00:04:05.360Here 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.
00:04:33.820Why does your department have so little capacity to investigate non-compliant potential fraudulent cases?
00:04:41.320And what tangible things are you going to commit to today to improve that?
00:04:45.600So we will be centralizing the investigation.
00:04:49.040We will be streamlining anyone that is flagged.
00:04:53.640We will be doing more reporting and we will be information sharing with CBSA
00:04:59.760of any students that are not compliant or that are not currently students notice how she keeps
00:05:07.080saying will be again like why weren't you doing that from day one it makes no sense reporters
00:05:11.140tried to press the immigration minister further on this failure and lena dayab just walked away
00:05:15.880she walked away michelle rumple took the opportunity to jump in and again call this
00:05:19.780whole thing a dumpster fire let's roll that clip pass their visa maybe mr ananda sangra you can
00:05:24.160answer this it's about the cbsa i'd like to say something i i have i i'm even less confident now
00:05:31.260in the system than i was after watching that here's the reality the minister has had this
00:05:35.480report for some time that's how auditor general's reports go the fact that she's coming out here and
00:05:40.340cannot um come up with a few key clear deliverables to change the system and ensure that all of these
00:05:48.920cases are being uh reviewed is crazy to me um but also like some of the things she said was were
00:05:54.740just wrong like for example she said that some of these um permits were extended but they got pr
00:06:01.120that's not the same thing uh to me the fact that the minister had this report um did not do anything
00:06:07.420about it and came with those lack of answers uh it's going to make more canadians have a lack of
00:06:12.840faith in the system and frankly it's going to tell canadians that the people who are in control of
00:06:16.480the immigration system are the fraudsters, not the government. So we will be holding the minister
00:06:21.360to account on this with more proposals. Thank you. 100% true. Wow, what a mess. What a just
00:06:27.520terrible, embarrassing mess. To help me break this all down and to understand a bit more,
00:06:31.860I'm pleased to welcome my friend Brian Lilly to the program. Brian Lilly, as you know,
00:06:35.480is a columnist, political columnist over at the Toronto Sun and the host of the Full Comment
00:06:40.560podcast. He also has a sub stack over at BrianLilly.com. Brian, welcome to the show.
00:06:44.920thanks for being here you know you're almost speechless looking at how incompetent this is
00:06:51.000candace and you and i both know the immigration system you and i both worked in ottawa um i
00:06:56.440covered it you worked for a while in the immigration ministry uh how do you become this incompetent
00:07:05.560this is a system that the rest of the world used to admire used to say let's go and copy
00:07:10.840And 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.
00:07:26.840You look at the expansion of the temporary foreign workers program, the utter abuse of the permanent residency program.
00:08:05.220And sometimes they say, well, no, we disagree, rarely, but sometimes they may disagree.
00:08:09.900But they almost always have a response.
00:08:12.100And 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.
00:08:30.500I 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.
00:08:36.180She doesn't have the support of the other ministers.
00:08:39.060And 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.
00:08:46.220Right. That was Trudeau. That was Trudeau's guys, including Mark Miller and Sean Fraser.
00:08:51.640Shockingly, they're still ministers. Actually, they've been promoted and they have bigger files now.
00:08:56.900Right. And so I want to just take this back because yesterday we reported on the show that Blackhawks reporter and our friend Holly Dole,
00:09:02.980uh don't sorry uh she broke this story about how policies enacted by two successive immigration
00:09:09.040ministers cost thousands of canadian students their jobs according to a federal memo department
00:09:14.140of employment for the first time admitted that the 18 jobless rate for canadian students was due
00:09:20.580in large numbers in large part to the large numbers of foreign students this contradicts
00:09:26.620the statements at the time made by ministers sean fraser and mark miller so holly was out there
00:09:31.320on social media yesterday. She quote tweeted this article from the Toronto Star. Toronto Star is
00:09:38.180even reporting this. Canada's international student program blasted by Auditor General for failing to
00:09:42.620address integrity concerns. And Holly tweeted it saying, you know, the Toronto Star, you missed
00:09:47.200the point here. Yes, the report was bad. But the main thing is that it contradicts the Trudeau
00:09:52.760ministers at the time. So at the time in 2022, Sean Fraser said it's good for the economy. And
00:09:57.860Mark Miller says, I don't think international students are taking away or jobs away from other
00:10:03.500people. Oh, he doesn't think. Pierre Polyev jumped in and made another important point here.
