about the platform that we are running on and making sure that people know that we're standing for Canadian sovereignty, Canadian economic independence.

That line really hit me. We're standing for Canadian sovereignty. To actually hear that needing to be said by politicians in this country is pretty wild. It's not exclusive to the Liberals. All parties have had to take a stand against our biggest ally. And this was exemplified in Anand's office with an assortment of I Heart Canada signs and little placards with our two letter national motto A. And as I visited more than halfway through the campaign, new volunteers were still coming in. Retirees, university students, a refugee from Ukraine. Have you ever gone out and volunteered.

Before, or this is your first time?

It was an impressive turnout for a country that tends far more towards apathy than political engagement.

So what was it that brought you, Sarah, to that particular campaign office?

So, a lot of things, Jason, because Anita Anand has been a minister since 2019 under Justin Trudeau, and she's handled some of the toughest portfolios, from procurement during COVID to national defense when Russia invaded Ukraine. And she as a candidate faces that hangover from the Justin Trudeau fatigue. And she said in January that she wasn't going to run again, but she made that call before Donald Trump was inaugurated and before Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership. So she's worked with Mark Carney at the bank of Canada when he was previously the governor.

I believed and continue to believe in his ability to steer our country during this extremely volatile time. And I want to be a part of his team.

And on top of all of that, this riding is in a heartland of a region that was polling strongly Conservative until Carney was tapped as Liberal leader. And now it's looking more in favor of the Liberals. So it acts as a sort of microcosm for what's happened nationally. And it is also worth noting that I did ask a number of Conservative incumbent candidates if they were willing to, you know, let me come out with them campaigning. And I got no response from them.

And so what did you hear on the ground? What are the voters saying?

So important to put this in context, because in Oakville, it's in the suburbs of Toronto, if you're knocking on house doors here, you are finding a more wealthy voter. But US President Donald Trump is a big topic. And tariffs and trade are obviously front of mind. And how are you making out with.

The provincial tariff discussion, reducing interprovincial barriers to trade? Yeah, July 1st, we should have them all. That would be a great eradicated for.

Those who are continuing to show up to Conservative leader Pierre Poliev's campaign events. The number one thing you are still hearing from them is about housing affordability and the cost of living.

I'm here to support his policies because.

His policies look to help my daughter, who's one of the young people that are trying to get her first job, trying to buy her first home.

But what interested me far more were things that were off this beaten path, things that signaled discord in Canada that existed before a second Trump administration came in, when one voter on the street from Montreal said he was a supporter of the Liberals, but he was concerned about the impact of safe drug consumption sites in his neighborhood. Something that was ruled out by the Liberals and that he was conceptually supportive of. But he was particularly concerned with how they were rolled out.

Literally, in six months, our neighborhood is a war zone.

And in speaking with one of my former colleagues, Jessica Valentin, she used to work as the lead for audience engagement at the national news podcast. I worked at Canada Land, and she was more concerned about the systemic issue of Canadians becoming increasingly uninformed.

News has left Canadian public life. It has become something you need to seek out.

And in many cases, I don't think.

People have noticed that it's not available anymore.

What does she mean by that? That news has left public life.

So we've talked about it on the show before. Canada's fight with big tech companies. In 2023, the government started charging Meta and Google and other social giants to link to news article. So Meta took all news off Facebook and Instagram. And what researchers found after one year of that news ban is that news outlets saw a 43% drop in engagement. That's nearly half. And what that equates to is about 11 million page views per day, according to research done by the Media Ecosystem Observatory. And I spoke with their director, Angus Bridgman.

Generally, people using those platforms continue to say that they get their news from those platforms. And generally Canadians don't know that news has been blocked on those platforms. Even amongst people who use it and say they use it for news. Awareness is not that high.

The void is now filled with political influencers and politicians going direct to the public and other accounts that don't really ascribe to the same values and principles that journalists do.

So Canadians are consuming less of the news, more of it biased, and they're not sure really where the bias is coming from.

