Guest: Frank McKenna, Deputy Chair, TD Securities
Host: Peter Haynes, Managing Director and Head of Index and Market Structure Research, TD Securities
In this episode, Frank discusses the very active calendar of events in the War in Ukraine, Trump's wins and losses in the primaries and the courts respectively, along with recent developments in China as relations with the US continue to thaw. Frank also provides a history lesson on how close Canada came to owning the Turks and Caicos Islands and covers off some of the good news stories in global geopolitics.
This podcast was recorded on February 26, 2024.
FRANK MCKENNA: Every single aspect of every single case he's involved in, he's going to run right through to the limit. He's going to run the clock as much as he can.
PETER HAYNES: Welcome to episode 49 of Geopolitics with the Honorable Frank McKenna. My name is Peter Haynes at TD Securities. And I get the pleasure to host this monthly podcast series, where we travel around the world to cover the most important global geopolitical issues of the day all from our perch here in Canada. Well, Frank, today, we're not going to spend much time on Canada.
But I must admit, I'm just off the plane from a week in the Turks and Caicos with my wife and son. And I'm happy to report that Grace Bay is as beautiful as it's ever been. I believe it's rated as the number one beach in the world. I know the Turks is a place that's near and dear to your heart. Can you tell the listeners an old story about how close Canada came once to owning the Turks?
FRANK MCKENNA: Yeah, no, look, I'd be glad to. Just before then, because there's a lot of concerning issues that we're going to be talking about during the course of this, I just want to start out with a little good news about things in the world. Number one, Sinn Fein ended up forming the government in Northern Ireland. We're closer to Irish reunification than we've ever been.
In Poland, we've got a pro-European government now, a pro-Western government, very democratically-elected government, very pro-Ukraine. I listened to the foreign minister on the weekend. And he is a breath of fresh air. He's absolutely terrific. So that represents a monumental change. Speaking of that, Sweden just ended up getting support from Hungary's parliament to join NATO. That's good news.
And on the domestic front, Trans Mountain is really on the verge of filling its pipe with oil. And that should narrow differentials in Canada by $4 or $5, which translates into cash right in the hands of Canadians, more royalties, more net-backs to companies, just more profits, more everything, so, all good. So, with that in mind, I'm going to talk about Turks and Caicos, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I agree. So I ended up going there over 20 years ago. I was Chairman of Canwest Global.
And David Asper, in particular, got quite excited about the potential of the Turks and Caicos and the long tradition of Canadian politicians talking about having a joint Canada. So he asked me if I would head up a group to go down and do a report on it. And the reporter, just to show you how funny life is, was Danielle Smith, our now premier of Alberta. And at the time, she was a reporter, I think, for the Calgary Herald. So we went down. We spent a weekend. I'm often fond of saying to people when they say, do you know Danielle Smith, I say, oh, yeah, I spent a weekend with her in the Turks and Caicos.
Anyway, we went down and spent the weekend. We met with the premier, First Minister, they called him, Michael Misick. And we met with other people there and concluded that there was a strong groundswell of support for joining Canada. Flash forward, I ended up being asked by First Minister Michael Misick if I would take on the project of trying to see if we could find common ground between the two countries. So I went back down several times.
I had to meet with the governor, who was a Brit, of course, because it was a British colony. I asked him his view. And he said, we want people to be with us who want to be with us. If people decide in a referendum they would like to join Canada, you have the total support of the British government. So we crossed that hurdle, come back to Canada. I spent a lot of time working on the file, made the proposition to the prime minister, who was Paul Martin at the time.
He was very excited about it, even had it written up as part of his campaign platform. I thought we were off to the races. I remember one day, I was coming in from [INAUDIBLE]. I was on the board of GM and coming back from a board meeting. And I got a call to see the prime minister at his hotel in Toronto. So, I went down to the hotel. He said, look, good news and bad news. Good news, he said, there's a huge amount of excitement and interest about the Turks and Caicos joining Canada.
