Juno News - June 04, 2024


The environmental case against mass immigration


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

158.48032

Word count

3,618

Sentence count

2

Harmful content

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Canadians for a Sustainable Society President and Commentator, John Mayer, lays out the environmentalist's case against mass immigration and calls for an end to the rapid growth in Canada's population and the rapid development of cities.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 have you ever stopped to consider what kind of impact uncontrolled mass immigration has on the
00:00:08.880 environment or what happens to all of the farmland that has to be paved over to make way for millions
00:00:13.760 of people every single year you can't get that farmland back you can't get forests back that
00:00:18.640 have to be completely bulldozed over to make way for sprawling subdivisions let me just give you a
00:00:23.840 statistic to better clear up what i'm talking about here every day canada is losing over 300 acres
00:00:29.760 of farmland remember that land is never coming back and only about seven percent of canada's land
00:00:35.680 is even arable so yes this is a major crisis and mass immigration is to blame but who is behind this 1.00
00:00:42.880 our save the planet prime minister justin trudeau is the man responsible for bringing in millions of
00:00:49.120 people a year into this country millions more than previous prime ministers so to make the case that
00:00:55.040 someone who is responsible for this rapid growth in population is also an environmentalist doesn't
00:01:01.200 seem to jive with the facts does it well our next guest is someone who has been consistently laying 0.87
00:01:05.920 out the environmentalists case against mass immigration and that is what we intend to explore
00:01:11.920 right now well joining us now on the show is a commentator conservationist and outspoken
00:01:17.120 critic of mass immigration as well as the president for canadians for a sustainable society john mayer john
00:01:24.720 thank you so much for joining us yes glad to be here so john why don't we just begin by having
00:01:30.880 you lay out the case lay out the environmentalist's case against mass immigration it's not something i
00:01:36.240 don't think the canadian audience gets to hear very much well basically i i mean if you're going to
00:01:43.120 achieve sustainability on this planet uh you have we have to stop consumption we have to stop the
00:01:49.280 consumption uh growth and there are two ways of doing that two necessary ways one we have to use less
00:01:54.960 stuff we have to use less energy and we can't have any more people using the same amount of stuff we
00:02:03.360 have now so we have to reduce the load on on the planet canada is a very energy intensive resource
00:02:13.440 intensive country in which to live it's extreme climate the distances are extreme and uh de facto
00:02:21.760 we will end up using more energy than someone who lives in guadalajara mexico we have to have uh
00:02:29.600 better built better insulated uh houses they have to have heating and uh we have to get our food
00:02:37.120 a fair amount of our food from afar uh it's just uh uh unfortunately uh very uh very energy intensive
00:02:46.080 and this has all been made possible by the immense uh reserves of fossil fuels we've exploited uh over
00:02:52.880 the last uh century a couple of centuries but oil in particular since the 1950s uh has really driven
00:02:59.680 the ability of us to go anywhere do anything that world is coming to an end uh for two reasons one is
00:03:06.880 the availability of oil it's going to become more expensive as the reserves become less rich and
00:03:14.000 the other is the climate issue where effectively we're setting the planet off into an area that it
00:03:21.120 hasn't been before in human existence over the last three million years so bringing people into canada
00:03:29.360 uh both for canadian rates of uh of uh emissions and for global rates is a disaster because the
00:03:37.760 the uh carbon emissions of the immigrant stream to canada uh quadruples when they arrive in canada so bad 1.00
00:03:49.360 loss for the planet loss for canada and it's just uh it makes no environmental sense and i i i and it makes no social sense
00:03:57.360 social sense either i think you'll find immigration policy uh has managed to evade uh any uh social
00:04:06.640 economic and uh environmental impact studies that's uh so it it it's a policy that needs to be reviewed
00:04:18.000 well i find it all interesting because trudeau of course has touted himself as a major environmentalist
00:04:23.520 he's very proud of the work that he's done on trying to save the climate but of course he has also
00:04:28.880 been in charge during this rapid uh mass immigration experiment into our country so i feel like the
00:04:35.680 the two just don't really mix do they uh they don't uh but you know what what trudeau says is about as a
00:04:42.960 as relevant as what donald trump says i i mean virtually everything comes out of their mouths but it is
00:04:48.880 interesting that donald trump uh mr uh uh climate change is a chinese plot actually outperformed his
00:04:58.640 his america uh for three years actually outperformed canada in terms of carbon emissions our uh carbon
00:05:07.120 emissions grew more rapidly under trudeau uh than uh mr trump's did uh uh in his term of office now there's
