Juno News - June 30, 2026


Trudeau admits he was WRONG on mass immigration

Topics
Trudeau immigration backlogs
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Mark Hunter Biden Kevin Vong Carney Kevin Blong Mark Carney Olivia Chow Joe Biden Majesty
Economist EXPOSES the hidden cost of Carney’s carbon tax Remember who you are Canada

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

160.95

Word count

3,685

Sentence count

144

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A former Liberal MP has taken aim at Justin Trudeau's comments about immigration. Former Member of Parliament Kevin Blong criticizes the Prime Minister for his comments on immigrants and shared Canadian values. Former Vice President Joe Biden's son wants his country to make systemic changes that protect America s relationship with Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 A former Liberal MP has taken aim at Justin Trudeau's comments about immigration.
00:00:11 The former Prime Minister was in Finland talking about the need for newcomers to
00:00:15 integrate and to have similar values as their new country.
00:00:20 If, you know, someone whose ancestry is not Finnish, for example, is able to come here
00:00:27 and grow up and go to school and learn the language
00:00:31 and appreciate hockey the same way and love winter
00:00:35 and have the same level of openness and respect
00:00:39 that people have for diversity in these countries
00:00:43 and the values we have,
00:00:45 then they should be able to feel like they are Finnish,
00:00:50 like they are fully part of this world.
00:00:52 increasingly in a very different world defining what a country is through shared values
00:01:03 and not through shared ancestry is the most important thing and let me tell you canada's
00:01:11 not some magical place uh you know we get it wrong sometimes and we have to adjust well he got
00:01:17 things wrong when it came to immigration and has admitted as much. Now, meantime, former Liberal
00:01:24 MP Kevin Blong posted this on X. When we raised exactly these points of the need for integration
00:01:33 of immigrants and shared Canadian values at Parliament, Justin Trudeau implied we were racist.
00:01:41 Trudeau dramatically ramped up immigration levels, which led to a housing crisis, overstretched health care services, increased crime and unemployment.
00:01:52 A massive immigration backlog continues to this day after Trudeau left.
00:01:58 This story in Blacklock's reporter, immigrant cases jam courts.
00:02:03 The federal court says it will see a record 30,000 immigration cases this year,
00:02:10 five times the average.
00:02:12 Prime Minister Carney says he's not worried about being left out of
00:02:16 so many cabinet decisions because of conflicts of interest.
00:02:20 There's a growing list of deliberations and government decisions
00:02:23 that you're excluded from because of your various conflict of interest screens.
00:02:27 Are you concerned that you have to outsource major decisions of your own government,
00:02:31 including potentially one on this project I'm not sure I'm not sure the
00:02:39 last bit of your question follows so I'm just gonna say no well I'm gonna say no
00:02:44 to the whole thing but more specifically your logic doesn't hold we have a very
00:02:49 strong team in cabinet who make decisions and and that process is
00:02:55 followed I have every confidence in their ability to make those decisions
00:02:59 decisions. And, you know, I think, to be clear, what happens with conflicts is that it's quite
00:03:05 often the avoidance perception of conflict as opposed to actual. Because, of course, my assets
00:03:12 are in a blind trust. I actually don't know whether or not I have an actual conflict.
00:03:16 Carney has millions of dollars worth of investments in a blind trust. He has rejected
00:03:21 a parliamentary ethics recommendation to sell off those investments.
00:03:25 Joe Biden's notorious crack-smoking son wants his country to make systemic changes that protect America's relationship with Canada.
00:03:36 Hunter Biden spoke with CTV News.
00:03:39 He lamented the state of U.S.-Canada relations and wants the next leader of his country to heal the relationship.
00:03:45 Trump has done more long-term damage to the status of our relationship, and not only the relationship with Canada, but the relationship with all of our allies, than people fully realize.
00:04:01 And so, at the end of the day, I hope that we elect someone that can heal and mend that relationship, but I think it's going to take time, and I can understand why it's going to take time.
