Juno News - July 26, 2019


LAWTON： Bureaucrats tracking and monitoring anti-Trudeau tweets


Episode Stats

Length

31 minutes

Words per Minute

172.22931

Word Count

5,494

Sentence Count

303

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

The federal government is tracking and monitoring the social media posts made by people like you and I on the subject of immigration. What are they doing with this information? And what does it say about the direction of Canada's immigration policy?


Transcript

00:00:00.040 Good afternoon, Canada. Welcome to another True North report. My name is Andrew Lawton, fellow with True North, here to talk about
00:00:08.880 immigration today, and I want to tackle
00:00:11.120 two particular sides of this. But first, hello!
00:00:13.760 I hope you're staying a little bit cool in this very sweltering summer we're having. I mentioned to a friend the other day
00:00:19.560 that I think the only thing worse than having 38, 40 degree days is people like Catherine McKenna feeling this somehow
00:00:27.680 vindicates them. So I don't know which I dislike more. I think I probably just like the second more. So
00:00:32.580 here's the... actually, I don't know if you're hearing it, but there are sirens outside my office now.
00:00:37.180 So I guess that's the environment department coming to get me for making that joke. Either way, hello, welcome.
00:00:43.000 Hope you're having a great week so far. It is Thursday, July 25th, and
00:00:47.740 I've just been doing a bit of traveling as of late.
00:00:50.460 So I'm coming to this later in the week than I often do with the lives, but I'm glad I'm doing it today
00:00:55.200 because True North had a story that I published earlier in the week
00:01:00.620 that I want to spend a bit more time talking about because not only is the story itself important,
00:01:06.340 but it also signifies part of a bigger problem right now that we're seeing in Canada and that we're seeing in the Canadian government.
00:01:13.900 And I am going to get to the the immigration issue itself because Maxime Bernier's party,
00:01:18.200 the PPC, has put out a massive immigration plan that is going to basically be eviscerated by the media,
00:01:26.760 but I think might actually resonate with some Canadians.
00:01:29.520 And I'm... there are parts of it that I think are great, parts of it that I'm a little bit leery of.
00:01:33.220 We're going to talk about both of those things later on in the stream.
00:01:36.460 But the story itself I want to talk about concerns all of us because what I uncovered
00:01:40.780 through an access to information request, which, by the way, was for something else entirely.
00:01:45.880 This was kind of included in one and I wasn't really looking for it,
00:01:49.960 but it ultimately gave me more information than what I was looking for, ended up panning out on.
00:01:55.660 But the federal government and specifically the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship,
00:02:01.860 so IRCC, is tracking and monitoring the social media posts made by people like you and I
00:02:08.400 on the subject of immigration.
00:02:10.800 And if you head on over to... and I'm going to post the link right now
00:02:14.940 because I think it's an important story and if you want to follow along,
00:02:18.520 I'm going to put that up.
00:02:20.460 Here's the story Andrew is talking about.
00:02:23.860 I've got to do the third person.
00:02:24.860 And I'm going to pin that.
00:02:26.860 Can I pin it?
00:02:29.160 I have no idea how to do this.
00:02:30.240 Oh yeah, I can pin it.
00:02:31.140 Okay, cool.
00:02:31.840 In any case, there's the story there because this really does impact every single person
00:02:38.300 who comments on immigration, who criticizes the government's policies on immigration
00:02:43.760 or on anything.
00:02:44.760 And in the document, which you can read in that story there at tnc.news,
00:02:49.700 what we have is evidence that there is a, not just a team of bureaucrats tracking your tweets,
00:02:56.540 hi Rick, saying hello in the chat, but a 12-person team.
00:03:00.540 And I did this.
00:03:01.880 I actually counted the names in the thread.
00:03:03.940 We're talking about a 12-person unit in the communications, social media, and care,
00:03:09.400 and other facets under that same banner that are talking about all of these issues.
00:03:15.340 And what they're doing is they're talking about tweets from Maxime Bernier,
00:03:18.840 they're talking about tweets from Michelle Rempel, tweets that were critical of Canada's official multiculturalism.