00:05:16.000 reasons for that but uh trudeau like canada has never kept unfortunately canada has never kept
00:05:22.960 its word on on any climate uh agreement uh we were of the kyoto uh uh signees i think there were 58
00:05:32.480 uh nations which signed on to that canada was the worst uh second worst performer so we were number 57
00:05:40.080 instead of having our emissions go down by six percent they went up by 19 percent and that's two
00:05:48.480 reasons one was the oil sands which everybody knows about the big bad oil sands and they are dirty
00:05:54.800 but adding i think was six or seven million people over the period of the kyoto accord time frame
00:06:03.920 uh that contributed more uh in emissions than the oil sands did one one stat that i heard john which
00:06:12.880 was really alarming when i was doing some research on this show and and for other projects was that
00:06:18.320 canada is losing over 300 acres of farmland a day due to primarily this massive growth in our population
00:06:26.880 am i right about that because that that just seems unbelievable
00:06:30.720 yeah it is unbelievable but it's uh i i believe that is the figure and it's been increasing
00:06:37.600 and i mean anyone who's traveled outside of any of our major metropolitan areas knows that
00:06:43.520 but there's also the other factor the smaller centers the small towns who pride themselves on being
00:06:50.160 small and being a viable community they are surrounded by farmland and forest and these
00:06:58.480 uh and uh these areas uh around those small centers are just being built up uh you know you don't have
00:07:04.720 to have kilometer after kilometer of subdivision uh to realize that uh you're losing a lot of farmland
00:07:12.320 and and whether it's uh southern ontario central ontario where the loss is mostly forest uh or out on
00:07:21.520 the prairie we're losing farmland all over the place and it's not just the big centers it's most apparent
00:07:28.240 there but it's not just the big centers when you were bringing up you know the kyoto protocols and
00:07:34.160 canada's climate commitments and targets i don't want to put you in a political box but it does sound
00:07:39.200 to be more of a it seems to be more of a liberal argument you're making my question for you john is
00:07:44.560 where is the left on this issue if they if they actually care about the climate the same way that it
00:07:49.840 appears you do why does the left not seem to want to address immigration at all uh well please don't
00:07:56.400 call me a liberal i mean i've been called everything else but i've never really qualified as a as a
00:08:01.600 liberal uh i like to think that i uh i understand what's going on and i i deal in real physical units
00:08:08.720 and i don't like to put political um uh blocks on on any particular position i mean we're looking for
00:08:18.720 better numbers and we're not getting better numbers we aren't telling the whole story uh we aren't going
00:08:24.080 through all the impacts of the things we're doing whether it's the oil sands or population growth
00:08:28.800 i i mean uh the uh the century initiative wants to triple our population where then that's what we're
00:08:34.720 on track to do that's what we've been on track for the last 30 years to do triple our population
00:08:39.600 there's no public support for that and uh you know it it doesn't i i don't think even liberals support
00:08:45.920 that uh i think the uh what is it the i think canadians are five or six to one against uh tripling
00:08:52.400 our population and so you're cutting across all kinds of uh political spectrums so we need good
00:08:59.200 numbers we need accountable government and we need a democratic system that works and uh we don't have
00:09:04.880 that at the moment uh i'm very sorry to say right no i would completely agree i was going to bring up
00:09:10.400 the century initiative it's something we've talked about on this show before is the century initiative
00:09:15.760 behind this are they are they a major lobbying force is this also part of what developers want
00:09:22.000 who do you think is behind what we're seeing here and the loss of our prime agricultural land
00:09:26.800 obviously through such massive growth the fix is in for has been in for 50 years the the people who
00:09:34.320 wanted this to happen uh banks developers etc uh i i mean effectively uh we lost control of our media
00:09:43.120 corporations uh they they knew this was going to be unpopular uh you know canadians have never wanted
00:09:50.800 since the 50s they haven't wanted more people in the country and immigration uh has pumped it up by 0.84
00:09:57.200 about 13 million i i think uh and so it it's been a slow process of gaining control and gaining control of
00:10:08.240 the narrative uh where growth is everything uh growth is a benefit uh we're talking about the economy we're
00:10:15.600 talking about toronto we're talking about canada uh be a big nation be an important nation and left out of
00:10:23.280 all this is any kind of uh value placed on the people per capita income equality affordable housing quality of life
00:10:31.920 access to nature any of these things that never gets discussed and it's because these people have
00:10:37.600 taken control they're the biggest donors to politicians they have controlling interest in the media
00:10:46.320 and it's uh although the media tends to be corporate media tends to be growth oriented
