Juno News - February 16, 2026


How can we reverse the disastrous impact of Trudeau’s mass immigration policies？


Episode Stats

Length

29 minutes

Words per Minute

181.67384

Word Count

5,340

Sentence Count

262

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

28


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful
00:00:07.320 family day, weekend, and long weekend for those who have a day off work, and hopefully you're
00:00:12.200 spending a lot of time with your family, connecting with what is important. Now, people who have
00:00:17.520 followed my career and people who have followed me for a while know that one of the major issues
00:00:21.960 that I talk about and that I focus on is immigration, dating back to when I was a
00:00:26.180 columnist at the Toronto Sun, wrote two books heavily critical of Justin Trudeau's immigration
00:00:31.100 policies. And even today, when we look around, so many of the major problems facing Canada are
00:00:37.660 downstream of immigration. Look at what I call the third world crime wave. Issues like extortion,
00:00:44.080 drive-by shootings, home invasions, carjackings. These are things that never used to happen in
00:00:48.720 Canada, and I think almost all the times, all of the instances that we see these brutal acts of crime.
00:00:56.180 They're carried out by foreigners or people who have barely been in Canada, people who are
00:00:59.180 certainly not born in Canada. I struggle to even think of examples of these kinds of crimes
00:01:04.880 happening 10, 15 years ago, and now they happen with some frequency. We're really dealing with
00:01:10.000 incredible, disturbing crimes in this country. Our country is not safe, not secure anymore like it
00:01:15.680 used to be. Not just that, we're talking about issues like cost of living, the cost of housing.
00:01:20.680 You know, when you flood the country with millions and millions of new people every single year,
00:01:24.560 you're going to have a hard time housing them. And because of these policies, it's pushed many
00:01:29.740 young people, most young people, almost all young people, away from the possibility of being able to
00:01:34.380 own a home and really start their lives. You know, the average age of a first-time home buyer is now
00:01:39.700 40, 40 years old. Think about how many people wait to start a family and have children until they can buy
00:01:45.340 a home. Well, if you're waiting until you're 40, it doesn't really leave you any time to start a
00:01:49.040 family and it's connected to the fertility crisis that we're experiencing in Canada. So there's a lot
00:01:54.540 of criticisms that I have and that I think most Canadians have when it comes to immigration. Most
00:02:00.280 people believe it has gone too far and that we need to roll it back. But just how far and just how
00:02:05.300 much can we roll it back? What can we do at this point? I wanted to welcome a guest today named Daniel
00:02:10.900 Thierry. Daniel is the executive director, the chairman, the founder of a group called the Dominion
00:02:17.140 Society, calling for massive changes within immigration. He's become a bit of a controversial
00:02:22.100 figure himself for some of the things that he said, some of the things he's calling for.
00:02:27.420 He was recently at the convention, the Conservative Party convention, very critical of Pierre Pauly of
00:02:33.320 the leader and really just questioning, you know, what is it that he's trying to conserve? So I'm not
00:02:39.220 sure if I agree with everything Daniel has to say on immigration. I thought we'd have a conversation,
00:02:42.560 a bit of a debate today to see where he stands and what he believes. So Daniel, thank you so much
00:02:47.580 for joining the Candace Malcolm show today. Thanks for having me on, Candace. Okay, so let's start
00:02:52.720 with the Conservative Convention. I think that you got a lot of attention. You had some viral videos
00:02:57.460 online with your group. You know, really stunning imagery. You were all wearing green. You were outside
00:03:03.500 the convention. I think you gave a speech. I saw the image that you had with Pierre Pauly of,
00:03:08.900 I think he was wearing a turban or something like that. And you know, you're really calling out the
00:03:12.840 ethnic pandering that we see from politicians of all stripes. So why don't we start with that?
00:03:17.180 What were you doing at the convention? And what was your point of being there?
00:03:21.920 Yeah, well, we knew it was the Conservative Party convention. We knew there'd be conservatives from
00:03:25.920 all over the country descending on Calgary. We knew there'd be a lot of eyeballs and discussions on
00:03:30.720 the direction the Conservative Party should be going in. So we saw that as an opportunity to kind of
00:03:35.180 put a spotlight on what we think is the most important issue, which is demographic change