00:03:24.400 But then they also talk about a Reddit thread that they refer to as bigoted.
00:03:30.760 They talk about this two-page list of tweets.
00:03:34.720 And I looked at the people on it.
00:03:35.800 These are just random people, you know, at skconservative, at rfinnamore, at big1007, at evasiu21.
00:03:45.860 Like, we're talking about random people here, that some of them are kind of like the tweets are incoherent,
00:03:53.100 others the tweets are making very salient points, and the government is tracking these people,
00:03:57.420 putting them on a watch list, basically, and reporting amongst themselves to the Privy Council office,
00:04:03.260 which we'll talk about momentarily, and to the Deputy Minister,
00:04:06.620 who runs the bureaucratic wing of the Immigration Department.
00:04:10.120 They're reporting these tweets to all of these different people.
00:04:14.060 So, what they're doing with this information, we don't know.
00:04:18.560 What they're doing, I mean, if they're a master database, where, you know, all of these emails,
00:04:23.060 over the course of maybe several months, are compiled,
00:04:25.560 was this thread that I encountered just a one-off, I don't know.
00:04:29.860 But what I can tell you is that these people were just Canadians voicing their opinions about the way the government's doing things,
00:04:38.460 and are now, they have a record, as they say, there's a file that has these people's names,
00:04:43.960 and information on it, there's a record, because I got the record.
00:04:46.960 That's what an access to information request is.
00:04:49.460 So, this story means a lot, I mean, because some people are saying,
00:04:55.960 well, of course the government's tracking and monitoring,
00:04:57.960 and I think there's a lot of cynicism that is probably well-placed,
00:05:01.460 but it goes beyond that, because I highlighted in my video on this earlier in the week,
00:05:05.960 a couple of the story, or a couple of the people, who were just ordinary people, and I don't know them,
00:05:10.960 a couple of them followed me on Twitter, which I was very grateful for, and you can do that yourself,
00:05:14.960 at Andrew Lawton, but I actually sent them a heads up, I said,
00:05:17.960 just so you know, your thing, your tweet and your username was in this government document,
00:05:23.960 and they didn't care, I mean, they're like, yeah, whatever, okay, like, they're kind of happy,
00:05:27.960 I mean, the reason you tweet is for people to see it, so, you know, they were just as happy that,
00:05:32.960 you know, people were paying attention to it, even if they are coming from within the government,
00:05:37.960 but there are a lot of people that wouldn't like that, and that don't like it,
00:05:40.960 and even if a tweet is public, or a Reddit thread is public, there's a difference between you putting something out there,
00:05:47.960 and the government saying, we're actually going to be reporting this up to the highest levels of the government,
00:05:53.960 because the Privy Council office, remember, is the office that was up until recently run by Michael Wernick,
00:06:00.960 who we learned was not an impartial, non-partisan bureaucrat, he was a shill,
00:06:04.960 he was running political interference for Justin Trudeau's Liberals,
00:06:08.960 and this is something that you can hear in his testimony, when he talks about advancing the agenda of the government,
00:06:14.960 and yes, it's his job to make sure the trains run on time, but he went beyond that,
00:06:18.960 according to Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony, and according to that leaked phone call,
00:06:23.960 and by the way, at the time that this access to information request came,
00:06:29.960 that was August 2018, Michael Wernick was still the head of the Privy Council office,
00:06:34.960 so we're talking about tweets and Reddit threads that are going up to the Privy Council office that we know has,
00:06:41.960 or at least at the time, had a partisan angle to it,
00:06:45.960 because it was doing the interference on behalf of the Liberals, on behalf of the Prime Minister's office.
00:06:51.960 So this is where all of these tentacles of government tend to interconnect with one another.
00:06:57.960 So why are they tracking it?
00:06:59.960 Well, according to the emails, and again, I don't need to editorialize,
00:07:02.960 because the information's in the documents themselves, and you can read it for yourself,
00:07:06.960 they're talking about monitoring, because they want to be able to address misconceptions about immigration,
00:07:14.960 and I'm going to read the exact wording on this here.
