256. Tony Keller: Did Mass Immigration Make Canadians Poorer?

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When did you begin to believe something had gone wrong?
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Sort of 2022, I started to notice, and I'm not the only one who noticed, that something had really changed about how Canada was doing immigration.
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The Trudeau government had very substantially changed some things, and I really believed not for the better, considerably for the worse.
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And that's when I started looking into immigration.
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Who made the final decision on that?
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And was it ideological, was it political, or was it the lobbying efforts?
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I think the answer is all of the above.
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I think that is the best answer we can arrive at, is um the Trudeau government has a predilection to believe that more immigration is always better than less immigration.
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At the same time, they are being lobbied by the business community, which is saying that Canada has a labor shortage.
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Do you think journalists were afraid to question the immigration policy to be associated with xenophobia and racism?
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Yeah, because I think, you know, we kind of got into an era of peak woke right at that moment, circa 2020.
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Did immigration cause the housing crisis or expose a country that already failed to build?
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Exacerbated the housing crisis.
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I would never say it caused the housing crisis because Canada had this strange situation of kind of underinvestment, well, underbuilding.
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Did mass immigration make Canada poorer?
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Pony Keller, thank you so much for being willing to join us today.
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I'm really excited to speak with you.
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I had the opportunity to speak with Mikhail, and we talked about your work.
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We talked about your book.
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He provided a lot of insights, and I started reading your book, and I just find the topic really fascinating.
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And I just really appreciate it.
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It's a contentious topic for many, and it can be one that can be approached in the wrong way at times.
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And I just really appreciate the steady hand that you bring to this topic.
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But before we dive into all of that, would you mind briefly introducing yourself?
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So I'm Tony Keller.
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I'm a columnist for The Globe and Mail.
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I'm very happy to be here with you, and I'm I'm honored by the introduction you've just given me because if there's anything that I like to hear, it's that I've been reasonable, I've been even-handed, and that kind of people on both sides of the aisle and in the middle can find something in what I've written.
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I like, I hope that that's true in my daily work, and I hope that it's true uh in the book.
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And a lot of the feedback I've received suggests that people, whether right or left, think that the book speaks to them.
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They don't think it's coming from some other side attacking them, or they don't think it's on their side attacking the other side.
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So that's that's where I'm coming from, and uh I'm I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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So we should say briefly what the book is, and I have a few questions before we dive into it.
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But you wrote uh borderline chaos, and it's about how Canada got immigration right and then very wrong.
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And so I'm excited to speak with you about that today.
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But I just want to start at the beginning.
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You grew up in Montreal, studied at Duke in Yale uh law school, and ultimately chose journalism rather than legal practice.
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And I'm just curious to start off, what shaped your interest uh in institutions, public policy, and how how Canada governs itself?
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Yeah, as a younger person, I thought I was going to be uh a historian.
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And I ended up as I finished university, my undergraduate degree, I ended up realizing, you know, I should probably try to get a job.
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And I do love writing and I have done some journalism.
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And so I applied to various places.
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I ended up getting hired by the globe.
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That's way back in 1991.
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A few years later, I went back to law school only for a year to do a master's degree in law, um, and then came back to journalism.
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So I've been writing about Canadian public policy issues, Canadian economics, Canadian politics for 35 years now.
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Um, I did not focus on immigration.
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I didn't spend a lot of time on immigration at all until fairly recently, until the last couple of years.
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Um, and my book, in a way, is kind of about that.
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It's about how Canada had an immigration system that worked quite well.
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It was something that we didn't, most of us didn't think about very much.
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It's something that our politicians didn't argue about.
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We didn't have a left versus right fight about immigration.
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And so immigration was something that just hummed along in the background and worked pretty well.
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And Canada was an outlier in that we were not fighting about immigration.
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We were not arguing about immigration, and we did not have left and right running against each other on uh increasingly radicalized visions of immigration.
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We actually had liberals and conservatives basically agreeing on the immigration system and not changing the immigration system when the Mulroney government changed to the Kretchen government and then when the Kretchen government changed to the Harper government.
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Immigration pretty stable in numbers, pretty stable in methodology, um, was one of the unusual things about Canada was there was not this big left-right fissure on immigration.
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You are now considered one of Canada's leading journalistic voices on immigration.
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What pulled you towards this issue?
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And when did you begin to believe something had gone wrong?
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Yeah.
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So I first, so when the Trudeau government was elected and in 19 in 2015, pardon me, and they had some ideas about considerably increasing immigration, considerably loosening immigration, um, I was critical then.
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And then I kind of just, you know, parked it because they, on the surface, they did not appear to be changing the immigration system all that radically in 2016, 2017, 2018.
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Um, then as we got into the pandemic and as we were coming out of the pandemic, sort of 2022, I started to notice, and I'm not the only one who noticed, that something had really changed about how Canada was doing immigration.
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The Trudeau government had very substantially changed some things.
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And I really believed not for the better, considerably for the worse.
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And that's when I started looking into immigration.
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So, like a lot of voters, like a lot of Canadians, I didn't really pay much attention to the immigration system until sort of 2022, 2023.
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And you see this in public opinion that public opinion on immigration was very stable all the way up to about 2023, and then suddenly it flips.
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But I think it flipped for the same reason my opinions flipped, which is that the underlying facts had dramatically changed.
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I don't think Canadians suddenly became xenophobic and said that they didn't like immigration.
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I think Canadians started to look at the immigration system, and even if they didn't understand exactly what was going on, they started to feel that something was not right and that they were not happy about the system.
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Not that they were against all immigration, not that they were against all immigrants, but that the way the system had been changed was a negative rather than a positive, and that it had really substantially changed.
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Your recipe is blunt.
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Welcome immigrants, many, but not too many, mostly educated and skilled, always legal.
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Why did that formula work and which part collapsed first?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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And boy, that's that's the whole book, pretty much it, right there.
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So I think the system worked because it gave Canadians a sense that immigration was a mutual choice, that immigrants were choosing Canada, but we were choosing those immigrants.
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We were choosing them first or simultaneously, um, and that people couldn't just come to Canada, and that the choices we were making about immigration were beneficial for Canada and Canadians.
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I think what's happened in a lot of European countries and in the United States is a large cohort of voters, and in some of those countries, a majority of voters, have come to feel that immigration is an imposition upon them, that it is a negative for them, a negative for the country, and that it's not something they chose.
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And I think most Canadians felt, and the system made them feel, that immigration was a choice.
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That, yes, immigrants wanted to come to Canada, but we wanted them to come.
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We were choosing who who would come, we were controlling who would come.
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And consequently, Canada was this, Canada was this real paradox where where in the 1990s and the early 2000s, all the way up to 2015, we actually have a much higher immigration rate than the United States.
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And yet, unlike the United States, there's no anti-immigration movement of any substantial size in Canada.
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So that's a that's to me is a fascinating paradox.
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The US has lower immigration, yet much more opposition to immigration.
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We have higher immigration and up to recently, not really any pushback on immigration or on the levels of immigration.
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And I think one of the reasons for this in speaking to Mikel was that because they're so highly skilled that they're welcome because when a person who needs help, they go see their doctor and they're an immigrant to this country, it's like, well, that's not so bad.
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I'm I'm experiencing a benefit from this person being here.
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But for this person being here, I might not get the level of service that I need.
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And then we started to move into a different direction.
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Am I getting that right, or are there a few other missing pieces to that?
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No, I think that is broadly speaking, that's really it.
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Um, I I don't think that's the whole story, but that is an important part of the story.
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So what Canada did starting in the 1960s is so in the early 1960s, we dramatically changed our immigration system.
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Up to the early 1960s, both Canada and the United States chose immigrants based on race and national origin.
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I mean, Canada up to the 1960s basically said if you're Asian or black, you can't come to Canada.
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Our immigration system was a very deliberately and very publicly uh pretty much of a whites-only immigration system.
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And in the early 60s, we said, we started to say, like, we this this can't continue.
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This this can't be our immigration system.
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We can't have this level of racism built into our immigration system.
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So but at the same time, Canadians did not want a complete open borders.
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Anybody in the world can come to Canada anytime they want.
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We'd have millions of people every year.
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So we came up with a system that said, okay, let's have something called the point system.
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Let's focus on people whose skills and educations are going to benefit Canada.
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Some of the people coming to the country are gonna come in through a separate system.
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They're gonna be family reunification.
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Some of the people are gonna be refugees, but the bulk of them are gonna be chosen for economic attributes, what economists would call uh human capital.
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Um and ideally, we'd like people who have some skills that we're missing, who have some education we don't have, and who can kind of, you know, assist our economy, like make Canada stronger and economically more vibrant.
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And that system kept being refined through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, into the 2000s.
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Um, it's a pretty good system, and it's part of what would make Canadians think that immigration was benefiting them.
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At the same time, we also had really, really tight border control.
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So this is another interesting Canadian paradox.
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Canada controlled its border way better than the United States.
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The United States had, has had for a very long time large numbers of people crossing the border without permission and staying in the United States.
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That's actually been a really important part of their immigration system.
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Canada didn't have that because we're surrounded on three sides by oceans, and the south of us is the United States, which is a border where people tend to flow south rather than north.
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So on two different levels, Canadians could feel like immigration is something we chose.
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People don't just show up.
