Juno News - March 24, 2026


Auditor General SLAMS Carney government over student visa fraud (w⧸ Brian Lilley)

Topics
international student visa fraud student visa fraud
Mentioned
Brian Lilly Berna Justin Trudeau Mark Carney Lena Diab Mark Miller Pierre Poilievre Kirk Lubinov Sean Fraser Holly Dale Michelle Rempel-Garner Amanda Galbraith Donald Trump Karen Hogan Patty Hajdu Sam Cooper Blackhawks Harper
Air Canada plane CRASHES in NYC + Canada listed as terrorist money-laundering haven CBC is Panicking

Episode Stats


Length

31 minutes

Words per minute

184.35

Word count

5,719

Sentence count

252

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A bombshell of a report released yesterday by the federal auditor general exposes the incredible fraud and mismanagement of Canada's international student program. Over 153,000 cases that the government suspected were fraudulent, and only 2,000 of them were actually investigated.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Hi, I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is the Candace Malcolm Show. Today is Tuesday, March 24th,
00:00:06 2026. We have a great episode for you today. And folks, today's episode is brought to you
00:00:10 by Berna, but more on them a little bit later. Okay. So yesterday, the federal auditor general
00:00:16 released an absolute bombshell of a report. Conservatives are calling it a dumpster fire
00:00:21 because it exposes the incredible fraud and mismanagement of our international student
00:00:26 program. So the report was released yesterday on March 23rd, and it found that the government has
00:00:32 a lack of capacity to investigate fraud in the system. Some 98% of fraud cases that were flagged
00:00:39 by the government for being fraudulent are not investigated. In other words, we turn a blind eye
00:00:44 to fraud in our system. We allow the system to just be out of control, used by some of the worst
00:00:49 forces in the world, and we don't do anything about it. The report found that between 2023 and 2024,
00:00:54 Immigration, Refugee, and Citizenship Canada, so that is the Department of Immigration,
00:00:59 identified over 153,000 cases of international students potentially non-compliant with study
00:01:07 permit conditions and had no funding to investigate these. So only 2,000 of them
00:01:13 were actually investigated. Let me repeat that because it is so stunning. Over 153,000 cases
00:01:19 that the government suspected were fraudulent and only 2,000 of them were actually investigated.
00:01:26 What an absolute joke. What an absolute joke of a country we live in. The audit noted that between
00:01:30 2023 and 2024, the Immigration Department launched 4,057 investigations into students
00:01:36 that did not comply to their visa. Now, speaking at a press conference in Ottawa, Canada's Auditor
00:01:42 General, Karen Hogan, noted that just 4,000 investigations, nearly half of the investigations
00:01:48 were closed due to students just not responding.
00:01:51 They just didn't want to be investigated.
00:01:53 So we just stopped investigating them.
00:01:55 Let's roll that clip. 0.89
00:01:55 But I think when you look at integrity,
00:01:57 while there were some adjustments made
00:01:59 to improve the integrity of the program,
00:02:02 what's concerning for me is that
00:02:04 the department is enacting on the information that it has.
00:02:08 There are so many things that were raised
00:02:09 by the department themselves,
00:02:11 and then no follow through.
00:02:13 So for example, the 153,000 cases
00:02:17 of students who were potentially identified as not following the terms of their permit.
00:02:22 While only 4,000 were investigated, within those 4,000, about half of them were closed
00:02:27 because the students stopped communicating with the Immigration Department.
00:02:31 I would expect that they'll take that all the way through.
00:02:33 That should be happening no matter where you are in the reforms.
00:02:37 That should be acting on the data you have to preserve the integrity of programs.
00:02:41 Should be something that's worried about at the start when you get an application,
00:02:44 throughout the application, and then when the application or the permit has expired.
00:02:49 This is totally unbelievable. Okay, so the audit found that 93% of the students whose visas were
00:02:56 expired, this is pointed out by Kirk Lubinov on X, they were allowed to stay in the country,
00:03:01 and 60% didn't leave. This is what Kirk Lubinov had to say, absolutely insane. The Liberal
00:03:05 government found and let 509,000 people with expired study permits stay in Canada. 39,500 had
00:03:12 no immigration status at all. That's just a finding for one year. Okay, it's just really
00:03:18 not a good day for the government. Speaking on CBC, yes, this is the CBC on power and politics.
