Juno News - January 22, 2024Liberals are capping student visas, but is it enough？
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Summary
In the wake of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canada announced a 35% reduction in the number of international student visas granted to Canadian citizens and permanent residents, and a new cap on the total number of foreign workers allowed into the country.
Transcript
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welcome to canada's most irreverent talk show this is the andrew lawton show brought to you by true
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north guten tag or uh guten morgen if you're on the west it was i can't you have to like roll the
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r a little bit but i know i'm going to sound like i'm offending the kind people of germany switzerland
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and austria if i try it is great to talk to you again back from the hometown here i'm back in
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canada this is the andrew lawton show canada's most irreverent talk show on true north we were
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in Davos in the Swiss Alps last week, not on a skiing vacation. I would certainly break my
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ankles, legs, feet, hands, neck, and probably take out a couple of people along the way if I
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were to try skiing. No, we were chasing down elites on the streets of Davos, which sometimes
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people were slipping a little bit. I had like one woman who I think was like the deputy head of the
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World Trade Organization, just like face plant in front of me. And I felt that would have been
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a rude time to ambush her so we all helped her up and she was on her merry way but if you followed
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our coverage in Davos last week it was great to have you tuned in thank you so much for doing that
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we will have a bit of an update on well not an update but we'll have a bit of a post-mortem
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of that later on in the show also our good friend and Monday correspondent Chris Sims
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from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation will be with us in I think about 12 minutes or so
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to talk about the fact that, well, you and I are grappling with inflation. Members of Parliament
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are getting yet another pay raise, one that is, if my math is correct, which it usually isn't,
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but I think it is here, a raise that outpaces inflation. So they're actually making more money
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well and above cost of living increases, even if they were entitled to that, which is dubious at
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best. But I want to talk about the big news of the day first, which is the federal government
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taking immigration seriously. The Liberal government is finally reining in rampant
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increases to immigration, which are causing shortages of housing, of jobs, of
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social welfare programs. Here is Immigration Minister Mark Miller.
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I am announcing three principal measures. One, a temporary two-year cap on new international
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student permits. It is the latest in a series of measures to improve program integrity
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and set international students up for the success in order to maintain a sustainable level of
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temporary residence in Canada as well. To ensure that there is no further growth in the number of
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international students in Canada for 2024, we are setting a national application intake cap for a
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period of two years. For 2024, the cap is expected to result in approximately 364,000 approved study
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permits, a decrease of 35% from 2023. In the spirit of fairness, we are also allocating the
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cap space by province based on population, such as that some provinces will see much more
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significant reductions we'll continue to work closely with those provinces and territories
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to put these measures into place as they will be responsible for determining how the cap is
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distributed between its designated learning institutions that they have jurisdiction over
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i've had productive conversations in particular with british columbia and ontario already and
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we all recognize that more needs to be done to protect the integrity of our system while
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supporting international students. In addition, effective immediately, applicants must provide a
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provincial attestation with their study permit application. Oh, sorry, sorry, I fell asleep there.