00:10:52.000 uh because they uh uh the advertising revenue from big things like houses and cars uh vastly exceeds bob's kitchen
00:11:04.000 renovation uh kind of sources so but anyway it's been a very conscious policy and a highly rigged policy
00:11:12.320 going back to the century initiative i saw that you wrote a letter to mps who were invited to a century initiative event
00:11:18.000 event asking them to reconsider their participation did you get any did you get anywhere anywhere with
00:11:24.640 that with those letters i sent that letter actually not to mps it was to one official from a uh a city in
00:11:33.120 in nova scotia i see i have not received their reply i will be following up i also sent that virtually exact
00:11:42.000 same letter to uh ontario nature who should be standing up for nature and they had published a uh an op-ed
00:11:53.360 basically saying don't blame immigrants for all these various impacts and we're not blaming immigrants
00:11:59.200 we're blaming a very corrupt immigration system and the response from them i just got it this morning was
00:12:08.560 we don't have space to accommodate a rebuttal but we are now going to be putting on our website this letter
00:12:16.800 so that it can be downloaded modified to the individual's uh taste and sent to their mps and
00:12:23.120 anybody if anyone cares to do that uh please send us copies of the mps responses and mps or your mayor or
00:12:33.200 mpp whatever uh please send us copies of the responses and we'll see what uh what is being
00:12:39.760 said but i suspect there won't be responses because i don't think they can absorb that message that
00:12:45.680 growth won't solve all problems it seems like you're laying out the case that the canadian canadian
00:12:51.760 leadership at both the provincial federal and at a media level have sold out the people for
00:12:57.840 corporations yeah well absolutely and i mean they've created this juggernaut where mentioning immigration
00:13:08.160 is is effectively death if you're a political party and and you mention that we should cut back on
00:13:14.480 immigration for whatever reason i think a you'll be attacked maybe you'll be attacked but b you'll
00:13:22.400 disappear off the uh the the pages uh you you won't be covered and you're asking me about political
00:13:29.520 orientation i mean i i i guess i would put myself down as i i've always been green uh i would put myself
00:13:39.040 down as a techno populist uh i think we should uh have all of these uh uh means of the uh determining uh
00:13:47.600 uh welfare of the country uh welfare of the people our goals and they should be oriented uh you know
00:13:55.360 on on the welfare of people uh and uh it had better damn well better be green right and so i'm guessing
00:14:04.160 then john your optimism that a a change in federal government will result in a in a change on immigration
00:14:11.120 policy that will be more geared towards conserving our country is not high no uh
00:14:17.440 well if you look at the the people i mean i talk uh with all kinds of biophysicists and uh you know
00:14:24.240 naturalists and this kind of thing and climatologists and no one sees a way out of this i i you've probably
00:14:30.880 read the latest climate uh where it's now becoming official officially able to discuss that they're uh
00:14:38.640 predicting uh most climatologists are putting uh the target uh where we will end up at two and a half to
00:14:46.960 three and a half degrees that's that's lethal and so everybody's sort of throwing their hands up in
00:14:53.680 the air but in terms of politically there's just no no savior on the horizon uh the uh people's party
00:15:02.480 max bernier he's the only one talking specifically about it and uh great for him you know he's got the
00:15:09.760 the guts to do it uh but uh his uh his environmental policies would make me throw up however i would
00:15:18.080 vote for him uh if uh i thought he'd i thought he had a chance of getting elected because the cutting
00:15:25.760 back on population growth is the a number one thing you can do to help this country at the moment
00:15:30.720 uh on all levels uh so but the green party is a dead lost cause that i just resigned a couple of
00:15:38.720 weeks ago uh so anyway you you've written about this this concept that that aging is not necessarily
00:15:48.080 a bad thing it's just what happens in in countries and communities and that the solution of course is
00:15:53.760 not to just keep importing people to solve that problem explain that a little bit more because that's
00:15:59.120 the argument that we are fed by people in charge that we have to solve our demographic problem and
00:16:04.640 the only way we can do it is through immigration you argue that that's not the solution why well i
00:16:10.640 thought this argument was over uh earlier in the century uh when jason kenny's paper came out and
00:16:16.560 basically said a report to him said uh you know aging uh immigration won't solve aging but there's no
00:16:25.520 need to solve aging because it's inevitable the population uh demographic transition started in the 1700s
00:16:36.320 people started to have fewer kids and they started to live longer and so now it's uh it's happening that
00:16:43.680 where populations are starting to stabilize and that means inherently that people are the percentage of
00:16:51.680 old people is going to be higher that's a permanent uh case if you want to keep the demographic profile 0.99