00:07:18.960 This is from Lynn Petri, who I believe is the communications manager.
00:07:23.960 She's one of 12, apparently.
00:07:25.960 She says, we will continue to monitor.
00:07:28.960 This conversation provides some indication of public sentiment on housing asylum seekers.
00:07:34.960 As discussed earlier, this underscores our advice to focus on numbers on the storyline,
00:07:41.960 and gives an indication of the types of misconceptions we might need to address going forward.
00:07:47.960 And then she asks one colleague to flag it with her team.
00:07:51.960 She asks another colleague to send it up to the Privy Council office.
00:07:54.960 She asks another colleague to put it towards the Deputy Minister's office and prepare a briefing for the Deputy Minister.
00:08:03.960 And this was all over a Reddit thread.
00:08:06.960 This was all over one Reddit thread.
00:08:08.960 And then there was the separate pages of this that had the list of tweets.
00:08:13.960 The list of tweets that were saying, oh, Maxime Bernier was added in these,
00:08:17.960 and IRCC's Twitter account was added, but don't worry, we didn't respond.
00:08:21.960 So people are putting criticisms to them.
00:08:23.960 They're not even responding to them.
00:08:25.960 They're just putting them in this neat little file, wrapping it up with a bow,
00:08:28.960 and handing it to the Prime Minister's office.
00:08:31.960 The reason this is so important is because you have to look at it in the context,
00:08:36.960 not just of the government really becoming the Big Brother,
00:08:41.960 or at least furthering its identity as the Big Brother.
00:08:44.960 We're also looking at this in the context of a government that's talking about wanting to regulate social media.
00:08:50.960 And a Liberal Party, whose members recently put a report to the House of Commons,
00:08:57.960 as I reported on a few weeks back,
00:08:59.960 in which they wanted the government to put human rights law protections
00:09:04.960 so that social media companies could be regulated,
00:09:07.960 and so that online hate speech, which wasn't defined, could be curbed.
00:09:11.960 So now you have bureaucrats compiling a list of tweets, calling them bigoted,
00:09:17.960 and this comes to light just a few weeks after this very same government
00:09:22.960 starts entertaining the idea of prosecuting people for online hate speech.
00:09:28.960 So yeah, I have some questions about a government that's calling,
00:09:31.960 on one hand, tweets about immigrants and immigration bigoted,
00:09:35.960 and on the other hand talking about regulating to purge the internet of bigoted content.
00:09:40.960 And these particular bureaucrats are not part of that effort.
00:09:43.960 This conversation took place eight months or I guess ten months before the committee released that report.
00:09:50.960 So I'm not saying the two are connected in stories,
00:09:54.960 or I'm not saying these two are connected in the stories in which they both existed,
00:09:58.960 but I am saying that under that banner of why Canadians need to be concerned about it,
00:10:04.960 I have to look at the context of that.
00:10:06.960 And I'm sorry, but I don't trust the government to just be letting everyone do their own thing,
00:10:11.960 because they've already proven they want a needle-nose their way into this.
00:10:15.960 And that's why people have to be concerned.
00:10:17.960 Again, with the election coming up, we've already heard from the government talking about its desire
00:10:22.960 to curb fake news without truly defining what fake news is.
00:10:29.960 So again, when bureaucrats are saying we want to address misconceptions,
00:10:34.960 they're saying this stuff is fake, we've got the true story.
00:10:37.960 How do we square that against a government that, I repeat,
00:10:40.960 wants to regulate the internet so that fake news doesn't exist in election times?
00:10:45.960 And these are questions that I think are so significant right now,
00:10:51.960 and no one in the mainstream media is really asking them.
00:10:55.960 You've got reporters that are assigned to this disinformation beat.
00:10:59.960 They're the ones trying to, you know, look under every rock and find disinformation and misinformation.
00:11:04.960 The problem is, if you set out on a mission to find one particular thing,
00:11:09.960 you have to essentially conjure that.