00:10:10.460Conservative leader Pierre Polyev says, the two most incompetent and destructive ministers in my
00:10:15.200lifetime who brought our immigration system from the best to the worst were promoted in Carney's
00:10:20.840cabinet. Nothing has changed. A liberal is a liberal. And I do think it's important because
00:10:24.640I agree that Lina Diab is, you know, she's being thrown under the bus in many ways. She's being
00:10:28.960here to take responsibility for these other guys who are now even more senior. And this is part of
00:10:33.940the problem with the whole liberal government under Mark Carney, Brian, which is that we're
00:10:37.760supposed to believe that we've got some change, that things are different now, that we've got
00:10:41.040the new guy and he's very competent. The old guy wasn't very good, but he's gone. And now Mark
00:10:45.100Carney's here to make everything better. But the reality is it's being run by the same people. It's
00:10:49.080the same government with the same ideas, the same worldview, and they're not really making the
00:10:52.860changes. What do you think? Well, I think that's absolutely correct. And if you back up, there were
00:10:58.560two policies, and I outlined this in my Toronto Sun column, two policy changes that the Liberals
00:11:03.620made in 2022, that by April 2024, Justin Trudeau was saying, we brought in people faster than we
00:11:12.660can absorb them. And then he also, he pointed out that these, the fact that we were bringing in so
00:11:22.140many people so quickly, including on the temporary foreign workers side, was driving down wages. So
00:11:27.100those changes. April 2022, the Liberal government in Ottawa decides, you know what? We don't need
00:11:34.740these guardrails around temporary foreign workers. At some point in a long-serving government,
00:11:40.660the temporary foreign worker program becomes a hot button, especially when unemployment goes
00:11:44.500up. But in April 2022, the unemployment rate nationally was about 5%. And for young people
00:11:50.840between 15 and 24, it was 10%. And it stayed that way throughout the whole year. But in April 2022,
00:11:57.860they got rid of the guardrails. It used to be you couldn't get a temporary foreign worker.
00:12:03.300This is outside of agriculture. But to work, you know, if you wanted to hire someone at Juneau,
00:12:08.000who was a temporary foreign worker, and where you are had unemployment above 6%, you couldn't get
00:12:14.480them. They got rid of that. They went from saying you could only have 10% of your workforce be a
00:12:19.960temporary foreign worker to saying it can be 20. And in some industries, including hospitality,
00:12:26.940so we're talking about the Tim Hortons and the A&Ws, you can have 30% of your workforce be
00:12:32.400temporary foreign workers. They completely took the guardrails off. They put the temporary foreign
00:12:37.260workers program on steroids. That's April 2022. Then you fast forward to November 2022. And they
00:12:45.740do the same with international students they say you know what employers are telling us they can't
00:12:50.460get people to work why maybe you're still giving them serb um and and so the uh the government says
00:12:59.900international students no longer have a cap of working just 20 hours per week they they have a
00:13:06.700full work permit now they added hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people to the the labor
00:13:13.900force who are not canadian are not permanent residents and we had more than a million people
00:13:19.340i think it was about a million five that were unemployed across the country at that time
00:13:26.300then what does that letter that the the memo uh the briefing memo for the secretary of state for
00:13:32.380youth and children say that starting in early 2023 the job market deteriorated for young people
00:13:39.500and it's still deteriorated and yet we're expanding the temporary foreign workers program
00:13:45.280again in certain rural areas. I asked the ministry yesterday, I emailed the minister's office and
00:13:53.600said, this is Patty Hajdu's office, and I said, you say this is certain eligible rural regions,
00:14:00.700can you tell me where? And they said, oh, when's your deadline? I said, you announced this 10 days
00:14:06.020ago. You must know where this is going to apply. And they said, we need some time. They got back
00:14:10.800to me at about 9, 9.30 this morning with a vague, these are some parameters that we will look at,
00:14:17.780but they don't even know where it's applying. So this is a total meltdown of our immigration
00:14:22.760system, abuse of our temporary foreign workers. And our asylum system has become gone from
00:14:29.400protecting groups like the Karens, which was a group that persecuted in Burma, now called Myanmar,
00:14:38.120that Canada went in and took a bunch of these people who were in refugee camps and resettled
00:14:42.060them or resettling Syrians who were fleeing the war and resettling them. We've gone from that to
00:14:49.240people showing up at Pearson Airport or Vancouver and saying, oh, I'm declaring asylum. Or you're
00:14:56.460here for a year and you say, oh, my student visa is about to end. I'm declaring asylum. I'm sorry,
00:15:02.460you're from Mexico or Hungary or India or the USA. You are not getting asylum. You shouldn't.