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We choose who comes, and we're on the whole choosing, choosing wisely.
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We're choosing people who are going to contribute to Canada.
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So I think that was that was the positive that people were feeling about immigration.
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That was the positive perception of immigration.
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The other piece, and you can correct me if I'm mistaken, is the assimilation process, right?
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When you have a doctor coming here, they're setting routes, they're connecting, they're integrating with the community.
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When you bring in temporary foreign workers, there's not that same level of assimilation process, that long-term horizon where they're confirmed to be here over the long term.
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And so that relationship, I suppose, would change as well, if I'm not mistaken.
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Okay, so you're you're now getting to into sort of one of the big things that changed under the Trudeau government.
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Um, and to be fair to the Trudeau government, it wasn't that this just the Trudeau government that did this.
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Many provinces wanted it.
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The business community was lobbying in favor of it, and higher education, which is backed by the provinces, really wanted it.
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So what flipped um uh after the Trudeau government came in and and or what began to change after the Trudeau government came in and then really flipped in 2022, 2023, into 2024, is that the number of people coming as temporary immigrants began to rise and soon exceeded the number of people coming under the regular permanent immigration program.
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Um, by 2023, we had more people coming as temporary immigrants than as permanent immigrants, most of them coming through the student program.
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However, as we now realize, the vast majority of those people want to become permanent immigrants.
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So they want to stay in Canada.
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Nobody's paying uh$10,000 tuition to a fly-by-night college because they want to take that education back to India.
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They, because the education in most cases is not worth very much.
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They're doing this because they want to come to Canada, which is entirely understandable.
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My ancestors came to Canada, and I, you know, I thank my lucky stars that they did and that they were let in.
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So um, but but that's the big change.
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So I would say that the temporary immigration piece has to be understood as notionally temporary immigration by people who want to become permanent immigrants.
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And the example that I use in my book is I say it's like if um the organizers of the Taylor Swift concert let a million people into the stadium and then discovered that they only had 100,000 tickets to sell.
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And this is sort of the dilemma that we're dealing with right now is that we have uh sort of approaching 3 million temporary residents of Canada.
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And the vast majority of those people want to be permanent residents.
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And the number of permanent residents that we allow in each year is not remotely high enough to absorb all of those people in a short period of time.
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Um, so we're actually asking most of them to follow the terms of their visas and go home, which understandably most of them do not wish to do.
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We'll get into that piece in a second, but just to be clear, with the previous style, was assimilation effective and the reason why it was also not contentious previously?
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Yeah.
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So this is something that I don't talk about much in my book, but I'm happy to talk about it.
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Um, so the officially, the the sort of official Canadian heritage moment story is that the United States assimilates immigrants and Canada is a mosaic.
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The United States is a melting pot and Canada is a mosaic.
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I will tell you from my experience growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, um we were, you know, my neighbors and the kids I went to school with were overwhelmingly the children of immigrants.
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And we all felt 100% Canadian and we would not have understood this story about Canada being a mosaic as opposed to a melting pot.
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Canada was functionally speaking a melting pot.
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And I think if you spend time walking around and you look at, look at and listen to first generation immigrant kids to Canada from whatever background, like their accents sound Canadian, their manner of speaking sounds Canadian, their life becomes Canadian.
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Like, so we so there isn't this sharp distinction in my mind between how the United States does things and how Canada does things.
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I think there are for sure there are differences, but you know, historically, the vast majority of people who come to Canada in a generation, they they become Canadians.
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The other piece I want to touch on, and then we can dive into what went wrong, uh, is when I spoke to Mikhail, he told me that John McCallum commissioned a group of economists in 2016, um, but their warnings were effectively discarded.
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He made the comment, thrown in the garbage.
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Um, what did you uncover about why the government preferred the Moreno Growth Council and the Big Canada vision over the advice of immigration economists?
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Yeah, so that is another really great question because so when McCallum is the first immigration minister in the Trudeau government, he's only there briefly.
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He's an economist.
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I mean, he has a PhD in economics, he taught at McGill, he was the chief economist of a major Canadian bank.
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And he sends a letter to this group of economists and says, Hey, can you give me advice on I have some questions about possible ways we could change the immigration system?
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And it's clear from the questions that the government is thinking about one higher immigration, but most importantly, kind of watering down uh quality measures of immigration, quality and control measures.
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And the economists send him back this letter, and it's a group of about a dozen economists, and they say this this doesn't make sense.
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What you want to do, forget about focusing on more immigrants.
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The number isn't really important.
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There are there are positives that could come from much higher immigration, there are negatives that could come from much higher immigration, there are going to be costs, there are going to be benefits.
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It's don't don't get lost on that.
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Focus on quality, focus on raising the education and the skill level of immigrants.
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That's the only thing that could have a positive impact on gross domestic product per capita and Canadian living standards.
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And the government basically ignores that.
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The government going forward, I mean, McCallum is out as immigration minister not long after.
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The government writes a report or is commissions a report, gets a report on ways to increase Canadian living standards, what they believe will do it.
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There's a focus on just increasing numbers, not on quality.
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And even that report is ultimately entirely ignored.
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And especially after, right after the pandemic, the government becomes absolutely fixated on the idea that Canada doesn't have enough people and that we have a late, we have we have massive labor shortages, and we have labor shortages at the bottom of the labor market.
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So the government doesn't get fixated on the idea that we have too few doctors.
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It gets fixated on the idea that we have too few people to work in fast food restaurants, and we really need to use the immigration system to bring in a lot more fast food workers, a lot more warehouse workers, a lot more people to do minimum wage jobs.
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Um, this is a really big change from uh the previous immigration system.
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And it comes so so basically what happens is Canada goes for an immigration system of much higher numbers and much lower standards.
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We put those two together.
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Who made the final decision on that?
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And was it ideological, was it political, or was it the lobbying efforts?
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Again, this is it's it's hard to say.
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And I think the answer is all of the above.
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I think that is the best answer we can arrive at is um the Trudeau government has a predilection to believe that more immigration is always better than less immigration, easier immigration is always better than harder immigration.
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At the same time, they are being lobbied by the business community, which is saying that Canada has a labor shortage.
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And and, you know, McAl would have talked to you about this, and I and I I just don't think um Canada had a labor shortage.
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I I don't think there's really such a thing.
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We have shortages of particular skills for sure.
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We could use more doctors, clearly.
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We could use more highly engineered, highly educated engineers, clearly.
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But there's no mass shortage of lack of people to work.
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But the business community convinced them of that.
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The provinces, led by Ontario, said, hey, this is a great way to finance our education system rather than taxing people, rather than, or rather than raising tuition for domestic students.
00:20:48.559 --> 00:20:54.799
If we just had more and more and more foreign students, that would be a subsidy to the rest of the education system.
00:20:54.960 --> 00:20:58.880
And kind of no one was no one was thinking about the national interest.
00:20:59.039 --> 00:21:06.960
There's a lot of thinking about short-term particular interests, but nobody thought about the consequences for the country as a whole.
00:21:07.279 --> 00:21:09.279
And nobody ran on this.
00:21:09.440 --> 00:21:14.160
It's not like the Trudeau government ran on this in any election.
00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:16.319
It just kind of quietly happened.
00:21:16.400 --> 00:21:21.039
And then Canadians woke up and said, Hang on a second, uh, I don't like this.
00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:25.839
Why why did you I don't understand what you're doing, and I don't understand why you're doing it.
00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:29.759
And by the end of the Trudeau government, they're they're backpedaling.
00:21:30.240 --> 00:21:48.960
That's such an important point, and I'm not going to move on from it because I think it's important that we sit with that fact for a second here, because it's what happened in the US as well, and likely led to uh Donald Trump's reelection is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's response uh to the border and kind of saying there's no there there.
00:21:49.119 --> 00:21:50.559
We don't know what you're talking about.
00:21:50.720 --> 00:21:54.160
And so many Americans are like, you don't see what I'm talking about?
00:21:54.319 --> 00:21:58.880
Like, you don't know what what my community is going through, then you can't be in power.
00:21:59.039 --> 00:22:03.119
And I think it just And I'd just love to get your take on this, this broader feeling.
00:22:03.279 --> 00:22:12.960
I'm really worried about our democracy, and not in the conspiratorial sense, in the sense that government officials are supposed to seek their mandate from their citizens.
00:22:13.119 --> 00:22:15.119
And we are supposed to provide that mandate.
00:22:15.200 --> 00:22:23.200
And we're supposed to talk about these issues in depth so that when the government comes in, they're like, this is what you, the people, told me to do, and I'm doing it.
00:22:23.359 --> 00:22:25.039
That's a healthy democracy.
00:22:25.200 --> 00:22:39.599
But with um, and I give Justin Trudeau great credit in the beginning of his time that he would sit and do these town halls that where he'd be surrounded by a room full of people, and they'd raise their hands and ask him questions, and he'd have his sleeves rolled up and he'd answer some of these.
00:22:39.759 --> 00:22:49.039
Now we can debate about the quality of the answers and all of those things, but there's something really important in a democracy about feeling like you're participating in the process.
00:22:49.200 --> 00:22:56.480
And I don't think there's a finer point to show that disconnect than the immigration file, where to your point, nobody voted for this.
00:22:56.640 --> 00:23:03.279
And so there's such a deep betrayal from I think citizens, where they're like, my government doesn't represent me.