00:04:15 When my dad was president of the United States, one of the things that he always say was leaders would come up to him and say, thank you, but how long is this going to last?
00:04:26 And I think that next time we have to make systemic changes in our system that are going to prove that this can't happen again.
00:04:36 Hunter Biden was found guilty of cocaine possession, illegal guns and tax offenses, but he was granted a pardon by his father.
00:04:46 It's time to modernize Canada's rules on nicotine.
00:04:49 Alternatives to cigarettes like heated tobacco vaping products and oral smokeless products don't burn tobacco or produce smoke.
00:04:57 Now, they aren't risk-free, but the growing body of scientific evidence shows that they have the potential to be substantially less harmful than smoking cigarettes.
00:05:07 Now, despite this, Canadians are banned from accessing this critical information and sometimes even banned from the products.
00:05:15 Nicotine pouches remain banned in convenience stores across the country, and current laws ban communication about the risk of these products compared to cigarettes. 0.59
00:05:25 It's absolutely ridiculous.
00:05:27 The evidence is here. 0.73
00:05:28 The tools exist.
00:05:29 Canadians deserve to have the freedom to know about them, to learn about them, to even just understand them.
00:05:35 It's a free country.
00:05:36 We should be able to have this information.
00:05:39 So learn more about this campaign and our friends over at Unsmoke by visiting their website, unsmoke.ca.
00:05:46 And thank you so much to Unsmoke for sponsoring this episode.
00:05:49 Our guest today is former Member of Parliament, Kevin Vuong.
00:05:53 uh his parents were both people from vietnam he knows a little bit about being a new canadian
00:06:00 welcome to the show kevin thanks for having me mark all right so you heard justin trudeau's
00:06:06 comments about immigration and i and it prompted you to react to those comments he was talking
00:06:13 about the need for integration and how people should value canadian values and fit in and
00:06:21 You seem to be suggesting from your comments that he had a very different point of view earlier on.
00:06:30 Yeah, listen, I think I am actually glad to hear a former Canadian prime minister celebrate Canadian values and recognize that our country is something that people want to be a part of.
00:06:45 But it's a very different tune that now the retired prime minister is singing than when we were both serving in the 44th parliament.
00:06:55 Because when those of us who dare to raise the exact same points that he's now saying in retirement, he would imply that we were racist.
00:07:04 There are times I remember in the House where they wouldn't overtly say we are racist or bigots.
00:07:11 But what he would say is something along the lines of, you know, saying that we were putting out dog whistles and say everything but calling us racist, but implying it throughout.
00:07:23 But for me, especially as a son of refugees, son of immigrants who came to this country, there's never been anything racist about expecting newcomers to embrace the values that make Canada worth coming to or being a part of, right?
00:07:37 My parents understood that as refugees, Mark.
00:07:40 They didn't come here to recreate what they fled.
00:07:44 They were persecuted by communists.
00:07:46 They lost everything to communism.
00:07:48 They were part of South Vietnam that, unfortunately, was a flawed but aspired democracy, but they lost the war.
00:07:54 And so when they came here to Canada, they came to become Canadian.
00:08:00 And saying that doesn't make me a bigot or a racist.
00:08:04 and advocating for integration also doesn't either, right?
00:08:10 Integration isn't exclusion, which during the 44th Parliament,
00:08:14 I heard a lot coming out of the then Prime Minister Trudeau and his party.
00:08:20 Because integration, I think for me,
00:08:22 is something that my parents were actually very intentional about.
00:08:26 And it's part of the promise that I think we make to everyone who comes to Canada.
00:08:30 There are things that we stand for and you can be a part of it
00:08:34 and you can belong as a Canadian, but there's things that you have to subscribe to, right?
00:08:39 If you want to be a part of Canada, you need to subscribe to rule of law.
00:08:45 You need to subscribe to, you know, our freedoms, which doesn't mean enjoying them.
00:08:51 It also means defending them.
00:08:53 You know, it was a big part of what my parents taught me to be grateful to Canada for giving my family everything.
