Juno News - November 05, 2025


Liberal bill to expand citizenship makes its way through Parliament

Topics
non-Canadian inmates in prisons
Hosted by
Isaac Lamoureux
Mentioned
Blaine Calkins Monica Gill Bill C-63 Bill C9 David Eby Dominic LeBlanc Michael McCoy Donald Trump Mark Miller Jenny Kwan Mike Howard
Carney’s $50B conflict of interest？ Conservatives accuse floor crosser of ＂betraying＂ constituents

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

164.84

Word count

2,305

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Number of foreigners in Canada s prisons has surged by over 30% since Liberals came into office, and Ottawa claims to have lost track of over a third of their citizenship information. A chain migration bill is going into its third reading in the House of Commons after Conservative and Bloc Quebecois amendments were revoked. British Columbia Premier David Eby dropped plans to run his own anti-tariff ad after meeting with the federal government, due to a breakdown in trade talks caused by an Ontario ad.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The number of foreigners in Canada's prisons has surged by over 30% since Liberals came into office and Ottawa claims to have lost track of over a third of their citizenship information.
00:00:14.000 A chain migration bill is going into its third reading in the House of Commons after Conservative and Bloc Québécois amendments were revoked.
00:00:21.000 British Columbia Premier David Eby dropped plans to run his own anti-tariff ad after meeting with the federal government following a breakdown of trade talks caused by an Ontario ad.
00:00:31.000 Hello Canada, it's Wednesday, November 5th, and this is the True North Daily Brief. I'm Isaac Lamoureux.
00:00:36.000 I'm Alex Zoltan.
00:00:37.000 We've got you covered with all the news you need to know. Let's discuss the top stories of the day and the True North exclusives you won't hear anywhere else.
00:00:44.000 Ottawa has seemingly lost track of nationality details for a third of foreign prisoners in Canada as the number of non-Canadian inmates reported by the Correctional Service of Canada hits a record high increasing by 31% since 2015.
00:01:03.000 The figures, obtained by Conservative MP Blaine Calkins in a written parliamentary question, show the Correctional Service of Canada is unaware of the citizenship of 319 foreign offenders, or 37% of the total, despite spending $126 million last year to house them.
00:01:22.000 Calkins' questions are intriguing. How many foreign nationals are in Canada's federal lock-ups? Where did they come from? What crimes got them committed? And at what cost?
00:01:31.000 The figures, covering 2015-16 to the current 2024-25 fiscal year, show non-Canadian inmates now represent nearly 6% of the total federal prison population, up from 4.5% a decade ago.
00:01:50.000 The government response claims the Correctional Service of Canada cannot provide a specific cost breakdown for housing non-Canadian inmates because it does not distinguish costs by citizenship status.
00:02:01.000 It did, however, include average annual costs per inmate across all federal offenders, which have ballooned 34% from $116,500 in 2016-17 to $156,700 in 2023-24, with figures for the current fiscal year still pending.
00:02:22.000 According to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian's annual income is around $59,900.
00:02:31.000 This means keeping a single non-Canadian inmate behind federal bars now costs taxpayers more than two years' worth of their before-tax income.
00:02:39.000 So, Alex, what are the demographics like among those foreigners in prison and what could be done to reduce the sheer number of those in prisons?
00:02:46.000 Well, I'll address your first question first, Isaac.
00:02:49.000 So, in terms of what demographics look like among those foreigners or non-Canadians in prisons, unfortunately we don't know.
00:02:57.000 And it appears as though Correctional Service Canada also does not know.
00:03:01.000 So, the total number, if my memory serves me correctly, is 457 non-Canadians in federal prisons.
00:03:07.000 Federal prisons are generally reserved for individuals who have been convicted of a serious indictable crime.
00:03:13.000 Those who are awaiting trial, by contrast, would typically be in provincial prisons.
00:03:17.000 Of those 457 non-Canadians in federal prisons, over 300 of them, Correctional Service Canada says they do not know or they are not willing to disclose what their citizenship status is.
00:03:30.000 That obviously is a curious, if not concerning, information gap.
00:03:37.000 I sometimes joke that it doesn't exactly exude confidence in me that we're going to be able to deport these individuals upon their release from prison, given that we don't know what country they are from.
00:03:47.000 I did email Canadian Correctional Service Canada, and I'll read you what I emailed them.
00:03:54.000 I said, To whom it may concern, I am writing to kindly seek clarification on data provided in the Correctional Services of Canada response to Parliamentary Question Q301 from the 45th Parliament First, responded to on October 31st by the Ministry of Public Safety.
00:04:08.000 In the breakdown of non-Canadian inmates by country of citizenship, a substantial 319 entries are categorized as, quote, unknown, at a reported total, sorry, of 894.
