In this episode of the True North Update, Candice talks about the devastating news out of Oshawa, Ontario and other manufacturing plants, the migrant caravan, and the Trudeau government's double standard when it comes to conservative voices.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, Candice Malcolm here with the True North Initiative. We're live. There is a lot that I want to cover today. Let me just go live here on Twitter. Live. Candice Malcolm here with the True North Initiative. There is a lot that I want to cover today. There's just a lot going on in the news.
00:00:18.500Originally, I was going to make this video about the UN Compact on Migration. I've been having a lot of requests for people who've asked for me to write about this, asked for videos on it. I have that in the works and I'm going to be releasing that later this week.
00:00:36.620But today, I just wanted to jump on to talk about a bunch of issues that are in the news right now. I'm going to wait a few minutes here for a few more people to jump on before we get into the issues at hand.
00:00:52.660It's been a crazy week, starting with the news out of Oshawa, news of GM pulling its operations out of Oshawa, as well as a bunch of other plants in the U.S., Michigan, Ohio, and I think Maryland.
00:01:10.160And sort of follow up from that, there's this sort of conversation emerging about, well, who is to blame and what exactly can be done to keep these kind of operations going?
00:01:21.420These are sort of the, you know, the grounds of having a solid workforce in the country, you know, working people, hardworking people, day in, day out, going to these sort of blue-collar jobs and having them ripped out from under you.
00:01:37.480You know, it's tough. It's been going on for years now. We're seeing numbers dwindling and dwindling.
00:01:43.960And then to get the news that it's just, you know, completely over, that we're shutting it down.
00:01:48.880And someone's pointing out that, yeah, there's a big protest out in Calgary today.
00:01:54.300So if you guys all saw the big protest against Justin Trudeau, who was in Calgary last week, I don't think he had quite the welcome that he wanted while the protests are ongoing.
00:02:05.440I'm going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about the double standard that we see from the federal government.
00:02:11.240There's a double standard in the media when it comes to how they talk about conservatives versus how they talk about liberals.
00:02:17.120And then there's also a double standard from the Trudeau government themselves and how they react and deal with job losses when they happen in central Canada and in Ontario and in Quebec versus job losses that happen out west and in the oil patch, which don't seem to get the same kind of reaction.
00:02:35.780All right. Let's let's get going here. Let's get going here.
00:02:39.340So GM has slashed its Canadian operations despite taking at least 13.7 billion dollars from Canadian taxpayers over the last decade.
00:02:49.900I want to talk about the migrant caravan, which surged the U.S. border.
00:02:54.560And of course, the mainstream media in the U.S. continue to just lie about it and mislead the public about what's going on down there.
00:03:01.280Twitter is cracking down on conservatives. There's yet another purge.
00:03:07.400Conservatives have lost their account, not just conservatives, but people who are on the left but dare to talk about some of the issues that conservatives talk about are also being purged.
00:03:18.120And finally, Canada is becoming the new global capital for birth tourism, birth tourism.
00:03:24.580So we're going to get into that. We'll cover all that and more in today's True North update.
00:03:29.340So thanks so much for tuning in. I want to start by talking about the issue that I was talking about a little bit off the top, which is GM.
00:03:37.280So GM announced that the company is slashing approximately 15 percent of its workforce in North America.
00:03:45.160It's closing five facilities. So we've got Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Ontario are all seeing their assembly line plants shut down.
00:03:55.040That will happen in January 2019. This is pretty devastating news for the community, all the communities, those ones in the U.S.
00:04:03.520And certainly in Canada, with Oshawa being, you know, a suburban, a suburb sort of outside of Toronto, but it's its own community.
00:04:12.620And GM has really been the heart. GM's Canada operations are based there.
00:04:18.400My understanding is there's about 10,000 workers that work at that headquarters.
00:04:22.760And then about 2,500 of them are assembly line workers, union workers.
00:04:27.940Those are the ones that are going to be losing their jobs. It's incredibly sad, you know, getting that news just right before Christmas,
00:04:33.340hearing that your, you know, your livelihood is gone just like that.
00:04:39.060It's not easy for these folks to transition. You know, you've been working in an assembly line your entire life.