00:15:09.280I'll say the Carney government's trying to do some very minor tweaks to the system
00:15:13.140to tighten it up. And the United Nations has now come out denouncing those changes and saying they
00:15:18.660will violate our international covenants. I mean, it's unbelievable. Our entire system is built on
00:15:24.800just so much trust. And the reality is that there's just so many people out there that
00:15:28.900are not trustworthy, that are trying to take advantage of our generosity. And the fraud in
00:15:33.360the system shows that the complete abuse of the refugee system. Okay, guys, let's be real. Crime
00:15:38.760is up. Repeat offenders are released on bail. Police responses are slower than ever. And in
00:15:44.800many places, law abiding citizens are expected to just hope nothing bad happens. That's not good
00:15:50.800enough. And that's why I'm very pleased today to be telling you about Berna. And I'm so pleased
00:15:54.780to have this partnership with Juno News because I actually own one myself. I bought one before we
00:15:59.320ever had this deal with Berna. So what is Berna? It is a non-lethal self-defense launcher that gives
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00:16:15.560but they don't use bullets. Instead, they fire powerful kinetic rounds designed to stop a threat
00:16:20.660from a distance up to 60 feet without lethal force. Here's why it matters. You don't need a
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00:16:41.280special offers. Make sure that you're prepared. It's better to be safe than sorry. Shaza, I want
00:16:47.100to bring it back to our economy brian because there was a pretty shocking report that came out
00:16:51.660on march 13th that canada's economy had lost 84 000 jobs in the month of february and that our
00:16:57.980unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7 you mentioned how temporary foreign workers program is supposed
00:17:02.700to be tied to unemployment and when it hits a certain they announced it the same day right
00:17:06.780well this i'm going to get to that so uh this is according to the cbc how they covered it back on
00:17:11.100march 13th canada has seen almost no job growth over the last 12 months wait a minute i was told
00:17:16.460Brian, that the reason that Mark Carney was able to win such a sweeping victory in April
00:17:21.740last year is because he had all of this business acumen and he was going to be able to get us back
00:17:25.940on track. Well, that has not borne out at all. The numbers show the exact opposite. Again,
00:17:30.300Canada's economy lost 84,000 jobs just in the month of February. Unemployment ticked up to 6.7%.