00:04:20.000 There's actually a lot more non-Canadian inmates than I originally thought earlier.
00:04:24.000 This represents over 35% of the list of non-Canadian inmates, which seems unusually high.
00:04:29.000 Could you please explain the reasons for this classification?
00:04:32.000 For instance, is it due to incomplete intake records, self-reported information not being provided, privacy protections under the Privacy Act, or other operational factors?
00:04:42.000 Understanding this would be helpful to provide context to my readers and to ensure transparency in how citizenship data is collected and reported for federal inmates.
00:04:50.000 Thank you for your time and assistance. I gave Correctional Services Canada a rather generous 24-hour runway for a response and they did not respond by deadline or at all.
00:05:02.000 So the question of how many non-Canadians are from where remains unanswered and it's not exactly clear why.
00:05:10.000 In terms of your second question, how could we reduce the number of non-Canadians in prison?
00:05:14.000 I think the obvious answer is to reduce immigration generally or to have greater safeguards in terms of who we are letting into the country.
00:05:24.000 A controversial bill dubbed the, quote, chain migration bill by conservatives is moving forward after the Liberals and NDP rejected amendments that would have required stricter security checks, language tests, and stronger ties to Canada for new citizens.
00:05:37.000 The bill, known as Bill C3, is now headed for its third reading.
00:05:42.000 Bill C3, also known as an Act to Amend the Citizenship Act, passed with 169 in favour to 163 against in the House of Commons on Monday after the NDP voted to reverse the amendments made by the Bloc Québécois and Conservatives during a committee meeting.
00:05:58.000 The NDP had no say at the committee level as they do not hold official party status.
00:06:04.000 The bill, which is expected to pass in the House of Commons, is in its third reading and will be voted on in the Canadian Senate and it would automatically grant citizenship to individuals born abroad who are descendants of immigrants who later became citizens.
00:06:18.000 Without the bill, there is a, quote, first generation limit, meaning those born in another country are only automatically citizens if one parent was born in Canada.
00:06:28.000 In December of last year, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that a previous iteration of the bill would grant citizenship to approximately 115,000 new people over five years, at a cost to taxpayers of around $20.8 million during the same period.
00:06:43.000 During immigration committee meetings, the Bloc and Conservatives would have required these new automatic citizens to demonstrate proficiency in either English or French, to possess a basic knowledge of Canadian history, to pass security checks, and to extend the length of time the parent of the new citizen had to be in Canada from three years to five.
00:06:59.000 NDP Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan introduced an amendment reversing the joint amendments from the Conservatives before the bill passed and similarly passed on the House floor.
00:07:08.000 Conservative MP Michael Maugh lamented that a party without official status and that didn't participate in the committees was able to reverse, quote, months of work done at the committee with the Liberal government.
00:07:18.000 He said the committee's work was being, quote, undone by the post-nationalist NDP and Liberals.
00:07:24.000 It is not a high bar to demand proficiency in one of our official languages. It is not a high bar to demand that a prospective Canadian citizen should understand the responsibilities and privileges of Canadian citizenship.
00:07:41.000 We expect much more of someone getting their driver's license. It is not a high bar to demand a security assessment, but it is a high bar for Canadians of convenience who would like to wear Team Canada's jersey without being a team player in our national ring.
00:08:01.000 Without the Conservatives and block safeguards, Isaac, this bill is sure to bring in over 100,000 new immigrants to Canada at a time when we have a housing crisis, many strains on our health care system, so on and so forth, many of which who don't speak English. 0.96
00:08:15.000 How could that affect Canada's institutions generally?
00:08:18.000 Yeah, Alex. So I think the first thing to say is that this isn't just a theoretical debate about passports.
00:08:24.000 It lands directly on institutions that are already buckling under the weight of record population growth.
00:08:29.000 On scale alone, we're not talking about some rounding error.
00:08:33.000 The Parliamentary Budget Officer pegged an earlier version of Bill C-3 at roughly 115,000 new citizens over five years.
00:08:40.000 And the Immigration Minister couldn't even say how many people would qualify under the latest version, or whether they'd face criminal record checks, language expectations, or even a basic citizenship test.
00:08:51.000 So you're potentially adding a six-figure number of people to the system with almost no clarity on screening or integration.
00:08:58.000 And we can already see what this would look like in schools.
00:09:01.000 In Calgary, the Public Board recently said that about 31% of its 142,000 students are learning English as a second language.