00:04:44.440And all of a sudden it's, you know, it's not like you can go find another assembly line or another car plant, car manufacturing plant to go work at.
00:04:53.300This just doesn't really exist that way. And so it's, it's tough news.
00:04:57.940And certainly, you know, we all feel for people who are in that situation in the same way as a topic I've been talking about for months,
00:05:06.220if not years, is the ongoing recession that we're seeing in Alberta and the oil sands.
00:05:10.900You know, it's tough for folks out in Alberta as well. So, you know, there's a couple of things, a couple of themes emerging.
00:05:18.400We're talking about the Oshawa plant closure, why it happened, what we can do about it.
00:05:23.180A lot of sort of finger pointing and blame is being talked about.
00:05:27.120Well, let's talk about the actual rationale. So GM itself came out and basically said the reason that this is happening is because they're moving to a greener strategy.
00:05:37.060So they're reimagining their entire manufacturing of cars and they want to focus more on environmentalism.
00:05:44.620So they're going to be creating more green cars, electric cars and self-driving cars.
00:05:50.760OK, so, you know, this this is exactly what the environmentalists and the left have long been demanding.
00:05:57.620Right. They they've initiated a war on car.
00:06:02.000They hate cars. They don't want you driving your car. They want you out of your car.
00:06:05.380And so, you know, it's to be expected. They first to demonize the oil, demonize the oil sands and they've been demonizing the car.
00:06:13.780So this is just the companies who are reacting to that decades long demonization of the car.
00:06:20.460Now we're at a point where there are actually feasible electric cars are on the market.
00:06:24.600They're not cheap and they're not very good. The quality isn't very good.
00:06:28.380But still, you know, this is the this is a consequence of that sort of, again, demonization of the cars.
00:06:37.200You can't expect to demonize cars, to demonize oil, to say that there's something wrong with our lifestyle and then still expect companies to sit and produce these cars and create these good middle class jobs.
00:06:49.540And there's just always this tension that exists in the last certainly in Canada, see the NDP where you have the two kind of factions of the left.
00:06:57.600You have the union base, the working class, working blue collar people who, who, you know, care about workers rights and they want these kind of good paying manufacturing jobs.
00:07:10.400And on the other hand, you have the sort of what we call the limousine liberals, the champagne socialists, the eco warriors, the feminists, the far left urban elites who, you know, really loathe and hate that other side.
00:07:26.300And you certainly saw that in the last election and down in the U.S. with Trump.
00:07:32.120You know, a lot of those blue collar workers left the Democrat Party.
00:07:35.080They felt abandoned. They felt that they're, you know, that they were no longer part of the coalition.
00:07:41.740They were pushed out by this sort of identity politics crowd and they were welcomed in the Republican Party and they rallied around Trump.
00:07:49.500And then, you know, those are the people that are really demonized in the media by elites.
00:07:55.080It used to be the core base of the left, the Democrat Party, the NDP Party.
00:08:00.640And increasingly they're leaving. So you can see why there's this new tension.
00:08:04.340So I certainly when we're talking about this issue and we're talking about why this plan closed, you know, one of the major things we have to talk about is this environmental movement that is just absolutely waging war against our lifestyle.
00:08:16.760And that includes sort of staple of middle class lifestyle in North America, which is the automobile, the car and people owning cars.
00:08:24.280Well, you know, we're not going to produce them anymore. They don't want you driving them.
00:08:27.460They're trying to make it so expensive for you to own a car you can't and moving to this whole electric self-driving kind of stuff.
00:08:36.800You know, I'm not necessarily opposed to electric cars. It might be good for the long run.
00:08:40.840I think that possibly having self-driving cars could be good, reducing congestion, making cars safer.
00:08:46.660I've read a lot of studies on this stuff and a lot of the traffic, a lot of congestion in cities comes from just bad driving and human error.
00:08:55.380And so self-driving cars could help speed that up, make your commute to work productive time because you're not driving.
00:09:01.880But of course, at the same time, it displaces thousands of workers, possibly millions of workers who people who drive for a living, people who, you know, truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, all these types of drivers would be out of work.