00:17:35.120Stats Canada said on Friday, a setback for labor market, one of the worst monthly job losses seen
00:17:40.220in years outside the pandemic. The decline in employment was largely driven by a drop in full
00:17:44.740time and private sector jobs the latter offsetting a short period of growth seen early in the fall
00:17:49.620employment mostly fell in goods and service producing industry 18 000 jobs lost in wholesale
00:17:54.500and retail trade 12 000 lost in construction 9 000 lost in manufacturing men aged 25 to 54
00:18:01.380were hurt hurt the worst as well as young people aged 15 to 24 so you mentioned about youth
00:18:06.900unemployment and how it was supposed to be under 10 well it's now 14 14 of young people who are
00:18:12.980trying to get a job are unemployed. And again, we know that this is impacted by temporary foreign
00:18:20.440workers being able to come in and take jobs. It's actually unbelievable. I'll just mention this,
00:18:25.340Brian. When I was a student, I studied in Australia, and my student permit did not let me
00:18:29.880work. I didn't have the ability to work. I remember some of the other students kind of
00:18:33.220grumbling because they wanted to get like a job, you know, at a coffee shop or something just to
00:18:37.320have some spending money. But the visa just simply did not allow them to work. So they had to either
00:18:42.040take out a loan or try to get some money from their parents or something like that and i kind
00:18:45.400of understood it right it's like you know we're here to study i was in australia to study i wasn't
00:18:49.560in australia to take a job away from a young australian who is trying to work right and so
00:18:53.960i always found it just mind-boggling that people can come here and work like if you're here to
00:18:58.760study study great right go ahead and and actually get a degree and in some ways they pay a higher
00:19:04.520student uh tuition payment so maybe they help subsidize the institution but why are they able
00:19:09.720to work and why are they able to work so much i just want to tie this to one more story which
00:19:13.400was black locks reporter um said that and w and tim hortons were basically lobbying the government
00:19:19.240to allow more temporary foreign workers to expand like this is the worst possible time for this
00:19:23.800right like everybody is fed up with immigration we see it displacing canadians we see just a huge
00:19:28.600explosion of students especially in cities like toronto it's just like it's hard to find a place
00:19:33.320to rent it's hard to find a job for young people because they you know there's just so many people
00:19:38.760here that shouldn't be here and the fact that they're still out there lobbying tim horns is
00:19:43.240still out there given the reputational damages company has received that they're still out there
00:19:48.840pushing for uh temporary foreign workers in the food service industry i just want to just show
00:19:55.720one clip michelle rumple garner yesterday was asking minister lena dieb about the specific
00:20:02.200like why are the liberals kowtowing to tim hortons rather than fighting for young canadians
00:20:07.080play that clip this is top five why aren't those jobs going to canadian workers and why are you
00:20:12.440guys kowtowing to tim hortons uh so lovely performance as usual madam uh thank you for
00:20:20.040the question uh we have a letter from many conservative members who have written to me
00:20:25.960and to minister haidu and to another minister of requesting those changes uh in fact pleading
00:20:33.880that they require those changes that's right in their problems so no love lost between those two
00:20:39.560yeah remble garner went on to say uh just seconds after that clip ended that um the letters that
00:20:46.200dia was referring to don't say what she's claiming and she will table them with the committee if she
00:20:50.840wants so i i haven't talked to the notorious mrg to find out what she was talking about there that's
00:20:56.120my nickname for michelle remble garner the notorious mrg uh so a couple of points you said
00:21:01.56084 000 job losses and that is the headline number but it's worse with it's only 84 000 because we
00:21:08.600had 24 000 part-time jobs but 108 000 full-time jobs were lost last month and over the last year
00:21:19.880you know you hear oh we're reducing immigration numbers okay the labor force survey says that
00:21:26.440we added 347 000 people of working age so that's 347 000 new people that is almost entirely driven
00:21:35.800by immigration that is not through population growth um and 81 000 of them joined the labor
00:21:42.600force 31 000 are unemployed or sorry 30 000 are unemployed 51 000 got jobs do you know where all
00:21:50.680those jobs were created in the last year candace 49 900 in the public sector that is not the sign
00:21:58.760of a healthy economy wow you know on on all these fronts we are stumbling and staggering and mark
00:22:07.640carney is getting a a free pass by far too many canadians i interviewed bill robson the former
00:22:13.080head of the c cd howe institute for the full comment podcast that just came out yesterday
00:22:18.520and he does not give him good grades on you know he's fair in his assessment he tries to be as
00:22:25.240neutral definitely not partisan but he's not giving carny good grades on the economy which
00:22:30.660is you know what were the two things he was hired for as pm why did canadians vote for him he can
00:22:35.940get a deal with donald trump and no one else can he hasn't done that he can steer the economy
00:22:40.680because he's a central banker he hasn't done that he also promised that they would rein in
00:22:45.720immigration they have not in any significant and meaningful way they have taken the temporary
00:22:53.000population down from about seven and a half to uh seven and a half percent of canada's total
00:22:57.880population to below seven it shouldn't be even at five percent you know we we have become too
00:23:06.600reliant on this and and meanwhile we've got well over a million people unemployed in this country
00:23:12.360Well, 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.
00:23:38.800So he ties the Auditor General's report to organized crime.
00:23:42.740This is a report he put out yesterday.
00:23:44.520One number above all defines the scale of the failure.