00:11:13.960 You have to create it if it doesn't exist naturally on its own.
00:11:17.960 And it's not to say that there's not going to be any fake news or dishonest news
00:11:21.960 or, you know, memes that are circulating in the next few months between now and the election.
00:11:26.960 But it is to say that most people are able to filter these things for themselves.
00:11:33.960 Most people can look at a story and say, you know, this doesn't have the ring of truth
00:11:37.960 or I've never heard of this before, I'm going to do some research.
00:11:40.960 And if, if someone can't do that, I don't think that a CBC story, no offense to CBC, is going to dissuade them.
00:11:51.960 If someone's believing like a total conspiracy theory, anything else that contradicts it just becomes part of the conspiracy.
00:11:58.960 So, so the fact that we have these, you know, massive, you know, operations that are focused on curbing disinformation
00:12:05.960 is scary when the government is trying to regulate all of these things by its own admission.
00:12:12.960 I got some comments on the chat here I want to read.
00:12:15.960 David writes, for over a year I was posting that diversity is not strength, unity is strength, diversity adds resilience to strength.
00:12:22.960 And then I heard the last part in a Justin Trudeau speech, but unfortunately not the first two part.
00:12:29.960 You lost me on that part.
00:12:30.960 But he said, did the PMO pay attention to me or someone else who repeated what I said?
00:12:35.960 Well that, oh, I understand. So, so you heard Justin Trudeau say something that you had been saying.
00:12:39.960 Well, who knows? And this is, the problem is that it calls into question anything you do here on, or you do see on social media,
00:12:48.960 because you know that government has started tracking some tweets.
00:12:53.960 So if they're tracking some people's, who's to say they aren't tracking other people's?
00:12:58.960 If they're looking at, you know, your buddy, how do you know they're not looking at you?
00:13:02.960 So there is going to be a continued dialogue here, to use the politician language,
00:13:08.960 where once you see a little bit about what they're doing, you have to question, are they doing this across the board?
00:13:15.960 And I don't doubt it. And remember that the Privy Council office is supposed to be nonpartisan.
00:13:23.960 Now, what this means in theory is that the Prime Minister says, hmm, I want to, you know, building a bridge is a bad example,
00:13:31.960 but I want to do something, and it doesn't fall under department, it falls under us.
00:13:36.960 The bureaucracy, the civil service is supposed to say, okay, our job is to do the bidding of the government of the day,
00:13:42.960 and their job is to make the trains run on time.
00:13:45.960 So if you're a conservative minister and you're writing a bill, you should be able to lean on the civil service to say,
00:13:51.960 I need you to research, you know, all of the times that such and such has happened,
00:13:56.960 because we're using that in the bill. And their job is to say, alright,
00:13:59.960 we are the administrative support for the government, and all the things that are nonpartisan as well.
00:14:06.960 So when you go to the passport office, well, Passport Canada is not a political or partisan entity,
00:14:11.960 they're there to give you a passport. And in Justin Trudeau's case, I think they'll just give them to anyone anyway.
00:14:17.960 But that's neither here nor there. So what happens with the Privy Council office though,
00:14:23.960 is that there's a line that any bureaucracy needs to draw between doing the work that is required for the government to function,
00:14:32.960 and doing the politicians bidding. And we know that Michael Wernick crossed that line.
00:14:38.960 And it sounds when we look at the reports that are being done by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada,
00:14:43.960 like this department is as well. And I guess this is what I would ask.
00:14:47.960 What does this accomplish for Canadians? What does this accomplish for Canadian immigrants?
00:14:52.960 Who benefits apart from the Liberals and Justin Trudeau by all of these lists of critics being put together
00:14:59.960 and shared internally within government? Who benefits from that? It's the Liberals.
00:15:04.960 It is Justin Trudeau who benefits because now there's this list prepared by a 12 person team of taxpayer salaried government bureaucrats saying,
00:15:14.960 these are all the people that have anti-Trudeau sentiments.
00:15:17.960 And I'm going to read some of the comments because this two page list of tweets features a number, features a number of descriptions.