00:23:03.359 --> 00:23:07.680
And then you get the conspiracies of who does represent, who are these people representing?
00:23:07.839 --> 00:23:09.359
Is it the World Economic Forum?
00:23:09.440 --> 00:23:10.400
Is it the WHO?
00:23:10.480 --> 00:23:14.000
Is it and that's where people go because they're like, well, you're not getting it from me.
00:23:14.079 --> 00:23:16.079
So who the heck are you getting this mandate from?
00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:23.920
I'm just wondering, as a journalist, like, how do you think about that disconnect between citizens and their government and what the government's following through on?
00:23:24.240 --> 00:23:29.039
Yeah, so I think all of that is very well said and and very apt for this situation.
00:23:29.279 --> 00:23:31.680
Um, nobody ran on immigration.
00:23:31.839 --> 00:23:45.279
Like immigration was basically not discussed in any of the federal elections, 2015, 2019, 2021, 2020, you know, the even the most re the most recent one, it was discussed a little bit because the government was pulling back.
00:23:45.519 --> 00:23:48.880
But previously, when the Trudeau government was doing all this, it wasn't discussed.
00:23:48.960 --> 00:23:52.880
And all the provincial governments that pursued this, they didn't discuss it either.
00:23:53.039 --> 00:24:01.440
So it's not that Canadians voted against this and the government did it anyway, it's that it's a major policy change that nobody talked about.
00:24:01.839 --> 00:24:22.559
And one of the things that um, you know, I discovered as I started to look more closely at immigration in 2023 and 2024 was that um the one issue that the conservative party would not criticize the Trudeau government on was immigration.
00:24:22.799 --> 00:24:27.920
So the Trudeau government was doing these things with the support of most of the provinces and the business community.
00:24:28.400 --> 00:24:35.440
A conservative party that would attack Justin Trudeau for anything and everything he did was totally silent on immigration.
00:24:35.680 --> 00:24:54.799
And again, I was told off the record by a number of conservatives that it was simply a decision on the part of the conservative party to not attack the government because they feared the government was actually doing some of these things in the hope that it could attack the conservative party for criticizing them.
00:24:54.960 --> 00:24:57.599
Then it could say, see, the conservatives are against immigration.
00:24:57.680 --> 00:25:03.920
The conservatives are racist, vote liberal, conservatives are racist, and that a lot of Canadians would receive that message.
00:25:04.079 --> 00:25:10.079
And so the conservatives did not start criticizing immigration until public opinion shifted.
00:25:10.319 --> 00:25:15.599
Until you could see month after month of polls showing that, hang on, Canadians aren't happy.
00:25:15.680 --> 00:25:18.319
And the Trudeau government was already backpedaling.
00:25:18.480 --> 00:25:26.720
So that's also interesting to me that that there was definitely a fear on the part of the Trudeau government that the liberals thought of immigration as a wedge issue.
00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:40.400
And they thought the more we, you know, they worried that the conservatives worried that the liberals were actually deliberately ramping up immigration in the hope that there would be conservative pushback against this.
00:25:40.640 --> 00:25:44.559
So all this to me is extremely American.
00:25:44.720 --> 00:25:50.640
This is not how Canadian immigration policy was done for a generation before.
00:25:50.880 --> 00:26:00.960
And I worry, like you, um, that that is going to be bad for our democracy and it is going to polarize the parties along this kind of left-right split.
00:26:01.039 --> 00:26:05.359
And on immigration in particular, there was no left-right split for a whole generation.
00:26:05.440 --> 00:26:12.240
There was just this consensus immigration policy that both sides could largely get behind.
00:26:13.039 --> 00:26:16.319
So as a journalist, I'm going to ask you two parts to this.
00:26:16.480 --> 00:26:21.599
As a journalist, what are your thoughts on the official opposition's decision not to do that?
00:26:21.759 --> 00:26:31.759
Because I think there's a fair argument to say they have a duty as the honorable opposition to offer different policy prescriptions and to criticize the government.
00:26:31.920 --> 00:26:34.640
They chose not to do that for political reasons.
00:26:34.799 --> 00:26:37.759
But as a journalist, what do you think their duty was there?
00:26:38.319 --> 00:26:47.680
Well, you know, it's it's we can talk about duties, but at the end of the day, if you are in politics, you are trying to get elected.
00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:50.799
I do, you know, I have to understand that.
00:26:51.200 --> 00:26:57.279
And you have to be very careful to not say things that are highly unpopular.
00:26:57.519 --> 00:27:01.359
Even like I can say things that are highly unpopular because I'm not running for office.
00:27:01.519 --> 00:27:06.160
So I can tell people things that they don't really want to know or don't want to believe.
00:27:06.319 --> 00:27:11.920
I can tell them that the things that they believe are actually wrong, and here's the evidence, and here's why you ought to change your mind.
00:27:12.240 --> 00:27:15.440
It's a lot harder for politicians to do that.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:19.920
So yes, I can I can criticize the Conservative Party.
00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:26.480
I I can even more criticize the liberal government because they're the ones actually actually pushed through these policies.
00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:35.519
Um, but I do understand that the the conservatives may have believed that they had to be very careful around the issue of immigration.
00:27:35.680 --> 00:27:45.440
Um, I think we should be careful around the issue of immigration because it's, you know, we we we don't want our politics to descend into racism and anti-racism.
00:27:45.599 --> 00:27:51.599
Um we don't want our politics to descend into the right moving much further right and the left moving further left.
00:27:51.920 --> 00:28:01.359
So on the whole, I I uh, you know, it may not have been such a bad thing that the conservatives laid off immigration for a few years.
00:28:01.599 --> 00:28:15.440
And something I wrote in 2020, probably late 2023, um, in a column in the Globe, I said, you know, I really hope and I really wish and I really want the Trudeau government to fix immigration.
00:28:15.599 --> 00:28:17.440
I want the liberals to fix immigration.
00:28:17.759 --> 00:28:31.119
Because if the Trudeau government continues down this path and forces the conservatives and a lot of public opinion to push back against them, I fear what will happen is the liberals will say, Oh, wonderful, we got our wedge issued.
00:28:31.519 --> 00:28:33.839
You're criticizing us because you're racist.
00:28:34.079 --> 00:28:45.359
But if the liberals move closer to sanity, closer to the old way of doing immigration, rather than doubling down on their mistakes, that'll get us back to a happier place.
00:28:45.599 --> 00:28:56.000
And I am hopeful that we are gradually moving back to a happier place because the Kearney government is saying a lot of the right things on immigration.
00:28:56.160 --> 00:29:16.319
I can criticize some of the things they are failing to do, but they are rhetorically saying things that sound very reasonable to me and sound like the old immigration system and sound like a lot of things that middle-of-the-road conservatives could have said a few years ago and do say today.
00:29:16.720 --> 00:29:17.440
Fascinating.
00:29:17.519 --> 00:29:28.559
I guess I would just say uh politically smart, uh, but um in your role as a leader, irresponsible to not speak on those issues.
00:29:28.799 --> 00:29:31.200
Can I ask your perspective?
00:29:31.440 --> 00:29:35.519
What is the century initiative and how did it play a role in all of this?
00:29:35.839 --> 00:29:36.079
Yeah.
00:29:36.240 --> 00:29:40.640
And so, like when I talk about the century initiative, I don't want to be conspiratorial.
00:29:40.799 --> 00:29:48.079
Like, I don't think it's some secret cabal that was secretly manipulating the government for the benefit of the World Economic Forum, et cetera, et cetera.
00:29:48.160 --> 00:29:50.559
Like I make a joke about the World Economic Forum in the book.
00:29:50.640 --> 00:29:54.640
And then later on I realized, you know what, that may feed into some conspiracy theories.
00:29:54.799 --> 00:29:55.680
Not trying to do that.
00:29:55.839 --> 00:30:16.559
No, look, the Century Initiative was a group of people who came together, led by Dominic Barton, who used to run Canadian, who used to run McKinsey Consulting, and Mark Wiseman, who at the time was uh had just left Can, I believe it just left Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and is now, of course, he's Canada's ambassador to the United States.
00:30:16.720 --> 00:30:29.359
Um, and the Century Initiative pitch was that something magical would happen to the Canadian economy if we had faster population growth and we got to 100 million people by the end of the century.
00:30:29.680 --> 00:30:31.359
The end of the century is a long way away.
00:30:31.519 --> 00:30:36.480
100 million people, we might actually get to that with moderate population growth.
00:30:36.559 --> 00:30:42.559
And so put that aside about this century, what what happens, you know, 75 years from now.
00:30:42.799 --> 00:30:45.200
Focus on what they said had to happen now.
00:30:45.279 --> 00:30:48.640
And they just pushed for we need higher immigration.
00:30:48.799 --> 00:30:50.559
More immigration, more immigration, more immigration.
00:30:50.720 --> 00:30:52.400
However much immigration we have, we should have more.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:54.799
However much we have next year, we should have more the following year.
00:30:54.960 --> 00:30:57.119
There was just a big focus on that.
00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:09.359
And the belief seems to be, or their beliefs seem to be, that higher immigration was necessarily economically beneficial.
00:31:09.759 --> 00:31:19.039
And this is where the century initiative and those economists you asked about who wrote a letter to John McCallan when he was immigration minister.