00:09:10.000 So roughly eight kids in a typical 28-student classroom, and it's now asking the province for $148 million just to cope with complexity, including hiring interpreters for regular classrooms.
00:09:22.000 So if you layer tens of thousands of more automatic citizens on top of that, many of whom may arrive with limited English or French, the pressure hits education budgets, special needs supports, and even independent schools that already serve a lot of newcomer families.
00:09:35.000 And we know healthcare is facing the same dynamic. Under Mark Miller, non-permanent residents climbed to about 7% of Canada's population, and the Fraser Institute recorded the longest median wait time on record, which is 30 weeks between referral and treatment.
00:09:50.000 Ottawa was running ads overseas bragging about free healthcare while provinces were warning that hospitals and clinics were at capacity.
00:09:58.000 If Bill C-3 quietly swells the pool of people entitled to full services without a corresponding plan to expand doctors, nurses, and beds, you're deepening a crisis in healthcare.
00:10:09.000 Ontario doctor Mike Hart previously told True North that language barriers and rising population pressures are worsening the province's doctor shortages and wait times, noting that one of his patients now faces a three-year wait just to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist.
00:10:25.000 And Hart said when two people are speaking different languages, it is going to complicate things and make things difficult, adding that the situation is getting worse as population growth outpaces the number of available specialists.
00:10:38.000 There's also a rule of law and social cohesion angle. Conservatives tried to attach very basic conditions such as speaking an official language, knowing something about Canada, clear security checks, and those were stripped out.
00:10:50.000 At the same time, birthright citizenship remains untouched despite a documented rise in birth tourism and hundreds of thousands of people in limbo on expired visas or dubious asylum claims.
00:11:00.000 So the risk isn't just that we add 100,000 people, it's that we add them into schools, hospitals, and social programs that are already strained while signaling that the state is more focused on expanding the passport club than on making sure the responsibilities and expectations of being Canadian are shared and enforceable, which of course will fuel public backlash against both immigration and the institutions themselves.
00:11:21.000 British Columbia's NDP government has abandoned its plans to run anti-tariff ads in the U.S. which would have highlighted American tariffs on Canadian goods after meeting with the federal government.
00:11:35.000 EB confirmed the ads wouldn't be aired alongside Federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc while speaking with reporters in Vancouver after a forced resummit between the provincial and federal governments.
00:11:46.000 The admission came in response to a question from City News reporter Monica Gull who had directed her query to LeBlanc.
00:11:53.000 Gull asked whether Ottawa was concerned about BC moving ahead with an anti-tariff advertising campaign after Ontario's similar effort prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to suspend trade talks with Canada.
00:12:04.000 Rather than allow LeBlanc to answer, EB stepped in.
00:12:07.000 Cutting off further responses even though Gull's original question had been directed to him, LeBlanc said, quote,
00:12:12.000 You've just answered it, thank you. The shelved BC campaign was intended to highlight what EB has described as, quote,
00:12:18.000 50% combined duties and tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber entering the United States higher, he claims, than those facing Russian fibre products.
00:12:26.000 So Alex, obviously you've been following the Cowichan lands dispute. Did EB address that potential private property dispute during the press conference too? And if so, what did he say?
00:12:35.000 So, Isaac, I did attend the Town Hall on the Cowichan tribes v Canada decision in Richmond last Tuesday.
00:12:44.000 The city lawyer for the city of Richmond has confirmed that this will impact landowners in BC in that particular area.
00:12:52.000 It's about seven square kilometres in Richmond. But this also has the ability to impact the entire province.
00:12:57.000 BC's, I guess you could call it unique approach to reconciliation, is rooted in the fact that our province was confederated into the rest of Canada much later than other provinces.
00:13:08.000 And so we did not actually have negotiated treaties with a lot of the tribes here in this province.
00:13:15.000 And that's why you'll hear a lot more land acknowledgements in BC that we'll begin with.
00:13:18.000 We are on the unceded territory of ex-First Nations tribe.
00:13:22.000 Don't take my word for it, though. I have spoken to numerous lenders who have said they will not touch this particular area.
00:13:29.000 And David EB himself said that this is of serious concern and he said that he would be worried.
00:13:35.000 So this is absolutely a something burger.
00:13:37.000 And everybody in BC should be very, very concerned about its potential implications on private property ownership in the province.
00:13:44.000 That's it for today, folks. Thanks for tuning in.
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