00:23:47.7201,000, sorry, 153,000 international students flagged as potentially noncompliant with Canadian
00:26:04.760I remember talking to liberal ministers, going back to early in my career, and putting forward
00:26:13.400the suggestion that some people were abusing the EI system.
00:26:17.200And they said, well, Canadians wouldn't do that.
00:26:19.900And 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?
00:26:36.020There 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.
00:26:49.220most people are law-abiding and doing what's right, but you have to be on the lookout for
00:26:54.240those who will abuse your good graces. And if you're not, they're going to take advantage of
00:27:00.440us. We have a government and a bureaucracy that believes nobody's out to do anything bad,
00:27:05.680and we don't need to investigate. And, oh, well, I called the student that
00:27:10.160submitted a fraudulent student visa application, but they didn't reply. So I guess it's fine.
00:27:19.220you know there's one um bit in the report on the student fraud the student visa fraud
00:27:25.980they found they they identified 800 cases there's the department not the auditor general the
00:27:32.320department identified 800 cases of fraud more than half of them or about half of them
00:27:38.240were renewed for another visa of one type or another so you lied your way into canada oh
00:27:45.380it's okay here's another visa we'll just let you stay what what's the point of any of these rules
00:27:52.200or laws if we will not enforce them and we are we're going to be in major trouble over this
00:27:58.980i would just push back against one minor thing that all cultures are equal and that that there's
00:28:04.460i'm not saying all cultures are equal well or that that that just is like you know i think
00:28:09.200there are other parts of the world brian where they don't have the high level of trust right
00:28:12.580Like 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.
00:28:24.740It'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.
00:28:32.460if you're a middle class you know an international student from india that's not supposed to be for
00:28:37.540you but but they maybe they just truly didn't get it or from their perspective that you know
00:28:42.140you guys are foolish for giving away free food it's like how naive are we how stupid are we of
00:28:46.820course they're going to take advantage of every little loophole if someone calls them saying hey
00:28:50.320we're investigating you for fraud and then they say well all i have to do is just stop taking
00:28:53.940their calls and they won't investigate me anymore like we are naive for putting this much trust
00:28:58.640into people that don't share our basic values and cultures maybe they could i'm not saying that
00:29:02.980they're incapable of it that if they were living in canada for 10 years they would serve to
00:29:06.100understand our norms and values but people who they definitionally are not canadian they just
00:29:10.860got here i don't think they have the same understanding that you know a lot of our
00:29:14.900system is based on honor and trust i i remember um a you may recall this there was a an immigrant
00:29:21.480services settlement agency in gatineau just across the river in quebec from ottawa
00:29:26.720and they started getting denounced because they put out a just a brochure to hand out to people
00:29:33.440what to expect and how to behave in Canada and they told people do not bribe government officials
00:29:39.280and of course the left went crazy and said how dare you tell immigrants not to bribe government
00:29:45.960officials the guy I'm working on with the story was from Russia and he said when he came to get
00:29:52.300he'd been in Canada a long time was a citizen he said when I came to Canada that was the best
00:29:55.900advice that I got. Because in Russia, if you don't bribe anyone, you don't get anything. So we do
00:30:02.740have to put forward our norms. I was not making an all cultures are equal comment there. I'm just
00:30:07.980saying it's pervasive. There's always people looking to game the system and you have to look
00:30:11.580out for it. But we shouldn't be afraid to put forward what our norms, expectations, and values
00:30:17.880are, including don't bribe, don't cheat the system, don't commit fraud. And by the way, if you do these
00:30:23.520things, we'll punish you. I don't think we do that last bit anymore. We're, you know,
00:30:29.540giving out participation trophies to everyone and not enforcing anything. We are breeding,
00:30:34.960you know, on a parental, to use a parental analogy, we're breeding those kids that are
00:30:39.940going to scream at everything and not follow any rules because we're not enforcing any rules.
00:30:46.480Well, I think we completely agree on that. Brian, always appreciate your time and analysis. Thank
00:30:50.840you so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, folks, that's Brian Lilly. Go check out his
00:30:54.760sub stack over at brianlilly.com. It's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for
00:30:58.760tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is the Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you, and God bless.