00:31:19.200 --> 00:31:22.160
This is where Century Initiative and the economists diverge.
00:31:22.240 --> 00:31:25.279
Because the economists said you got to focus on the quality.
00:31:25.839 --> 00:31:34.240
If your goal is higher living standards for Canadians, which means higher GDP per capita, you got to focus on the quality of immigrants.
00:31:34.480 --> 00:31:40.640
More highly educated people, more highly skilled people, more people who are going to work in high-income fields.
00:31:40.799 --> 00:31:44.640
And the Century Initiative was just saying, no, no, no, no, it's about numbers.
00:31:44.960 --> 00:31:57.440
And what I talk about in the book and what other economists have pointed out is that we got much higher immigration numbers, but that did not magically lead to higher Canadian living standards.
00:31:57.519 --> 00:31:59.359
It came with a number of costs.
00:31:59.519 --> 00:32:01.359
It made the economy grow faster.
00:32:01.519 --> 00:32:12.000
Because the good news is if you pump a lot more people into the economy, the a free market economy can figure out how to give them jobs because every every person is both supply and demand.
00:32:12.079 --> 00:32:13.920
Every person's working and they're buying things.
00:32:14.000 --> 00:32:17.359
And because they're buying things, that's creating more demand for other jobs.
00:32:17.519 --> 00:32:30.799
So it doesn't cause mass unemployment, but it can bring down living standards if you're bringing in a lot of people and those people tend to be lower skilled and lower education working lower pay jobs.
00:32:31.119 --> 00:32:34.720
And that also can cause some public costs.
00:32:34.960 --> 00:32:45.519
Someone making$500,000 a year and paying taxes on a$500,000 a year income is going to be a net contributor to our public services.
00:32:46.160 --> 00:32:55.039
Someone who is working part-time in a minimum wage job is not going to be a net contributor to our public services because they just don't pay enough taxes.
00:32:55.519 --> 00:32:57.920
And that that doesn't make them a bad person.
00:32:58.720 --> 00:33:01.039
But it just means like life is like that.
00:33:01.119 --> 00:33:03.279
There are costs and benefits at every choice.
00:33:03.599 --> 00:33:08.400
We made a choice that on the whole had somewhat more costs than benefits.
00:33:08.480 --> 00:33:19.279
And the Century Initiative did not appear to understand that with their focus on higher immigration numbers are a magic answer to Canada's problems.
00:33:19.680 --> 00:33:26.480
So, Tony, I'm just curious as to your perspective on this, because so many Canadians are falling behind.
00:33:26.799 --> 00:33:29.839
And so many people blame themselves.
00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:33.039
Like no matter how hard you work, you can't get ahead.
00:33:41.279 --> 00:33:43.920
So they they take on that sense of failure.
00:33:44.079 --> 00:33:56.799
And I just I think about so many people who are just trying to get by, who don't like you, I'm sure you see in the globe, like all the time, this people couldn't get$200 together in an emergency, like all of these challenging circumstances.
00:33:57.039 --> 00:34:06.319
And while I think there's been a change in the immigration approach, this had, to your point, a real impact on Canadian families.
00:34:06.400 --> 00:34:08.880
And they were not put first in this policy.
00:34:09.039 --> 00:34:11.280
And so this is unlikely to happen.
00:34:11.360 --> 00:34:17.039
But like, what would you think of the government coming forward and apologizing to those most vulnerable Canadians?
00:34:17.119 --> 00:34:18.320
I know that that's unlikely.
00:34:18.480 --> 00:34:26.079
I just, I have such a heart for people who like who hate themselves because they can't give their kids Christmas presents and think they did something.
00:34:26.239 --> 00:34:33.280
But when these macroeconomics happen, there's no one there to tell them at Christmas this is actually part of government policy and it's not all your fault.
00:34:33.440 --> 00:34:39.840
And yeah, maybe you could go get a different job, but this isn't, this isn't, you're not a bad dad, you're not a bad mom for these circumstances.
00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:40.800
What do you think of that?
00:34:41.039 --> 00:34:42.800
Like that's where my mind goes when I hear these things.
00:34:43.039 --> 00:34:43.199
Yeah.
00:34:43.280 --> 00:34:59.360
So the big change that I would like to see, and that the government has sort of taken baby steps towards, is to um say that we're gonna function, we're gonna we're gonna run immigration as a system of bringing in immigrants kind of from the top down.
00:34:59.519 --> 00:35:04.000
And what I mean by that is go for the most skilled and work your way down.
00:35:04.159 --> 00:35:19.679
A lot of what happened under the late years of the Trudeau government is we were kind of doing immigration from the bottom up, which means so the people who get hurt by that, the Canadians who get hurt by that, are people at the bottom of the income scale.
00:35:19.840 --> 00:35:32.800
Um, because if we're saying, well, we're not gonna bring in more doctors, but we are gonna bring in more fast minimum wage fast food workers, so that's actually a benefit in some ways for someone like me.
00:35:32.960 --> 00:35:39.840
I mean, it's not a benefit I want, but but you understand, like I can order a burrito at three in the morning and have it delivered.
00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:50.079
And that burrito, if if you create a large enough pool of low-wage workers, that burrito is probably 17 cents cheaper and arrives eight minutes faster.
00:35:50.159 --> 00:35:54.239
Um, and the restaurants open at three in the morning where it might not be open at three in the morning.
00:35:54.480 --> 00:35:56.960
So, so this is the cost benefit.
00:35:57.039 --> 00:36:08.800
Where if we if we um bring in more doctors, more engineers, more people at the top of the income scale, that's competition for people at the top of the income scale and benefits everybody, and in particular, people at the bottom.
00:36:08.960 --> 00:36:11.840
So I would say that to me is the big change.
00:36:12.079 --> 00:36:21.760
And and one very simple change I I would like the government to make and have been arguing for for several years, is to just get rid of the temporary foreign worker program.
00:36:22.079 --> 00:36:28.800
The temporary foreign worker program is not the biggest part of our temporary immigration system, but it's pretty substantial.
00:36:28.960 --> 00:36:32.800
I mean, at the peak it was a couple hundred thousand, a stock of a couple hundred thousand workers.
00:36:32.880 --> 00:36:34.079
It's a bit lower now.
00:36:34.239 --> 00:36:55.199
Um, we should just say, listen, we you can bring in temporary workers for jobs over, say,$150,000 a year, but you can't bring in your restaurant, your delivery service, your warehouse cannot go hire people overseas for notionally temporary jobs that are in fact full-time jobs.
00:36:55.280 --> 00:37:00.639
You can't hire temporary workers for full temporary foreign workers for full-time Canadian low-wage jobs.
00:37:00.800 --> 00:37:04.320
I think that would just be really helpful and clean and simple.
00:37:04.639 --> 00:37:21.519
And um, yes, it it would make it harder for Amazon or Burger King or McDonald's or Tim Hortons to find um workers, but that would drive up wages at the bottom of the scale, which is what I would like to do.
00:37:21.920 --> 00:37:23.679
You brought it up, Tim Hortons.
00:37:24.000 --> 00:37:29.440
Wouldn't be a Canadian conversation on immigration in today's day and age if we didn't talk about Tim Hortons.
00:37:29.760 --> 00:37:43.039
I'm not sure if you saw the recent ad that Tim Hortons put forward uh around who they're hiring, and it really got a visceral reaction from Canadians because I think they knew what Tim Hortons was trying to do.
00:37:43.199 --> 00:37:47.679
What's your reflections on kind of the impact on that approach?
00:37:48.079 --> 00:37:54.239
So this is a great question because, and it's something I haven't written about, but I did a little research on and meant to write about.
00:37:54.400 --> 00:38:09.920
So Tim Hortons announced this um maybe a month ago or so, and they said we're no longer going to use the temporary foreign worker program to bring in temporary workers for what are full-time, permanent, indefinite jobs.
00:38:10.159 --> 00:38:19.119
Um, but in the fine print of that announcement, they said, of course, we can hire anybody who's legally allowed to work in Canada, which is true.
00:38:19.360 --> 00:38:28.400
Um, the bulk of Canada's temporary workforce, which is quite big, the bulk of Canada's temporary foreign workforce are not temporary foreign workers.
00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:33.360
They're students or former students who are now on postgraduate work permits.
00:38:33.599 --> 00:38:50.159
So um I'm going from memory here, but the last time I looked at the stats, um Canadians, among Canadians aged 20 to 24, uh, around 25% of the population were non-permanent residents.
00:38:50.480 --> 00:38:52.400
Okay, that's a number never before seen in Canadian history.
00:38:52.480 --> 00:38:55.840
And in BC and Ontario, the number was closer to 30%.
00:38:56.880 --> 00:39:02.719
So, and most of those people are not temporary foreign workers, capital T, capital F, capital W.
00:39:03.039 --> 00:39:13.199
They're workers who are temporarily in Canada because they are students or they graduated from a program and were given a postgraduate work permit that goes on and on and on and on.
00:39:13.599 --> 00:39:20.079
Um so Tim Horton's not making as big of a sacrifice as as they are trying to let on.
00:39:20.320 --> 00:39:29.360
Um they they again, I'm going the number from I'm going from memory is that they said that their workforce was something like 4% temporary foreign workers.