00:15:26.960 One of which, a woman who, the document says, commends Bernier for standing up for Canada, rails against diversity and irregular migration.
00:15:35.960 Another, condemnation of the Trudeau government.
00:15:40.960 Another one, irregular migration.
00:15:43.960 Another one, condemnation of Trudeau Gov.
00:15:46.960 Another one, takes aim at processing times, anti-immigration, UN combat on migration.
00:15:53.960 So all of these things are categorized and basically sorted so that if you are on this list and this is being sent around,
00:16:01.960 the government says, oh, you know, so-and-so is now in our file for wrong speak because they were expressing condemnation of the Trudeau government.
00:16:09.960 And I don't get what this social care thing is about.
00:16:12.960 That's what they call themselves, the social care team.
00:16:14.960 It's in their email signatures.
00:16:16.960 But when they're saying, oh, this Reddit thread was bigoted and, oh, these comments are anti-Trudeau and anti-immigrant.
00:16:22.960 This is social engineering.
00:16:24.960 It's not social care.
00:16:25.960 It's not even social media.
00:16:26.960 This is social engineering.
00:16:29.960 This is social engineering.
00:16:31.960 And when you see in an email here, quote, the comments are unfavorable to the prime minister and government and are also very unsympathetic to those claiming asylum.
00:16:43.960 And this pledge that they'll continue to monitor and the addressing misconceptions, all of these things.
00:16:49.960 This is a bureaucracy that is spying on what Canadians are posting.
00:16:54.960 Now, if you don't want anyone to read it, don't post it.
00:16:57.960 I think that's a very fair comment to make.
00:16:59.960 And I stand by the idea that you need to have a level of self-awareness.
00:17:06.960 If you're going to be posting something that, yes, people who don't like you might read it.
00:17:11.960 People you don't want to see it might read it.
00:17:12.960 And that includes the government.
00:17:14.960 So all of that I completely understand and I'm not disputing at all.
00:17:18.960 But what I am going to say is that that doesn't make it right that the government is using its resource to do this.
00:17:26.960 I mean, at the very worst, we've got a big brother problem.
00:17:29.960 At the very least, at the very least, we've got an issue of government waste here.
00:17:35.960 A 12-person team just spy on Maxine Bernier, Michelle Rempel, and just ordinary Canadians.
00:17:41.960 Which I just find so insanely ridiculous.
00:17:44.960 And Michelle Rempel, who's named in these documents, had actually tweeted about this.
00:17:49.960 She says, instead of closing the loophole in the Safe Third Country Act or agreement, Trudeau spent hundreds of millions on illegal border crossers and dedicated 12 bureaucrats.
00:18:01.960 And she puts in brackets a question mark and an exclamation mark.
00:18:04.960 12 bureaucrats from Citizenship Immigration Canada to monitor my tweets.
00:18:09.960 She says, to the crats reading this, go do something useful.
00:18:13.960 Yeah, and I'm glad she's indicated here that this is not a problem with the individual bureaucrats because mostly they're not self-directed.
00:18:22.960 Their orders come from the government of the day.
00:18:24.960 Rosemary writes, heading towards total government control, it's a very slippery slope.
00:18:30.960 Maggie writes, draining the swamp will affect Canadian government and high office.
00:18:35.960 David writes, social care leads to social control.
00:18:39.960 That's the Orwellian translation.
00:18:41.960 No, you're not wrong, David.
00:18:43.960 I don't know if you mentioned that before or after I said social engineering.
00:18:47.960 If you said it before, I apologize for inadvertently stealing you.
00:18:51.960 But, you know, the thing is, you're absolutely right.
00:18:54.960 That they try to couch this in flowery language.
00:18:57.960 And this is like a communist tool, actually.
00:18:59.960 Doris Lessing, the late British-Iranian author, had talked about this.
00:19:04.960 That, you know, the communist and Soviet mentality was use flowery language to say nothing with as many words as possible.
00:19:12.960 And that way you couldn't get in trouble for saying anything.