00:03:39.120 and mass immigration. So from my point of view, I don't find the Conservative Party of Canada very
00:03:44.700 conservative. They've kind of based their whole ideology around free trade, free markets,
00:03:51.260 smaller government. I don't think any of these things are inherently conservative
00:03:55.380 in themselves. And really, Canada is going through the most radical transformation that we've ever
00:04:02.380 seen to our society in our history. And the Conservatives are silent to it, or even trying
00:04:06.840 to like use it to their own advantage through things like this ethnic pandering, playing dress up and all
00:04:11.220 these things that people didn't tolerate when Trudeau was in office. And I don't think we should
00:04:14.540 tolerate it when Pierre Pauly of does it either. So we wanted to shift the conversation. And I think
00:04:19.800 we succeeded in what we aimed to accomplish. And so how were you met by the Conservative Party? Did
00:04:26.280 they welcome you into the conference? Would any of the MPs speak to you? Did you feel satisfied by
00:04:30.840 the response from the party? Well, some people going in and stuff, rank and file members,
00:04:37.200 saw us pretty warmly. Like we had some good conversations outside, people were receptive to
00:04:41.940 our message. We were only there for a few moments before we got dressed off the property. The party
00:04:48.480 brass definitely didn't like us trying to shift the conversation and target these issues.
00:04:54.840 You know, it's in their right to do so. So we abided by their request and left the property.
00:05:00.420 But I still think we were able to put a spotlight on the most important issue.
00:05:06.260 Well, it seems to me that someone was listening because last week, Pierre Pauly of announced that,
00:05:11.220 I think this is a new policy, that he wants to quickly deport any non-Canadian citizen living in
00:05:17.520 Canada who is convicted of a serious crime. I would have assumed that that would automatically
00:05:21.140 make someone inadmissible and that that would be the current law, that they would have to go anyway.
00:05:24.920 But it is good to see the Conservatives heading in that direction. So Daniel, tell us a little bit
00:05:29.860 about the Dominion Society's positions. Like what are you advocating for and what would you like to see
00:05:34.940 the Conservatives do with regards to immigration?
00:05:37.340 So we advocate for a concept that we call re-migration. So everyone in Canadian society
00:05:44.380 agrees now that mass immigration has gone too far. It's just a question of how we deal with
00:05:49.000 the kind of mess that the politicians of days past have created. A lot of people are proposing
00:05:54.480 solutions on like kind of how we can live with the problem. We go a step further. We say we don't
00:05:59.820 have to put up with the mistakes of the past. We can actually go and correct them. So we have a kind of
00:06:04.740 10 point policy bundle that would shift immigration policies in order to change incentives, in order
00:06:11.320 to reverse the flows of mass immigration. We think for the next several years, there should be
00:06:17.740 much more people leaving the country than entering the country. And ultimately, we believe that
00:06:22.820 our immigration policy should be more about just economic factors. That we need to put that Canada
00:06:29.860 as a nation. That is to say, a people with a distinct heritage, a shared history, a shared culture.
00:06:37.300 And that kind of ethnocultural identity needs to be put at the heart of our immigration policy. We need to
00:06:43.780 actively conserve Canada's distinct identity, not just bring in people like their interchangeable economic
00:06:50.820 units.
00:06:51.440 Okay, so interesting points there. I want to get like a little bit deeper to the heart of the matter
00:06:57.680 of like, what does it mean to be Canadian, right? Because, you know, I think that post Second World
00:07:04.000 War, most Canadians were of a similar stock, they were probably from the somewhere in Great Britain,
00:07:09.680 or somewhere in France, right. And they probably came at a certain point in history. And unless you're
00:07:15.680 First Nations, but that was always a pretty small population, probably less than 5% or so. But
00:07:23.280 post Second World War, Canada started admitting large numbers of people from all over Europe,
00:07:29.280 Eastern Europe, Central Europe, people who are not part of that original sort of nation of English
00:07:35.040 Canadians. And so, you know, you could look back at that. And then you could see the demographics
00:07:41.600 changing in the 90s, more and more people from Asia, and now more and more people from Central Asia,
00:07:46.800 South Asia, and really all over the world. And so I'm wondering, like, when you're talking about