The bad news is, the public service have been working on. I got an inch-thick file. And they're saying that we should defer any consideration of this for the present because of two things. One, we're not a colonial country. I said, well, this is a fish jumping in the boat. We're not out, trying to force them to do anything. And he said, yeah, we could get by that.
Secondly, they believe that whatever special arrangements we make with the Turks and Caicos will reopen the Quebec question as to what special status they might want within Canada. And they said, the public service are recommending against us opening up any such debate at the present time. That's where it kind of foundered. But I have to tell you, the Turks is heavily represented by Canada. There are a lot of the great restaurants, the great resorts. Stan Hertling owns Regent.
And you've got John Macdonald with Da Conch Shack. And so many of the facilities there, including health care and the policing, are run by Canadians. So I still think it's a subject for a day down the road. I love the idea of us having a place in the sun where one can go without worrying about passports or health care. And we can keep our dollars in Canada.
PETER HAYNES: Yeah, that's great. I'm sure there aren't that many people, certainly in our vintage, but certainly not with the younger crowd that were aware of how close that came. So we'll keep our ear to the ground. So, Frank, on a more serious note, I do want to start with Ukraine, where a lot has happened since you made your prediction last month that Trump is the one that holds all the cards on the US's support for Ukraine.
So, let's me recap some of the events that have occurred in that country over the past month. First of all, we have the-- well, not quite in that country, but we have the Tucker Carlson interview of President Putin, which has been panned by pretty much every credible news outlet in the world as a fluff, no tough, two-hour advertisement for Putin. You have Trump claiming that he would tell Putin to do, quote, "whatever he wanted to any NATO country that hadn't paid its fair share of the tab for the alliance." You have Putin's key political opponent in Russia, Alexei Navalny, dying in prison.
You have Putin winning the recent Russian election after one populist competitor, Boris Nasedkin, was ruled ineligible due to, quote, "inaccuracies" with his ballot support, despite supporters lining up overnight to sign the petition needed to get him on the ballot. And then, finally, and perhaps most importantly, you have Ukraine President Zelenskyyy admitting this past weekend that Ukraine is, in fact, losing ground to Russia as a result of the lack of Western support, mostly due to gridlock in the US Congress over aid to Ukraine. What do you make of all of these key events taking place in the Ukraine-Russia war?
FRANK MCKENNA: So, Peter, this is one of the most important events taking place in the planet. And there's a lot to unpack. So I'm going to take a few minutes to go through it, one by one. One, I thought Tucker Carlson, it was disgraceful journalism. Secondly, the Senate, with the agreement of all, launched a program to try to put a package together that would involve the biggest issue for a lot of people, which is the border of the United States, the Southern border, and also Ukraine and Israel.
A bipartisan group of senators came up with an excellent package, the most aggressive Southern border measures in history. It was destroyed. Trump weighed in, directly saying, politically, it would be better for us to keep the immigration file alive until we can really screw Biden with it during the election campaign. And on that basis, the rest of the package all failed.
He also has come out with some horrible language around Ukraine and Russia, including talking about Russia taking over any NATO countries if they wished, if the NATO countries hadn't been paying their bills. So, bottom line is that it foundered in the Senate. The House hasn't taken it up, even though there's a majority in the House that would put that package through.
Now, the President is meeting with House leadership this week. And hopefully, they can get that package through. But what's going on now for US politics to be in such a reckless state of disregard for the plight of Ukraine, I think, is disgraceful. We get to the battlefield. And it is not going particularly well for Ukraine, as you might expect, when they simply don't have the funding, 31,000 dead according to Zelenskyyy, ground lost.
There's no doubt that the Ukrainians are heroic, no other word for it, in the battlefield. And they're holding the line. And not a lot of territory has changed hands. There has been a change in Avdiivka and Bakhmut. But they're holding the line in Robotyne and Verbove. And what they're doing is absolutely heroic. But they're up against an extraordinarily large force, much more artillery, much more hardware, a lot more soldiers.