00:09:16.040So that's a different conversation for a different day. But definitely let's let's talk about environmentalism.
00:09:21.780The second thing that I would point to when it comes to GM closure is the fact that these companies, GM specifically, has been a massive recipient of government handouts, government bailouts, corporate welfare.
00:09:37.640I mean, the idea that yesterday and today there are people on the left and people in the media who are criticizing capitalism and blaming capitalism and free markets and saying, you know, this is the this is what happens when you have free market capitalism.
00:09:52.760It just shows an utter ignorance of, first of all, what it is, what free market capitalism is, the difference between crony capitalism or corporatism and free markets.
00:10:06.740So, you know, when it comes to GM, we know that they were huge recipients of the big government bailout that was orchestrated by the Stephen Harper conservatives back in 2009.
00:10:19.000I was incredibly critical of this move. I thought it was absolutely idiotic for the government to be bailing out losers.
00:10:27.880That's not that's not how markets work. Right. The whole idea of free market capitalism is that there are prices.
00:10:34.180They send out signals. So when you have the government manipulating the the actual bottom line and bailing out companies that have failed, you're just creating more failure.
00:10:45.980You're prolonging the failure. You're not allowing that company to correct and to try to create a product that people might want.
00:10:52.320Instead, you're rewarding your bad behavior and you're continuing it. And that's essentially what it does.
00:10:57.100It creates a bubble. Eventually, that bubble is going to burst.
00:11:00.080So I've seen it over and over and over and over again. So there was a CBC study that I found that showed that the you know,
00:11:09.860it's hard to track exactly how much money the Canadian government has given to GM over the years.
00:11:15.200But there was a CBC report had the number of close to 14 billion dollars over the years.
00:11:28.480It wasn't just the Harper government as well.
00:11:31.520Every year there's in the budget every year, both both federally and Ontario provincially, there's these automobile innovation funds.
00:11:38.940The government just continues to throw good money after bad hundreds of millions of dollars at these companies to prolong production.
00:11:48.180But they don't care. They don't have any loyalty. They don't have any skin in the game.
00:11:50.720The Auditor General came out with a report saying that there is very little oversight over these loans and where the money is actually going.
00:11:56.880And because they don't have any skin in the game, you know, at any point there are companies, a free society.
00:12:01.740They can just decide to pull the pull the rug out from under you.
00:12:05.500And that's, well, again, why it's just a terrible idea for governments to be getting involved in the private sector,
00:12:12.400choosing winners and losers and using our money again to make these kinds of decisions.
00:12:18.960So we saw it with GM right now, despite 13.7 billion dollars from the Canadian taxpayers.
00:12:26.520They feel no loyalty and they're pulling out of Canada.
00:12:29.200The same thing happened with Bombardier.
00:12:32.440Bombardier. Let me pull up these numbers.
00:12:36.600So in 2000, in just this year, so in February 2018, the government announced that it was giving out a new loan to Bombardier,
00:12:49.600$372.5 million loan package that was announced in February for Bombardier's C-Series and Global 7,000 Aircraft Program.
00:12:58.260And then lo and behold, in February, sorry, in November, in November, so just this month, 2018, November 8th,
00:13:08.660Bombardier announced that it was cutting 5,000 jobs, 5,000 jobs.
00:13:12.380So, you know, why is the government taking $300 million out of the economy, taxing people and then giving it to a company that relies on that kind of funding,
00:13:22.780and then that company turns around and pulls the rug out and cuts 5,000 jobs?
00:13:29.020This is just why you don't do business with corporations.
00:13:36.540And you have another example just right now.
00:13:39.780The Ford Government Ontario, the Conservative Government Ontario, announced it was giving $62 million to Maple Leaf Foods.
00:13:48.660Maple Leaf Foods is moving its operations, and it is basically closing down to – it's creating a new plant in London and closing down two others.
00:13:59.440And the result is a net loss of 300 jobs.
00:14:04.240So, again, Canadian Ontario taxpayers, there's both grants coming from both Trudeau and Ford, giving these guys millions of dollars, $62 million to lose 300 jobs.
00:14:19.560Aaron Woodrick over at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has been tweeting about this.