Right. And it's kind of developed this terrifying dynamic. Angus Bridgman likened it to sleepwalking into a place where we just have a continuously less informed public.

So that was sort of the path, I think, that we were on to a certain extent and probably are still on with a temporary pause during this period of threat and during the election. I think it'll be very interesting after the election if people will still be kind of in that sleepwalking mode.

Increasingly, any conversations you have about politics in Canada have to be stopped in their tracks because you realize that you're not operating from the same set of facts anymore as other people. And often there's a lot of emotion attached to it. And frequently you find that it's anger. I asked Anita Anand about it. And it's something that's weighed a great deal on her, specifically in the last six years that she's been in the public eye because she's a woman, because she's of Indian descent, because she's had some of the most high profile issues on her plate. But she's had a front row to the impacts of that toxic polarization of politics in Canada. And she says it's one of the hardest parts of her job, particularly for her, that's come in the form of death threats.

I came into political life in 2019 hoping that I would add rational voice to complex discussions about policy, but that is not what the discourse today, or at least in this election, is proving to be. Is it a reason to leave? For me, it's a reason to stay.

And meanwhile, from the research done by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, they found that this entire trend generally favors politicians on the right. So social posts from federal Conservative politicians last year received 61% more engagement than those from the Liberal and the next further left party, the ndp, than both of those two parties combined. And Conservative Leader Pierre Poiev has actually leaned into this idea of going direct to the voters and cutting out the media as the middleman. And he took in this election the unprecedented move of not allowing media to travel with him on the campaign plane. He has also made one of his key promises to defund my former employer, the public broadcaster cbc.

And we'll save a billion dollars by defunding the cbc.

And in a country that's so geographically spread out, private media organizations have really struggled to stay afloat here. The media industry is really in crisis. So defunding the CBC would certainly magnify this problem going forward.

And as for this election, what are you watching for in terms of reading the tea leaves?

Well, Jason, there are five Canadian hockey teams in the NHL playoffs this year. So realistically, I think that's what we're watching most closely. But really, election day is on Monday, and the Economist poll tracker puts the odds in favor of the Liberals winning a majority, which is one of the largest election poll swings in the world in modern history. But anything can happen, and Canada is especially prone to volatility in elections. And even with a record number of Canadians already having cast their ballots last weekend, voter turnout on Monday is expected to be really high. But far beyond this election, we'll have to wait and see if Canadians are really just happy to continue this sleepwalking into a reality where they are just less informed, or will they take this energy and the threat to the country and decide to reinvest in knowledge and civic debate that would ultimately make for a stronger Canadian democracy.

Sarah, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

The pink colored shapes on your left side are container carrier ordered from Singapore. The ship on Your left is 174,000 cubic meter LNG carrier.

I went on a tour of the world's largest shipyard. It's owned by Hyundai Heavy Industries, or hhi, and it's located in Ulsan, which is in the south of South Korea.

Noah Snyder is our East Asia Bureau Chief.

The scale of this shipyard is unbelievably fast. I was shocked to say the least. They have these huge cranes which are multiple stories high. They tower above the dry docks where ships are assembled and you could see ships of different kinds coming together. There were liquefied natural gas tankers, container ships and naval destroyers. And they were all taking shape with workers moving these giant hulking iron blocks and slotting them together. It was almost like watching a giant play with Lego.

After the hull is completed, the ship is launched by filling water in the dry dock and moved to the quay for finer touches.

The size of this shipyard means that at full capacity, there are something like 40 to 50 ships that roll off of the Ulsan shipyard lines every year. That's helped to make South Korea the world's second largest shipbuilding industry, ahead of Japan and behind China, which has in the last two decades steamed to the lead in shipbuilding production in America, however, sank in the decades following the Second World War and now is virtually insignificant. But South Korea and Japan, which are of course two American allies in East Asia, may hold the key to helping counter the Chinese shipbuilding buildup.

Noah, it sounds like you've had a fantastic chance to do some great industrial tourism, but this isn't just about ships, is it? Just lay out the stakes here.