00:03:23 Former Harper advisor Amanda Galbraith said that this entire thing is a dumpster fire. I couldn't
00:03:27 put it any better myself. Let's roll that clip. Amanda, the report confirms what many observers
00:03:32 have been saying for a long time, that that post-COVID international student program
00:03:36 was frankly a bit of a mess.
00:03:40 Yeah, I think a dumpster fire is a kind way to describe what is before us here.
00:03:45 I mean, 150,000 cases, you know, like the system throws up red flags.
00:03:50 They make two phone calls, nobody says anything, and the government just ignores it.
00:03:53 And respectfully, if the minister is one saying,
00:03:56 I've only been in the job for a fraction of this audit, so don't point the finger at me,
00:04:00 like you've been part of, there's a liberal government that's been in place for over a decade.
00:04:03 Like, it is at their feet.
00:04:05 Here is Canada's Immigration Minister, Lina Diab. This is one of the most ineffective, terrible communicators I've ever seen in politics. But here is Minister Lina Diab saying that the government just didn't have any capacity and that they will start doing things better starting now. Just let them completely start again. You know, pretend that the Liberals haven't been in power for the last 10 years. Pretend that it was someone totally different that created this problem. Starting now, we're going to be flagging more and doing more. Let's roll that clip. This is thought three.
00:04:33 Why does your department have so little capacity to investigate non-compliant potential fraudulent cases?
00:04:41 And what tangible things are you going to commit to today to improve that?
00:04:45 So we will be centralizing the investigation.
00:04:49 We will be streamlining anyone that is flagged.
00:04:53 We will be doing more reporting and we will be information sharing with CBSA
00:04:59 of any students that are not compliant or that are not currently students notice how she keeps
00:05:07 saying will be again like why weren't you doing that from day one it makes no sense reporters
00:05:11 tried to press the immigration minister further on this failure and lena dayab just walked away
00:05:15 she walked away michelle rumple took the opportunity to jump in and again call this 1.00
00:05:19 whole thing a dumpster fire let's roll that clip pass their visa maybe mr ananda sangra you can
00:05:24 answer this it's about the cbsa i'd like to say something i i have i i'm even less confident now
00:05:31 in the system than i was after watching that here's the reality the minister has had this
00:05:35 report for some time that's how auditor general's reports go the fact that she's coming out here and 0.84
00:05:40 cannot um come up with a few key clear deliverables to change the system and ensure that all of these
00:05:48 cases are being uh reviewed is crazy to me um but also like some of the things she said was were
00:05:54 just wrong like for example she said that some of these um permits were extended but they got pr
00:06:01 that's not the same thing uh to me the fact that the minister had this report um did not do anything
00:06:07 about it and came with those lack of answers uh it's going to make more canadians have a lack of
00:06:12 faith in the system and frankly it's going to tell canadians that the people who are in control of
00:06:16 the immigration system are the fraudsters, not the government. So we will be holding the minister 0.95
00:06:21 to account on this with more proposals. Thank you. 100% true. Wow, what a mess. What a just
00:06:27 terrible, embarrassing mess. To help me break this all down and to understand a bit more,
00:06:31 I'm pleased to welcome my friend Brian Lilly to the program. Brian Lilly, as you know,
00:06:35 is a columnist, political columnist over at the Toronto Sun and the host of the Full Comment
00:06:40 podcast. He also has a sub stack over at BrianLilly.com. Brian, welcome to the show.
00:06:44 thanks for being here you know you're almost speechless looking at how incompetent this is
00:06:51 candace and you and i both know the immigration system you and i both worked in ottawa um i
00:06:56 covered it you worked for a while in the immigration ministry uh how do you become this incompetent 0.50
00:07:05 this is a system that the rest of the world used to admire used to say let's go and copy
00:07:10 And now whether we're talking about this student fraud, our much abused asylum system, the health care program that for asylum seekers that used to cost $60 million now costs a billion.
00:07:26 You look at the expansion of the temporary foreign workers program, the utter abuse of the permanent residency program.
00:07:37 Every single part of this is broken.
00:07:40 And I want to highlight something that Michelle Remble-Garner said there.
00:07:45 She said the ministers had this Auditor General's report for some time.
