Juno News - August 29, 2023


Trudeau once said Canada was genocidal. Now, he says it's the ＂best country in the world＂


Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

174.23676

Word count

5,905

Sentence count

223

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau has a new talking point: Canada is the best country in the world. Is it possible for Canada to be that good at something? And why does it matter if it is or isn t? The answer may surprise you.

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 .
00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30.000 Thank you.
00:01:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:01:16.980 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:01:27.580 Hello and welcome to you all.
00:01:29.820 this is canada's most irreverent talk show the andrew lawton show here on true north we i this
00:01:36.280 has been kind of a running gag now we've been in the process of troubleshooting this little audio
00:01:40.740 problem we've had on the show i think we've fixed it now although i feel my producer sean has gotten
00:01:45.460 a little too optimistic that we fixed it because he said sounds good before i'd even opened my
00:01:50.400 mouth which got a little bit confusing so maybe he's got a glimpse a few seconds into the future
00:01:55.920 But nevertheless, we have sorted it out.
00:01:58.640 It is another week, Tuesday, August 29th, 2023.
00:02:02.040 Welcome to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:02:04.740 A lot of things I want to get to today, one of which is the brokenness of Canada
00:02:09.580 and whether it's really possible for...
00:02:12.980 He says he had already preloaded the message to send.
00:02:16.100 Yes, but you didn't know it was accurate when you sent it.
00:02:18.960 Perhaps he's that optimistic in his own abilities.
00:02:21.960 Nevertheless, it's good to have you on the ball, Sean.
00:02:25.540 It's good to have all of you tuned into the show.
00:02:27.520 The brokenness of Canada that we have talked about on the show time and time again
00:02:32.240 has reached a bit of a boiling point where now there seems to be a bit of a delusion going on by our Prime Minister.
00:02:38.960 He can't acknowledge how things are broken because he's been the guy there for the last eight years
00:02:43.840 who is the one ultimately holding the bag if things are in fact broken.
00:02:47.560 But he has started to paint a rather rosy picture of what Canada is all about and how things are in Canada.
00:02:55.120 Take, for example, this comment he made in one of his press conferences last week.
00:03:00.280 I'm going to continue working hard every day to build that future that we all know Canada can have.
00:03:08.420 We are the best country in the world.
00:03:12.180 Let's keep making it better.
00:03:14.940 Oh, the best country in the world, but a little bit of room for improvement there, as he says.
00:03:19.640 Let's keep making it better.
00:03:21.200 Well, let's take a look at another clip from him not long after that one.
00:03:26.440 Times are really tough for a whole lot of people right now.
00:03:29.960 And we're going to keep rolling up our sleeves and bringing forward the best possible solutions
00:03:35.340 because Canadians can get through this.
00:03:38.680 This is the best country in the world and we're going to keep making it even better.
00:03:44.080 Ah, the best country in the world and we're going to continue to make it better.
00:03:49.040 And you can see all the little bobblehead ministers in the background nodding up and down. 0.51
00:03:53.580 This is the new talking point that just dropped.
00:03:55.600 Canada is the best country in the world.
00:03:58.460 Now, what is the big deal, right?
00:04:00.260 You may find this a little bit of a weird thing for me to latch on to.
00:04:03.400 Why wouldn't the Canadian prime minister say that Canada is the best country in the world?
00:04:08.760 This was, you may recall a while back, a bit of a controversy in the case of Barack Obama,
00:04:13.400 who decided to abandon this longstanding belief in American exceptionalism by saying that,
00:04:18.560 well, yeah, America's the greatest, but the Greeks think that they're the greatest and, you know, 1.00
00:04:22.640 the Polish think that they're the greatest. And he didn't really want to position America as being
00:04:26.960 all that greater than any other country. Now, in the case of Justin Trudeau, again,