It's not. Rosie, that's absolutely right. When we talk about ships, what we're talking about are primarily two things. One is the movement of goods around the world. To this day, the vast majority of international trade and goods is transported by sea. So the things that we all depend on in our daily lives, from computers to cars to everything in between, are largely moving around on merchant container ships. And the second piece is a military maritime domain piece. Control of the seas is a part of the bigger geopolitical struggle unfolding today. And which country can field the most formidable navy has been a determinant in the global balance of power for as long as ships have sailed.

You say that China's responsible for half of all merchant tonnage produced globally. What would chasing down that lead actually involve?

Well, it's a great question, and it's part of why I found this story so fascinating, because I think it really gets at one of the fundamental tensions facing American policy today. On the one hand, the obvious solution is to do more with allies that have the capacity, namely South Korea and Japan, so to build more ships together in the yards where they have the capacity to build them, like the one I visited in Ulsan. But on the other side, you have this countervailing force, which is a really powerful protectionism, a desire to build in America, to bring industry and manufacturing back to America. So that would involve getting big shipbuilders to invest in American shipyards to help revive them, to bring them up to 21st century standards, like the shipyards in South Korea and Japan. And we're seeing some signs of that. Last year, Hanwha, which is another big South Korean shipbuilder, bought a shipyard in Philadelphia, the Philly shipyard. At the Ulsan shipyard, I spoke to a senior executive who's looking into some of these opportunities in America. He told me about a visit from delegations of American lawmakers and senior officials. Having a look at what it is the South Koreans are able to do in the shipbuilding space to see the 21st century shipyard in action.

So that would be a tall order to bring us yards up to the 21st century standards. Right.

It's a huge undertaking, and even in the best of circumstances, would involve years and years and billions and billions of dollars in capital investment and modernization at yards. But on top of that, you have a broader ecosystem problem in America, which is that there aren't the supply chains, there aren't the labor forces to ramp up production quickly or to build out the shipbuilding industry quickly. So leads you back in the other direction, which is that if you need to build more ships fast, which seems to be the case for America and its allies, then maybe you need to do more in the places that have the capacity. So we are seeing some steps in that direction as well. The way in the door is what is known in the shipbuilding trade as mro, which is maintenance, repair and overhaul. So essentially fixing up existing ships in South Korean and potentially Japanese yards rather than building new ones. Now, the industrial players there are hoping that this will just be a first step, that once they build trust and build relationships and once some of the crucial political hurdles are cleared in America, that perhaps you can see more ships, Ships being built in East Asia.

You haven't mentioned one of the obvious obstacles, which is Donald Trump himself, who doesn't seem to be a fan of offshoring in anything. And I'd be surprised if he'd be keen on having warships made or maintained abroad.

It's hard to imagine this administration, or frankly any American administration in the current environment really pushing hard on this. Now, some senior American military officials in private do salivate over the prospect of it. America is making about two Aegis destroyers every year at its shipyards, while the shipyard in Ulsan has 10 dry docks, each of which can produce two per year. So there is a potential to be tapped. And we have seen in Japan, for example, where America has large naval bases and ships deployed on more permanent rotations, Japanese workers doing maintenance on American ships. So there are ways over some of the smaller hurdles, but the biggest ones are legislative. They require legislative action in America. And there are powerful vested interests that are resisting that kind of change.

And just lay out those obstacles then.

Well, there are several of them. But the most important one in this context is what's known as the Jones act, which has mandated since the 1920s that essentially all American domestic maritime cargo travel has to be carried out on ships that are American built, American owned, American flagged and American operated. And there are similar procurement rules for the US Navy as well that prevent acquiring warships from overseas. So basically, there are protectionist laws in place that both limit the options for the American shipbuilding industry and have stunted its growth over many, many decades. There is potentially untapped capacity in the East Asian allies. America, at least under the Biden administration, was trying to line up more co production with Japan for things like missile. So there is an acknowledgement that there's more that can be done together to counter the threats that allies all face, and the Chinese threat in particular. But again, it comes back to these countervailing impulses, these forces, on the one hand of geopolitics and on the other hand of domestic politics.