00:07:54.080 conserving the ethnic makeup of Canada, like, what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about white
00:07:59.600 people? Are you talking about British people? Like, can you be a bit more specific about that?
00:08:03.440 Yeah, yeah, I think we need to be, especially after decades of them transforming Canadian identity
00:08:09.680 to literally just be, you know, a civic concept, a piece of paper, a passport. I'm the one that'll
00:08:16.960 step forward and say the very obvious reality that being Canadian is more than just a piece of paper.
00:08:22.320 It is, it is to be a part of a national ethnic continuity that stretches all the way back to the
00:08:29.280 to the original founders and settlers of this country. So yes, those were broadly English and
00:08:37.280 French or Anglo rather from the British Isles, Irish, Scottish, Irish, Scottish, English, as is
00:08:44.080 represented on the on the Red Ensign behind me, our previous flag, which showed our final foundational
00:08:50.320 ethnic makeup. Within the Dominion Society, we take it a kind of a step further because the
00:08:54.080 diversification of Canada happened even before the Second World War, as you pointed out, it really
00:08:58.720 happened in the early 1900s when we moved to settle the Western Canada. This is when we let in larger
00:09:05.600 groups of European migrants from further Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, although mostly still from
00:09:12.000 from America and the British Isles to quickly settle Western Canada to stave off kind of American
00:09:19.200 advances and kind of manifest destiny, so to speak. So we put forward kind of two top concepts,
00:09:27.120 so what we call the ethnic Canadian, which is two distinct ethnic groups, the Franco-Canadians and
00:09:31.280 the Anglo-Canadians, which are the people who settled the St. Lawrence Valley over hundreds of years,
00:09:37.840 underwent an ethnogenesis to form two unique ethnic groups. But then we go a step further to offer this
00:09:44.400 larger umbrella term, which we call Heritage Canadians. And these would be all the people who helped to
00:09:49.120 settle the country. So a slightly broader kind of ethnic definition of these people, further European
00:09:55.840 settlers who came through the late 1800s, early 1900s to help settle the country. We think that that
00:10:04.800 that experience of settling the kind of hostile wilderness that is Canada that brings a community
00:10:10.480 together is very important. And we think that there's a there's a large difference between a settler and an
00:10:15.840 immigrant, someone who comes across brave hostile waters and an open ocean to carve civilization out
00:10:25.520 of a out of wilderness is very different than someone who comes over from a from a country to
00:10:30.160 take advantage of our economic opportunities or sign up for benefits. So these, we think it's very
00:10:36.320 important to be clear about what a Canadian is and what a Canadian isn't. That being said, I don't think
00:10:40.880 it's as simple as just deporting anyone who doesn't meet our strict definition. But I think culturally
00:10:45.760 speaking, we need to be clear about who we are, if if we're going to have something, an identity to
00:10:50.640 maintain. It's interesting, because Oh, actually, I have a friend who her family was fifth or sixth
00:10:56.240 generation Canadian is one of my close friends growing up. And she was of Chinese stock, but her
00:11:03.040 family came over to help build the railway, and has, you know, just as Canadian as probably you and I are, I
00:11:09.200 would argue at least culturally, even though ethnically, I don't know if she would fit into
00:11:12.960 your definition or category of a heritage Canadian. One of the things that drove me crazy about Prime
00:11:19.040 Minister Justin Trudeau, was when he defended terrorists and foreign nationals who pick up arms
00:11:24.560 against Canada, and said that they must be able to keep their Canadian citizenship, even if they're a
00:11:29.840 citizen of a foreign country, because a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. And therefore, anybody who
00:11:35.120 has a, you know, has it has a claim to Canadian citizenship, through their parents, or through
00:11:41.040 just, you know, like Omar Khadr, who happened to be born here, but his father was part of Al Qaeda. And
00:11:46.640 he, he picked up arms and fought against Canada and Afghanistan, that he that he was he gets to be a
00:11:52.400 Canadian just because his family took advantage of our generosity. And this idea that a Canadian is
00:12:00.400 inalienable, as if it was an ethnicity, right? Like, you could say that about someone who's Japanese,
00:12:04.800 or someone who's Swedish, right? A Swede is a Swede is a Swede, doesn't matter what they believe,