00:14:25.060So the idea is, why do we have corporations receiving these handouts?
00:14:30.520Why does the government choose some and not others?
00:14:33.140You know, companies that get rewarded and get these handouts are always the ones that, you know, have the high profile.
00:14:38.740People know who they are, they make for good photo ops and make the politician look good, that they're, you know, getting involved and, you know, helping create jobs.
00:14:49.860It's such a myth that the government creates jobs, right?
00:14:52.940These companies are creating jobs, and they're taking loans from the government.
00:14:56.760They're manipulating their relationship.
00:14:58.840If governments truly want to create an environment for job growth, they should do it across the board.
00:15:06.160Instead of targeted handouts, targeted loans or special deals with companies, just do across the board, make the environment friendly to businesses.
00:15:17.180And, you know, that's the rule for the government.
00:15:20.680The rule for the government isn't just to jump in and to, you know, do these ridiculous corporate bailouts.
00:15:31.820And then, you know, other people are saying that this is just a free market decision and that it had nothing to do with Trudeau, nothing to do with Ford in Ontario, that this is just a free market decision and there's nothing that could be done.
00:15:46.920The reality is that, again, the business climate is set by the government.
00:15:51.800So when you have endless red tape and regulations, when you have high taxes, when you have looming carbon taxes that are going to be increasing every year, when you have an ideological government like the one run by Justin Trudeau that's committed to all kinds of ridiculous U.N.
00:16:08.080government schemes and endless, you know, threat of future taxes and future regulations, you have a government that's piling on debt at completely unsustainable rates, driving up interest rates.
00:16:22.620You just have this overall picture that's not great.
00:16:27.360You know, the increasing income taxes as well.
00:16:30.000So, you know, you have to imagine, like, why would you want to set up a business in Canada right now?
00:16:35.060If you're working out in Alberta and you're in the oil patch, you know, you have something like Bill C-69, a ridiculous review process that's going to rely on identity politics and intersectionality when determining whether or not a pipeline can be approved.
00:16:52.680It's basically the end of this kind of infrastructure in Canada.
00:16:55.260And you look at this environment, I don't know how you can say that the government has no fault whatsoever in businesses leaving town.
00:17:03.920And then, you know, you also have the unions, which are driving up the cost of labor and making it so it's just not affordable, that companies can't make a living in Canada just given the basic economics.
00:17:17.260And, you know, I don't have a lot of time for someone like Jerry Diaz, who's the head of the Unifor Union, and now all of a sudden, you know, he's out there being the champion of the people, saying that we're going to do anything we can to stop GM from closing its Oshawa camp.
00:17:32.560Well, you know, maybe, Jerry Diaz, if you hadn't spent the last two, three weeks creating a political campaign and running against conservatives, and you had actually been looking out for your workers and getting ahead of this, you know, you could have negotiated and tried to stop this before it happened.
00:17:49.420I had so many people over the last few weeks reach out to me, people who are part of Unifor, people who are part of that union, talking about their frustration with the leadership within their union, that they are frustrated that their union dues are going to idiotic political campaigns like Jerry Diaz's idiotic The Resistance, finding a resistance against an opposition party in Canada.
00:18:13.080And yet, you know, the core role of the union is supposed to be looking out for workers, making sure that they have the benefits and the jobs and the health care, you know, that kind of stuff.
00:18:22.360That's where the money should be going when you pay union dues.
00:18:25.140Instead, they're going to ridiculous leftist causes, and there's no transparency, and there's no accountability.
00:18:30.120So I don't have a lot of time for people like that.
00:18:33.560Another one I mentioned off the top is that there's just a total disparity and a gap between how the media and specifically the Trudeau government treats job losses in different parts of the country.
00:18:49.700You saw him instantly comment and jump to send his thoughts and talk about how he's doing whatever he can to help these workers in Oshawa have lost their job.
00:19:00.400Well, that's all well and good, but where has that sentiment been towards Alberta, towards Alberta's recession that's been ongoing?
00:19:08.020I mean, it's an absolute crisis at West.
00:19:10.520Every time I go to Alberta, I hear more and more people talking about the just total lack of respect that they feel in Canada.