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Okay, no, so I may have misled you when I said there was some big, bold changes that were taking
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place uh the big bold change from the government is that they are going to drop by 35 percent
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the number of international student visas they're approving so they're going to have 360 000 now
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instead of i think it was around 420 000 okay but the 500 000 a year uh that are coming into canada
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as new permanent residents that number is still going to keep going up and the number of temporary
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foreign workers that's about half a million a year that's going to continue going up uh so
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whoop-dee-doo there are going to be 60 to 70 000 fewer international students coming into this
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country okay um yeah you know it's funny they're trying to pretend that they're doing something
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but they are not and here's the thing about this i am very much a believer in immigration i think
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everyone has to be we are a country that is going to go into demographic well it is in demographic
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decline we're a country that is going to cease to have a population without immigration but the
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problem is that the government has used this as an excuse and a pretext to have a very irresponsible
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approach to immigration because the government actually does not believe that there is anything
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worth protecting in this country they believe that in the words of my old friend Mark Stein
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The Canadian society can just be like the Queen's terminal at Heathrow airport where its population
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is transient. It's made up of whoever happens to be walking by at a particular moment. There is no
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meaning to the word Canadian to the Liberals. Now international students are not permanent
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residents. There is a pathway for them to stay in Canada, many do, but at a certain point what
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we have to realize here is that international students are coming to Canada because oftentimes
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they are looking for a way into the country that has nothing to do with their studies. Fraud in
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the international student world is incredibly, incredibly rampant. The government has investigated
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this. They found that there are these pseudo phony colleges that are operating out of strip malls in
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Brampton that are just giving out letters of acceptance. And the government has been going
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along with this. The government has been issuing people these visas. But for legitimate international
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students, you have universities that view them as major, major cash cows. These kids are paying
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$50,000 a year in tuition and none of the expectations that are there for domestic
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students exist for international students. So universities love this. They'll just churn out
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letters of acceptance left, right, and center. And as a result, you have at universities like
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the U of T and Queens and Western and UBC, students that don't even have a basic proficiency in
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English that are being accepted and kept in and eventually graduated without ever actually
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developing a proficiency in English because the universities know they can profit. They can profit
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hugely from international students. So this has become, and again, there's nothing wrong with
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being an international student that says, I want to go to Western. Someone I knew somewhat well
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was from Germany, went to my alma mater. I knew someone from Sweden there. They all went for the
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right reasons. They took what they learned. They went elsewhere with it afterwards. But you have
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students that are using international student visas to do an end run around Canada's immigration.
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And many of them are being sold a bill of goods, which is absolutely shambolic here. I have,
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for example, in my own community, I have a college that has a number, a huge number of
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Indian international students. Students are going to this school and they are living in absolute
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and abject poverty. If you order food delivery, it's one of these students overwhelmingly no
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matter what day or time that's going to be delivering it to you. You have students that
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are staying in illegal housing situations because it's all they can afford. So they're shoving
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multiple beds into basement rooms. They don't have windows illegally passing them off as bedrooms
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because they can't afford to be here. And all of this is because you have universities, colleges,
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and the government that are juicing the numbers without any regard for what the situation on the
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ground looks like. Now, Conservative leader Pierre Paliyev did a press conference this morning
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and he touched on that somewhat. Take a look. The question is, how do we get into this mess?
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We didn't, you know, most Canadians didn't even know there was an international student program
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eight years ago because it was so peaceful. They might have seen students happily walking off to
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class who were from another country, but we didn't think it was a problem because it wasn't. It worked.
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we had the most successful immigration system in the history of the world here in Canada.
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There are nations around the world that come to study how we got it so right for so long.
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And then along came Justin Trudeau, and through his total incompetence and irresponsibility,
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through his endless and nauseating virtue signaling,
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has destroyed that common-sense consensus on immigration.
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Immigrants, international students, and temporary foreign workers are not to blame for his incompetence.
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He is the one that brought hundreds of thousands of people here without homes to cram 16 or 17 into a one-bedroom or basement apartment.
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He and Sean Frazier granted the study permits for tens of thousands of students to come and go to fake colleges that the Liberal government now admits are, were, quote, puppy mills.
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Let's blame the one man who is responsible for this disaster, and that is our incompetent Prime Minister.
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What Pierre Palliev is saying there is what I've been talking about,
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what a number of people have been talking about.
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He takes the view that, look, we shouldn't blame the students for this.
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I would blame the students who knowingly engaged in fraud.
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I would blame the students that were going to do an end run around the immigration system,
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signing up for a school that there was no earthly reason to want to travel across the world to attend
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But students that have done the right thing, that have signed up for a university or college,
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wound up in Canada and only to find that, oh, well, I can't afford an apartment.
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Or I'm just going to shirk my studies because that's the only way I can get a job to afford to stay here
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and maybe hopefully cobble together an education.