00:12:08.560 where they live, ethnically, they're always going to be Swedish. But Canada was more of an idea,
00:12:13.280 right, an ideal, or, you know, people who came, took part in this project, and then believe in Canadian,
00:12:21.840 you know, the project, right, believe in our in our system of government and in our country. And yet,
00:12:30.160 for Dustin Trudeau, even people who don't believe in that, even people who don't have shared values
00:12:33.600 whatsoever, are Canadian. So it did lead us to this question of like, what are Canadian values? What
00:12:38.320 does it mean to be Canadian doesn't mean anything. And I, you know, I think where we've landed is kind
00:12:43.040 of sad. And I agree that we need we need something to help define us. But at this point, Daniel, I mean,
00:12:50.240 I don't know, there's there's 40, nearly, I think there's 40 million people in this country.
00:12:54.560 Now, I would say only only 25 20 or 25 million of them would be what you would consider Canadians.
00:13:01.600 So what do we do with the rest of them? What do we do with people who were born here or people who
00:13:07.040 fled other countries that are here that don't have any other place to go? Like, like, how would how
00:13:12.080 would you how would you deal with that problem? I think we need to start rolling back the policies
00:13:16.720 specifically of the most recent and most radical policies that we saw under Justin Trudeau. So
00:13:23.360 our government needs to take this a lot more seriously there. We don't have any serious
00:13:28.960 government agents in for with tasks with enforcing our immigration laws, the government themselves have
00:13:35.680 said they rely on things like self deportations, we need to take this things a lot more seriously,
00:13:40.480 we need to one, round up and deport all illegal migrants in this country, there's estimates that
00:13:46.400 there's upwards of 500,000 of them all around the country, these people need to go, we need to get
00:13:52.640 rid of all of these asylum claimants. This system has been taken advantage of for about the last 10 years
00:13:59.040 now, since about 2015, we've seen a massive spike in these claims, there's over 300,000 of them sitting
00:14:05.120 in the system. These are just people trying to skip the queue and take advantage of our system, these
00:14:09.760 asylum claimants need to go as well as anyone who may have been an illegal migrant or asylum claimant
00:14:14.560 that has been granted permanent status or citizenship status over the last decade, like these people came
00:14:20.480 here taking advantage of our laws, they need to go. Same, same thing goes for birthright citizenship,
00:14:25.760 we have much too lax laws. And we know that people are taking advantage of this through things like
00:14:30.000 anchor babies, and birth tourism, we need to tighten these laws. And again, we need to,
00:14:36.400 we need to revoke status from people who took advantage of our laws and get rid of these people.
00:14:41.280 We need to shut down the temporary foreign worker program, the international mobility program, again,
00:14:45.520 hundreds of 1000s of people in our country, these people have got to go. And then when it comes to
00:14:51.440 people that are here as permanent residents and citizens, like we need to, we need to take into
00:14:56.640 account things like these people that are, that are just sapping off of benefits that that take
00:15:02.560 more out of the system than pay into the system. These people are not helping our country, like,
00:15:07.680 we need to strip them of status and send them home. And the same goes for citizens. And especially
00:15:11.680 anyone that's working, actively working against Canada's national interests and social cohesion,
00:15:16.800 proposing using Canada as like a safe country, a safe haven to forward their foreign political
00:15:23.520 causes. This is not like our country is a homeland for the Canadian people. It's not just some hit
00:15:27.920 safe haven for people from all over the world to take advantage of to to advance foreign political
00:15:32.640 causes. We're going to put our people first, and we're going to send people back if they're
00:15:37.920 threatening our identity, our security, our cohesion. So I really don't think any of this is is
00:15:45.440 radical. I think this is in line with how people think immigration policy should be managed.
00:15:50.080 People don't even realize how how absurd the system has got. They just see the consequences
00:15:55.680 in their daily lives walking up and down the street. We need to put kind of identity at our
00:16:00.320 coal, we need to put our people first before this kind of abstract, egalitarian, liberal,
00:16:05.440 internationalist kind of perspective that has become the norm since the since the Second World War,
