Juno News - December 05, 2025


How Canada Sabotaged Its Own Economy


Episode Stats

Length

29 minutes

Words per Minute

172.87564

Word Count

5,021

Sentence Count

329


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, Juneau News, Alexander Brown back for another episode, host of Not Sorry, writer,
00:00:07.840 communicator, campaigner. Always thrilled to be here. And while you are here, take advantage
00:00:12.040 of our promo code. I know a guy who'll hook you up. It is me, junonews.com slash not sorry for
00:00:18.360 20% off. I spoke for the House of Commons Immigration Committee on Tuesday, where I laid
00:00:24.020 the blame for Canada's high unemployment, the failing economic productivity, failing
00:00:29.580 health care system, poor housing market, and low public opinion of Canada's immigration
00:00:34.220 system at the feet of the Liberal government. On the temporary foreign worker and international
00:00:39.280 mobility program front, it wouldn't be wrong to view these programs, for example, as distortionary
00:00:45.540 government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm
00:00:51.500 younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market. As former Bank of Canada Governor
00:00:56.500 David Dodge has warned, the last thing we want is a bunch of low productivity businesses
00:01:01.960 hanging on because we provide them cheap labour. Not only then is that bad for Canadian productivity,
00:01:07.340 but there's also a big risk that it contributes to wage suppression and job displacement for Canadian
00:01:12.560 workers. Can you tell the theme of the episode yet? Moreover, Canada's delusional quest to replace
00:01:18.660 US trade, it isn't going well. We've now even been passed by Mexico as our neighbour's top export
00:01:25.360 partner. As Tristan Hopper writes, virtually every economic analysis on the issue of trade
00:01:31.300 diversification has concluded that although it's a good idea in principle, Canada remains a country
00:01:37.120 whose prosperity has been disproportionately owed to the fact that it happens to sit atop the most
00:01:42.600 powerful economy in human history. And there's word now that Trump may soon use the USMCA withdrawal
00:01:49.280 as a bargaining tactic. Trade experts are warning and that could be another curveball for us.
00:01:55.120 The layoffs are mounting. This situation is not improving as 1000 workers at Algoma Steel were just
00:02:02.480 handed pink slips before the holidays. The excuses for not securing a trade deal, for continuing so much
00:02:09.040 of the status quo, it's harming Canadians and their pocketbooks. Let's talk to Professor Ian Lee of Carleton
00:02:15.840 University, a frequent Juno guest. He's a wealth of knowledge when it comes to diagnosing our economic
00:02:21.920 woes for a poli-sci student like myself. And first, a word from our sponsor.
00:02:27.600 Folks, I want to take a minute to thank today's sponsor, which is Macamie College. So Macamie College
00:02:32.800 has an applied politics and public affair program. It's a two-year evening online program available across
00:02:39.600 Canada. Students have the opportunity to learn to run political campaigns, organize grassroots movements,
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00:02:54.240 Applicants only need a high school diploma or homeschooling equivalent to apply. Intake starts
00:02:59.280 in September and January. And folks, we are very excited to announce that anyone who who applies and is
00:03:05.920 successful in enrollment will get a $500 scholarship from Juno News. So apply using our link. It's in the
00:03:13.040 description. You can go to CandiceMalcolm.com slash Macamie. That's M-A-K-A-M-I. And if you apply
00:03:19.520 through that link and you're successful, you get a $500 Juno News scholarship. You know, I went to the
00:03:26.080 University of Alberta and studied political science. And the thing you realize when you're doing a
00:03:29.520 university degree is that it doesn't lead you to a job. And so for me, after three years of being a
00:03:34.720 political science student, I looked around and realized I had no job skills. I had never worked in
00:03:39.760 politics. Everything was theoretical. It was all in the classroom. And I had to start working on
00:03:44.720 political campaigns just to get my foot in the door. The hard thing about politics is that you need
00:03:49.040 experience to get a job, but jobs require experience. And so doing something like this, I mean, the fact
00:03:54.480 that you can do it online, the fact that you could do it on the evening is really helpful. If you're
00:03:57.760 interested in politics and you're watching the show, I presume you are, this is something that you really
00:04:01.360 might want to consider, or hey, maybe, maybe one of your adult children might be interested in doing
00:04:06.640 something like this. So again, check out this link at CandiceMogel.com slash Mackamee College.
