The Rundown 9/14/26: Canada-U.S. Trade Talks Collapse, Anthropic’s AI War, and Miro’s $16B Fall

John Ruffolo (0:01)

I would like to know what are the trade-offs that we're talking about, that were palatable or not. For example, and I'm being purposely colorful here, are we treating cows for tech? And by that, I mean, are we saying we must have dairy supply, but fuck the tech industry, fuck all the regulations, allow the US statecraft to suck out all the economic.

Matt Cohen (0:27)

Welcome back everyone to another electrifying episode of Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, and joining me as always is the one and only John Ruffolo. Get ready as we dive headfirst into the hottest news and most exciting headlines at the intersection of business, innovation and politics.

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Matt Cohen (1:41)

All right, John, welcome back to the Tank. Well, I don't think we could have timed our release of our last episode any worse when we released it on Friday, the day before all hell broke loose and the trade negotiations fell off the cliff between the Carney government and the Trump administration.

It feels like everyone's pointing fingers at each other saying who's who to blame, but it really feels like Canadians are the ones getting the short end of the stick at the end of the day no matter what. So maybe for our listeners who are trying to figure out what actually happened in that room and who is to blame, I'd love to hear your take on how things likely went down, why they went down the way they did, are there some internal politics happening in our own government between provincial and federal parties? And how is this going to get resolved after all the memes and Lake America moves forward?

John Ruffolo (2:33)

How much time do we have?

Matt Cohen (2:35)

Wow.

John Ruffolo (2:36)

So where do we start? So let's start off from the beginning here.

We had an election basically over Kuzma, where we were going to, at least the promise was, we will get Kuzma resolved very quickly, i.e. by July 1 as the interpretation. And again, the implied version was we were going to get the same or similar agreement. But even those two comments are subject to interpretation. But that's where many people have believed. Problem number one is, there has never and still not been declared what the success looked like from a Canadian perspective. I would like to know under what time frame and what are the things that Canada wants to have in this trade agreement specifically. And if people say, well, you shouldn't disclose that bullshit. Almost every other country states its objectives. If you look at Mexico, you look at the United States, they state it up front. They don't promise it, they state it. They don't tell you as the negotiations are going, what are all the chits that are being negotiated. I don't expect that.

But we don't even know today what is success. That's a problem. So we now go into this fiasco that happened last week. And by the way, I get it completely. We're not dealing with some normal folks, it seems like, but I'm not part of the trade negotiations. I am hearing things both in favor of Canada, against Canada. I don't know, but here is the problem that I do know. I do find it's a problem that we still don't know what actually happened. And I don't know why we don't know. And I can tell you why I think, because perhaps if we actually stated what success looked like, and if we now state what we might end up with, those might be two different states.