00:16:11.280 and start remembering who we are and putting our people first. But as I said, like, we're not,
00:16:15.200 I'm not advocating for blood tests and sending anyone back that's not a pure blooded Anglo-Stock
00:16:21.360 Canadian. Like, I'm talking about reversing the radicalism that we've seen over the last few decades.
00:16:27.840 Well, it's interesting, because I think that most people on the conservative side of Canada,
00:16:33.600 and many people who would consider themselves more centrist, opposed Justin Trudeau's citizenship
00:16:38.880 policies. I was one of the biggest critics. I wrote a book called Losing True North,
00:16:42.320 back in 2015, 2016 was published just after he was elected, criticizing some of the major fundamental
00:16:49.520 shifts that he did. I mean, he made it so that most Canadians, new Canadians didn't have to learn
00:16:54.640 French or English anymore. He made it so that you could become a citizen without even being a full time
00:17:00.320 resident of Canada. And he shrunk the time that it takes for newcomers to become citizens down to just
00:17:06.240 just to just over two years. So you could be a Canadian without even living in Canada. I mean,
00:17:11.600 you could be a foreigner without even living in Canada, without even being able to speak French
00:17:14.720 or English, and you could become a citizen under Trudeau. I think it's outrageous. I think that
00:17:20.080 Justin Trudeau massively grew the population, as sort of, you know, for two reasons. One,
00:17:26.640 because he doesn't really believe that there's anything that is a Canadian, and that basically,
00:17:31.840 Canada is a refugee camp. Our purpose is to help resettle people from bad countries and give them a
00:17:37.600 better life, that that is the purpose of Canada. And second, obviously, just for crass political
00:17:42.720 reasons, they want more people to vote for the Liberal Party of Canada. And they bring people in,
00:17:47.120 lie to them, tell them that conservatives will deport them if they don't elect a Liberal government.
00:17:51.360 And then also to artificially boost the GDP, right? They completely damaged the economy through their
00:17:58.160 anti-development policies. And the only way to avoid a full-blown recession was just to open the doors
00:18:03.680 wide open. We also have a looming demographic problem in this country that many of our liabilities
00:18:10.880 are unfunded. Pensions, old age security, there's a lot more people retiring than people being born.
00:18:16.960 Canadians aren't having children, which is a whole other problem that I'm sure we could talk about,
00:18:20.800 Daniel. But we actually need workers. Otherwise, we will face, you know, a huge recession, possibly
00:18:28.960 some kind of an economic collapse. And so, you know, with your policies of saying,
00:18:32.800 hey, let's find all the people that came under Trudeau and try to figure out a way to entice them to
00:18:37.280 leave. What do you think about the fact that our economy is, you know, propped up artificially by
00:18:44.320 the mass numbers of people that Trudeau has brought into the country? Are you concerned about economic
00:18:50.240 contraction? Well, I reject the premise. There was a study actually released by Cornell University over
00:18:57.680 the summer that found that countries with stagnating and even declining populations
00:19:02.400 were actually some of the most thriving countries in the world by a whole slew of metrics. They had a
00:19:07.600 bundle of different issue areas where they looked into, including corruption, economic development,
00:19:13.360 like patents and discoveries and all across every single metric. It was countries that had declining
00:19:19.280 and stagnating populations that actually performed best. As well, I think there has been deleterious
00:19:25.680 kind of economic impacts caused by mass immigration that gets swept under the rug as they try and serve
00:19:31.120 us this lie that low skilled labor is necessary to continue propping up our economy. These sort of
00:19:38.880 policies cause wage stagnation or even lowering wages. It might increase GDP, but it's reducing GDP per capita,
00:19:48.240 the share that each of us has in the growth of our economy. And it boosts up housing costs and rent and
00:19:55.440 everything. This proposition that immigration is necessary for the economy is a very elite skewed
00:20:03.920 kind of position. In reality, mass immigration is hurting each individual Canadian more than it's
00:20:09.520 helping. So I do reject the kind of premise in general. I do think that a large scale remigration would
00:20:16.960 cause some kind of short term strife, some short term tension, but really we've seen this slow build of
00:20:23.680 tension within our society over the last two decades. I think we need some to kind of rip off the bandage.