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So students have been put into the middle of this.
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But I think we cannot exonerate from this the universities and colleges themselves,
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which have completely abandoned their mandate, which is to provide an education.
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I've talked to students and heavens, I've talked to professors who have seen this decline,
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this decline in the caliber of the international students over years,
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because they know the universities are putting their bottom line above their mandate of providing an education.
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Now, as long as one of these international students doesn't misgender someone, they will be fine even if they don't speak English and are unable to pen an essay that would be expected of anyone else to get a passing grade in the class.
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So no, when the government just wakes up one moment and says, hmm, I think we're going to drop it to 35% without doing anything else on immigration, I just have to roll my eyes and say, are you frigging kidding me?
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Even, you know, economists who are not right-wingers
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Oh, well, there's no one to do the construction.
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So we need more immigrants to build the houses.
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Oh, great. We've got some more houses. Oh, wait, no. But now we need more for those immigrants to
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build those houses to live in. And you end up in this seemingly endless cycle where we have a
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country that keeps rapidly increasing its number of immigrants every year while not being able to
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scale up all of the things you need to integrate immigrants into Canadian society, both economically
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and in terms of housing and jobs. And the thing missing from this, which I've talked about on
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the past and no one else wants to talk about is that there is a non-economic dimension to
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immigration as well. There is a cultural and a social aspect to immigration, which no one,
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liberal, conservative, or otherwise wants to talk about. I shouldn't say that. The liberals want to
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talk about it because they just want to call anyone racist if they bring it up. So I guess
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they do want to talk about it, but not in a constructive or productive way. But there is a
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cultural and social aspect to this. And I would say that most hardworking immigrants in this
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country are well aware of that because they came here because there is a work ethic and a set of
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values that they wanted for themselves and their families. And they, these people, these immigrants
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are the ones that oftentimes raise the biggest objections when people come here who do not want
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to integrate in the Canadian way of life. And to be honest, I can't blame them because we have a
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federal government, a media culture, an academic culture, which doesn't even seem to want to concede
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that there is a Canadian way of life that is worth protecting. We have a war on Canadian institutions
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from the government, so how can we expect immigrants to this country to want to uphold
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or protect any Canadian institutions? I mean, we can't even fly the flag at full mast in this
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country for long periods of time, so how could we expect anyone who comes here to be proud of that
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flag and the country and what it stands for? So all of that is to say that absolutely there has
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been a tremendous erosion of the immigration consensus and it's coincided with the Canadian
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values consensus and this goes back far I mean look this is a bigger problem than Justin Trudeau
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because we're talking about a cultural phenomenon here but Justin Trudeau has certainly taken that
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cultural phenomenon and embedded it into the Canadian political and legal framework here which
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is why we have these immigration numbers that have been so catastrophic for this country so
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yeah, whoop-dee-doo, a 35% reduction in international student visas. It's not going
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to amount to a hill of beans. One thing I wanted to talk about, all of these politicians that
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have presided over this decline have gotten a pay raise. Have you gotten a pay raise yet this year?
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I don't see a lot of hands out there. I mean, I'm looking at a camera, but I'm imagining
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that if you're sitting in your living room or driving around, you probably wouldn't have
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raised your hand for that had I actually asked you to in a serious way. Well, parliamentarians
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play by different rules than we do. Much as the folks we scrummed on the streets of Davos last
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week, it's rules for me and rules for thee. Never the twain shall meet. Just to look at the numbers
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here, courtesy of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, MP pay increases are going up between $8,100
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a lowly backbench MP, then you're on the bottom end
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or if you are Justin Trudeau, he's on the top end.
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Well, that is, as I understand it, larger than inflation.
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So we're not even just talking about keeping up
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We're talking about actually getting more money
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Chris Sims is sure of most things, though, in this world.
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She is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and back with us as on every Monday.
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Chris, I'm not messing up the numbers here, right?