Noah, great to talk to you as always. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Tomorrow on the weekend Intelligence, our subscriber only show, we go inside the rallies of Nigel Farage, the charismatic and controversial head of Britain's Reform UK Party. Part revival meeting, part political theatre, these giant gatherings show how Britain's most divisive politicians is redrawing the rules of political communication.

Eighty years ago, in late April 1945, Berlin was under siege. The Red army fired nearly two million shells as one and a half million soldiers stormed the city.

Fraser McGilraith is the author of the Economist's Archive 1945.

By May 2, the last German troops in Berlin had surrendered.

Little but rubble was left of the.

Once proud capital city.

85% of its buildings had been destroyed or damaged.

Two days earlier, Adolf Hitler had shot himself. With Archive 1945, we were publishing regular excerpts from the Economist's archive week by week as the Second World War rolled to an end. By the time the Economist went to press on May 5, Hitler's death was a swirl of rumour and speculation.

Mussolini is dead. So, according to general belief, is Hitler, though the world has not yet been given the spectacle of his corpse being kicked around the streets as proof, proof of death. Whether he has really cheated justice or is merely trying to escape it. Whether he has met a soldier's death or the gibbering dissolution of a lunatic, whether he died of natural causes or by his own hand or shot by some other member of the gang. All these are questions that for a few more days will have to go without answers.

It was all but the end for the Nazis and their allies in Europe.

The Third Reich is dead. The end has been an indescribably sordid welter of blood and betrayal.

The fall of Berlin prompted reflection in the Economist on the final phase of the war in Europe. The German counterattack in December 1944 in the battle of the Bulge meant the Nazis defeat had come more slowly than the Allies had hoped the previous year.

The slow asymptotic approach of the anti and during these last few months always nearer but never quite reached, will make the hour of acknowledged victory, when it arrives, something of an anti climax. This will be no grand climacteric like November 11, 1918, but one more stage reached and overcome in a world crisis that has been raging for 30 years and has many storms ahead. The moment of rejoicing will be grief and the rejoicing itself will be restrained by the knowledge of efforts and sacrifices still to come. But a moment there will be. And though verdicts must be left to history, this, the hour of surrenders and capitulations of liberty and victory, is the time for tributes.

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, gave his Russia, he said, had given blood and America material wealth. Wealth, while Britain had contributed time. The Economist was keen to note Britain's success in fending off Germany while much of the rest of Europe was under occupation. It provided Allied countries like France with a base for their governments in exile and eventually the staging ground for the D Day landings. According to the Economist, Britain's resilience and the Nazis defeat was a vindication for democracy in Europe.

The war has been fought with skill as well as with courage. Just as in its personal aspects, the sordid end of the gangsters caught like rats in a trap is one of history's monumental vindications of immoralities, so in its political aspects, the end of the war is an irrefutable proof of the values of liberty. Once again, demonstration has been given of the immense moral and and physical resources upon which a free and tolerant and honest society can call. The British people have fought this war longer than most, more continuously than any, harder than many. They have fought it in the field and at home, at sea and in the air, with technical skill and physical courage and great human qualities of imagination. Hitler called them military imbeciles, and that is why one once again, they have made magnificent soldiers.

The scale of the devastation in Europe meant that the Allies faced an enormous task of rebuilding. After the fighting ended in Eastern Europe, anti Communist partisans were still fighting against the Red army, which was extending the Soviet Union's control across the region. Still, the collapse of the Nazi regime was cause for rejoicing. But for the formality of surrender, the war against Germany was over.

To find arXiv 1945 just open up the economist app or visit economist.com interactive.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway, Sarah Larnyuk and Alize Jean Baptiste. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Henrietta macfarlane, Benji Guy and Jonathan Day. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias, we'll all see you back here for the weekend. Intelligence tomorrow.

Sam.