And as Lenin once said, but it's quite prophetic, sometimes, you make up for a lack of quality with quantity. Or quantity has a quality all of its own. And that's what the Ukrainians are up against. They're fighting valiantly, in my view. But they do need help. Canada deserve some credit here. Canada's just announced a $3 billion package to the Ukraine that should help fill in the gap a little bit.
But what we need is for the West to come up with the money, which they've said they would, and do it quickly and stop being a day late and a pound light. We've talked about the need for tanks. Well, stop talking about it and provide the tanks, the same with the F-16s. It's going to be months now before F-16s are operational with trained pilots, too much talk, not enough action. HIMARS, it's the same thing. It took forever before they'd finally been deployed.
And they have been deployed to great effect. And now, Ukraine desperately needs the army tactical missile system, which will have a range of about 300 kilometers and put all of Crimea under the gun. Everybody has got to stop talking and provide this country with the support it needs. As for Putin, this February is on display even more gruesomely every day. And how Trump can continue to suck up to him and bring along with him lackeys like Lindsey Graham and some of the other senators is beyond my understanding.
Look, we know that he's directly responsible for the death of Alexei Navalny. In the Soviet Union, they're calling his death, that he died from sudden death syndrome, a lot of that going around. Maxim Kuzminov was killed in Spain. He's the helicopter pilot. Yevgeny Prigozhin, we know, died in a bomb on his plane. Ravil Maganov, an energy oligarch, fell out of the hospital window. A lot of Russian dissenters fall out of windows. And Putin is cute about this, not enough that he can be charged criminally, but enough to tell everybody that my hands are on this. So don't screw with me.
The final thing I want to talk about is just NATO because there's a lot of cheap talk about it. And I just want to lay out a little bit of background. The United States is not wrong in pointing the finger at some of us as being scofflaws on NATO. And I think Canada should be doing more. So we'll just declare that. But it's not as simple as one might think. For example-- and again, the Polish Foreign Minister, we talked about that this weekend. Procurement is almost universally directed towards the United States. So in the case of Canada, we might not have reached the 2% limit of GDP.
But we are making a lot of Americans very rich on our procurement. The F-35s are being procured from Lockheed Martin. The Osprey, which we just decided to purchase over Bombardier, which felt they had a competitive product, is being purchased from Boeing. So a lot of the procurement that all of the NATO countries are making goes directly into the US economy, which is a good thing for America. And they should take account of that.
Secondly, I know from some experience in Washington that the George Orwellian expression, "all pigs are equal but some pigs are more equal than other pigs," is very, very true in the case of NATO. When we were in Afghanistan, Canadians, I'm talking about, we fought outside the wire without caveat in the toughest part of Afghanistan. And the head of the US Marine Corps and Special Forces told me how heroic the Canadians were.
A lot of our allies who got credit for going into Afghanistan operated under caveats where they weren't allowed to be armed or they weren't allowed outside the wire and so on. So we paid a hell of a price in blood, being in Afghanistan, much more than some of our NATO allies. So that needs to be remembered as well. And thirdly, Trump's suggestion that he wouldn't offend countries that weren't paying its share, that would become quite laughable if you look at one country in particular. And that's Canada.
Do you think for one minute that the United States of America is going to allow Russia to occupy Canada and be on the northern border of the United States with weapons pointed at the country? Look at what they've done with Cuba. 70 years, they have been enemies of that small little piece of sand out in the ocean just because they had the temerity to try to host some weapons from Russia on their soil. So I think that the United States is stuck with the defense of Canada, whether they like it or not. Having said that, I do declare, I think that we need to do more. And I'm glad to see that we are headed in that direction.