00:19:19.580More and more people, both on Facebook, on social media, and when I go to Alberta in person, talking about how they're just sick of Canada, frankly.
00:19:28.360They're sick of being part of a confederation that doesn't appreciate what they've contributed.
00:19:33.820You still have equalization payments, so money is flowing out of Alberta to the rest of the country.
00:19:39.260At the same time, there's record high unemployment rate.
00:19:42.960The oil prices, crude oil, is the lowest it's been in generations.
00:19:47.000And you never hear Trudeau sending out his thoughts or jumping to send condolences or say he's going to work as hard as he can to help workers in Alberta who are out of work.
00:20:01.400I don't understand how Trudeau can just so brazenly ignore the suffering and the job losses that are happening in Western Canada and then, you know, jump in to be the hero when it comes to these job losses in Ontario.
00:20:18.460And then, of course, speaking of double standards, my colleague at True North, Andrew Lawton, pointed this out, and it's pretty ridiculous.
00:20:27.180So this is two news stories that were back-to-back on a news website.
00:20:34.580And, you know, it's just – let me see if I can find it here.
00:20:38.980It just goes to show the way that the media talk about conservatives versus the way that the media talk about liberals.
00:22:14.300So anyway, Doug Ford is trying to advocate for people, but the headline is that he's under fire.
00:22:21.460Whereas Trudeau, who's doing nothing, as far as I can tell, other than issuing, you know, more platitudes about his thoughts with the workers.
00:22:30.880And his headline is totally positive and rosy.
00:22:35.900So welcome to the world of Canadian media and bias.
00:22:40.520It's that kind of, you know, subtle bias that just drives conservatives crazy.
00:22:45.040Every time I read a news story in the mainstream media, I see it playing out, regardless of the topic, whether it is, you know, talking about illegal immigration and refusing to call it illegal immigration, or whether it's, you know, glowy praise for people like Justin Trudeau, and then, you know, just disparaging comments and sort of looking down their nose when it comes to any conservatives.
00:23:10.840But, you know, that's my thoughts on the GM bailout.
00:23:13.360Let me know what you think, if you agree, what you think can be done, why you think this happened, if there's anything you think I'm missing, or there's something you think I'm wrong about, let me know in the comments.
00:23:24.980But I've got lots more, so let's move on.
00:23:27.420I think, speaking of media bias, I wanted to talk about the invasion, the surge of illegal immigration that's happening on the U.S. border.
00:23:36.160There's a massive caravan of people that have been walking across Mexico.
00:23:39.480They come from Honduras and Guatemala mostly, and, you know, this thing has been a long time coming.
00:23:46.340It was super politicized during the midterm election in the U.S.
00:23:50.260There's been lots of reports out about who's been organizing and coordinating this caravan, migrant caravan, and, you know, the whole thing is just very suspect.
00:24:02.380I think that it was sort of, you know, the timing is suspect.
00:24:07.320The people who were there were suspect.
00:24:09.540Anyway, the migrant caravans finally reached the U.S. border.
00:24:14.720It's interesting because they came up through Mexico.
00:24:17.000It would have been a lot faster for them to just go into Texas, but they didn't.
00:24:20.000They went over towards California, towards Tijuana, possibly because they want to get into California.
00:24:26.760They want to get the benefits of California, possibly because they just want more attention, more, you know, coverage in the media.
00:24:33.880And they know that they'd get that in California near a major city as opposed to through some back channel in Texas where there's not a lot going on.
00:24:42.240So yesterday there was footage of basically a surge, a large group of these migrants attempted to just rush the border.
00:25:16.700And there's a lot of footage of these people throwing rocks and just sort of trying, throwing whatever they can across at border agents.
00:25:26.120The response was that the border agents, you know, protected themselves.
00:25:32.060They shot tear gas at some of the men that were throwing the rocks.
00:25:36.540And unfortunately, you know, there were some women and children that got caught up in it.
00:25:40.100And so, of course, the mainstream media, you know, latches on to that story, that narrative.
00:25:47.640There was a picture on basically a bunch of newspapers yesterday and today showing a mother with children bare feet and, you know, wearing diapers and stuff, fleeing away from these U.S. border agents.