00:04:12.320 Professor Ian Lee of Carleton University Sprott School of Business joins us again. Professor,
00:04:16.400 thank you. My pleasure, Alex. Professor, a thousand workers were just
00:04:20.960 handed pink slips at Algoma Steel. I believe that takes us to close to 41,000 total directly impacted by
00:04:27.920 this protracted tariff situation. That's not much of a Christmas present for thousands of families.
00:04:33.360 Is it time to park some of the political gamesmanship and make a deal here?
00:04:39.040 With, you mean the United States? Yes. Yes. I do. I do. I have argued
00:04:48.240 a couple of points, very big picture. I've been, I've given a couple of papers actually in the last
00:04:53.920 little while, I testified before the Senate House Committee, Finance Committee and the House Committee
00:04:59.200 as well, that I argue that we have, we Canada, that's not the real we, Canada, Canadian governments
00:05:07.120 have made a big mistake over the last approximately 60 years since roughly the time of the auto pack.
00:05:14.800 And we have gone down a rabbit hole that we believe that we could, using government regulation
00:05:24.320 and subsidies, corporate subsidies, we could lift up the manufacturing sector at large into becoming
00:05:31.680 a major international player, a competitor. And I would argue in defiance of the laws of economics.
00:05:39.920 I say that because we're a small country, even though I think a lot of Canadians are confused by the,
00:05:45.440 I mean what I'm saying. We think, well, because we're gigantic geographically, and we are,
00:05:50.960 we think, well, that means that we're the same power and importance as the United States. We're not.
00:05:56.080 They're 32 trillion, we're two and a half trillion. You know, we are, as Pierre Trudeau famously said,
00:06:01.600 you know, we're, they're the 10 ton elephant and we're the mouse. The elephant sneezes and the mouse
00:06:07.680 catches pneumonia. So we made a very large mistake in going down that road, chasing the manufacturing
00:06:15.120 rabbit, going down the rabbit hole, pouring billions and billions, not just on auto industry,
00:06:20.400 Bombardier, and many other similar attempts to try to create an industrial policy. At the same time,
00:06:27.680 we denigrated and sneered at and dismissed our resource sector saying it was low tech, it was dirty,
00:06:35.200 it was, it was 19th century, it was hewers of wood, drawers of water, wrong way to go. And yet,
00:06:42.400 we have trillions of dollars in natural resources. And we have a comparative advantage in natural
00:06:49.280 resources. We do not have a comparative advantage in manufacturing because we're too small. We're
00:06:54.400 smaller in the state of California. And yet, from the, throughout my entire lifetime, my adult lifetime,
00:07:00.240 from the sixties on through, I mean, I was a kid in the sixties, we've been trying to, you know, create
00:07:06.800 these superpowers, if you will, whether it was in Bombardier or General Motors and the auto industry and so
00:07:12.560 forth, in, in pursuing that while we were deliberately suppressing our natural resource sector. And this
00:07:19.680 culminated in the last 10 years, in the Trudeau years, where we were, we developed very clear policies
00:07:25.040 to suppress the development of natural resources. Well, now the chickens are finally coming home to roost.
00:07:30.960 And we are coming up against the reality that we are not $32 trillion GDP, we're a two and a half
00:07:38.480 trillion dollar GDP. And so I think we're realizing the, slowly, but most assuredly,
00:07:45.920 we're realizing the futility of this idea that we can direct and create through industrial policy,
00:07:54.560 we can create chosen instruments that will do our beck and call and become world-class competitors.