00:39:29.519 --> 00:39:41.440
But I would be, I asked them many months ago, but what percentage of your workers are non-permanent residents of Canada here through something other than the temporary foreign worker program?
00:39:41.599 --> 00:39:43.199
And they said, we're not going to tell you that.
00:39:43.440 --> 00:39:46.800
Um, but I would bet you that that number is quite high.
00:39:47.039 --> 00:39:51.519
Um, and it's why you, you know, I would bet you that number is very high.
00:39:52.800 --> 00:40:02.400
How do we have the conversation about the changes within something like a Tim Hortons without coming across the wrong way about the people working there?
00:40:02.639 --> 00:40:04.800
Because I think Canadians experience it.
00:40:04.880 --> 00:40:10.480
You go to a Tim Hortons, it's largely an East Indian population working there.
00:40:10.719 --> 00:40:17.280
And I just don't know how we have this mature conversation in a way that doesn't become racist, xenophobic.
00:40:17.440 --> 00:40:40.480
Like I just I want to be able to address the real frustrations Canadians have where they don't, where there's a language gap, where there's these challenges with being able to feel connected to the person taking your order without making it sound like I have anything against anyone who wants to come to this country to live a more successful life, to open doors for their family, to to live the life that I get to live in this beautiful country.
00:40:40.719 --> 00:40:42.559
How how do you think we have those conversations?
00:40:42.719 --> 00:40:54.159
Because obviously you see people go, oh, the the people at Tim Hortons, and they say comments that come across as racist and xenophobic, but I just don't know how you say some of these things without it coming across potentially the wrong way.
00:40:54.559 --> 00:40:55.679
Yeah, it's a it's a tough one.
00:40:55.920 --> 00:40:59.440
I don't have a good answer for it because, like, first of all, you don't know.
00:40:59.599 --> 00:41:03.199
It's not like you get to look at people's papers and find out, you know, how they're there.
00:41:03.280 --> 00:41:08.880
I mean, uh, first of all, uh, probably every single one of those people is legally in the country.
00:41:09.119 --> 00:41:11.840
Um so keep that in mind.
00:41:12.000 --> 00:41:18.480
Um, so so whatever, you know, whatever you're unhappy about, it's a government problem and a government policy problem.
00:41:18.559 --> 00:41:20.400
It's not the immigrants problem.
00:41:20.559 --> 00:41:23.119
It's the system, it's not the person.
00:41:23.360 --> 00:41:27.519
The person, for however they came to Canada, and they could have come a lot of different ways.
00:41:27.599 --> 00:41:29.199
They could be a refugee claimant.
00:41:29.280 --> 00:41:31.519
Um, they could have come in under family reunification.
00:41:31.599 --> 00:41:37.519
I mean, if they're a young person, it's possible that their father or their mother came to Canada and they were sponsored to come over immediately afterwards.
00:41:37.679 --> 00:41:39.039
There are lots of ways they could come to Canada.
00:41:39.119 --> 00:41:42.800
They may not be temporary residents, they may be permanent residents, they may have Canadian citizenship.
00:41:42.880 --> 00:41:44.480
Like there's all kinds of things you don't know.
00:41:44.639 --> 00:41:53.280
But whatever the situation is, um they came to Canada um for for a good reason.
00:41:53.440 --> 00:41:56.639
Um they they they would like to be here and they would like to stay here.
00:41:56.719 --> 00:42:10.880
And that is that is the you know, that is the difficulty and the challenge in in all of this is um all those of us who have Canadian citizenship, those of us who have Canadian permanent residency and live in Canada, we we understand the benefits.
00:42:11.039 --> 00:42:13.519
We understand why someone would want to be Canadian.
00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:21.280
Um so I don't have any great way to talk about this except to sort of say, let's try to have a sane immigration policy.
00:42:21.519 --> 00:42:29.440
And I don't think one of the things I talk about in my book is I say, you know, we could have a very simple immigration policy.
00:42:29.519 --> 00:42:33.920
And the immigration policy could be anyone who wants to come to Canada can come.
00:42:34.159 --> 00:42:36.480
No control of the borders, no limits.
00:42:36.719 --> 00:42:39.679
We don't need to have a refugee system, we don't need to have a point system.
00:42:39.840 --> 00:42:42.559
If you've entered Canada, you can stay as long as you want.
00:42:42.719 --> 00:42:45.119
If 10 million people come, 10 million people come.
00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:49.199
That's a really simple system, and that is philosophically consistent.
00:42:49.360 --> 00:42:52.400
There is the idea of open borders, there's a whole philosophy behind that.
00:42:52.559 --> 00:43:03.280
But unless you want that system, you have to come up with a system to decide who's gonna come and who isn't, and how many and under what conditions.
00:43:03.440 --> 00:43:04.880
It's inescapable.
00:43:05.039 --> 00:43:11.599
Um, and I think Canada came up with one of the world's better systems for answering that question.
00:43:11.760 --> 00:43:17.599
And on the whole, my advice is to move back towards that, plus add in some improvements.
00:43:18.079 --> 00:43:18.719
Fantastic.
00:43:18.880 --> 00:43:20.159
And that's why I love your book.
00:43:20.239 --> 00:43:26.639
And and speaking to you and Mikkel is because there is this deep understanding about the government's role in all of this.
00:43:26.800 --> 00:43:29.119
I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire now, Tony.
00:43:29.599 --> 00:43:35.039
You were the Globe and Mail's editorial editor during much of the uh period of 2021.
00:43:35.280 --> 00:43:41.920
The Globe partnered with the Century Initiative for a discussion about population growth and prosperity.
00:43:42.079 --> 00:43:49.199
Do you think Canadian media, including your own institution, subject the Big Canada project to enough scrutiny?
00:43:49.920 --> 00:43:59.039
So on that on that century initiative partnership, um, yeah, I so for what it's worth, you know, the globe is sort of we have a business side, we have a journalism side.
00:43:59.199 --> 00:44:04.719
As a journalist, I knew nothing about this, had nothing to do with it, and it didn't affect me in any way.
00:44:05.440 --> 00:44:08.800
But that doesn't mean I was I was happy about that.
00:44:09.199 --> 00:44:10.239
And I did notice that.
00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:11.679
It's not something I knew about even at the time.
00:44:11.760 --> 00:44:12.559
It's something I noticed later.
00:44:12.639 --> 00:44:16.800
I was like, wow, we we we did a conference sponsored by the Century Initiative.
00:44:17.039 --> 00:44:17.920
Interesting.
00:44:18.159 --> 00:44:35.280
Um so I think, I think I was uh uh reluctant to criticize um things that I saw going wrong in immigration or I thought might be going wrong in immigration policy in sort of 2021, 2022.
00:44:35.440 --> 00:44:39.119
I think I could have, I could have jumped in earlier and been critical.
00:44:39.280 --> 00:44:50.800
I was critical and wrote a number of critical columns at the beginning of the Trudeau government, and then I laid off it for a while and things sort of evolved, and we got busy with other, you know, everybody gets busy with other topics.
00:44:50.880 --> 00:44:55.440
The immigration system wasn't changing that radically, the Trudeau government didn't do as much as we feared they would.
00:44:55.599 --> 00:44:57.039
You sort of forget about it.
00:44:57.119 --> 00:45:07.039
Um, but I could have, I could have been earlier in my criticism than I didn't really jump in, I think, until late 2022 or early 2023.
00:45:07.199 --> 00:45:13.280
I could have jumped in earlier with criticism because I was already starting to think there's something not right here.
00:45:13.440 --> 00:45:20.639
And I didn't really start to do the research to figure out how much wasn't right and how much was going off the tracks.
00:45:20.960 --> 00:45:23.519
You deserve a lot of kudos for being willing to share that.
00:45:23.679 --> 00:45:30.960
Do you think journalists were afraid to question the immigration policy to be associated with xenophobia and racism?
00:45:31.360 --> 00:45:49.440
Yeah, because I think um, you know, we kind of got into an era of peak woke uh right at that moment, circa 2020, where there are a lot of things people don't want to think and don't want to say and don't think they're allowed to say, and they sort of they may shut down their critical faculties.
00:45:49.599 --> 00:45:52.719
Um, and you also have this whole debate going on in the United States.
00:45:52.800 --> 00:45:59.039
So you don't want to feel like you're you're, you know, people don't want to feel like they're taking the wrong side.
00:45:59.280 --> 00:46:04.400
But I I again, I think my job is not to take a side.
00:46:04.559 --> 00:46:20.639
My job is to try to critically analyze an issue and tell you what I what I think a rational analysis is and a rational conclusion is based on the underlying facts and everything going on around it.
00:46:20.800 --> 00:46:24.079
And um, you know, that's that's our job.
00:46:24.159 --> 00:46:31.760
And if that that happens to make a point that coincides with a conservative point or coincides with a liberal point, that's just the way it is.
00:46:31.920 --> 00:46:35.519
Those parties can all, everybody, every partisan can change their views.
00:46:35.599 --> 00:46:41.119
And we've seen that the Liberal Party has changed its views pretty substantially on immigration policy.
00:46:41.440 --> 00:46:47.280
So partisan points are the points of those partisans until they move to different points.
00:46:47.440 --> 00:46:50.719
And sometimes people like me can help them do that.
00:46:51.679 --> 00:46:57.119
Your book contrasts rising total GDP with weak GDP per capita.
