But this is where I ask you, as the strategist at RBC, can fiscal policy come to the rescue if needed? And does that seem to explain why Canada seems to be unwilling to accept a bad trade deal at this point?

I do think fiscal policy has a big role to play here.

And I think that's one of the primary reasons that Carney, you know, for the good of the nation, to be honest, doesn't want to accept the bad deal.

And there's two, you know, kind of angles I would take on it.

One, we have the fiscal space, right? The projected deficit for the current fiscal year is two and a half percent in GDP.

That is not large in a global context.

That's not large in at least a recent historical context.

I mean, is this pricing reasonable to you, or is it slightly unreasonable?

So do you think, Jason, that the new and also proposed increase in auto tariffs will impact the economy?

Yeah, thanks, Peter.

Obviously, tariffs kind of grabbed the headlines, but I think it's important to understand that the biggest shock that Canada's faced over the past 12 to 18 months has been on the population side.

So population growth went from 3% to 0%.

When I look across a number of metrics, Canada-US trade frictions, they have caused some temporary weakness and volatility in the Canadian data, but nothing long-lasting.

And I think we have to consider some of the following evidence I'm going to talk about.

First off, employment in trade-related sectors, it's been stagnant.

So is the market pricing reasonable or unreasonable, or where do you stand on this?

I mean, can you remind our listeners what's at stake here and what the correct framing of these upcoming talks should be?

Just thinking about it from the standpoint of how the Bank of Canada has been looking at it over the past few months, they've said that if there were more tariffs, more trade disruptions, then they may need to cut interest rates.

That's not what's happening.

We're in the status quo type of an environment, so that's not a sufficient trigger for them to do anything.

And I think it was their expectation, it was widely believed in the market, political circles, that July 1st was never going to be met.

There was no way that...

Trump, the US administration, was going to sign on to the current deal.

First question, what's behind this move? And I guess a follow-up to that is, do you think this is structural?