00:08:01.040 And we're learning that that's not, we don't have that scale, we don't have the economies of scale,
00:08:06.640 we don't have the comparative advantage. And now we're running up against the reality,
00:08:11.520 that reality. And so we have to do a deal with the United States that I think plays to our strengths,
00:08:16.960 which are natural resources and critical minerals, and not to pretending that we're going to be a
00:08:22.160 world-class manufacturing superpower along with China, Europe, and the United States, which we never
00:08:27.280 were, are not now, and never will become. Yeah. And I think of, and I'm reading about it recently,
00:08:34.720 even Diefenbaker's push in the, I believe the fifties to strengthen trade ties with the UK were,
00:08:40.240 were failures due to sort of, it was just from the jump, there was the overwhelming advantage of
00:08:45.520 trading with the US. Can you elaborate on why similar diversification attempts by, by, you know,
00:08:52.880 previous governments, why they too failed, we can obviously look at today and look at the self
00:08:58.240 sabotage of the last 10 years, but maybe a little history lesson for our viewers.
00:09:02.800 I, I, I'm going to use a fancy term. Um, and, and I want to use this term and I'm saying it with a
00:09:08.480 bit of a smile. Okay. Um, and it's, it's the big fancy academic word propinquity.
00:09:14.400 That's a new one for me. Okay.
00:09:16.640 Propinquity is a big fancy word, which means being close. Okay.
00:09:20.160 And a famous American president, John F. Kennedy, who had a quite a sense of humor,
00:09:24.480 even though I didn't always agree with his policies. He said, nothing propinks like propinquity.
00:09:29.040 In other words, nothing beats being close, closer than being close. Okay. Let me bring that down to
00:09:34.640 brass tacks and see, explain what I'm talking about. Let me state the obvious. The United States is right
00:09:40.160 next door, 9,008 to 9,000 kilometers right next door. 90%, 90% of Canadians live within 150 kilometers
00:09:50.720 of the U S border. So, and there's all kinds of people literally going back to Pierre Trudeau and
00:09:56.160 the third way it was called. We're saying, no, no, we're not going to trade with those people.
00:10:00.560 They speak the same language. We're on the same continent. We have the same time zones. We have
00:10:04.640 very similar endowments in terms of the geographic endowments. And we're going to instead deal with
00:10:11.520 countries halfway around the world, completely different legal systems, often completely
00:10:17.040 different languages, and we're going to develop relationships with them. But this is just silly.
00:10:23.280 And for those who still don't agree with me, I I've studied different countries that are pairs. I've been,
00:10:29.360 I've taught in Poland from 1991 until the present every year. Well, guess who is the biggest investor
00:10:37.040 in Poland? It's the country that it shares the border with. It's called Germany. It's not the United
00:10:44.000 States halfway around the world. Germany is shares the East German West Polish border. I've driven through
00:10:51.200 there in a car on road trips, and you should just see the German factories all through the East,
00:10:56.480 the West Polish countryside. It's just stunning. Then you go and look at Brazil and Argentina,
00:11:03.840 or Argentina and Chile. You tend to trade over centuries with the people next door. In fact,
00:11:11.760 you get intermarriage. You get cross immigration. You look at Elsass Lorraine, which went back and
00:11:18.400 forth between France and Germany for 500 years. I've been quite a few times there. And the trade and commerce
00:11:25.440 between Elsass Lorraine, between France and Germany is just, it's just stunning how obvious it is.
00:11:31.920 And so people that are trying to say, let's deny geography. Let's deny it. Let's pretend we're not
00:11:39.120 next door to the United States. It's silly. I mean, geography, you know, that famous phrase,
00:11:45.360 geography is destiny. And there's a reality to it. I mean, I've crossed that border without
00:11:51.760 exaggeration since I was a child. I grew up in Eastern Ontario. I estimate I've crossed that
00:11:56.880 border probably 600 times. Imagine. I mean, we will go down in the 60s. I was a kid and my parents
00:12:03.200 would say, let's go for a picnic lunch. And we'd go down onto the US side. We'd cross over at Prescott,
00:12:08.560 and we'd cross over for the day. I mean, I've gone so many day trips to the United States,
00:12:12.640 it's not funny. And that's just the propinquity factor. They are right next door. And they speak
00:12:18.640 the same language predominantly. They're predominantly English as the majority language.