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We have to also keep in mind how much these MPs are paid for things like housing, right?
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All of their bills are paid, their travel is paid, all that stuff that you and I will have to, you know,
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save money for, things like your heating bills or transportation, anything like that,
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your rent, your mortgage, the vast majority of that is covered courtesy of the taxpayer.
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And we really need to stress here, the Prime Minister is now going to be making,
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as of April 1st, once these pay raises kick in, the Prime Minister is now going to be
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paid more than $405,000. So just like picture what you make,
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quadruple it, more than quadruple it. Imagine yourself as the taxpayer, which you probably are
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and you're working, you know, nine to five, you're working 40 hours a week. You probably work pretty
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hard for what you do earn. Now picture $405,000 plus expenses. So we have to keep in mind that
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he gets to stay in a mansion, which is called Rideau Cottage, but it's not a cottage right next
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to the governor general. And we pay for this massive lake house at Harrington Lake and we pay
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for all of his transportation. So again, $405,000. This is what's annoying though, is that we're not
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hearing enough Members of Parliament, Andrew, speaking up against these pay hikes, including
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from some of the usual suspects that we would be expecting to speak up against these automatic pay
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increases. So we want to see Members of Parliament really walk the talk here. If they want to truly
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save taxpayers money, they should do leadership things and lead by example and say, you know what,
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I'm going to donate all of my pay raise to charity. And as soon as my team, we don't care
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if it's the blue team or the orange team, as soon as my team is in power, I'm going to stop these
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MP pay increases and perhaps even cut member of parliament pay. That would be novel. And that's
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something we want to see coming out of Ottawa. And one thing that I would point out here as well
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is that this is exactly the problem of automatic increases.
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I don't think there should ever be an automatic escalator
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because it lets politicians do exactly what they're doing now,
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I mean, they should really have to vote for this
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There's a law that automatically increases your pay on April 1st, no fooling, and you don't need to trot yourself into the House of Commons. You don't even need to sign up through Zoom or whatever terminology they're using there and vote for your own pay increase.
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But what's really disingenuous is when they throw their hands up in the air metaphorically and say, oh, what are we to do? It's automatic. They work in the legislature. They are legislators. They create law. They could stop this tomorrow if they felt like it.
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So it's not as if some sort of alien god of government is forcing Prime Minister Trudeau to take more than $405,000 home every year and is foisting this upon him unwillingly.
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They could stop this tomorrow if they felt like it.
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Apparently, though, they just don't feel like it.
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And it's always bad when politicians are taking big pay hikes.
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But especially now, as my friend Franco Terrazzano points out, people are struggling to afford hamburger.
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Like I was just doing my family grocery shopping last night and I noticed a family ahead of me.
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The mom was putting away the grapes and putting away the stuff that she could, you know, eke out and do without with her kids that week.
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These are the people paying for these politicians' pay increases.
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So that's pretty gross and we want to see them stopped.
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A lot of us, I can't speak for you, but a lot of us in the private sector during the lockdowns and the madness that was happening over the last four years, right in the heat of it and the teeth of it, at the worst of it, a lot of people in the private sector took pay cuts.
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And now just imagine the small business owners who were completely locked out, frozen out, lost everything.
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these are the people who are paying for these politicians pay increases they've not missed one
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i was just going to bring up the seba payouts i mean we have businesses across this country that
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cannot afford to pay back the i think it's forty thousand dollars in a lot of cases if people took
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the full amount uh in seba loans now look they took this back they took this money they knew
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they were going to have to pay it back but you have businesses that are saying i literally cannot
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afford this well governments are finding uh room in their budget to pay mps more and i i don't
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want to do the math here, but you even take that lower number, $8,000 and multiply it by 338.
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That's massive. Yeah. It's an enormous amount of money. And as far as the, you know, the 0.1.2
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trillion dollar debt goes, it's not going to balance our books, but it leads by example.