00:25:59.380And the reaction in the media and by Democrats has just been so outrageous, you know, saying that these are possible war crimes that were committed and that they were gassing civilians.
00:26:09.680I just want to say a couple of things.
00:26:11.120First off, we now know that the whole media narrative, again, about these people being bona fide refugees and asylum seekers isn't exactly true.
00:26:21.740We know that the majority of the people who are in this caravan are young men.
00:26:25.560They're economic migrants and not refugees.
00:26:28.500And, you know, the fact that there were some mothers with their children that were there is just really sad.
00:26:34.920I don't know why you would put your family in that kind of situation.
00:26:40.920I can't I can't fathom why anyone, any mother would decide to bring her young children into that scenario, especially when there's men and they're throwing rocks and they're engaging with officials.
00:26:51.520You know, that's an act of violence on an international border.
00:26:55.220It's just a really bad idea to bring children into that mix.
00:26:59.800So I don't know why, you know, more of the blame isn't being placed on the parents who would decide to put their children in that situation.
00:27:08.580Again, it was their personal decision.
00:27:11.640And second of all, there's been a whole bunch of reports now debunking this media narrative because apparently the Obama administration used to also use tear gas in these situations.
00:27:20.800A report came out that found that basically Obama administration was doing this constantly on average of about once a month and the media was completely silent about it.
00:27:33.800There's no Democrats calling it war crimes, of course.
00:27:37.200And then, you know, it happens once under Trump.
00:27:39.900And lo and behold, you know, he's a monster.
00:27:43.580So, you know, that's, again, the kind of media bias and the outright lies that just turn people away from watching the mainstream media and being able to relate to the Democrat Party.
00:28:00.840You know, everyone knows that these social media platforms are completely biased, that they have a major problem when it comes to enforcement,
00:28:07.320that they don't – they haven't set out rules that are consistent, that are followed.
00:28:15.840You know, people constantly get censored.
00:28:25.640And there's kind of a theory that a lot of people have that, you know, there are a lot of bad actors on the far right, on the right,
00:28:33.200and we probably shouldn't want to associate with them anyway.
00:28:36.380So when they get in trouble, there isn't a huge surge of conservatives saying, hey, wait a minute, what about free speech?
00:28:44.660What about, you know, our ability to, you know, just whatever, communicate?
00:28:49.500That's what the whole point of these social media sites are, is free speech and to allow people to communicate.
00:28:55.920But, you know, you don't really want to jump up and support someone whose opinions you might find vile or who you don't like their tactics.
00:29:06.380And so there is this one conservative writer who had this theory, it's like a slippery slope, that, you know, the media goes after someone like Milo Yiannopoulos,
00:29:14.540and you might say, oh, well, I don't really like Milo, I don't agree with him, and, you know, he's gone too far, and he does some things I don't like.
00:29:23.680And then a couple months later, they go after Alex Jones.
00:29:26.200And you're like, well, you know, Alex Jones is a lunatic, and he's a conspiracy theorist, so, you know, I'm not going to jump in and defend him.
00:29:33.580And then all of a sudden, you know, the media companies are going after people more and more and more and more mainstream.
00:30:19.300And I think this has sort of woken up a lot of conservatives down in the U.S. about, you know, the sort of arbitrary power that Twitter and these companies have to just completely take away your audience.
00:30:34.340You know, you spend a lot of time producing content and building things up on social media.
00:30:57.620So I think it just shows that, you know, these companies have an issue when it comes to accountability, when it comes to, you know, just exactly what their rules are, how they're structured.
00:31:11.920These companies as well, they're not structured in the same way as, like, a media company.
00:31:17.080They they're not supposed to have editorial opinions.
00:31:20.540They're not supposed to, you know, be able to pick and choose who can say what on their platform.
00:31:26.500So I think I think it's a major problem that we have to deal with.
00:31:31.500And, you know, a lot of people are just saying enough is enough with Twitter.
00:31:35.340You know, time to move off that platform and go somewhere else.
00:31:39.320But the reality is, you know, where else are you going to go?