00:12:22.560 Same here. English common law there. English common law here. We have many of the same
00:12:27.120 companies in both sides of the border. So of course, we're going to trade with the United States.
00:12:32.560 I'm not saying we shouldn't try to diversify our trade. But there are people who really think that
00:12:37.680 we're going to go from 70% to something close to zero. And I just think it's delusional.
00:12:42.480 If we can get from 70% down to 60%, that'll be stunning.
00:12:47.520 Yeah. It strikes me that the outlier, I was reading over some data before talking to you,
00:12:52.800 it's Austria and Germany. Austria has a kind of a balanced dependency on Germany where it's actually
00:12:58.880 one third. That's very impressive. But of course, you have all of Europe right at your doorstep.
00:13:04.240 When you're sharing it with your neighbor, same thing with Mexico and America, it's like you tend
00:13:08.000 to do all your work with them. And what strikes me as crazy as a non-business-minded individual is
00:13:16.160 we're even framing our US trade ties right now as a vulnerability, not a strength, a vulnerability.
00:13:22.880 And we're focusing on these non-binding agreements with regions like the Middle East and Africa.
00:13:27.440 We're talking seemingly exports of 1.6%. On what degree of delusion is this? Can we make up some
00:13:37.280 of that number in the aggregate? You're absolutely right. In fact, I would argue,
00:13:41.520 and I don't belong to any political party. I don't donate money to any political party.
00:13:45.840 But the vision of what some journalists have called, I think correctly, the Laurentian elites,
00:13:51.520 who are the political decision makers in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Not the corporate elites,
00:13:55.680 but the political elites. They've had this vision literally since the 60s that the United States was
00:14:02.240 not that good of a country. Maybe we should try and deal with them a lot less and go somewhere else.
00:14:08.640 And it became the politically dominant viewpoint. And without looking at the sheer scale and size of
00:14:17.760 the United States, all of the natural advantages of the north-south trade flow that occurred between
00:14:23.920 the two countries, and imagined that we're going to go halfway around the world to trade, notwithstanding
00:14:30.960 the incredible transportation barriers, the costs, the logistics, the time zone changes.
00:14:36.880 And I'm saying this for anyone listening who might say, well, that Ian Lee is a real ethnocentric guy.
00:14:43.040 I've taught in Europe over a hundred times, probably more than 99% of Canadians.
00:14:47.600 I've been teaching in China every year since 1997. I've traveled around the world many, many, many times.
00:14:56.000 I've been to the United States in 44 of 50 states on road trips. So I've been to a ton of countries.
00:15:03.520 I'm not ethnocentric saying we shouldn't deal with those countries. Of course we should deal with
00:15:08.080 whoever we want to trade with. But the reality is because of the propinquity factor of being that
00:15:14.480 they are right next door and there's lots of similarities between the two countries. Yes,
00:15:19.280 there's differences between Canada and the United States, but there are many, many similarities.
00:15:24.240 And so I think that those blinkers of the Laurentian elites have caused us to see the United States as a
00:15:32.320 quote, threat. Instead of saying we just had the wrong package over the last 60 years, we were trying to
00:15:41.120 become a competitor. Imagine a competitor of the United States, which is just as far as I'm concerned,
00:15:48.720 is just madness on steroids. Instead of saying we should be a partner, they need certain things from
00:15:56.320 us. They've always needed natural resources. And we should, right now they need desperately,
00:16:01.520 they need critical minerals because China has them by the throat hole. And the United States has a
00:16:06.720 desperate shortage of critical minerals. We should be talking about this almost every day of the week.
00:16:11.760 Instead of saying, how can we move away from the United States? Why don't we say, well, what do they,
00:16:17.120 what are they good at? They're obviously a manufacturing superpower. There's three in the
00:16:20.960 world, China, Europe, US. We're not, we're never going to become one, no matter our delusions and
00:16:26.800 thinking that we can. So let's give up those silly delusions and say, we're not going to try to
00:16:34.480 continue to pour billions of dollars down a manufacturing rabbit hole, trying to turn us
00:16:40.800 into something we will never become a manufacturing superpower. So yet we've got trillions,
00:16:46.880 literally trillions of dollars in natural resources. And I don't just mean oil and gas.