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And if we saw politicians and MPs leading by example and saying, you know what, I'm going to
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take a pay cut. Here's my stipend. Here's my pay stub. I'm taking this pay cut, or I'm going to
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campaign on cutting everybody's pay. I'm going to make sure that we actually put our time and
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our dues in too. That would go a long way. And to your point on folks who were taking CERB,
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yeah, that needs to be payback, but we need to be as compassionate and kind and patient as possible
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because in many cases, these businesses were forced to lock down. They were forced to shut
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down. This is not something that they just woke up in 2020 and said, you know what? It feels like
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a fun idea. I'm going to completely freeze out all of my employees. I'm going to close the
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restaurant that I worked for for 20 years. They didn't, no sane person does that. So by and large,
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most of the folks who were taking those payments were doing so to keep the lights on somehow,
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to keep even their credit rating flowing in hopes that they could one day open up again. So yes,
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they do need to pay it back, but we need to be as calm and reasonable and kind as possible.
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and that is not something we're seeing coming from this federal government it really reminds
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me and to remember back in the before times when the cra was shaking down waitresses for every
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single dollar tip they got yeah they were going after girls working at the mall andrew saying
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did you get 40 off that pair of slacks well that's a taxable benefit like this is crazy these are the
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same people jetting off to places like you just got back from and thank you yeah you know well
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I just, I wanted to ask you the devil's advocate position here, because we do hear sometimes
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people say, listen, if you want to attract good people in politics that aren't there
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for the money, there needs to be some fair compensation.
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And I'm sympathetic to the argument in some way.
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I mean, not everyone can afford to do the Donald Trump thing and say, I'm going to donate
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Or I think Javier Malay in Argentina, I think he did like a raffle for his salary, which
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which was like, again, it sounded impressive, like, you know, 25, you know, 2.5 million pesos,
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but it was like $2,000 or something. But, but, but how should this be dealt with? Because
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obviously you can't just bake in a salary in, you know, 1867 and never increase it. So how
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should this be dealt with? As minimally as humanly possible. So let's start even from the
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ground up from local politics. Okay. Unfortunately, now you're seeing at local city halls in places
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like Calgary and Edmonton, the mayors being paid more than the premiers. You are seeing
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councillors whose life goal it is to park their butts at city council for the next 10, 15, 20
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years and make a career of it. That was never the role of local government. Local government was
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always staffed by people who were former teachers, retired police officers, current shop owners,
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people who were either directly currently invested in what was going on in their neighbourhoods,
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like a shopkeeper, or had already worked most of their lives and now had time to give back.
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That is the entire reason why we call it public service. They should be paid a stipend for showing
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up to those meetings and doing the homework and writing the reports. That should not be a career
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goal of a four-year undergrad in poli-sci and city planning degree person. That is not what
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that is supposed to be for. That's where the rot starts. It's that level of entitlement and
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permanent government that leads to this sort of nonsense. Then you jump up provincial. It's
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slightly better, slightly worse than city politics, by and large. Now you're at the federal level.
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I would turn the question around and say, are you getting good value for money?