00:07:48 She absolutely has.
00:07:50 If you read AG reports, what you see is what they found, and then the auditors go back
00:07:56 to the department, including to the minister's office, and say, okay, here's all the problems.
00:08:02 What is your response?
00:08:04 How will you fix it?
00:08:05 And sometimes they say, well, no, we disagree, rarely, but sometimes they may disagree.
00:08:09 But they almost always have a response.
00:08:12 And that minister, Lena Diab, who is the least competent minister that I've ever seen in my 25 years of covering politics, couldn't answer. 0.50
00:08:21 She couldn't answer at committee.
00:08:22 She couldn't answer in the House.
00:08:24 She couldn't answer to reporters.
00:08:26 I can't believe that she's still in her job.
00:08:29 I completely agree.
00:08:30 I almost feel bad for her when she's talking because it does seem like she's totally out of her depth and that she's not briefed properly.
00:08:36 She doesn't have the support of the other ministers.
00:08:39 And like, let's just back up a little and make it clear that she has not been the immigration minister during the period that we're talking about.
00:08:46 Right. That was Trudeau. That was Trudeau's guys, including Mark Miller and Sean Fraser.
00:08:51 Shockingly, they're still ministers. Actually, they've been promoted and they have bigger files now.
00:08:56 Right. And so I want to just take this back because yesterday we reported on the show that Blackhawks reporter and our friend Holly Dole,
00:09:02 uh don't sorry uh she broke this story about how policies enacted by two successive immigration
00:09:09 ministers cost thousands of canadian students their jobs according to a federal memo department
00:09:14 of employment for the first time admitted that the 18 jobless rate for canadian students was due
00:09:20 in large numbers in large part to the large numbers of foreign students this contradicts
00:09:26 the statements at the time made by ministers sean fraser and mark miller so holly was out there
00:09:31 on social media yesterday. She quote tweeted this article from the Toronto Star. Toronto Star is
00:09:38 even reporting this. Canada's international student program blasted by Auditor General for failing to
00:09:42 address integrity concerns. And Holly tweeted it saying, you know, the Toronto Star, you missed
00:09:47 the point here. Yes, the report was bad. But the main thing is that it contradicts the Trudeau
00:09:52 ministers at the time. So at the time in 2022, Sean Fraser said it's good for the economy. And
00:09:57 Mark Miller says, I don't think international students are taking away or jobs away from other
00:10:03 people. Oh, he doesn't think. Pierre Polyev jumped in and made another important point here.
00:10:10 Conservative leader Pierre Polyev says, the two most incompetent and destructive ministers in my
00:10:15 lifetime who brought our immigration system from the best to the worst were promoted in Carney's
00:10:20 cabinet. Nothing has changed. A liberal is a liberal. And I do think it's important because
00:10:24 I agree that Lina Diab is, you know, she's being thrown under the bus in many ways. She's being 0.98
00:10:28 here to take responsibility for these other guys who are now even more senior. And this is part of
00:10:33 the problem with the whole liberal government under Mark Carney, Brian, which is that we're
00:10:37 supposed to believe that we've got some change, that things are different now, that we've got
00:10:41 the new guy and he's very competent. The old guy wasn't very good, but he's gone. And now Mark
00:10:45 Carney's here to make everything better. But the reality is it's being run by the same people. It's
00:10:49 the same government with the same ideas, the same worldview, and they're not really making the
00:10:52 changes. What do you think? Well, I think that's absolutely correct. And if you back up, there were
00:10:58 two policies, and I outlined this in my Toronto Sun column, two policy changes that the Liberals
00:11:03 made in 2022, that by April 2024, Justin Trudeau was saying, we brought in people faster than we
00:11:12 can absorb them. And then he also, he pointed out that these, the fact that we were bringing in so
00:11:22 many people so quickly, including on the temporary foreign workers side, was driving down wages. So
00:11:27 those changes. April 2022, the Liberal government in Ottawa decides, you know what? We don't need
00:11:34 these guardrails around temporary foreign workers. At some point in a long-serving government,
00:11:40 the temporary foreign worker program becomes a hot button, especially when unemployment goes
00:11:44 up. But in April 2022, the unemployment rate nationally was about 5%. And for young people
00:11:50 between 15 and 24, it was 10%. And it stayed that way throughout the whole year. But in April 2022,
00:11:57 they got rid of the guardrails. It used to be you couldn't get a temporary foreign worker.