00:20:30.960 It might be a bit rough for a year or two, but then it'll be much better afterwards. And then the last thing
00:20:37.920 I think to consider is we're undergoing a significant transformation in the economy through things like
00:20:45.680 development of automation and of course, artificial intelligence. This is going to completely
00:20:50.880 transform the labor force landscape. And we're saddling ourselves with all these kind of low skill
00:20:58.000 workers that are going to be put out of work by these developments. Really, we need to be at the
00:21:04.240 cutting edge of these things. Things like the temporary foreign worker program has really
00:21:09.600 acted as a reverse incentive. It's given people, it's given owners the path to not invest in capital
00:21:19.360 instead to invest in low skilled workers as a kind of stop gap. As a result, we're falling behind
00:21:25.760 productivity and compared to things like the United States. So really I think
00:21:31.360 this is what's really going to transform our labor force landscape and we need to be taking that much
00:21:39.200 more seriously. And right now we're kind of living with policies that aren't in line with the rapid
00:21:45.600 change in technology. So really I think all these Uber Eats drivers and stuff are going to be irrelevant
00:21:52.240 when self-driving cars and stuff become the norm. So really we should be preparing towards that
00:21:57.600 and making sure that we can leverage it in the best interest of our people, not acting on the behest
00:22:03.600 of elite kind of economic interests to lower wages and increase asset prices.
00:22:09.600 Well, I think that change is happening sooner than many people think. My family and I were in San
00:22:13.760 Francisco in the fall and they had self-driving Ubers and they had robots delivering food. So I mean,
00:22:20.080 the technology is already there. Yeah, it's freaky. I want to shift gears a little bit,
00:22:23.600 Daniel, and talk about a essay that you contributed to Juneau News. It's really a beautifully written
00:22:28.560 piece to commemorate the 61st anniversary of Flag Day, which happened yesterday, February 15th.
00:22:35.040 And, you know, we, many of us bemoan Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He infamously said that Canada is the
00:22:40.720 first post-national state, that we're not a nation. And he was proud of that, that being Canadian means
00:22:45.520 nothing. And you say that this didn't start with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I mean, I was hugely critical
00:22:51.760 of them changing the lyrics to our national anthem. I still cringe when I hear the new version and I
00:22:56.240 refuse to sing it. I was also so critical of changing the national holiday to Canada Day,
00:23:02.720 even though it happened before I was born, that my family and I still host our annual Dominion Day
00:23:07.520 barbecue, which is on July 1st. And it used to be called Dominion Day to celebrate the Dominion of
00:23:11.680 Canada, which was our legal name. And we slowly erase all of our British traditions to sort of water
00:23:17.760 it down. Well, you say it happened long before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, actually before he was
00:23:22.160 even born. And you talk about the origin of the new flag in juxtaposition to the old flag. You talk
00:23:31.040 about the history of it, the beautiful red ensign, which you have hung behind you there. I thought
00:23:36.800 it was really well written, and I agreed with it. And so I would publish it. So I wanted you to have
00:23:40.960 opportunity to talk a little bit about the history and how this problem actually predated Prime Minister
00:23:47.360 Justin Trudeau. Yeah, yeah. People don't realize how new the leaf is. I saw that was a big reaction
00:23:54.400 throughout yesterday. We were posting all sorts of content for flag data to really raise awareness
00:23:59.520 of this, as is one of the kind of fundamental purposes of our organization. We do want to just
00:24:04.080 increase pride and knowledge in Canadian heritage. And I don't think there is any more symbolic moment
00:24:11.440 in Canadian history than that flag change. Really, the kind of post-nationalization of our society
00:24:18.400 happened throughout the post-war period. But 1965, the change of the flag is really the perfect example,
00:24:24.880 because we went from this symbol, the red ensign, that really captures all of Canada's kind of
00:24:32.000 ethnic heritage within one symbol. You have the Union Jack representing our kind of colonial past,
00:24:38.960 and then you have the shield there, a simplified version of our coat of arms, which includes all
00:24:43.520 the kind of major symbolism for our main four founding ethnic groups. The English represented by
00:24:50.880 the three lions, the Scottish represented by the red lion rampant, the harp representing the Irish,