00:19:14.960 That was really the original political correctness in many sense.
00:19:18.960 I mean, China, but then the Soviet Union.
00:19:20.960 So that where I was going with that is that when they use all these terms like social care or problematic,
00:19:32.960 what they're doing is they're trying to distract from the idea that they're talking about something very sinister and, yes, Orwellian.
00:19:40.960 And in this case, social engineering or social control or tracking.
00:19:44.960 I mean, that's exactly what it is. It's tracking.
00:19:46.960 It's spying on and cataloging citizens who have been critical of the government.
00:19:52.960 And where we need to go with this as Canadians is, first off, to make sure that this does not translate into all of these other things
00:20:02.960 that government is talking about doing with regard to regulating the internet.
00:20:08.960 And these are things that I was critical of anyway, because these are things that are wrong no matter what.
00:20:13.960 But I go back to what I said at the beginning, that when you put it under this new context,
00:20:18.960 you find there is a significantly sizable hole through which the government could drive a truck, basically,
00:20:26.960 while saying, oh, no, no, no, no, we're not censoring.
00:20:29.960 We're just protecting, you know, discourse and protecting, you know, all of these other things.
00:20:34.960 But they're not doing anything. They're controlling discussion.
00:20:36.960 They're controlling the discussion. That's as simple as it is.
00:20:41.960 And by controlling the discussion, you obscure talking about real ideas.
00:20:48.960 And you obscure the ability for people to talk about all of the ways in which we might implement new policies, new procedures, new whatever.
00:20:59.960 And this is why when you censor discourse, what you are doing is you are trying to throw down a blockade on the expression of ideas themselves.
00:21:14.960 It's that simple.
00:21:16.960 And I want to read a little bit. I teased this at the beginning from Maxime Bernier's party's immigration plan.
00:21:23.960 And I want to preface this by saying that I don't share this because I'm a PPC supporter.
00:21:29.960 I'm not. I'm also not a CPC supporter in this sense.
00:21:32.960 I mean, I've always voted conservative. I don't have an issue telling you that.
00:21:37.960 I ran as a provincial progressive conservative candidate.
00:21:40.960 So my political persuasions are not at all a secret.
00:21:46.960 But in this election, everyone keeps asking me, are you PPC or CPC?
00:21:51.960 And I'm not going to answer it because my focus is firstly on issues themselves.
00:21:56.960 If Andrew Scheer comes out with a great policy, I'll support it.
00:21:59.960 If Maxime Bernier comes out with a great policy, I'll support it.
00:22:02.960 Similarly, if either comes out with a negative policy, I will critique it and condemn it.
00:22:07.960 And on the people themselves, I have friends of mine who are candidates in both parties.
00:22:12.960 I have friends of mine who are running for the Conservatives who I'll support.
00:22:15.960 I have friends of mine who are running for the PPC who I would support as individuals.
00:22:19.960 And I say that for both of them.
00:22:21.960 So I'm not going to get into, and pardon the crassness here,
00:22:24.960 but I'm not going to get into this pissing contest.
00:22:26.960 And I would love it if people could avoid turning the comment section of this into one of those things.
00:22:32.960 Right now, I want to talk about the issue itself.
00:22:34.960 And that's the Maxime Bernier People's Party of Canada approach to immigration.
00:22:39.960 Because the PPC unveiled at a press conference last night its immigration plan.
00:22:46.960 Now this is interesting for a couple of reasons.
00:22:49.960 Because up until now, the Bernier position has been, you know, my platform is, and the party's platform is,
00:22:55.960 what I ran on as a leadership candidate.
00:22:58.960 That was their initial line.
00:23:00.960 But now that the election nears, they're putting out a little bit more in the way of detail on key issues,
00:23:09.960 like freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and also on the issue of immigration.
00:23:15.960 And this brings us to the announcement for the PPC immigration plan.
00:23:21.960 So Bernier says his party would cap immigration at a number between $100,000 and $150,000 a year.
00:23:28.960 Now this would be a 33-year low, basically.
00:23:32.960 We haven't seen that since 1986.