PETER HAYNES: The one stat that stood out to me from Zelenskyy this weekend was that, for every 12 rounds of ammunition fired by the Russians, the Ukrainians are only able to fire one round back based on their limited amount of ammunition that they have. And that just tells you something in terms of, that's not an even fight. And so, the fact that, as you used the word heroic, have been as heroic on the battlefield is pretty impressive. So, here's hoping that next month when we speak, some of the gridlock in the US will have been broken such that we can get what we need to Ukraine as quickly as possible.
So the name Trump seems to come up in every one of our conversations. And he himself has had a very eventful month. First of all, he won all the primaries, including this weekend in Nikki Haley's home state of South Carolina. So he's clearly on his path to the Republican nomination, which I guess could come as soon as next week following Super Tuesday.
But losing personally big time in the civil case against his New York-based company-- I guess they call it Trump Organization-- a judgment that set back the former President over $450 million, this leads some pundits to wonder, how can he cover this tab? And how can the company, Trump Organization, continue in business with all of the Trump's barred from its management for two years? So, naturally, Trump and his organization have appealed, except he needs to post bond equal to a judgment in order for the appeal to be heard.
And there's some concern over his liquidity. Most of the attention to date in court, and for that matter, on this podcast, related to Trump has been around his criminal cases. Frank, I'm curious. Are you surprised by the amount of money at stake here in the first of his civil judgments? And what do you think of the right wing defense that, quote, "every real estate company inflates the values of its assets to earn favorable terms with its bankers."
FRANK MCKENNA: Well, to start with, I am a little surprised at the amount. And with the interest running on it and the clock ticking, that amount goes up every day. Believe it or not, there are apologists for Trump who are starting GoFundMe pages to try to pick up the money to help him pay the bills. I just hope that the Republican Party doesn't decide this as a Republican bill because it really should be something that Trump would bear himself. So I'm going to say two or three things.
One, it looks as if he's winning sizable victories. And he is. And I have to admire Ambassador Haley for the fight that she's putting up. I think she's campaigning hard and well. And it's frustrating for her. We know that it's going to end up with a Trump victory in the primaries. But she continues to battle on. And I think that's a good thing. There are some factoids out of this that we should bear in mind.
Even in South Carolina, a third of GOP voters have indicated in some of the exit interviews that they will not vote for a convicted candidate. That's a pretty dramatic statement to make. And secondly, a Fox News analysis said that 59% of Haley supporters wouldn't vote for Trump if he was the nominee. So he does have some barnacles that he's collecting. And as some of the criminal cases go against him, I think that's going to play out in the general election, even though he's in a fight with a very favorable environment.
People are furious about immigration issues, 10,000 people coming across the border. They're unhappy about Biden's ability to deal with that, unhappy about cost of living, unhappy about Biden's age, et cetera. So Trump should have an easy path ahead of him, lots of tailwinds. There's no doubt that there are some barnacles as well. Your direct question on the no victim defense, I've been listening to that on Fox News particularly and other channels. I just find that a laughable defense.
Those of you who are involved in the financial services sector I think have a right to ask the question, why do credit ratings matter? Why does investment grade matter? Why do evaluations matter? Why are prospectuses so important? Why is misrepresentation the basis of most class action lawsuits, et cetera? It's because these things do matter. And the value of your assets are material in terms of the credit rating, and/or the funding costs.
Maybe there's no victim in the sense that something didn't fail. It doesn't mean that the lenders involved extracted the appropriate economic grant for that credit decision. So I just don't buy that at all. I don't think it makes an ounce of sense. And by the way, I think it's kind of interesting that you don't see any mainline North American banks involved in these cases.
In large measure, a lot of the traditional North American lenders found through experience that lending to the Trump Organization was not a good thing to do. And they bailed. So, you end up getting-- in this case, I think it was Deutsche Bank, is probably the bank that would be the primary lender, but just not a large syndicate of North American banks. So I think that's a bit interesting as well.