00:04:32.120 Canadian prime minister thinks Canada is great. Shouldn't be a bit of a headline. It shouldn't be
00:04:36.760 newsworthy. But in the case of Justin Trudeau, it is. I remind you of his far more tepid
00:04:42.620 endorsement of the country back in 2018 makes canada special is not that we know that this
00:04:50.300 is the best country in the world it's that we know that it could be we know our work together
00:04:55.900 is not yet done not until every senior has a safe place to live not while anyone faces racism or
00:05:02.540 injustice not why we still have so far to go on the path of reconciliation i forget uh from time
00:05:10.780 to time that he went through that bearded phase that was also i believe the press conference where
00:05:16.380 there was one of those really really awkward kisses between him and sophie gregoire trudeau
00:05:22.060 which we now fast forward a few years later and the two of them have announced their separation
00:05:26.540 but nevertheless in 2018 canada was a country that we should just kind of say yeah maybe there's
00:05:33.580 a way that we could be the best country in the world but now canada's great everything's wonderful
00:05:39.340 bring out the lobster, bring out the oysters, pop the champagne.
00:05:42.860 We're going to have a celebration because we are on top.
00:05:46.440 We're number one.
00:05:48.140 Well, it's a little bit odd, though, isn't it,
00:05:50.080 that this is a country that just a couple of years ago
00:05:52.680 had the flag at half-mast for the better part of half a year
00:05:57.220 because we had to all collectively hang our heads in shame
00:06:01.040 about what Canada was.
00:06:03.120 And you may recall, if you go back even before then
00:06:05.420 to before the 2021 election,
00:06:07.580 Justin Trudeau, had acknowledged the report on the missing and murdered Indigenous women and
00:06:13.420 girls, which said Canada was complicit in genocide. Remember when he accepted at face value
00:06:19.640 that very conclusion? We recognize the need for a national public inquiry
00:06:26.440 into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. And we
00:06:30.940 We have commissioners who came back with findings of fact and with calls to action.
00:06:39.360 We thank them for their work, we applaud their work, and we accept their findings,
00:06:44.000 including that what happened amounts to genocide.
00:06:50.260 So again, I wonder how we can go from in 2018, the idea that, you know, Canada is not quite the best,
00:06:58.540 we've got a lot of work to do, but we're getting there.
00:07:00.940 to Canada is a perpetrator of genocide, to Canada is the best country in the world.
00:07:07.520 I feel like we maybe have skipped a few different steps along the way here.
00:07:11.840 Now, I asked him a question in the 2021 election.
00:07:14.780 This was at the Scrum following the leaders debate,
00:07:17.660 my one and only opportunity to put a question to Justin Trudeau in many, many years,
00:07:22.080 given the painstaking lengths through which the Trudeau government goes
00:07:25.540 to keep independent media away from Justin Trudeau.
00:07:28.860 And I asked him very specifically about that, because I actually believe words have meaning.
00:07:35.520 I believe words like genocide have meaning.
00:07:37.700 And I also don't like the logical fallacies that we can create if we want to one day say
00:07:42.380 that Canada is doing something and the next day never speak of it again.
00:07:45.980 This was that exchange in Gatineau.
00:07:48.680 Prime Minister, in 2019, you accepted the assertion of the...
00:07:52.060 Prime Minister, in 2019, you accepted the assertion of the missing and murdered Indigenous 0.99
00:07:58.400 women and girls report that Canada had engaged in genocide. More than two years later, do you
00:08:03.660 believe that Canada is still engaging in genocide? And if not, what's changed? And if so, what are
00:08:09.000 you doing about it? Well, when I visited COSS First Nations to grieve with them over the unmarked
00:08:18.440 graves of the children that we had so cruelly mistreated as a country and ripped away from
00:08:27.500 their families over the past many, many generations and decades, we also took a very concrete
00:08:36.660 step forward on removing kids at risk from the provincial system of treatment and keeping
00:08:46.100 them in their communities, in their language.
00:08:48.680 And it is concrete steps like that that actually doesn't just grieve over the terrible tragedies