00:09:00 It's why I volunteered to join the Naval Reserve and why I was proud to wear the maple leaf on my
00:09:05 uniform. Yeah, I mean, all of those things were, I think, generally accepted. At least they were
00:09:12 for many years. And then Trudeau became prime minister, and we saw a dramatic uptick in just
00:09:19 the sheer volume of people coming into the country, millions of people, which he let in.
00:09:23 this precipitated an economic crisis in the form of housing. You in your own district saw
00:09:31 an explosion in homelessness, you know, the 10 cities, that sort of thing. We saw dramatically
00:09:39 overstretched health care services. Many other services were overstretched. We saw increased
00:09:45 crime, unemployment, inflation. A lot went wrong because they let in so many people that we didn't 0.99
00:09:52 have space for at the time. We just could not absorb the sheer volume of people. I mean, look
00:09:57 at the gridlock on our highways. And it created a sense of, unfortunately, a resentment on the part
00:10:02 of some. You know, they blame the immigrants rather than government policies. So a lot has
00:10:08 gone wrong in the last 11 years in terms of immigration. In your position, how do you see
00:10:14 that degradation in what Canada used to be? You know, we used to have a pretty good immigration.
00:10:20 for decades we had a good immigration system it all went south what do you suppose went wrong
00:10:26 um yeah i think you're right to point out there there used to be a consensus on immigration i
00:10:32 think canadians saw immigration as a net benefit what made it a net benefit was because we were
00:10:38 screening for the best we were vetting who was coming in and over the last 11 years i i think
00:10:46 it's now become very clear that the standards were loosened. We weren't screening for the things
00:10:53 that had kept Canadians safe, right? Making sure that people who were being admitted didn't have 0.99
00:10:59 ties to terror, didn't have ties to criminal elements, that people who were coming here,
00:11:05 like my parents, for example, claiming asylum because of alleged persecution, actually were
00:11:12 legitimate claimants. You know, my parents waited two years in refugee camp to wait their turn to
00:11:17 come into Canada. That seems like a very novel concept because especially, you know, in my
00:11:23 writing and at one point we were ground zero for kind of homeless asylum seekers. And I got to meet
00:11:30 a lot of people who came here claiming asylum. And to help the process, to help their processing,
00:11:36 I heard their stories
00:11:39 and my staff kind of pitched in
00:11:41 with the Immigration Refugee
00:11:43 Board and documentation and all that
00:11:45 and you could tell from my
00:11:47 own experience Mark
00:11:49 directly I could tell who was
00:11:51 a legitimate claimant and who
00:11:53 wasn't you know
00:11:54 there was for example someone who came from
00:11:57 Uganda she 1.00
00:11:58 it took me a while to coax out of her
00:12:01 why she was here and she quietly
00:12:03 said to me Mark oh it's because I'm a lesbian 1.00
00:12:05 and that makes sense
00:12:06 because they have some of the world's most serious anti-gay laws,
00:12:10 including punishable by death.
00:12:13 Then I would meet someone else. 1.00
00:12:14 This individual happens to be from Nigeria. 0.99
00:12:17 And I'd be like, why are you here? 0.96
00:12:18 And he's like, oh, I'm bisexual.
00:12:20 And he would smile at me.
00:12:21 And it's like saying, claiming that they were bisexual
00:12:25 was like a cheat code that had been shared
00:12:27 with different people who wanted to come to Canada.
00:12:31 And honestly, I can't blame anyone for wanting to come here
00:12:33 who wouldn't want to come here.
00:12:34 But if you're an economic migrant,
00:12:36 There are legitimate streams that we have established that are going to vet you based on the skill sets and value that you will bring to this country. 0.71
00:12:45 And if it doesn't fit, I'm sorry, like, you know, there's not a fit.
00:12:48 But for the longest time, the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau would turn a blind eye to people who are clearly making false claims.
00:12:57 And so I think now to hear our former Prime Minister, while he's gallivanting around the world, celebrate the things that talk up Canadian values when for so long during his own administration, he was focused not on celebrating the good of which there is many of Canada and Canadians,
00:13:18 but on acknowledging and seemingly focusing almost on the flaws and the bad parts of Canada.