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So when you think of all the different services you have from private corporations, whatever it is,
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internet service, food production, delivery time, all that stuff, airplane tickets,
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think of all of the services that you actually use and get over a calendar year. Ask yourself
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if you're getting good value for the money that you pay. Be as honest as you can. Now ask yourself
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if you're getting awesome value for money from your federal politicians. I'm venturing a guess
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that the answer is usually no. So the whole argument of, well, we need to attract good people,
00:27:01.880
are we all right i have one weird idea i want to run by you okay i part of it i don't like but i
00:27:09.240
think there's something to it if we massage it a little bit for every dollar you cut in spending
00:27:14.800
you get 10 that goes to the house of commons as salaries
00:27:19.160
i'm gonna have to think about that but i like it yeah it's you have like your base salary is like
00:27:26.740
you know, a hundred dollars a week or something, but for every dollar you save that year, uh, you
00:27:32.140
know, 10 cents of it goes into a pool that pays MPs, but you only get it if you voted in favor
00:27:37.680
of the spending cut. That's so smart. Otherwise like everyone cuts spending and then the NDP
00:27:42.400
gets to like benefit from the, uh, the spending cut commission. I don't know. I, there's something
00:27:46.420
to that. I've got to figure out the fine tune details. Have you bought the domain name yet
00:27:50.280
or no i don't know what what's the domain name like uh cuts cuts for paychecks cuts for cuts
00:27:57.140
for yeah what is it uh that's for cookies when do you get your cookie when you made your cut
00:28:01.420
something like that yeah oh man i'm trying yeah i'm trying to think of uh all right we'll try to
00:28:06.980
come up with a snappy name and we'll book the domain by the way i would never normally tell
00:28:12.180
a lady to disrobe but i have to point out that the way your jacket is it was saying fund cbc the
00:28:17.580
entire interview. Oh, no. Let's not do that. No. Although we did it. One of my colleagues did
00:28:23.280
email and say he wanted that shirt. Oh, nice. Well, we don't make money off of them. They're
00:28:28.840
at cost. I think they're only 20 bucks. Just go to our website. Everything is included. We don't
00:28:33.420
make money off of it. We just want to spread the good word that we should defund the CBC,
00:28:38.880
not fund. You actually had a... I haven't read it yet, but you flagged a CBC story for my producer.
00:28:43.940
what's going on there very quickly and we can touch on this again next week uh while you guys
00:28:48.260
were out holding truth to power and speaking truth to power thank you very much and davos for doing
00:28:52.900
that because that's where a lot of bad ideas come from folks we need to cut them off there so thank
00:28:56.820
you for doing that um black locks reporter uncovered the fact that uh you know how the cbc
00:29:03.300
talks about how vitally important they are for indigenous programming well apparently point three
00:29:10.180
70%. So 0.3% of their money goes towards Indigenous programming. And Black Locks found
0.98
00:29:19.040
that they cut that budget, the Indigenous programming budget, by about $25,000 last year.
00:29:25.440
So the next time that the bigwigs at CBC try to say, oh, we're essential. No, you're not. And in
00:29:31.880
fact, you cut that funding. Nice. Well, I think that is definitely something we should look into.
00:29:38.000
Yeah, CBC always loves to do the glitzy, glamorous stuff
00:29:41.640
and not the things that are actually in their mandate.
00:30:08.000
Chris. That's got a nice ring to it. Chops for checks. All right. Well, I'm probably going to
00:30:11.800
forget by the time we get off air. So I'll let you do the domain name searching there. As you know,
00:30:17.360
if you've watched this show for any considerable length of time, I don't do sports coverage. And
00:30:22.120
when I do, it angers the people that like sports out there, of which I'm told there are two or
00:30:27.120
three. Now, I don't know if UFC is itself a sport. When I first heard people talking about UFC,
00:30:32.600
I thought they were talking about like the barcodes you scan at the grocery store, but I'm
00:30:35.360
told that's, uh, UPC, but I know Sean saying MMA, I know what MMA is. It's a degree in
00:30:40.540
multimedia arts. Um, Oh, sorry. No mixed, uh, mixed martial arts fight. I see Sean's giving
00:30:46.000
me all these acronyms. He's like MMA, UFC, LMAO. Um, but, uh, the, the point of this is that there
00:30:52.940
is this big, huge, uh, fighting championship UFC. Uh, I've heard little snippets of it last week.