00:23:34.960 It would also be lower than the cap that Bernier himself pitched during the leadership, which was $250,000.
00:23:42.960 So he's basically cutting his own prior limit in half.
00:23:49.960 And he also says we're going to, as a country under a PPC government, embrace a policy that would get rid of extreme multiculturalism.
00:23:58.960 And he took aim at the globalist vision, his words, the globalist vision of Justin Trudeau.
00:24:05.960 So he says what's happening here is that support for immigration will continue to diminish and social tensions are likely to rise.
00:24:12.960 We need to slow down.
00:24:14.960 So what Bernier said is he'd prioritize economic immigrants, which is fine, except fewer refugees, which I think can be fine.
00:24:24.960 I think you need to have, I think you need to look at refugee resettlement on a case-by-case basis.
00:24:28.960 He would considerably limit the family reunification program and make it so you can't sponsor parents and grandparents.
00:24:37.960 Bernier also said he would repeal the Multiculturalism Act, withdraw from the UN Global Compact for Migration,
00:24:44.960 and reject immigrants who do not share Canadian values.
00:24:48.960 So let's talk about a few of these things.
00:24:52.960 So I think the Canadian values test is an important one.
00:24:56.960 Now how you enforce it, sometimes it would be cartoonish, other times it could be effective.
00:25:00.960 I think you need to do it in a smart way.
00:25:03.960 But certainly the idea of admitting there are Canadian values and people who come here need to abide by them,
00:25:09.960 is not and should not be seen as controversial.
00:25:12.960 The immigration limit I don't agree with.
00:25:15.960 I think 100,000, 150,000 is far too low.
00:25:19.960 And the reason I say that is not because I think that in Canada we need to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of immigrants for population growth.
00:25:28.960 I think that your growth level needs to be commensurate with what you can as a country accommodate.
00:25:35.960 And I think under the Stephen Harper years, Canada proved that it could maintain steady growth of 200,000 and even upwards of 200,000 immigrants without losing control of the economic issues or the cultural issues or the tensions that Bernier is talking about.
00:25:54.960 So I don't think that slashing to 1986 levels is necessary.
00:25:59.960 I think in a lot of ways it's very cynical because there is an anti-immigrant vote.
00:26:04.960 And I think by Bernier saying we're going to cut immigration in half, actually more than that.
00:26:09.960 By saying we're going to cut it in less than a third, you're trying to capture a particular type of person.
00:26:14.960 And I don't think he believes it because if he did believe it, he would have made that his policy when he was running for the leadership.
00:26:20.960 And at that time, 250,000 was entirely normal and entirely justifiable.
00:26:26.960 So I think that is the issue that I have with there.
00:26:30.960 It's the number and only really the number because the other things I don't think are disagreeable.
00:26:35.960 When he talks about prioritizing economic immigrants, ending birth tourism, when he talks about making family reunification something that is not going to allow you to bring in your 90-year-old grandmother.
00:26:48.960 I think these are normal, natural policies that any conservative government or conservative party should be talking about.
00:26:56.960 I do think that it's regrettable that conservatives have not been hitting immigration issues as squarely as they need to be.
00:27:05.960 And I look at the birth tourism one.
00:27:07.960 Remember, the conservative members had a vote and made official policy for the party, if memory serves, ending birth tourism.
00:27:15.960 And Andrew Scheer was very equivocal on that.
00:27:18.960 He didn't come out and say, yeah, it's ridiculous that you can just come into the country illegally and your child is a Canadian citizen from birth.
00:27:26.960 That was the point.
00:27:28.960 And I don't think that should be seen as controversial, but this is the climate in which we find ourselves.
00:27:34.960 And Bernier also talked about the idea of pushing back against extreme multiculturalism last summer.
00:27:43.960 And it was that discussion that triggered the tweet tracking from the bureaucrats.
00:27:49.960 So I find it does come a bit full circle here.
00:27:52.960 Andrew Scheer has not put a number on immigrants he wants to let into Canada.
00:27:56.960 He says emphasis on the number is a little bit of a red herring.