00:46:57.199 --> 00:47:03.679
Uh Mikhail cautioned that immigration did not cause Canada's long-standing productivity problems.
00:47:04.079 --> 00:47:08.159
But did mass immigration make Canada poorer?
00:47:08.800 --> 00:47:12.880
So I think Mikhail's caution is really important.
00:47:13.119 --> 00:47:37.119
Canada's got a bunch of underlying, had a bunch of underlying and continues to have a bunch of underlying economic challenges, some of which we don't fully understand, that led to very slow productivity growth, uh low investment in by business and improving productivity, and low growth in living standards through the early 2000s until basically the present.
00:47:37.519 --> 00:47:46.239
I think immigration, I think a very high immigration rate with low quality immigration contributed to that for several years.
00:47:46.400 --> 00:47:49.599
But it's contributing to an existing situation.
00:47:49.920 --> 00:47:57.840
It's not the entire cause, it's just exacerbating something, or it was exacerbating something that was pre-existing.
00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:07.119
So it's again, it's kind of like a patient with a pre-existing condition, and you you add on, you layer on one more thing that makes the pre-existing condition a bit worse.
00:48:07.280 --> 00:48:09.280
That's the way I would I would describe it.
00:48:09.360 --> 00:48:10.400
And yes, you're you're right.
00:48:10.480 --> 00:48:14.719
The key is focus on raising living standards per capita.
00:48:14.880 --> 00:48:17.920
Don't get fixated on the size of the pie.
00:48:18.400 --> 00:48:26.880
Um, you know, China or India has a bigger economy than Canada, but each individual Canadian is much wealthier than each individual Indian.
00:48:26.960 --> 00:48:30.480
So what matters is not GDP, it's GDP per capita.
00:48:30.639 --> 00:48:36.719
What matters is not the total size of the pie, it's the size of the pie divided by the number of forks in the pie.
00:48:36.880 --> 00:48:42.159
And we got very fixated on if we just added a lot of forks, uh that grows the pie.
00:48:42.559 --> 00:48:50.000
And what we should have been fixated on is how do we grow the pie faster than the number of forks going into the pie.
00:48:50.559 --> 00:48:51.280
Well said.
00:48:51.519 --> 00:48:57.360
Did immigration cause the housing crisis or expose a country that already failed to build?
00:48:57.920 --> 00:48:59.440
Exacerbated the housing crisis.
00:48:59.599 --> 00:49:07.679
I would never say it caused the housing crisis because Canada had this strange situation of kind of underinvestment, well, underbuilding.
00:49:07.840 --> 00:49:13.599
Like a lot of Canadian money has gone into housing, but we were underbuilding relative to where our population was.
00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:24.000
And we were in particular underbuilding in the places where Canadians really wanted to live, um, in and around Toronto, in and around Vancouver, et cetera.
00:49:24.320 --> 00:49:42.800
So, but if if you take that situation and you add to it a tremendous spike in people, and in particular, a tremendous spike in people who are coming and are gonna need are are often at the low end of the market and are gonna need rental housing.
00:49:43.360 --> 00:49:48.000
Um so we really shot up rental housing prices in the early 2020s.
00:49:48.320 --> 00:49:54.639
That is absolutely exacerbated by immigration and by our immigration choices.
00:49:54.800 --> 00:49:57.760
Not 100% caused, exacerbated.
00:49:58.239 --> 00:50:01.840
What does the Canadian government need to do next?
00:50:02.000 --> 00:50:13.280
And when I say that, I I spoke to Mikhail and he said uh like small steps are being taken, but the big looming question is what do we do with all of these people?
00:50:13.440 --> 00:50:17.599
How do we support these people who are here, who don't want to go home?
00:50:17.760 --> 00:50:21.920
Um and he said there's no plan in place today to address that problem.
00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:23.599
So what do we need to do next?
00:50:23.840 --> 00:50:24.960
It's incredibly difficult.
00:50:25.119 --> 00:50:34.960
As I said, we let a million people into the stadium and then discovered we only have 100,000 tickets to the concert, and we're not exactly sure what we're gonna do with the other 900,000.
00:50:35.199 --> 00:50:47.119
So over time, um some temporary immigrants are going to become permanent residents of Canada, which means they'd get citizenship, which means they're they're here, they're Canadians.
00:50:47.280 --> 00:50:50.639
Um but the numbers got so large, it's gonna be difficult to do that.
00:50:50.800 --> 00:51:06.880
I I tend to think that we are going to probably have to amnesty some people, but uh there's a danger in that because you essentially encourage more people to stay if you offer amnesty and you encourage more people to arrive.
00:51:07.199 --> 00:51:10.719
I think we have to speed up the refugee determination system.
00:51:10.880 --> 00:51:15.199
And I hate to say this, but the refugee determination system has to be tougher.
00:51:15.519 --> 00:51:24.559
We haven't talked about that at all, but it it it does have to not it's it's at the point where it's almost all refugee claims are accepted.
00:51:24.639 --> 00:51:32.559
It's a very high percentage that are accepted, and even those that are not accepted with appeals and humanitarian appeals, we don't remove a lot of people.
00:51:32.800 --> 00:51:37.119
Um we have to make it difficult to work if you're not legally in Canada.
00:51:37.199 --> 00:51:42.480
It is very painful to say this because Canadians don't even Canadians don't like the term illegal immigrant.
00:51:42.719 --> 00:51:48.239
Um but someone who and Americans never Americans on the left will not use the term.
00:51:48.480 --> 00:51:52.400
In fact, I I think my own newspaper does not like to use the term illegal immigrant.
00:51:52.480 --> 00:52:03.599
But a person who is not legally in the country, just like a person who is driving a car without a license is is is not a legal resident of the country, just like a person without a license is not a legal driver.
00:52:03.840 --> 00:52:15.679
We can talk about changing that status, but I don't think playing around with words really changes the fact that we have a large number of people in the country who at some point may become non-legal.
00:52:15.760 --> 00:52:19.280
Um, and we have a fair number, we don't even know exactly how many who are not legal.
00:52:19.360 --> 00:52:24.000
So I it's a very tough situation, and I think it's gonna take a mix of measures.
00:52:24.079 --> 00:52:30.159
Of some of these people are going to be allowed to stay on merit because they do actually qualify under the point system.
00:52:30.320 --> 00:52:37.920
Some of these people are gonna be allowed to stay because we fudge the point system, which we have already done, and they're working at low-wage jobs, but we're gonna let them stay.
00:52:38.079 --> 00:52:46.559
Some of these people are gonna be amnestied, some of these people are just going to try to stay, and we need to have measures in place to make it difficult to stay.
00:52:46.719 --> 00:52:51.360
Um, and I think it's gonna be some mix of that, but it is going to take years to work this through.
00:52:51.679 --> 00:53:01.679
The most important first step, which the government has begun to take, is to dramatically reduce the number of people coming in in the temporary streams.
00:53:01.840 --> 00:53:07.840
And they've mostly done that by sharply lowering, lowering the number of new student visas.
00:53:07.920 --> 00:53:09.039
And that's a good step.
00:53:09.199 --> 00:53:33.840
And they should also get rid of the temporary foreign worker program for anything other than high-wage jobs and one exception, which is agriculture, because agriculture in some areas has actually become dependent and has been dependent for generations on um temporary foreign workers, most of whom really are temporary in the sense that they come for a few months and then they go home and they come for a few months and they go home again.
00:53:33.920 --> 00:53:37.119
Um, but I think those are the kind of changes that are gonna have to be made.
00:53:37.440 --> 00:53:42.800
I have a few more questions for you, not related uh specifically to immigration, that I just love to get your take on.
00:53:42.960 --> 00:53:44.960
I recently had Robert Fife on.
00:53:45.039 --> 00:53:46.639
I don't know if you saw that interview.
00:53:46.960 --> 00:53:49.199
I didn't see it, but I know it very well, of course.
00:53:49.519 --> 00:53:49.840
Yes.
00:53:50.000 --> 00:53:53.599
I it had a large reaction for some of the comments that he had made.
00:53:53.760 --> 00:54:00.079
One of the comments he had made was that Mark Carney has had a remarkable year and that there's no arguing against that.
00:54:00.239 --> 00:54:01.360
Do you agree with him?
00:54:01.920 --> 00:54:02.480
Oh, yeah.
00:54:02.639 --> 00:54:08.159
I mean, remarkable in the sense that he's he's changed a number of things about government policy.
00:54:08.320 --> 00:54:13.280
He's he's set out rhetorical markers that are even more ambitious than that.
00:54:13.440 --> 00:54:23.519
And he's had to deal with um kind of a radically changing world, and he himself has tried to shape that radically changing world to the benefit of Canada.
00:54:23.760 --> 00:54:30.400
So look, uh historians will get to write, um, we'll get to decide whether or not he was successful.
00:54:30.559 --> 00:54:36.800
All of us will get to decide whether or not he's been successful because we're still in the, you know, we're still in the early stages of the movie.
00:54:36.960 --> 00:54:41.760
Like we can't write the movie review yet because we we don't know how all this is going to turn out.
00:54:41.920 --> 00:54:47.599
But there have been enormous plot changes, both engineered by Mr.
00:54:47.760 --> 00:54:49.679
Carney, promised engineered by Mr.
00:54:49.760 --> 00:54:50.800
Carney, promised by Mr.