00:16:52.480 We've got timber, we've got electricity, James Bay, we've got nuclear, we've got potash,
00:16:57.840 we've got agriculture, we've got critical minerals. And yet what have we done for the last 60 years?
00:17:02.880 We've tried to suppress our natural advantages and artificially create an advantage we don't have,
00:17:10.080 never did, do not now and will not in the future. And we still are, there are people in Canada
00:17:16.400 perpetuating this false vision for the future of Canada.
00:17:21.440 And standing in a way seemingly, even now of a moment where we claim to be serious about major
00:17:27.040 projects, where we're sending mixed signals on memorandums of understanding.
00:17:32.080 Yeah. Okay. I'll let you, I'll let you build a pipeline to the coast, but the tanker ban stays
00:17:37.280 in place. Well, it's like, well, where the heck is it supposed to go? And so it's incredibly frustrating.
00:17:43.040 And these, these carny trade missions, they've resulted in, I believe Tristan Hopper in the post
00:17:47.680 used the term non-committal bromides to borrow, to borrow a quote there rather than substantive deals.
00:17:54.080 In your view, what metrics should Canada use to evaluate the success of, of this kind of
00:17:59.200 international outreach? And if you're a business leader, you know, how could you influence a more
00:18:05.200 effective outcome right now? I mean, I use the phrase, I use it with my students all the time.
00:18:09.760 I said, you know, we economists and policy analysts try and make this into something very,
00:18:14.800 very complex. And I'm, I'm a very simple guy. Cause I grew up on a farm and many, many years ago,
00:18:20.400 and I believe in this thing called arithmetic. I tell my students, I can't, you know,
00:18:25.040 calculus is too complicated for me and algebra is too complicated. Let's just stay with arithmetic.
00:18:29.360 Cause I understand one and one is two and two and two is four and so forth. So I look at the United
00:18:34.480 States and I say, okay, there's 196 countries in the world. We could trade with all of them, right?
00:18:39.440 Cause they're all equally useful for Canada. Well, wait a minute. The United States is 32 trillion.
00:18:45.920 There's no other country on planet earth that is even close to the United States.
00:18:50.000 China's 20 trillion, far, far behind. And then you look at Europe. Okay. They're about 19,
00:18:55.680 20 trillion. And then everybody else falls down to single digits and they're halfway around the
00:19:00.320 world. There's more arithmetic. There are thousands and thousands of kilometers away. They have very,
00:19:06.000 very different legal systems. They have very, very different cultures, very different languages.
00:19:11.760 And so when you look at these herd realities, I mean, and yet there are people who want to deny
00:19:19.280 these realities. The U S is right next door. It is the largest economy in the world. It is the modern
00:19:26.640 Roman empire. It is the role today that was played by Rome at the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar,
00:19:33.360 the dominant superpower in the world. And we're talking about running away from there and going halfway
00:19:40.720 around the world where we've never had a trading tradition with any of these countries. And they're very
00:19:46.240 small GDPs. I mean, these are countries that have single digit GDPs. You know, it's just stunning that
00:19:54.080 people can live with these delusions and kid themselves that we are going to suddenly stop
00:20:00.640 trading or slowly stop trading with the United States and go halfway around the world and start
00:20:06.160 trading with countries we've never traded with at that level or magnitude. It's not going to happen.
00:20:11.920 So where are the business voices vocalizing the opinion that you are now? I mean, I,
00:20:20.160 it makes a ton of sense to me in our audience and it's great to hear, you know, such a champion of
00:20:24.400 common sense, but like, is anyone doing this right now in, in our business lobby? Is anyone saying this
00:20:30.080 in the Globe and Mail?
00:20:30.560 I think I'm not as critical as you are on that point. I mean, the Chamber of Commerce has been
00:20:37.760 making the argument. I've certainly read their, their position papers and they have made some
00:20:43.040 arguments. Look, the United States, we're going to continue to trade with them in a very major way.