PETER HAYNES: So I want to read you language here, Frank. Put your lawyer hat on for a quick second. Here's some language from the appeal that Trump filed today. And I want you to just tell me if this is just standard operating procedure. The quote from the appeal is as follows, that the judge, quote, "committed errors of law and/or fact, abused its discretion, and/or acted in excess of its jurisdiction." Is that literally-- that's just boilerplate in every appeal, Frank? Or is there anything specific in there that you would draw your attention to?
FRANK MCKENNA: No, I think that's totally boilerplate. In fact, every appeal that, or even every court argument, every phrase usually reads in the alternative. If you don't buy that defense, buy this one. And the alternative, if you don't buy these two, we're going to throw this at you. You throw everything against the wall that you can. You know, he's doing what one would expect. And I think it's savvy on his part.
Every single aspect of every single case he's involved in, he's going to run right through to the limit. He's going to run the clock as much as he can. He knows that if he gets into office, he can avoid a lot of these cases. And he knows that winning, in large measure, is going to be a result of staying ahead of the clock and also making himself a victim all the way through. I think he understands the ground that he's on, the train. And he's being very effective at it. And he's getting some help, too. The Fani Willis stuff is just pure stupidity.
PETER HAYNES: Oh, god.
FRANK MCKENNA: It's just a gift to him. And then he's got a judge who seems to be giving favorable rulings on the documents case. And we don't know what the Supreme Court is going to do on the President's prerogative appeal. And he's got a chance to run the clock on every single aspect of every single case. So that's the game plan. I don't blame him for doing that. And that may very well decide the election. If he goes on trial on the Washington case, which is essentially close as you can get to being charged with treason or sedition, and if you were convicted on that, that's a tough thing to have on your record when you're going to the public and asking to become the president of your country. But we're a long, long way from getting to trial on that.
PETER HAYNES: Frank, I honestly feel like we're on an ongoing soap opera. As the Trump World Turns, I think we're watching literally every single day. One final point before we move on here, Frank, interesting development in that Trump is trying to insert his daughter-in-law in as the chair of the Republican National Congress.
And in doing so, people are starting to ask the question, campaign donations to the Republican Party, where are they going? Are they going to pay a $450 million bill in New York or are they going to help the Trump campaign? It's going to be really concerning. And you talk about draining the swamp. And just, at the end of the day, it feels like Trump is just putting in family members in all these important positions everywhere he turns.
FRANK MCKENNA: Yeah, his daughter-in-law is there. I didn't think the previous chair was hostile at all to him. But Lara Trump has indicated that all of the money will be directed towards Trump from the RNC. And he's got a North Carolina executive who's going to be there as well, who is extraordinarily pro-Trump. So, one has to admire just how clever he is.
He's been able to get the courts that he wants with the appointment process. He's been able to get the RNC that he wants. I think he's very astute. I've watched him come out last week on the IVF decision instantly, before the ink had dried, positioning himself in a very pragmatic way on that decision, rather than letting the ideologues rule the debate. And I just think it shows that he's a very savvy politician.
PETER HAYNES: Yeah, that's a topic we'll get to in future episodes. It's an important one, for sure, that came out of nowhere. Let's move on to the Israeli-Hamas War. This weekend, police were called to quell a protest near the Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv, where a group numbered in the thousands had gathered to call for President Netanyahu to step down and for an election to be held. These protests were commonplace prior to the October 7th Hamas attacks. And I know you've talked about it when you were in Israel. Some of the people you were meeting were literally going out to protests while you were there.
And it was all around the fact that the citizens of Israel were growing tired of the fact that Netanyahu had made an attack on the judiciary aimed at keeping him in power and that the people of Israel needed to be able to litigate that through some form of election. Meanwhile, support for Israel is fracturing around the world with respect to its attack on the Gaza Strip. I don't think it's a stretch to say that point. Now, how does Netanyahu's situation at home impact the war in Gaza? And does he survive as Israeli leader at least until the end of this war?