00:31:42.600You know, you can go to Facebook, but Facebook has similar compliance issues.
00:31:46.240You can start your own blog, but, you know, then you're not really reaching the same amount of people in the same way.
00:31:51.340So I think that it's interesting when it comes to just Twitter in and of itself, because the whole idea was that you're having a conversation.
00:32:12.960I haven't seen many stories of Canadian conservatives getting kicked off of Twitter.
00:32:18.680I think probably because Canadians just aren't really on the radar in the same way as these high-profile American accounts are.
00:32:26.720But it doesn't mean we're not, you know, safe from that threat.
00:32:31.180And so finally, I want to talk about the new report that came out in the Toronto Star this week about birth tourism.
00:32:38.700And you might recall this issue came into the news earlier this year because at the Conservative Convention, they voted to remove birthright citizenship.
00:32:52.100The liberals and the left in Canada kind of had a moral panic, and they did the whole pearl-clutching routine that they tend to do over these issues,
00:33:00.960pretending that the Conservatives had kind of just invented an issue and it was no big deal.
00:33:04.360They pointed to a Statistics Canada report that found that there was only a couple of hundred babies that were born to illegal immigrants each year.
00:33:14.860And so, yeah, a Statistics Canada report said that only about 312 babies are born in Canada to mothers whose place of residence is officially listed outside Canada.
00:33:26.160Well, a new study just completely destroys that narrative.
00:33:29.220The Institute for Research on Public Policy put out a paper, and it was published in Policy Options that suggests that about 22% of children born in Richmond Hospital are born to non-resident mothers.
00:33:45.420So it's more than double the percent of any other hospital in Canada, but really one in five.
00:33:51.020So we're talking about one single hospital in Richmond, B.C., and the report found that one in five mothers, one in five babies that was born in this hospital was basically a baby that was born through birth tourism.
00:34:06.100So the concept, for those not familiar, is that wealthy women, mostly from China, from Nigeria, from Russia, from Europe, decide that they want their children to have dual citizenship.
00:34:20.480They want their child to be a citizen of both their country and of Canada.
00:34:25.320And they choose Canada because Canada just has absolutely no structure to protect against this.
00:34:34.180There's so many other countries who have dealt with this issue in the past.
00:34:37.220They've changed their laws to outright ban this.
00:34:40.260And Canada is sort of the lone country that's just naive and optimistic and thinks that, you know, anyone who wants to be Canadian is going to be a great Canadian.
00:34:54.980And so these women come to Canada late in their pregnancy.
00:34:57.880They hide the fact that they're pregnant.
00:34:59.420And they conceal it to the border guard and just lie and say that they're coming to Canada to visit a friend or whatever.
00:35:05.480They go to sometimes they go to these birthing homes and they live there right up until they go into labor.
00:35:11.540Then they go into a Canadian hospital.
00:35:14.460A lot of times they don't speak English.
00:35:16.240They can't really communicate properly with doctors.
00:35:19.000A lot of times the doctors are the ones that are complaining and blowing a whistle about this because they find it unsafe.
00:35:23.380They don't know anything about a woman's medical background or history.
00:35:26.600It's hard to plan how many doctors and how many nurses to have on staff in a given day when you have, you know, one in five people coming to your hospital who are just tourists to Canada showing up to give birth.
00:35:38.620And then basically the baby's born, it gets its Canadian passport and the couple leaves or the mother leaves, the baby leaves and they don't come back to Canada except for the fact that the baby is automatically a citizen.
00:35:52.060So they automatically get access to all of the benefits and handouts that Canadians receive.
00:35:59.040And so you basically get free Canadian citizenship without having any kind of relationship with Canada.
00:36:05.760And then, you know, you can use that forever in the future.
00:36:09.700You can use that for future health care.
00:36:12.520If you have a baby ends up having some kind of serious illness, then, you know, baby can move to Canada.
00:36:18.020The family can move to Canada and the baby will get free health care or free education.
00:36:22.660You can go, you know, no matter what, you know, you can end up going to a Canadian university and paying domestic student prices instead of international.
00:36:30.400And the students know there's a huge disparity between the price that Canadians pay to go to Canadian universities and the price that foreign students would pay.