00:12:03 This is outside of agriculture. But to work, you know, if you wanted to hire someone at Juneau,
00:12:08 who was a temporary foreign worker, and where you are had unemployment above 6%, you couldn't get
00:12:14 them. They got rid of that. They went from saying you could only have 10% of your workforce be a
00:12:19 temporary foreign worker to saying it can be 20. And in some industries, including hospitality,
00:12:26 so we're talking about the Tim Hortons and the A&Ws, you can have 30% of your workforce be
00:12:32 temporary foreign workers. They completely took the guardrails off. They put the temporary foreign 1.00
00:12:37 workers program on steroids. That's April 2022. Then you fast forward to November 2022. And they
00:12:45 do the same with international students they say you know what employers are telling us they can't
00:12:50 get people to work why maybe you're still giving them serb um and and so the uh the government says
00:12:59 international students no longer have a cap of working just 20 hours per week they they have a
00:13:06 full work permit now they added hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people to the the labor 0.99
00:13:13 force who are not canadian are not permanent residents and we had more than a million people
00:13:19 i think it was about a million five that were unemployed across the country at that time
00:13:26 then what does that letter that the the memo uh the briefing memo for the secretary of state for
00:13:32 youth and children say that starting in early 2023 the job market deteriorated for young people
00:13:39 and it's still deteriorated and yet we're expanding the temporary foreign workers program
00:13:45 again in certain rural areas. I asked the ministry yesterday, I emailed the minister's office and
00:13:53 said, this is Patty Hajdu's office, and I said, you say this is certain eligible rural regions,
00:14:00 can you tell me where? And they said, oh, when's your deadline? I said, you announced this 10 days
00:14:06 ago. You must know where this is going to apply. And they said, we need some time. They got back
00:14:10 to me at about 9, 9.30 this morning with a vague, these are some parameters that we will look at,
00:14:17 but they don't even know where it's applying. So this is a total meltdown of our immigration 0.96
00:14:22 system, abuse of our temporary foreign workers. And our asylum system has become gone from
00:14:29 protecting groups like the Karens, which was a group that persecuted in Burma, now called Myanmar,
00:14:38 that Canada went in and took a bunch of these people who were in refugee camps and resettled
00:14:42 them or resettling Syrians who were fleeing the war and resettling them. We've gone from that to 0.97
00:14:49 people showing up at Pearson Airport or Vancouver and saying, oh, I'm declaring asylum. Or you're
00:14:56 here for a year and you say, oh, my student visa is about to end. I'm declaring asylum. I'm sorry, 0.94
00:15:02 you're from Mexico or Hungary or India or the USA. You are not getting asylum. You shouldn't. 0.53
00:15:09 I'll say the Carney government's trying to do some very minor tweaks to the system
00:15:13 to tighten it up. And the United Nations has now come out denouncing those changes and saying they
00:15:18 will violate our international covenants. I mean, it's unbelievable. Our entire system is built on
00:15:24 just so much trust. And the reality is that there's just so many people out there that
00:15:28 are not trustworthy, that are trying to take advantage of our generosity. And the fraud in
00:15:33 the system shows that the complete abuse of the refugee system. Okay, guys, let's be real. Crime 1.00
00:15:38 is up. Repeat offenders are released on bail. Police responses are slower than ever. And in
00:15:44 many places, law abiding citizens are expected to just hope nothing bad happens. That's not good
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00:16:41 special offers. Make sure that you're prepared. It's better to be safe than sorry. Shaza, I want
00:16:47 to bring it back to our economy brian because there was a pretty shocking report that came out
00:16:51 on march 13th that canada's economy had lost 84 000 jobs in the month of february and that our
00:16:57 unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7 you mentioned how temporary foreign workers program is supposed
00:17:02 to be tied to unemployment and when it hits a certain they announced it the same day right
00:17:06 well this i'm going to get to that so uh this is according to the cbc how they covered it back on
00:17:11 march 13th canada has seen almost no job growth over the last 12 months wait a minute i was told
00:17:16 Brian, that the reason that Mark Carney was able to win such a sweeping victory in April
00:17:21 last year is because he had all of this business acumen and he was going to be able to get us back
00:17:25 on track. Well, that has not borne out at all. The numbers show the exact opposite. Again,
00:17:30 Canada's economy lost 84,000 jobs just in the month of February. Unemployment ticked up to 6.7%.