FRANK MCKENNA: I think there's huge animus against Netanyahu and Israel. I also think that he survives until the end of the war. Both of those statements can be true. And they can be true because Israel is a country that understands that it is being targeted now, that its very future and identity is in many ways at stake. And Israelis are largely rallying to support their government during that fight, including the coalition partners. So I believe they will continue to prosecute the war in the way that they think appropriate.
On the other hand, the anti-Netanyahu feeling and the pro-democracy people, so-called, haven't gone away. They will fight extraordinarily hard when they believe the circumstances are propitious to remove Netanyahu from office. Now, he's supported-- now, the reason he's in office, he has the support of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who's an ultra right wing orthodox leader, with several others.
And he keeps their support by being extremely militant on a number of issues they care about, particularly the West Bank and expanding settlements there, which, of course, the Americans and other allies hate, but which ends up attracting support from the ultra right wing in Israel. So Netanyahu has got a reasonably good coalition, intact coalition, because of his catering to that right wing and, generally, Israelis supporting him during the prosecution of the war.
My view is, he needs to stay in power. He doesn't want to go to jail. In many ways, it's like Trump's situation. He's got a number of judicial proceedings that he wants to avoid by staying in power. But ultimately, he will end up having to answer for his own personal conduct and also for the democracy issues, which Israel is so deeply divided on. But I think all of that's for another day.
The world is increasingly hostile to Israel and what they think is an unnecessary amount of force and violence in prosecuting the war. But Israel will, in my view, not be deterred. They're hitting Hezbollah hard, another Iran proxy. They're hitting Hamas hard. They feel violated. They feel threatened. They feel like their future is at stake. And they're going to continue until they have a better result than they have at the present time.
PETER HAYNES: So how much time does he have to finish this war? Because you're arguing, on the one hand, that he knows he'll stay in power as long as the war continues and therefore has, in some way, an incentive, not to suggest he's putting people at risk, but that the longer the war goes on, the longer he stays in power. Now that these protests have started again, it was almost like they had a four month pass post the October 7 attack. Realistically, Frank, if this goes on for another four to six months, is the unrest going to grow in Israel, do you think? Or do you think that that was more of a one-off?
FRANK MCKENNA: No, I think the protests will continue to grow. If you remember, aside from all the pro-democracy people in Israel and people are [INAUDIBLE] Netanyahu for any number of reasons. But the real challenge he'll be held to answer to is allowing Hamas to attack Israel, leaving Israel vulnerable to that attack. How that huge security failure took place, that will be the subject matter of widespread debate and very intensive inquiry. So all of that's to come.
Look, like in a lot of situations, the peace may not be much different from the war. And so, there won't be a mandate, per se, when you say, OK, war is over. Let's get back to dealing with internal issues. I think it'll be more vaguer than that, where the fighting will teeter off, where, hopefully, the hostages are released through negotiations. But the animosity lingers. And he would argue that, look, we need to continue doing what we're doing, even though we're not engaged in intense physical war. So I think this will end up not resolving itself, but ultimately ending up in more ambiguity than certainty in the months ahead.
PETER HAYNES: This won't be the last time we've talked about that topic in the year of 2024. Before we finish up, Frank, I wanted to point out that this is the second straight episode where China was not a hot-spot for us to discuss. Now, I must admit, personally, I am following very closely some of the local government decisions in China that have been made recently.
And they're aimed at propping up the Chinese stock market. And they include limitations on when institutions can trade during the day, and that to the outside observers, this is clearly a government that is desperate to keep a positive narrative about its economy and stock market despite the facts getting in the way of this story. From your perspective, Frank, is there anything about China you are following right now?
FRANK MCKENNA: Well, I think there's some of the tension gone out of the relationship with the US. So that's good news. But still, on the economy side, China's got a lot of vulnerabilities. I'm watching real estate and the extent to which some of these companies, large companies, may not survive. I'm watching the economic growth from China, which is a real problem for the country. They've got to feed a lot of hungry mouths. And they need a lot of growth to do it.