00:27:59.960 And I'm inclined to agree with Andrew Scheer on that one.
00:28:02.960 I don't think that we need to basically have an outwoking mentality in politicians of whoever can just give the highest number of immigrant resettlement
00:28:11.960 is supposed to be the wokest and the most pure.
00:28:14.960 I think that the number is ridiculous.
00:28:16.960 It's all about the efficiency.
00:28:18.960 I mean, if we had 350,000 educated, qualified, eager, hardworking immigrants who want to embrace Canadian values coming in,
00:28:29.960 that would be better than 100,000 that are a combination of in need of health services, elderly, not speaking English, not educated,
00:28:40.960 not willing to assimilate with Canadian values, which is why the number doesn't matter.
00:28:44.960 I'd take 350,000 in the first group in a second before I took even 10,000 in the second group.
00:28:51.960 So in that sense, I do agree that the number is not important.
00:28:55.960 But I do think that if you put a number, you have to be prepared to back up why you are.
00:29:00.960 And I've done an interview with Bernier.
00:29:02.960 I would love to do another one with him that's specifically on immigration,
00:29:05.960 because I do have some questions as to why 100,000 when the Harper era,
00:29:09.960 which I think conservatives have typically held up as being the gold standard for immigration,
00:29:14.960 Harper and also Jason Kenney, who's now the Premier of Alberta,
00:29:18.960 why their approach, which was, yes, growth, modest, steady growth, manageable growth,
00:29:24.960 why that's no longer good enough.
00:29:26.960 That's, I think, a significant question.
00:29:28.960 Maggie writes, Bernier also said that he wants immigrants that will benefit Canada,
00:29:32.960 not welfare recipients, my wording, not his.
00:29:35.960 That's Maggie's wording, not mine.
00:29:37.960 The, yeah, and that's, I mean, prioritizing economic immigration should always be what a country does.
00:29:43.960 The idea that a country is supposed to just be, you know, a free-for-all,
00:29:46.960 like, you know, a mall in Toronto of just, you know, if you just want to go in,
00:29:50.960 as long as the doors are open, you go in and you have at it.
00:29:53.960 That should never be what an immigration policy is about.
00:29:56.960 But again, so whether you agree or disagree with what Bernier says here,
00:30:00.960 and we're going to unpack this a little bit further,
00:30:02.960 once I've had time to read more into some of the background of why they're doing certain things.
00:30:07.960 The fact that any Canadian who expresses this opinion will end up on a government watch list is such a significant problem.
00:30:15.960 The read, right, just before we wrap up here, the article, so that he's referring to mine, was disingenuous.
00:30:23.960 It was very clear that the IRCC group was monitoring right-wing threads on Reddit towards refugees at the Radisson Hotel,
00:30:31.960 and it was promptly visited by right-wing types, then attacked by a right-wing arsonist.
00:30:35.960 But these details were not included, nor was the context of the emails.
00:30:39.960 I'm going to defend this because, Reid, I actually included the entire context that was provided by the government.
00:30:45.960 So this was the access to information request. They gave it. I gave the entire thing.
00:30:51.960 That's it. So when I include the source documents, people can see the full context.
00:30:56.960 People can read for themselves. People can identify it. It's not disingenuous.
00:31:00.960 Yes, they were monitoring right-wing comments, not threats. They were monitoring comments.
00:31:05.960 And if you look at the two-page database of tweets, not a single threat was in that.
00:31:10.960 They were monitoring tweets by their own acknowledgement, which you can see in the emails,
00:31:14.960 that were critical of the Trudeau government.
00:31:17.960 So I'd say, sir, of the two of us, your comment is the disingenuous one.
00:31:21.960 We've got to wrap things up here. My thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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00:31:43.960 Hope you have a great weekend. Thank you. God bless, and good day, Canada.
00:31:47.960 Thank you.
00:31:48.960 Thank you.
00:31:49.960 Thank you.
00:31:50.960 Thank you.
00:31:51.960 Thank you.
00:31:52.960 Thank you.