00:13:27 No country's perfect, Mark, but I would suggest we have more to celebrate and be proud of than we don't.
00:13:34 And so for him to do a complete 180 now, seemingly as if he had always been like this, is gaslighting Canadians.
00:13:44 And frankly, I find it offensive.
00:13:47 Yeah, I mean, where was that when he was Prime Minister?
00:13:50 You know, when he was calling Canada a systemically racist country,
00:13:55 when he was suggesting that it was a genocidal country,
00:13:59 you know, when he was posing with a teddy bear over by the alleged mass grave site.
00:14:05 You know, it just seems like everything's different now.
00:14:09 You know, like now that he's out, it's okay to praise Canada,
00:14:12 Whereas when he was Canadian prime minister, he took every opportunity to heap abuse on this country unless it was politically expedient to wrap himself in the flag on any given day.
00:14:23 I mean, we have people who really seem to hate the country, you know, hate where we came from.
00:14:29 It's European roots, you know, he's attacked that.
00:14:33 And so that's what we had for 10 years.
00:14:35 And that's what his immigration policies almost seem to be a way to repudiate where we came from.
00:14:42 And so now that he's gone, should we care, I guess, what he thinks at this point?
00:14:50 Listen, I very much welcomed no longer seeing his name in the news cycle.
00:14:55 Unfortunately, it started popping up again in my algorithm.
00:14:59 You know, I wish I have no say over that because he's dating someone who's, you know, in pop culture.
00:15:06 um and you know i would very much love to never have to talk about for our former prime minister
00:15:13 again um my hope is time and history will judge his administration um to to be what i think was
00:15:23 a very flawed uh time of our country's history and and in fact um probably had not only set us
00:15:31 back 10, 11 years, but the damage that they've actually brought to the country is something
00:15:39 that I think is going to take decades to repair.
00:15:42 It's actually, you know, part of the reason why, and folks, some folks will know, when
00:15:48 I was asked to run for parliament, it was actually the liberals who initially had asked
00:15:51 me to run.
00:15:52 And was I a Trudeau liberal?
00:15:54 No.
00:15:54 But I did believe, naively, I guess, now I know, that I would bring perspectives and experience I thought was missing.
00:16:02 You know, as an entrepreneur, as a tech entrepreneur before I was elected, I was proud to serve in what was then Her Majesty's Royal Canadian Navy.
00:16:10 I was a naval reserve officer for, I think, eight, nine years at the time.
00:16:14 Those are all things I thought were missing.
00:16:17 For me, my own experience, I was proud to be part of an institution like the Royal Canadian Navy
00:16:22 that was over a century old, that grounded who I was in my identity. And that was something that
00:16:29 I was proud of. And I thought that pride was missing. I wanted to be a voice advocating for
00:16:33 that. Ultimately, it wasn't meant to be. And I sat as an independent and that gave me the chance to
00:16:39 be able to, I think, raise these issues, whether it was immigration, whether it was being proud
00:16:45 to be canadian um and and other things that i think uh the liberals clearly didn't want to hear
00:16:51 and and my hope is as the prime minister former prime minister trudeau has changed his tune
00:16:57 that our current liberal government under mark carney will do the same we've seen some changes
00:17:03 south of the border as well i mean in cities like new york's new york city for instance and
00:17:10 and other areas of the country where there's this flirtation with communists i mean your family was
00:17:15 persecuted by communists literally persecuted and your folks were both people forced out of
00:17:22 vietnam i'm sure it would have ended up uh either dead or in camps if they had stayed where they
00:17:30 were, and what goes through your mind when you see naive people, frankly, whether it's in Canada
00:17:40 or the United States, thinking that somehow communism is the answer, or quote-unquote
00:17:44 socialism, I'm not even sure they exactly know what the difference is, but they think that,
00:17:50 you know, seizing wealth from people who have it, and taking some for themselves, which usually
00:17:56 happens and then spreading a little bit around that somehow that's the answer to economic problems
00:18:03 um what goes through your mind when you see that so i think it's lunacy at best um they to me must