00:17:35 Stats Canada said on Friday, a setback for labor market, one of the worst monthly job losses seen
00:17:40 in years outside the pandemic. The decline in employment was largely driven by a drop in full
00:17:44 time and private sector jobs the latter offsetting a short period of growth seen early in the fall
00:17:49 employment mostly fell in goods and service producing industry 18 000 jobs lost in wholesale
00:17:54 and retail trade 12 000 lost in construction 9 000 lost in manufacturing men aged 25 to 54
00:18:01 were hurt hurt the worst as well as young people aged 15 to 24 so you mentioned about youth
00:18:06 unemployment and how it was supposed to be under 10 well it's now 14 14 of young people who are
00:18:12 trying to get a job are unemployed. And again, we know that this is impacted by temporary foreign
00:18:20 workers being able to come in and take jobs. It's actually unbelievable. I'll just mention this,
00:18:25 Brian. When I was a student, I studied in Australia, and my student permit did not let me
00:18:29 work. I didn't have the ability to work. I remember some of the other students kind of
00:18:33 grumbling because they wanted to get like a job, you know, at a coffee shop or something just to
00:18:37 have some spending money. But the visa just simply did not allow them to work. So they had to either
00:18:42 take out a loan or try to get some money from their parents or something like that and i kind
00:18:45 of understood it right it's like you know we're here to study i was in australia to study i wasn't
00:18:49 in australia to take a job away from a young australian who is trying to work right and so
00:18:53 i always found it just mind-boggling that people can come here and work like if you're here to
00:18:58 study study great right go ahead and and actually get a degree and in some ways they pay a higher
00:19:04 student uh tuition payment so maybe they help subsidize the institution but why are they able
00:19:09 to work and why are they able to work so much i just want to tie this to one more story which
00:19:13 was black locks reporter um said that and w and tim hortons were basically lobbying the government
00:19:19 to allow more temporary foreign workers to expand like this is the worst possible time for this 1.00
00:19:23 right like everybody is fed up with immigration we see it displacing canadians we see just a huge 1.00
00:19:28 explosion of students especially in cities like toronto it's just like it's hard to find a place
00:19:33 to rent it's hard to find a job for young people because they you know there's just so many people
00:19:38 here that shouldn't be here and the fact that they're still out there lobbying tim horns is
00:19:43 still out there given the reputational damages company has received that they're still out there
00:19:48 pushing for uh temporary foreign workers in the food service industry i just want to just show
00:19:55 one clip michelle rumple garner yesterday was asking minister lena dieb about the specific
00:20:02 like why are the liberals kowtowing to tim hortons rather than fighting for young canadians
00:20:07 play that clip this is top five why aren't those jobs going to canadian workers and why are you
00:20:12 guys kowtowing to tim hortons uh so lovely performance as usual madam uh thank you for
00:20:20 the question uh we have a letter from many conservative members who have written to me
00:20:25 and to minister haidu and to another minister of requesting those changes uh in fact pleading
00:20:33 that they require those changes that's right in their problems so no love lost between those two
00:20:39 yeah remble garner went on to say uh just seconds after that clip ended that um the letters that
00:20:46 dia was referring to don't say what she's claiming and she will table them with the committee if she
00:20:50 wants so i i haven't talked to the notorious mrg to find out what she was talking about there that's
00:20:56 my nickname for michelle remble garner the notorious mrg uh so a couple of points you said
00:21:01 84 000 job losses and that is the headline number but it's worse with it's only 84 000 because we
00:21:08 had 24 000 part-time jobs but 108 000 full-time jobs were lost last month and over the last year
00:21:19 you know you hear oh we're reducing immigration numbers okay the labor force survey says that
00:21:26 we added 347 000 people of working age so that's 347 000 new people that is almost entirely driven
00:21:35 by immigration that is not through population growth um and 81 000 of them joined the labor
00:21:42 force 31 000 are unemployed or sorry 30 000 are unemployed 51 000 got jobs do you know where all
00:21:50 those jobs were created in the last year candace 49 900 in the public sector that is not the sign
00:21:58 of a healthy economy wow you know on on all these fronts we are stumbling and staggering and mark
00:22:07 carney is getting a a free pass by far too many canadians i interviewed bill robson the former