00:54:50.880 --> 00:54:52.079
Kearney, and imposed on Mr.
00:54:52.159 --> 00:54:53.679
Kearney, all of the above.
00:54:53.840 --> 00:54:59.760
And we're still really kind of barely into the second act of a multi-act play.
00:55:00.159 --> 00:55:00.960
Interesting.
00:55:01.199 --> 00:55:13.280
The other piece I wanted to ask about was uh Robert Fife confirmed from his perspective that there is a bias against conservatives in Ottawa and in political reporting.
00:55:13.440 --> 00:55:15.360
Do you agree with his assessment?
00:55:15.920 --> 00:55:18.320
Um That's an interesting question.
00:55:18.559 --> 00:55:19.679
So I don't know.
00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:27.039
I I don't know if that if if it's fair to say that's universally true or true on average.
00:55:27.280 --> 00:55:29.679
I think for sure it's true in some places.
00:55:29.840 --> 00:55:32.000
I hope I'm not guilty of it.
00:55:32.159 --> 00:55:35.440
Um, because I'm often pretty critical of the Conservative Party.
00:55:35.519 --> 00:55:38.880
But again, I think I'm critical of the Conservative Party on merit.
00:55:39.119 --> 00:55:44.320
I'm also much more critical of the Liberal Party than of the Conservative Party because they're the government.
00:55:44.800 --> 00:56:00.480
Um and to come back to your question about Mark Carney, I mean, I think the big thing for me that Kearney has done is he has shifted the Liberal Party to a place that it was in a generation ago.
00:56:00.719 --> 00:56:05.599
He has shifted the Liberal Party to being a progressive conservative party.
00:56:05.920 --> 00:56:09.679
Um and I I tend to I think that's a good thing.
00:56:09.840 --> 00:56:16.400
I think that it they he has moved on economic issues to a better place or is attempting to move to a better place.
00:56:16.480 --> 00:56:20.960
Um and it seems to be that voters have have agreed with that.
00:56:21.280 --> 00:56:32.800
What we're gonna learn is is whether that's simply a reaction to Donald Trump or whether that is a permanent shift uh in in Canadian politics that endures for for many years to come.
00:56:33.440 --> 00:56:42.480
I guess I'd be interested in your take on this piece, which is it does, and I'm NBC, so I'm not in, I'm nowhere near the Ottawa bubble or what's taking place over there.
00:56:42.559 --> 00:56:47.840
But when I look at the amount of criticism Pierre Polyev is receiving right now, I'm really astonished.
00:56:47.920 --> 00:56:58.639
I just interviewed him and I told him from the outset I am not Rosemary Barton, I am not um Donna Friesen, I am not here to catch you on every sentence and try and jump in with a comment.
00:56:58.800 --> 00:57:00.880
Now, I'm not saying that that's bad journalism.
00:57:00.960 --> 00:57:04.000
There's a place for trying to hold a leader's feet to the fire.
00:57:04.079 --> 00:57:07.599
I just think, to your earlier point, he doesn't have political power right now.
00:57:07.679 --> 00:57:10.159
He doesn't have the authority to change policy or law.
00:57:10.320 --> 00:57:13.440
So I just went in and said, I just want to get your understanding of the issues.
00:57:13.519 --> 00:57:20.400
And we went through what he'd do in his first 90 days, um, how quickly he would address the housing crisis, really just trying to get him on record.
00:57:20.639 --> 00:57:22.320
What would your leadership look like?
00:57:22.480 --> 00:57:26.239
A lot of people criticize me because they thought it was I didn't push back hard enough.
00:57:26.400 --> 00:57:29.039
I just I think people have done that ad nauseum.
00:57:29.199 --> 00:57:32.960
Like I just don't think I need to be the 11th person to try and catch him.
00:57:33.199 --> 00:57:39.519
But then I look at Mark Carney and I can only think of one time he's been asked about his relationship with Brookfield.
00:57:39.599 --> 00:57:44.320
And it was when Rosemary Barton asked him about it, and Mark Kearney kind of went, Well, what are you doing?
00:57:44.480 --> 00:57:54.639
And then I don't know if you know who David from Moose on the Loose is, but he's done an extensive chart trying to map out all of Mark Kearney's conflicts of interest in detail.
00:57:54.800 --> 00:57:57.119
And then I don't hear that from most media.
00:57:57.280 --> 00:58:10.400
I don't hear constant concerns about Brookfield and their involvement and how they're connected and whether or not, like Peter Polyev's posted about how much Brookfield's made under Mark Kearney's leadership and how much Canada's grown during his leadership.
00:58:10.559 --> 00:58:14.880
And I think that's a valid fear Canadians have because he could have divested.
00:58:15.039 --> 00:58:16.960
He could have just put it into a savings account.
00:58:17.039 --> 00:58:18.079
He wouldn't have made a lot of money.
00:58:18.320 --> 00:58:18.960
I get that.
00:58:19.199 --> 00:58:22.480
But what like why take the job if you're in it for the money?
00:58:22.639 --> 00:58:28.159
Like I would, I would go broke to try and lead in a way that people had confidence in.
00:58:28.239 --> 00:58:35.760
I'm a First Nations chief, and I'll go on record right now and say, I made$34,000 last year being chief of my nation.
00:58:35.840 --> 00:58:37.440
It's going to be presented in our audit.
00:58:37.519 --> 00:58:41.360
It will be publicly available on the First Nations financial transparency website.
00:58:41.519 --> 00:58:48.960
I don't make much, but the purpose is that my my members know I'm not in it to be corrupt or to do something against my people.
00:58:49.119 --> 00:58:51.280
And Canadians know I'm not on the take.
00:58:51.440 --> 00:58:55.039
I don't have a biased interest about making money off of any of these programs.
00:58:55.119 --> 00:58:57.360
I'm just here to try and lead in a good way.
00:58:57.519 --> 00:58:59.519
And people have concerns about Mark Kearney.
00:58:59.599 --> 00:59:04.079
And I just don't feel like that's being criticized on a regular basis from my perspective.
00:59:04.239 --> 00:59:10.480
What are your thoughts on the So I look, I I think that's all well said and and and well taken.
00:59:10.639 --> 00:59:25.199
Um, for what it's worth, I don't think Mark Kearney became prime minister so he could get rich because he could have gotten a lot richer by staying exactly where he was and continuing to pick up various corporate directorships and other things like that.
00:59:25.440 --> 00:59:28.480
That said, I can't prove that to you.
00:59:28.719 --> 00:59:38.639
And I agree with you that I would be more comfortable if he had just divested himself of a number of these assets that he has.
00:59:39.119 --> 00:59:43.519
Um I'm kind of taking it on trust that he's not Donald Trump.
00:59:43.599 --> 00:59:52.960
Like Donald Trump is very clearly trying to enrich himself and his family by every vehicle possible, by every lever of the presidency available to him.
00:59:53.119 --> 00:59:55.039
I don't think Carney's doing that.
00:59:55.280 --> 00:59:58.800
But at the same time, conflict of interest is about perception.
00:59:58.960 --> 01:00:05.599
Like we don't just say don't have a conflict of interest, like don't use your power to benefit your own interests.
01:00:05.760 --> 01:00:14.559
We say don't put yourself in a position where there could be a perception that your interests could benefit from a government decision.
01:00:14.719 --> 01:00:17.679
So I agree with you, it would be better if he had done that.
01:00:17.840 --> 01:00:33.679
Um and, you know, to come back to your question about like is the media biased against the conservatives, it is very interesting how much of the Pierre Polyev platform of two years ago is now the liberal platform.
01:00:34.159 --> 01:00:38.159
Um and uh I don't criticize the liberals for that, by the way.
01:00:38.320 --> 01:00:58.800
Um, I mean, I I think what that tells you is um it's kind of, you know, in in politics we often talk about the Nixon goes to China story, um, which is so we, you know, people will trust Mark Carney to implement Pierre Polyev ideas far more than they would trust Pierre Pauliev.
01:00:58.960 --> 01:00:59.119
Right.
01:00:59.280 --> 01:01:00.559
I think that is true.
01:01:00.719 --> 01:01:03.440
And I don't think that's a a media created fiction.
01:01:03.679 --> 01:01:06.559
I think that's actually the way a lot of voters have reacted.
01:01:06.719 --> 01:01:15.679
Um the Nixon Goes to China story is Richard Nixon in the early 1970s opens relations with the People's Republic of China.
01:01:15.840 --> 01:01:24.559
For the previous 25 years, the United States government position was the People's Republic of China is not the legitimate government of China, the government of Taiwan is.
01:01:24.800 --> 01:01:28.960
Nixon, a Republican, a staunch anti-communist, goes to China.
01:01:29.199 --> 01:01:35.840
Um, if a Democrat had done that, a lot of people would have said, hang on a second, you're sympathetic to the communists, you're caving into the communists.
01:01:36.000 --> 01:01:40.159
When an extreme anti-communist goes and talks to communists, people are like, you know what?
01:01:40.320 --> 01:01:43.679
I actually have trust that you're not going to go too far on this.
01:01:43.760 --> 01:01:50.159
That you're, if you think it's a good idea to talk to the communists after being an anti-communist your whole life, you know what, I'm okay with that.