00:20:46.800 There are some voices out there, but I take your point is very well taken that the voices are not
00:20:51.840 loud enough. They're not strong enough, not enough of them to state these, these realities.
00:20:58.800 And I get that they're scared. They don't want to be branded as traitors or something right now from
00:21:03.360 perhaps the elbows up crew, but it would be so great to hear this on a day-to-day basis from,
00:21:07.520 from our, our leaders.
00:21:09.040 And, and I think we have to, I mean, I just went out and gave, I, I, I'm giving presentations to
00:21:13.760 business associations and business community, uh, in the business community and so forth.
00:21:17.920 And, and I'm talking about this and I'm always, I'm amused, I guess is the right word,
00:21:24.640 by the normal people said, what are you talking about? We can't have a made in Canada car.
00:21:28.560 You know, yes, we can. I said, have you looked at the global R and D just for the auto manufacturing
00:21:36.800 industry. I've got the data. It was done by the European association of manufacturers. That's
00:21:41.040 Volkswagen and company 150 billion euros last year. That's a year. That's not cumulative to the beginning
00:21:47.680 of time. That's the amount spent in the world by the 10 largest auto manufacturers for R and D to
00:21:54.880 build cars. That's $200 billion a year. And then I looked up the capital because you've got to build
00:22:00.320 the factories and buy the technologies to actually make the cars. Once you've done the R and D on
00:22:04.640 developing a new car and it's close to another a hundred billion dollars now. And we're talking about
00:22:09.920 Canada where we make 1.8 million cars a year, 80% are exported to the United States. Okay. So we're talking,
00:22:16.960 making a half a million cars a year and you've got to put billions and billions into R and D and
00:22:22.960 capital expenditures. It's just not, it's not on the arithmetic doesn't work. The numbers don't add
00:22:30.160 up, but we're, these are people dealing at the up at, you know, at 50,000 feet without looking at any
00:22:35.840 of the data to say how feasible, how credible, how realistic is this? And I think it's driven by,
00:22:42.720 because there's so much anger at the United States. It's always been an anti-Americanism
00:22:46.560 in Canada all my life. Part of the identity. Yeah. And Conrad Black has written about this
00:22:51.280 extensively, but with Trump it's become exacerbated. And so people are being driven by their anger and
00:22:59.200 their emotions, not by logic or the evidence-based reality of who we are and the fact that we are next
00:23:07.360 door to the world hegemon, the world's most powerful nation on planet earth.
00:23:13.920 Yeah. Professor, I want to wrap with this question because you're not the only one giving
00:23:19.040 presentations right now. I testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship
00:23:24.400 and Immigration Tuesday. One of the concerns I voiced was that of David Dodges, the former GBOC,
00:23:30.000 who has warned coming out of our immigration moonshot as of 2021, that the last thing we
00:23:34.960 want is a bunch of low productivity businesses hanging on because we provide them cheap labor.
00:23:39.840 Not only seemingly with that continuation of sort of the large scale temporary cog economy
00:23:45.520 be bad for productivity, but there's also a big risk that it contributes to further wage suppression
00:23:50.320 and job displacement for Canadian workers. I appreciate the concerns of our business lobby. I get that
00:23:56.800 I was on the panel with a guy who was looking for welders and I'm saying my remarks and he's going
00:24:02.080 like, come to my factory in Quebec. I can't find people. So I appreciate the high skill, the need there,
00:24:08.720 but how do we balance what our companies are telling us that they need while also realizing that
00:24:15.360 we surely can't go continuing down this path of creating this sort of surf-like economy?
00:24:23.120 Okay. I understand completely. First off, I do support immigration. I support controlled immigration.