I'm also watching the way in which they're trying to control their technology sector. And just this month alone, the Communist Party's decreed that it's going to play a bigger role in the companies that are fostering science and technology development. They're going through what I think is a bit of a cognitive dissonance situation, where they want their companies to grow faster. They want the Chinese economy to accelerate. But they increasingly are intrusive and interventionist with respect to their companies. And that's just the opposite of what you see with colossal US companies that are growing so quickly.
PETER HAYNES: Yeah, and it's not something that gains favor with the institutional investor community who are not going to be making long-term commitments to a marketplace where the government seems to be running the marketplace by the seat of its pants. That's certainly the feeling that we're getting right now. So we'll finish up here, Frank, on baseball, as we always do.
The Toronto Blue Jays started spring training games this weekend amid all kinds of optimism that players such as Alejandro Kirk, Daulton Varsho, and Vlad Guerrero Jr. will have bounce-back years and that the rotation will maintain its great performance. Have you allowed yourself to get caught up in this hype? Because I know you were bitter with the way the season ended last year.
FRANK MCKENNA: Yeah, I'm totally caught up in the hype. There's nothing like the pre-season to lift your spirits. I've been watching the team and their preseason games and all of the new players and so on. I think that the talent is there if people play up to their potential. And you've named them, Kurt Varsho, Guerrero. If they play up to their potential, this will be a very good team. I don't think we improved ourself in the off season. In fact, we probably suffered more losses than gains. So the only way we can overcome that is with the existing roster to play up to their potential.
So, Guerrero seems to be in terrific shape, the best shape of his career, he would claim. So we'll see how that goes. Two things quickly. One is that it would be a bonus if we could get Alek Manoah to become the stud of a pitcher that he was before. That would give us a really, really strong starting staff to go with the hitting lineup. And secondly, I'd like John Schneider to be a more creative and activist coach than he was last year.
There were flashes of time when he seemed to want to light it up a little bit and make it fun for the fans. But overall, the team played a pretty boring brand of baseball. And I'd like to see them play a much more exciting brand of baseball, manufacturing runs where they need to, and using power where they have it, and et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I live in hope. I live in hope.
PETER HAYNES: Yeah, well, we're going to be hoping for a great season and next month, where we'll have the opportunity to talk just before the season is about to start. And I guess, Frank, at some point, we're all going to get a look at the stadium renovations which have been completed, or are being completed now, on the lower deck of the Rogers Center.
And it'll be very interesting to see how that looks, as there will be a different configuration on the fencing around the outside of the diamond. So it's going to be interesting. I think everybody was very pleased with the renovations for the upper deck. And now, we'll get a chance to see the lower deck. So, here's hoping for a great baseball season. And Frank, we'll look forward to chatting again next month. Thanks for your time.
FRANK MCKENNA: Thank you.
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Frank McKenna
Deputy Chair, TD Securities
Frank McKenna
Deputy Chair, TD Securities
Frank McKenna
Deputy Chair, TD Securities
As Deputy Chair, Frank is focused on supporting TD Securities' continued global expansion. He has been an executive with TD Bank Group since 2006 and previously served as Premier of New Brunswick and as Canadian Ambassador to the United States.
Peter Haynes
Managing Director and Head of Index and Market Structure Research, TD Securities
Peter Haynes
Managing Director and Head of Index and Market Structure Research, TD Securities
Peter Haynes
Managing Director and Head of Index and Market Structure Research, TD Securities
Peter joined TD Securities in June 1995 and currently leads our Index and Market Structure research team. He also manages some key institutional relationships across the trading floor and hosts two podcast series: one on market structure and one on geopolitics. He started his career at the Toronto Stock Exchange in its index and derivatives marketing department before moving to Credit Lyonnais in Montreal. Peter is a member of S&P’s U.S., Canadian and Global Index Advisory Panels, and spent four years on the Ontario Securities Commission’s Market Structure Advisory Committee.