01:01:50.320 --> 01:01:59.679
So, in a funny way, um, you know, Pierre Poilièvre was saying advocating for various policies, a lot of voters were sort of nervous about that.
01:02:00.079 --> 01:02:06.000
Um Mark Carney flips and basically picks up large parts of the conservative platform.
01:02:06.639 --> 01:02:08.800
A lot of Canadians say, Yeah, I'm okay with that.
01:02:09.039 --> 01:02:10.559
Um it's it's surprising.
01:02:10.800 --> 01:02:14.159
Probably not, in a way, it's not fair, but politics isn't fair.
01:02:14.559 --> 01:02:19.760
I guess I would ask as a follow-up, why give Mark Carney the benefit of the doubt?
01:02:20.639 --> 01:02:22.320
It's it's a tough one.
01:02:22.559 --> 01:02:27.840
And um I I I hope I'm I hope I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt.
01:02:27.920 --> 01:02:33.280
I hope I'm engaging in, you know, trust but verify with a pretty strong emphasis on verify.
01:02:33.519 --> 01:02:46.159
Um but at the same time, um, you know, I think I I I really do think many of the things that Kearney is attempting to do and promising to do are things that need to be done.
01:02:46.400 --> 01:02:55.440
I cannot guarantee that they will be executed fully or competently, um, which is why I'm watching pretty closely.
01:02:55.679 --> 01:03:15.360
I don't know how this movie ends, um, but I do feel like a number of things that the government is trying to do on a number of different files on the economy are trending in in in the are tending in the right direction, but execution is everything, and we don't know how that's going to turn out.
01:03:15.760 --> 01:03:16.400
Apologies.
01:03:16.480 --> 01:03:36.079
I mean with Brookfield, why give him the benefit of the doubt on that he's not in because like if I'm in Mark Carney's shoes and I obviously know nothing about him, but I look at what Donald Trump's doing, because he knew before he even ran for the liberal leadership that Donald Trump was planning to run for president again, you go, this guy, he sucks all the room out of the air.
01:03:36.239 --> 01:03:39.599
Like anything I do is this big in comparison to what he does.
01:03:39.760 --> 01:03:56.719
So anything I do is not going to be focused on because when you compare it, like you just did, and that's not a bad thing on your part, but when you compare it to the corruption Donald Trump has participated in, it's even if you agree that like maybe he is making a little bit of money, well, it's nothing in comparison to Donald Trump.
01:03:56.800 --> 01:03:58.880
That's like, to me, that's still unacceptable.
01:03:59.039 --> 01:04:01.119
Like you can't have any sense of corruption.
01:04:01.280 --> 01:04:14.960
And so, like, that's where I guess I I worry is that we're kind of, if we compare him to Donald Trump, well, it's an easy, uh, like, yeah, nothing's gonna compare to get being given uh a plane from another country that's gonna replace Air Force One.
01:04:15.039 --> 01:04:17.280
Like this is in your face corruption.
01:04:17.360 --> 01:04:24.239
But if you do it the way Mark Kearney's done, which is it's very small, it's not in your face, but there are still like these interests that are connected.
01:04:24.320 --> 01:04:31.199
And I just I worry that the Canadians that are worried about that are not being taken seriously the same way we saw with the immigration file.
01:04:31.519 --> 01:04:36.079
Yeah, so look, I um uh I I think you make a good point.
01:04:36.239 --> 01:04:42.559
I would, I would stress, I'm not saying Donald Trump is super corrupt and Mark Carney's only a little bit corrupt.
01:04:42.719 --> 01:04:50.880
I'm I'm just saying I have no evidence or reason to believe that Mark Kearney is doing anything to personally enrich himself.
01:04:51.039 --> 01:04:58.719
However, to your point, conflict of interest is not about proving that somebody, you know, made money.
01:04:58.960 --> 01:05:09.440
It's it's about the them being in a position where they could and trying to prevent them from being in that position by divesting of those assets, putting those assets in a blind trust, whatever it is.
01:05:09.760 --> 01:05:30.239
And I I do not like the situation that there have been a number of issues where apparently, you know, like if Cabinet discusses it, Kearney or his um his uh uh Minister of Finance can't like his Minister of Finance can't be involved in discussing Alto, the high-speed rail, or certain aspects of Alto.
01:05:30.320 --> 01:05:32.559
Like that's that's kind of a crazy situation.
01:05:32.719 --> 01:05:36.079
Like, like divest yourself of those conflicts.
01:05:36.159 --> 01:05:38.079
I I think you should be able to do that.
01:05:38.320 --> 01:05:44.960
So so I I, you know, again, uh I I don't want to reject your criticism or anybody else's.
01:05:45.119 --> 01:05:48.079
I I think these are questions worth asking.
01:05:48.320 --> 01:05:54.639
I just have to be honest, it hasn't been the main focus of my coverage of the Kearney government and the main focus of my concerns.
01:05:56.079 --> 01:05:56.800
Absolutely.
01:05:57.039 --> 01:05:59.519
The last question on this piece the Globe's editorial board.
01:06:00.159 --> 01:06:13.760
Recently acknowledged that the media, including the Globe, failed journalistically in 2021 by initially reporting that the remains of 215 children had been found at Kamloops when ground penetrating radar had identified anomalies rather than human remains.
01:06:14.000 --> 01:06:15.840
Do you agree with that assessment?
01:06:16.480 --> 01:06:20.000
So I'm going to tell you, I'm not an expert on this subject.
01:06:20.800 --> 01:06:37.599
It is a subject that caused me some concern because so you were asking earlier about whether there are issues, like for example, immigration, that people are afraid to ask critical questions about.
01:06:37.679 --> 01:06:42.239
They're afraid to use their critical faculties and examine it honestly, fairly, and cleanly.
01:07:36.079 --> 01:07:40.719
And I wrote a piece which upset a lot of people that said, hang on a second.
01:07:41.360 --> 01:08:00.239
If the government of Canada is currently to this very day engaged in genocide, and that is your considered legal opinion, you should want to arrest Justin Trudeau, not invite him and you know, thank him for coming and have a drink with him and then send him on his merry way.
01:08:00.480 --> 01:08:02.000
So you're either very serious.
01:08:02.800 --> 01:08:07.599
I said this report is either very serious in what it's saying, or it isn't really serious at all.
01:08:08.159 --> 01:08:10.000
You can't take this opinion seriously.
01:08:10.159 --> 01:08:13.840
It's historical analysis, is one thing, but it was saying right up to the present.
01:08:14.159 --> 01:08:19.920
So, but no one else said that, and and I got a lot of criticism for saying that.
01:08:20.159 --> 01:08:25.520
But I think I was fully engaging my critical faculties and saying, hang on a second.
01:08:25.760 --> 01:08:29.279
Um let let's look at this honestly.
01:08:29.439 --> 01:08:30.640
Is this is this right?
01:08:30.800 --> 01:08:31.520
Is this real?
01:08:31.680 --> 01:08:33.359
Is this a fair analysis?
01:08:33.520 --> 01:08:37.680
Or is it an unfair analysis, but everyone feels we're not allowed to say that?
01:08:38.880 --> 01:08:40.079
I couldn't agree more.
01:08:40.239 --> 01:08:51.439
I think that's one of the issues Canada faces as uh as a really important threat to our democracy is our willingness to say uncomfortable things in a respectful and kind way.
01:08:51.520 --> 01:08:53.840
And I feel like that should be the Canadian way.
01:08:54.000 --> 01:09:11.039
And I think the way that you've approached this book in addressing a topic that so easily can fall into racism and xenophobia uh was done very well and very thoughtfully and gave the space to people who saw this and were frustrated, a voice that was measured and thoughtful on the issue.
01:09:11.199 --> 01:09:14.319
So uh would you mind sharing how people can find your book?
01:09:14.720 --> 01:09:16.960
You can find it everywhere.
01:09:17.119 --> 01:09:24.880
Uh it's uh it's available at a lot of uh indigo stores in in hard copy and in the store.
01:09:25.039 --> 01:09:26.319
It's available online.
01:09:26.720 --> 01:09:30.479
Amazon appears to have the cheapest price right now online if you buy it online.
01:09:30.560 --> 01:09:33.439
It's available as an ebook, it's available as a physical book.
01:09:33.600 --> 01:09:46.399
Um, if you're in a larger city, it's probably available at your library, though I I've out of curiosity checked the Ottawa Public Library and uh it like the wait list is like into 2028 to get the book.
01:09:46.479 --> 01:09:47.840
So you may have to buy it.
01:09:48.079 --> 01:09:50.239
Um tremendous.
01:09:50.399 --> 01:09:51.840
Well, thank you very much, Tony.
01:09:51.920 --> 01:09:56.960
I was very excited to speak with you, and I'm glad to see the shifts.
01:09:57.039 --> 01:10:11.199
Uh, I think this will be an ongoing concern that we'll have to keep our eye on and monitor because how uh these individuals who are here, how they get treated, how we support them in either returning or how we address this is going to be a live question for the next several years.
01:10:11.359 --> 01:10:14.640
So I appreciate your work on this and for you willing to share your time today.
01:10:14.960 --> 01:10:16.399
Aaron, I'm honored to have talked to you.
01:10:16.479 --> 01:10:18.960
I'm I'm I think this was uh time very well spent.
01:10:19.039 --> 01:10:20.239
Thank you very much.