00:22:13 head of the c cd howe institute for the full comment podcast that just came out yesterday
00:22:18 and he does not give him good grades on you know he's fair in his assessment he tries to be as
00:22:25 neutral definitely not partisan but he's not giving carny good grades on the economy which
00:22:30 is you know what were the two things he was hired for as pm why did canadians vote for him he can
00:22:35 get a deal with donald trump and no one else can he hasn't done that he can steer the economy
00:22:40 because he's a central banker he hasn't done that he also promised that they would rein in
00:22:45 immigration they have not in any significant and meaningful way they have taken the temporary
00:22:53 population down from about seven and a half to uh seven and a half percent of canada's total
00:22:57 population to below seven it shouldn't be even at five percent you know we we have become too
00:23:06 reliant on this and and meanwhile we've got well over a million people unemployed in this country
00:23:12 Well, it's unbelievable. And I don't know, I think that a lot of people treat fraud in the system like very like kind of low level, like, you know, someone just sort of like misrepresenting something minor here and there. But Sam Cooper, our friend over at the Bureau, he's an investigative journalist, formerly in the legacy media, worked for Global for many years, and now he runs his own subset called the Bureau. And he tied this to something much more nefarious, Brian. And I just wanted to read you part of it, because this is the kind of thing that shocks me.
00:23:38 So he ties the Auditor General's report to organized crime.
00:23:42 This is a report he put out yesterday.
00:23:44 One number above all defines the scale of the failure.
00:23:47 1,000, sorry, 153,000 international students flagged as potentially noncompliant with Canadian
00:23:52 study permit conditions.
00:23:54 The federal government investigated fewer than 4,100 laying bare an enforcement system
00:23:58 so overwhelmed cannot meaningfully police the program it is mandated.
00:24:01 Those findings validate what the Bureau first reported inside British Columbia's multi-agency
00:24:07 anti-extortion tax force that canada's immigration system enforcement system has been overwhelmed by
00:24:13 transnational organized crime exploiting a student visa program that spiraled out of control
00:24:17 leaving investigators struggling to counter networks now driving a national security crisis
00:24:23 of extortion shootings in surrey bc rammed ontario edmonton and winnipeg report found that of the
00:24:30 investigations department did roughly 40 percent stalled because the students simply did not respond
00:24:34 to government's request for information we highlighted that off the top of the zone but
00:24:38 you know we had the the mayor of surrey declaring basically a national emergency saying that they
00:24:43 couldn't control the extortion the drive-by shootings the fact that these like like indian 1.00
00:24:49 gangsters basically were going and shaking down their fellow compatriots businesses saying if you 0.95
00:24:54 don't pay us we're going to kill you we're going to kill your family and this is a spiraling problem
00:25:00 sam cooper is saying that this is all linked it's not just like individual bad actors there are 0.99
00:25:05 these networks that go across our entire country it's actually shocking how dangerous things are
00:25:11 and how many naive canadians are to just say like oh they're students you know they're just not
00:25:16 complying they didn't respond so we're just gonna like leave them be well according to sam cooper
00:25:20 some of these are actually very bad people involved in very bad activities here in our
00:25:25 own backyard what do you make of it even if we try and get rid of them you look at the case in
00:25:30 saskatchewan that was in the news last week a guy found to have been committing immigration fraud
00:25:36 let go um and now he's suing the government of canada for charging him with something that
00:25:42 he even his lawyer says yeah he did it uh you know you talked about people being naive and
00:25:49 And, you know, Sam's work on this is stellar.
00:25:53 But you talk to folks in Ottawa about any type of fraud, and they are naive.
00:26:00 They think that nobody is out to game the system.
00:26:03 And it's not just on immigration.
00:26:04 I remember talking to liberal ministers, going back to early in my career, and putting forward
00:26:13 the suggestion that some people were abusing the EI system.
00:26:17 And they said, well, Canadians wouldn't do that.
00:26:19 And I thought, have you never been in a room where some guys are trying to figure out how to get their weeks in so that they can be off in time for the opening of deer season or bass season, or they want to make sure that they're off for the summer?