00:36:39.880And then, of course, they can sponsor in their parents and other family members to become Canadian once they're 18.
00:37:04.180The data shows the number of births to non-resident mothers, including all provinces but Quebec, which refused to release the data, skyrocketed to 3,628 last year from just 1,354 in 2010.
00:37:18.440So the numbers basically tripled in the last decade, in the last eight years.
00:37:22.840And yet, you know, when the conservatives wanted to talk about this issue, when the conservatives brought it up, the membership did, the leadership didn't.
00:37:31.000But when the conservative members wanted to talk about birth tourism and how to stop it, there is basically the reaction from the left and from the media was, oh, this is, you know, the conservatives are lying.
00:37:44.240They're creating a problem that doesn't exist.
00:37:46.540They're just trying to create fear when it comes to immigrants.
00:37:49.660And, you know, there's nothing to see here, basically.
00:37:51.840Well, we now know that that's not true, that this is a real problem, that it needs to be addressed, and that, you know, we can continue to stick our head in the sand and ignore the issue all we want, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
00:38:05.100So I'm glad to see that that study was put out.
00:38:08.600The report actually came through the Toronto Star, which you wouldn't really expect them to be covering this issue.
00:38:14.820But, again, you know, there are serious threats and problems, not just in the fact that there's a group of people who are taking advantage of Canadian citizenship, which devalues the citizenship for all of us.
00:38:26.520And, you know, if anyone can just walk into Canada and automatically get citizenship for their child, despite never paying taxes, never living in Canada, having no commitment to Canada, no connection to our culture, to our values, to our language, that that child gets to grow up in a foreign country, but then gets all the privileges of being Canadian.
00:38:48.840I mean, it just isn't fair. It just isn't fair. But it's not just that. It's also, again, a safety concern, because a lot of times there can be complications with pregnancies, things can go wrong.
00:39:00.580And if the doctor doesn't know anything about you or your medical history or doesn't even speak your language and you're in a hospital about to have birth, I mean, it creates a major potential problem.
00:39:12.980And that's exactly why you have doctors blowing the whistle about this, saying, like, hey, what's up with all these people coming in and giving birth who, you know, we have no idea who they are and we can't communicate with them.
00:39:26.040I think that this could be a pretty, there could be a pretty easy way to stop this, stop giving citizenship automatically to people who are not legally in Canada.
00:39:36.540So if you are a legal resident, if you have a visa, if you have permanent residency, and if you are a citizen and you have a child in Canada, then yes, your child is a Canadian citizen.
00:39:47.420But if you're here on a tourist visa or you're here illegally, if you're not in Canada legally, then your child should not get to be a Canadian citizenship, a Canadian citizen.
00:39:59.800They should not be granted Canadian citizenship. That's basically the standard rule across Europe, in the UK, in Australia.
00:40:06.540You know, it's basically Canada and the US that have the policy that anyone born in our territories automatically gets to be a citizen.
00:40:13.920And I don't think that that's really right in today's day and age.
00:40:18.780And you have Trump in the US who's now talking about issuing executive order to get rid of the exact same thing, the exact same phenomenon.
00:40:26.980And, you know, it's basically creating, getting rid of the incentive to come to Canada or the US illegally just to have a kid, which isn't really fair to all the people who come legally, who follow the rules, who work hard and sometimes expensive to get, you know, the visa, make sure you have everything filled out properly, working with an immigration lawyer and whatnot.
00:40:48.280When you go through that whole process to become a legal resident or legal citizen, and you turn around and you see someone else from your country who didn't bother doing any of that, who just came into the country illegally, gave birth.
00:41:02.100You know, it's just not fair. It's a total double standard.
00:41:06.120And it's not fair. So I'm going to leave it at that today, guys.
00:41:09.540I'll be on the radio with Brian Lilly in Ottawa in about half an hour.
00:41:15.080We'll be talking about illegal immigration and the border chaos, both on the US border and on the Canadian border.
00:41:21.700So make sure to tune in. I'll post a link on my Twitter and my Facebook so you can listen live.
00:41:27.940And thanks so much for tuning in. Have a great day.