Josh Udall
Role at the time: Host of The Elevate Report, a Canadian politics podcast and Substack, speaking on his own programme
Statement summary
On the September 16 episode of his podcast The Elevate Report, host Josh Udall opened with an extended sarcastic passage treating Ursula von der Leyen's associate-membership offer as another announcement without substance from Mark Carney, then set out his own position: he supports expanding trade with the European Union but objects to closer regulatory and cultural alignment, citing the digital trade agreement and recent EU lawmaking. After reading Pierre Poilievre's red lines on taxes, laws and immigration, Udall said there was nothing in them he disagreed with and that they were "spot on," and argued that pursuing closer ties the way the government appears to want would require giving up some sovereignty. His characterisations of Carney's record and of EU lawmaking are his own.
“Sure, I think deeper trade EU is great. If we can expand trade with them, awesome. … But to culturally get closer to them, that's what makes me nervous. This whole digital trade agreement, seeing what we've been seeing in the EU and the laws they've been trying to pass, no thank you. … There's nothing he said there that I disagree with. It's spot on. … So what does an associate membership really mean? Because it looks like you keep wanting to get closer to them. You're going to have to give up some type of sovereignty if you want to do it the way that you seem to want to be doing it.”
Episode of The Elevate Report, a Canadian politics podcast and Substack, published to its YouTube channel on the morning of September 16, 2026, running 46:52. Host Josh Udall, identified as the publication's author on elevatereport.ca, opens with an extended sarcastic passage treating the associate-membership offer as another empty announcement from Mark Carney before setting out his own view. Much of the episode consists of him reading and reacting to other material, including a Financial Times report, a Sam Cooper post and Pierre Poilievre's statement of red lines; those passages are the other speakers' words, not Udall's. Quotations attributed to him here were transcribed from the episode audio, and the auto-generated captions render "Carney" as "Curry" throughout.
Why we used this label
This dossier's fixed reference point is the proposition that Canada should become an associate member of the European Union. Udall combines materially different positions on it: he endorses deeper trade with the EU without qualification, while rejecting the regulatory and cultural convergence he believes the arrangement would entail and asserting it would cost sovereignty. That is the same shape as Pierre Poilievre (945), whose red lines Udall expressly adopts, and both are classified mixed_or_conditional. The closest competing label is condemns, used here for Andrew Scheer (950), who rejects associate membership outright as a sovereignty question; it loses because Udall's "no thank you" is directed at cultural and legal alignment specifically, immediately after he calls expanded trade "great" and "awesome," so he does not reject the arrangement as such.