00:30:59.000
I think there was some guy that was going off against Justin Trudeau. So it broke from the
00:31:02.960
sports world into the political world. And that was how I was able to learn a bit. But there was
00:31:09.400
this chant that was taking place at a UFC match last week, which I will share a redacted version
00:31:16.120
with you for. Now, it's no fun when you have to bleep out the good word, but they were all saying
00:31:30.000
F. Trudeau. F. Trudeau, it's reminiscent of F. Joe Biden, which was, or let's go Brandon,
00:31:36.280
if you're that one reporter, that became a common refrain at NASCAR. Now, I don't believe in the
00:31:42.000
incivility and profanity there, but it was, I shouldn't say I don't believe in it. I've used,
00:31:46.620
I've used dirty words. Sorry if my mother's watching, but the point is here, this is what
00:31:51.440
they've decided to do. I believe Trudeau's son, Xavier, was actually at that match. So I don't
00:31:57.100
know if he was joining in the chant or if he was like just looking away, hoping that no one would
00:32:01.020
notice him. But UFC has become now a little bit of a linchpin of the culture war against Trudeau.
00:32:07.700
Real people that are out there that aren't a fan of Canada's prime minister. You had that one UFC
00:32:12.560
fighter last week that was criticizing him. And then there was a reporter that decided to bring
00:32:17.180
up this political aspect, not Trudeau specifically, but the politics of what UFC fighters can say
00:32:24.780
to dana white who's the head of the league you obviously give a long leash to your fighters
00:32:31.620
about you know what they can say when they are up there with the ufc microphone and you are
00:32:36.760
getting into territory of homophobia transphobia like is there i don't give anybody a leash well
00:32:42.500
i'm saying you a leash i'm like free speech control what people say gonna tell people what
00:32:50.820
to believe going to tell people i don't tell any other human being what to say what to think and
00:32:57.080
there's no leashes on any of them what is your question i was asking that question i'll move on
00:33:05.140
though yeah probably a good idea that's ridiculous to say i give somebody a leash free speech brother
00:33:11.740
people can say whatever they want and they can believe whatever they want
00:33:14.460
i like the sheepishness at the end of like what was your question oh that was that was my
00:33:20.800
question, but I'm going to move on. Yeah. So right there you had, I mean, because again, I get a
00:33:26.300
sense from people that watch sporting events that athletes are very tightly constrained in what they
00:33:31.300
can say generally. And they're very heavily regulated and they get punished and penalized
00:33:35.620
and sanctioned if they say the wrong thing. And it's kind of refreshing that here we have the
00:33:39.100
head of this league saying, yeah, they can say what they want. It's free speech. He thought it
00:33:42.520
was just an absurd question. So if a UFC fighter wants to get up there and talk about how he doesn't
00:33:47.040
like Justin Trudeau and taking him at the media for being Canadian, then that is absolutely
00:33:52.500
something that is within their prerogative in this league. I mean, clearly the fans themselves
00:33:57.120
are on board and the woke-ification of sports is a big reason that a lot of people are tuning
00:34:02.140
out pro sports. So that's the one thing I've learned about it anyway. And then every now and
00:34:05.800
then someone will tell me something and it'll be about the sports themselves. And I'm like,
00:34:09.700
I'm sorry if I deceived you into thinking that I cared for a moment. I only care about
00:34:13.620
the stuff of it that is like nothing to do with sports.
00:34:19.260
I will watch the Super Bowl and enjoy the Super Bowl.
00:34:22.540
that just watches it for the halftime show.
0.92
00:34:26.080
But nevertheless, I'm going to do a little bit of a debrief
00:34:35.060
We were able to ask questions to a lot of people
00:34:37.260
like the head of the World Health Organization,
00:34:41.640
I spoke to the Queen, Her Majesty, the Queen of the Netherlands.
00:34:50.020
Sorry, I mean e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
00:34:54.980
We have a couple of interviews we'll share with you over the days that come.
00:34:58.560
But I wanted to bring this up again because I think there was a big takeaway from all of this,
00:35:02.480
which is that the World Economic Forum and its elites have been put on notice here.
00:35:06.640
They are not used to, even though we've been doing this now for three years, being asked questions.