00:18:10 be historically illiterate mark um my parents like you said they lost everything to communism
00:18:17 i mean my my mother my mom and dad didn't know one another um they met in the refugee camp but
00:18:22 my mom she was training to be a doctor she lost her career um and and came here and and retrained
00:18:29 learned english and became the first female uh line worker on the assembly line uh in her factory
00:18:34 in mississauga actually um but you know she had an entirely different trajectory in life my father's
00:18:41 side you know they were business owners they're entrepreneurs of course that's not something
00:18:46 communists will suffer and so they lost everything my grandfather on my mom's side um he he was
00:18:53 actually a goalkeeper since fifa's on um for for the south vietnamese national soccer team
00:18:58 um and we know how communists treat uh any any anything that may be perceived as a threat
00:19:05 um to you know to their rule sports icons academics whatever and so on not that you
00:19:10 know i think my although i'm sure my grandfather thought he was an icon but he was thrown in jail
00:19:15 by nature of the fact that he was on a sports team my late uncle also my mom's side he was
00:19:22 a ranger in the south vietnamese rangers he was a captain and he fought communism he was a prisoner
00:19:27 of war if it wasn't for the us and the democratic forces um he probably would have died uh in a
00:19:33 prison camp they freed him before the end of the war ultimately everyone had to escape but
00:19:37 i think that the people who today celebrate communism all these sort of things need to open
00:19:44 a book they need to read a little bit of history and i am proud to continue my family's legacy
00:19:51 of not only fighting communism but to continue to stand up and defend democracy however i can
00:19:57 wherever i can and what's your political future if you have one i mean obviously things didn't go
00:20:05 exactly as you had hoped originally and now you're not in politics but sometimes you know when you get
00:20:14 you're bit by the political bug it was hard to shake entirely do you see yourself as having a
00:20:20 future in politics in canada yeah mark you're right like i i think for those of us who see
00:20:27 public service as a calling um it's hard to step away what helped me to step away and and why i
00:20:33 didn't run again um in april of 2025 is because i became a dad uh it was my daughter was was born
00:20:40 I was a first-time dad and I wanted to be there for her and actually my son we now know the gender
00:20:48 is due in October this this fall and so I want to be the best dad that I can be and be the best
00:20:55 husband and frankly I don't know that I can be the best MP that I would want to be and I think
00:21:00 that people would deserve and be those things but I'm still politically adjacent I'm still involved
00:21:06 A lot of people were very MPs and councillors very kindly had been actually texting me to run in the upcoming municipal election.
00:21:14 I'm involved and because I'm not about to stand by and let four more years of communism continue to grip City Hall here in Toronto and do everything that I can to ensure that Olivia Chow is defeated.
00:21:28 but we're also supporting other candidates across the city
00:21:32 because we also need to take back city council.
00:21:35 We need to bring common sense also back to our school boards.
00:21:38 And those are things that I'm able to do in some ways, Mark,
00:21:42 with a lot more flexibility and I think impact
00:21:46 than if I was still in a particular office
00:21:48 because I would be focused on doing the best that I can
00:21:50 for my constituency as opposed to necessarily
00:21:53 being able to spread myself as I have.
00:21:55 There's also different ways to serve.
00:21:57 i've i've done in uniform um i'm working with others to to build out an ai orchestration uh
00:22:03 technology company right creating jobs um bringing back entrepreneurism um to to canada is another
00:22:10 way to contribute and so those are some of the ways that i'm keeping myself busy but i i know
00:22:16 myself well enough that when my kids no longer want me around which i'm told daughters uh it
00:22:21 it happens sooner than one once,
00:22:24 I'll probably be looking to enter
00:22:26 or return to serving again.
00:22:28 All right.
00:22:29 Kevin Vuong, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:22:31 We appreciate it.
00:22:33 Thanks for having me.
00:22:35 If you enjoyed this show,
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