00:16:58.960 of the 1950s going on into the future you're going to have to grow at an increasingly rapid rate forever
00:17:06.240 and nobody's proposing that i i mean you can say oh we won't have that problem if we keep up with mass
00:17:13.040 immigration and we get to 100 million well at 100 million you will have that problem if you try and
00:17:18.480 stabilize you're going to have to go to 700 million uh in another a couple of hundred years so it it just
00:17:24.960 doesn't work and we should there are a lot of benefits to aging first of all old guys like me
00:17:31.680 we don't use up as many resources we've got the infrastructure we don't have to buy new stuff we don't
00:17:38.080 have our egos as much attached to the cars we drive or whatever and we just energy demand resource demand is
00:17:47.920 going to go down and also the value of young people is going to increase because they're going to be 0.99
00:17:54.560 fewer of them so they will be more valuable their wage rates are going to go up we're going to invest
00:18:00.000 to get their productivity up so and housing is going to become more affordable plus no society is a society
00:18:08.960 is far less likely to squander its young men in a in a war particularly a foreign war if there they be they
00:18:17.040 are such a valuable commodity as they will be in an aged in a an aging society so do you think that 0.99
00:18:25.840 there's any justification to use data like gdp to justify whether or not a country is doing well
00:18:33.200 it's something you've written about that you know everybody who's involved in this growth agenda
00:18:37.600 always fixates on gdp you have an economics background why why do you say that that's that's just not worth
00:18:43.920 considering or not worth you know using as a barometer the gdp it was a great system uh it it
00:18:50.080 outlines the uh uh the the makeup and the the size of the uh commercial economy it was created uh to be
00:19:00.640 the basis for an equitable tax system in an increasingly uh complex economy and the people who
00:19:07.120 created it said it should never be used as a measure of welfare it should not be used as a measure
00:19:14.160 as a tool to define national policies but in fact it has become that because the money economy
00:19:23.680 has sort of overridden the real economy and the money economy loves inflation it loves cash flow and
00:19:33.760 people have are accumulating immense wealth without producing it uh holding up gdp as their banner but
00:19:41.120 it's a completely false god it's it's not uh it's a cash flow for any accountants out there or any business
00:19:48.080 owners it is not an accounting system it is simply cash flow right do you think the the solution to this
00:19:58.080 can come from politics do you think politicians will eventually come around to this if there's
00:20:03.200 enough public support behind it or do you think that the solution needs to simply just uh be besides
00:20:08.560 politics it needs to be involved with with local communities pushing back um and kind of organizing
00:20:14.400 at a ground level well i've been to two meetings locally uh in uh here in uh western nova scotia southern
00:20:22.880 nova scotia and uh one was liberal and one was grassroots populist same theme the people that
00:20:30.000 showed up same theme uh and you could hardly believe it was a liberal meeting uh you know uh it it's all
00:20:37.680 the same complaint and everybody sees the same problem but it just hasn't translated to a leader who's
00:20:44.240 going to stand up and say you know we have to change we have to do this and this um the uh century
00:20:51.680 initiative uh the people they represent uh the control that they have in the media these people
00:20:56.800 are very good at what they do uh and they're not going to give up uh their cash cow uh they know how
00:21:03.280 to control things they know the terms they know the means and uh you know they've got other politicians
00:21:08.880 lined up uh i don't i don't know what's going to happen mind you trump happened and who would have
00:21:14.960 thought that someone like trump could ever become president of the united states but uh it uh it
00:21:22.000 happened and uh that was on the riding on the anger of uh a huge proportion of the society right
00:21:30.560 absolutely well i think that the work you're doing and the the kind of the kind of voice that you're
00:21:34.560 adding to this conversation is extremely important uh john where can our audience find your your work
00:21:39.840 and where can they connect with canadians for sustainable society well website is sustainable
00:21:46.320 society.com i've written a couple of books the renewable energy transition realities for canada in
00:21:56.320 the world and second one is a little bit more arcane but basically the website is the place to go and
00:22:06.880 uh you know we need to i think it's got a lot of good information that people can use to bolster
00:22:12.080 their arguments we've broken it down so that people can can use it pick it apart and use it on all
00:22:17.440 kinds of different topics and hopefully they will and start talking to their politicians and demand that
00:22:26.480 the politicians talk back to them absolutely and a link to sustain canadians for a sustainable society you
00:22:33.840 can find in the description of this video if you're watching on youtube facebook or rumble
00:22:38.400 mr john meyer thank you so much for joining us okay thanks it's been a pleasure