00:26:34 So that's gaming the system.
00:26:36 There is a certain percentage of every population that will game the system, and you need to be on the lookout for them, people who will abuse the system.
00:26:46 And it's not just one culture.
00:26:47 This is around the world.
00:26:49 most people are law-abiding and doing what's right, but you have to be on the lookout for
00:26:54 those who will abuse your good graces. And if you're not, they're going to take advantage of
00:27:00 us. We have a government and a bureaucracy that believes nobody's out to do anything bad,
00:27:05 and we don't need to investigate. And, oh, well, I called the student that
00:27:10 submitted a fraudulent student visa application, but they didn't reply. So I guess it's fine.
00:27:19 you know there's one um bit in the report on the student fraud the student visa fraud
00:27:25 they found they they identified 800 cases there's the department not the auditor general the
00:27:32 department identified 800 cases of fraud more than half of them or about half of them
00:27:38 were renewed for another visa of one type or another so you lied your way into canada oh
00:27:45 it's okay here's another visa we'll just let you stay what what's the point of any of these rules
00:27:52 or laws if we will not enforce them and we are we're going to be in major trouble over this
00:27:58 i would just push back against one minor thing that all cultures are equal and that that there's
00:28:04 i'm not saying all cultures are equal well or that that that just is like you know i think
00:28:09 there are other parts of the world brian where they don't have the high level of trust right
00:28:12 Like we saw this with the food bank scandal that like students were taking advantage of food banks and maybe they were like they didn't even know that they were doing anything wrong because their culture is like, wow, these people are literally giving away free food, free diapers.
00:28:24 It's all for free. Just go over there and you get it. And to us, we're like, wait a minute. No, no, no. That's supposed to be for people who are really struggling, for people who are really poor.
00:28:32 if you're a middle class you know an international student from india that's not supposed to be for 0.98
00:28:37 you but but they maybe they just truly didn't get it or from their perspective that you know 1.00
00:28:42 you guys are foolish for giving away free food it's like how naive are we how stupid are we of 0.99
00:28:46 course they're going to take advantage of every little loophole if someone calls them saying hey 1.00
00:28:50 we're investigating you for fraud and then they say well all i have to do is just stop taking
00:28:53 their calls and they won't investigate me anymore like we are naive for putting this much trust
00:28:58 into people that don't share our basic values and cultures maybe they could i'm not saying that
00:29:02 they're incapable of it that if they were living in canada for 10 years they would serve to
00:29:06 understand our norms and values but people who they definitionally are not canadian they just
00:29:10 got here i don't think they have the same understanding that you know a lot of our
00:29:14 system is based on honor and trust i i remember um a you may recall this there was a an immigrant
00:29:21 services settlement agency in gatineau just across the river in quebec from ottawa
00:29:26 and they started getting denounced because they put out a just a brochure to hand out to people
00:29:33 what to expect and how to behave in Canada and they told people do not bribe government officials
00:29:39 and of course the left went crazy and said how dare you tell immigrants not to bribe government
00:29:45 officials the guy I'm working on with the story was from Russia and he said when he came to get
00:29:52 he'd been in Canada a long time was a citizen he said when I came to Canada that was the best
00:29:55 advice that I got. Because in Russia, if you don't bribe anyone, you don't get anything. So we do
00:30:02 have to put forward our norms. I was not making an all cultures are equal comment there. I'm just
00:30:07 saying it's pervasive. There's always people looking to game the system and you have to look
00:30:11 out for it. But we shouldn't be afraid to put forward what our norms, expectations, and values
00:30:17 are, including don't bribe, don't cheat the system, don't commit fraud. And by the way, if you do these
00:30:23 things, we'll punish you. I don't think we do that last bit anymore. We're, you know,
00:30:29 giving out participation trophies to everyone and not enforcing anything. We are breeding,
00:30:34 you know, on a parental, to use a parental analogy, we're breeding those kids that are
00:30:39 going to scream at everything and not follow any rules because we're not enforcing any rules.
00:30:46 Well, I think we completely agree on that. Brian, always appreciate your time and analysis. Thank
00:30:50 you so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, folks, that's Brian Lilly. Go check out his
00:30:54 sub stack over at brianlilly.com. It's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for
00:30:58 tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is the Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you, and God bless.