00:35:11.360
They're used to Davos being their little safe space where no one can penetrate it
00:35:15.720
because the World Economic Forum makes it very difficult to get there.
00:35:21.940
You've got to travel a bit from Zurich to get to Davos.
00:35:27.440
Getting in and out of town is very difficult, and they like that.
00:35:31.800
Because do you know who it's not difficult to get in and out of town for?
00:35:34.580
People that take a private jet, then hop into a helicopter, and then have a limo pick them up.
00:35:38.920
And those are the people that dominate the group that we collectively refer to as the self-styled Davos elites.
00:35:47.700
Chrystia Freeland did not make a public appearance that I saw.
00:35:50.560
She spoke on stage, did not see her on the streets, did not see her going in and out through the public entrance,
00:35:55.820
which makes me wonder if perhaps she just did not want to be speaking to people,
00:36:01.080
did not want anyone to ask her a question like I attempted to do last year.
00:36:05.180
Pierre Polyev, the Conservative leader, had criticized Chrystia Freeland for being there.
00:36:10.660
A spokesperson from his office referred to it as being high-flying, high-carbon hypocrisy was the line that they used.
00:36:19.680
And then Polyev put out this tweet taking aim at the Davos billionaires boarding their private jets after lecturing the world's working class about heating their homes and driving to work.
00:36:29.260
He reiterated his ban on all ministers from being involved in the World Economic Forum.
00:36:35.000
So I think it was important to be there. I caught up with Avi Amini and Ezra Levant from Rebel News, who were also on the streets doing some of this work and wanted to share that with you today.
00:36:53.420
Okay, apparently we don't have that interview. My apologies. So we will share that with you at another point.
00:36:58.420
But the reason that I bring this up to you is because we have all of the, really all
00:37:06.420
of the arguments that exist about the World Economic Forum, all of them tend to be broken
00:37:14.300
You have on one side of it, people that say, okay, this is an important group.
00:37:24.680
The, you know, the Klaus Schwab, the future is built by us.
00:37:27.460
And then on the other hand, you have people that believe things that I would say are conspiratorial about it, people that believe things that are blatantly untrue, and even a lot of the legitimate criticisms of them. I've had this conversation with people about things they've said tend to get blown out of proportion.
00:37:44.180
So own nothing and be happy. The World Economic Forum never said we are advocating for a future
00:37:50.880
in which you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. They published an essay from a woman. She was an
00:37:55.740
MP, I believe in Finland, or it was some Nordic or Scandinavian country. And she had sort of
00:38:00.620
given her prediction for the future. And that was that. Now, does that excuse the bonkers idea? No.
00:38:07.160
But I think it means you need to have a little bit of nuance with it. Same as the Juveliza bugs.
00:38:11.620
I mean, you can buy meat in Davos. They're all eating meat. They've never said, okay, all of you
00:38:16.860
are going to live without meat. No, it's a lot more subtle than that. But the point that I've
00:38:21.320
always made is that those sorts of ideas, those sorts of ideas have a home in Davos. And they
00:38:29.020
have a home among the people that fly in those circles. And if you look at the things that they
00:38:33.620
say very blatantly and brazenly, they are all incredibly fervent in their advocacy for a
00:38:39.640
transition away from oil and gas. I mean, you don't even need to be conspiratorial to find the
00:38:43.260
danger in that. And so few people, as I talked about on one of my shows last week, are willing
00:38:47.920
to stand up and say, whoa, hang on. This just is not going to fly. This just will not work.
00:38:55.660
And that's why when you had someone like Javier Malay go in there, drop the mic and say,
00:38:59.680
we reject socialism, we defend free markets, we defend capitalism, we defend profit. A lot of them
00:39:04.760
are like, oh, well, we've never really heard anyone talk to us like that before. And I've
00:39:14.480
But nevertheless, we'll have more as the week continues.
00:39:17.020
This is Canada's most irreverent talk show on True North.
00:39:23.400
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:39:25.400
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.