00:24:56.240 and three fleurs-de-lis, covered up by my microphone, representing the French.
00:25:00.000 In 1867, when Canada was first founded, these four groups represented 97% of Canada's population,
00:25:07.120 the remaining 3% being mostly First Nations groups. There were small groups of things like Black
00:25:12.880 loyalists and slaves that had come over through the Underground Railroad. There were small groups of
00:25:19.200 Chinese who had settled in mostly British Columbia. But 97% of it were these kind of founding stock groups.
00:25:26.960 So you got those four symbols above the kind of three maple leaves, which are representative of the
00:25:33.040 three founding nations coming to one, the Anglo-Canadians, the Franco-Canadians, and the First Nations,
00:25:37.440 merging into one country. So I think this is a beautiful symbol that represents Canada's heritage,
00:25:44.320 and I think it's something that we should be proud of. But in 1964, 1965, Lester Pearson kind of moved to replace the flag.
00:25:52.000 He thought in the post-war period that this symbol was problematic, that we needed to move on from our
00:25:56.800 colonial roots. We needed to remove the Union Jack. And he proposed a new flag free of all this kind of
00:26:04.640 ethnic foundation to be more inclusive to what he called the new Canada, which included newer groups of
00:26:12.400 immigrants that were coming over post-war, that included later generations of settlers that weren't from
00:26:17.600 the four founding nations. It was really the beginning of this kind of post-national project
00:26:24.960 and captured in this transition in symbols. And I'm not a big fan of the leaf. It's this kind of soulless
00:26:32.240 corporate logo. It's intentionally devoid of meaning. Like the number of points on the maple leaf,
00:26:39.120 there's 11 points. That doesn't mean anything. There's been some retroactive kind of
00:26:45.440 actions to try and give it meaning. People say that the two red bars represent the two oceans,
00:26:51.280 but none of this is official. Red and white are technically our national colors, but even then,
00:26:59.920 explicitly they were decided to make what would be most aesthetically pleasing and most visible.
00:27:05.280 So I think that a flag should really hold weight and hold symbolism and relate to a country's heritage and
00:27:12.240 identity. And I think you capture that in the red ensign. So I do advocate for a return to our
00:27:18.800 old flag. Well, I have to ask this question because I've always liked the red ensign as well,
00:27:23.600 but I would never hang it in my office, mostly just because there's a group of people that believe
00:27:29.360 that the red ensign is a white nationalist symbol. I know you yourself have been accused of being
00:27:34.560 associated with the far right and with a white nationalist group. So I'm just wondering, is there any
00:27:40.640 validity to that? Do you consider yourself a white nationalist or do you consider yourself far right?
00:27:45.600 I consider myself a Canadian nationalist. That being said, I'm very clear about what a Canadian
00:27:52.800 is. And all these groups that established Canada, this ethnic continuity that we're talking about,
00:27:57.680 these people can be called white people. So these kind of labels don't really bother me, but I prefer
00:28:04.640 to call myself a Canadian nationalist. I don't see Canada as some sort of home for all white people. I see
00:28:10.320 Canada as a home for Canadians. In fact, I've gotten in trouble with some groups for pointing out
00:28:17.280 things like that Swedes are Swedish and Swedish people are Canadian just because they're white.
00:28:25.360 And then, you know, right, left, I think that nationalism kind of goes above what we see as the
00:28:32.240 traditional political spectrum right now. You know, people like Wyatt Claypool say that I'm not even
00:28:38.560 right wing. I'm not conservative. I don't bicker too much about these labels. I call myself a
00:28:43.920 nationalist. I believe that Canada is a nation. We're a group of people with a shared history and
00:28:48.480 culture. And I proudly identify with that. Interesting. Well, Daniel, I really appreciate
00:28:53.280 your time. Thanks again for submitting that wonderful essay. I encourage everyone to take a look.
00:28:58.080 It's called Leaf versus Shield and the great flag debate of revisiting that moment in Canadian history.
00:29:04.720 So appreciate the time and the little bit of friendly debate here. And hopefully we'll have
00:29:09.760 you on again soon. Thanks for having me on, Candice. Looking forward to it.
00:29:13.600 All right, folks, that's all the time we have for today. We'll be back again tomorrow with all the
00:29:16.480 news. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is the Candice Malcolm Show. Thank you and God bless.