00:24:30.240 Same. Okay. For the last 10 years, I will use a very, very strong word. I believe that the
00:24:36.480 government of Canada, the Trudeau government, sabotaged our bipartisan agreement that ran for,
00:24:43.440 from the 60s until the last 10 years, a very strong bipartisan recognition of the need for controlled
00:24:52.000 immigration that serves the interests of Canada. Brian Mulroney famously said, we're a nation of
00:24:57.680 immigrants and we need to bring in immigration to serve our needs. So I'm very much in the school that
00:25:04.320 we're not doing immigration as a social benefit for the world. We're doing it because it's in our
00:25:11.760 national interest. And that means then we have to identify where the interests are. And I agree with
00:25:17.280 David Dodge. And I, and I think that what Mr. Trudeau did, and I'm not trying to pick on him,
00:25:21.600 it's just, he did announce the policies. They tripled immigration and they went from a policy,
00:25:26.880 an immigration policy. And this has been written up by immigration scholars, where we went from a point
00:25:32.800 system that brought in people with high skills, you know, engineering, for example, engineering skills,
00:25:38.960 not just one, there's many others. And we went from one extreme to not extreme,
00:25:43.680 but we went from that very targeted policy approach to bringing in people that were very unskilled,
00:25:50.160 low skilled and uneducated or very poorly educated. And, and I thought it was an enormous mistake
00:25:57.200 because now we brought in people that are low productivity at a very time when our productivity
00:26:01.600 has been collapsing and declining precipitously. And so I'm not one of those people who say,
00:26:07.360 shut down all immigration. What we have to do is return to a system of immigration that's controlled
00:26:14.640 and that serves the interests of Canadians and is based on the needs of the, of skills,
00:26:20.880 the skills that we don't have. Just, I want to give you one little vignette. So people don't think
00:26:25.440 that I'm just being personal about Trudeau at all. Harper passed a policy that said, which I had
00:26:32.320 strongly supported for a long time saying that if you come to apply to come to Canada,
00:26:36.640 it is one of the conditions you must have along with the other, the points and the skills,
00:26:40.960 you must be already fluent in English or French, one of the two official languages.
00:26:47.360 And I just thought this was just the most obvious policy you have, because if you bring someone in
00:26:52.160 who can't speak English or French, that means they cannot work because the reality is that's the
00:26:58.560 language of this country, English and English Canada and French and French Canada.
00:27:04.000 When Mr. Trudeau came into power, he removed that requirement. And so we brought in all kinds of
00:27:08.960 people who can't speak English or French. So what are we doing? We are condemning them and exploiting
00:27:15.040 these people, hurting these immigrants by forcing them onto social assistance because they can't work.
00:27:21.440 You know, speaking a language of from, you know, from so halfway around the world that isn't spoken
00:27:29.280 in Canada will not allow you to work anywhere in Canada. No. And it means you're not going to
00:27:33.680 integrate either, right? Like you're going to balkanize within, within a small community,
00:27:38.240 but you're increasingly less, you know, the argument is, well, we're sensitive and we're compassionate.
00:27:42.800 This policy was not compassionate. This policy I thought was viciously discriminatory towards
00:27:49.840 vulnerable new Canadians who had no idea when they came here, what the country's like,
00:27:54.640 because they're from halfway around the world. And we said, come on in, come on in. Everything's
00:27:58.160 going to be fine, you know, and, and they couldn't speak and get a job. And so I don't call that
00:28:03.840 compassionate. I just call that it's a form of discrimination against vulnerable immigrant
00:28:11.200 Canadians. And we should bring back that rule that says you must be fluent in either English or French
00:28:17.200 so you can function. The moment you hit the ground in the country, completely agree,
00:28:22.640 produce this and destructive policy that was, uh, developed, uh, some eight years ago.
00:28:27.520 I'm in the hub with Dr. Michael Bonner, who worked on the immigration file, arguing the same thing,
00:28:32.640 where even the United nations condemned our, our explosion in the last few years as a modern form
00:28:37.920 of slavery, where we can't, the liberals can't pat themselves on the back for what is in essence,
00:28:43.200 a basement apartment economy. And there are 15 people to those basements. And so lots of common
00:28:48.880 sense, professor. Thank you. The word of the day, everybody is propinquity. Let's, uh, let's remember
00:28:53.760 that one. I'm going to go, I'm going to go look that up, but professor, thanks for joining us.
00:28:57.600 My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you.
00:29:00.640 Thank you.