00:08:56.560 of the past but takes steps to correct and move forward that makes all the difference
00:09:02.680 i have to apologize by the way that i'm wearing i forgot that i was wearing a mask in that moment
00:09:08.880 i just blocked that from my mind that was the that was like the one thing that everyone had to do
00:09:13.640 to be in the room uh which was unfortunate because you know in 2019 we had to sue our way
00:09:18.020 into the debate in 2021 we were accredited rebel had to sue but it's like i didn't want to make
00:09:23.040 the principled stand after going that far of like getting thrown out for not wearing a mask when
00:09:27.320 it would be my my one opportunity to ask Justin Trudeau a question but uh never the you see you
00:09:33.160 could like barely hear the question I'm like uh which is basically how communicates I actually do
00:09:39.840 my show like that actually it would be great I wouldn't need to do any prep whatsoever I could
00:09:43.200 just be like because that was how we all agreed to speak as a people for the last three years if
00:09:50.200 By the way, if you're listening to the podcast, I'm like covering my mouth to mimic the highly, highly effective masks.
00:09:56.760 They don't block COVID, but they block speech.
00:09:58.440 So anyway, the point of all of this is that Justin Trudeau was realizing in that moment that he had been forcing himself to come up with an answer for why Canada had one time a year earlier been a genocidal nation, but by 2019 was not.
00:10:14.520 And his answer was, well, we've, you know, rejigged some of the federal program spending.
00:10:18.620 Imagine if you could just spend your way out of genocide by reallocating which level of government is dealing with which welfare program and which child welfare program, because that was basically what he did.
00:10:34.620 So we have vanquished our genocidal tendencies as a nation.
00:10:38.600 We are once again a country that Justin Trudeau will call the best country in the world.
00:10:42.940 Why does this matter?
00:10:44.400 It matters because the Liberals are Canadians of convenience. 0.95
00:10:47.660 They are patriotic when it suits them, and they will crap all over Canada when that suits them.
00:10:54.060 The thing that's changed between then and now is that they're up against a leader in Pierre Polyev,
00:10:59.800 the leader of the Conservatives, who is reinforcing the message that Canadians are sharing around their kitchen tables
00:11:05.720 that Canada is broken.
00:11:07.840 Justin Trudeau is up against a Conservative leader that's pointing out all of the things in this country that are not working.
00:11:15.200 So his only response to that is to gaslight this country
00:11:18.700 into saying that everything is working,
00:11:21.500 to saying that everything is hunky-dory, everything's fine,
00:11:24.080 and anyone who points out the brokenness of Canada
00:11:26.780 is being negative and divisive.
00:11:29.560 So the reason that we're hearing this talking point
00:11:31.940 so regularly from Justin Trudeau now,
00:11:34.040 that we're the best country in the world
00:11:35.400 and we're going to use that momentum moving forward,
00:11:38.120 is because it's the only way that he could really justify
00:11:41.480 his continued leadership of this country.
00:11:43.700 Because if Canada is in a mess after eight years of the Liberals, there isn't really
00:11:49.100 anyone else they can blame.
00:11:50.940 The idea that Stephen Harper is responsible for all of the ills of Canada was maybe believable
00:11:56.460 conceivably for a couple of years, a little bit less plausible with each passing day.
00:12:01.360 Now he might as well be blaming John Diefenbaker for the woes of Canada.
00:12:06.280 So that's why this is happening.
00:12:07.840 Justin Trudeau has to campaign on Canada being great and sunshine and roses because it's
00:12:12.760 the only way that he has a case to sit there in his office and continue to run this country, which
00:12:18.960 if you look at poll numbers, is not particularly a role that Canadians want for him. The polling,
00:12:25.300 and you don't hear me talk about polling often on the show, because nine times out of 10, in fact,
00:12:29.160 I'd say 19 times out of 20, to use the polling language, it is utterly meaningless. It may give
00:12:34.560 you a snapshot of time, but it is subject to all of these different inputs that more importantly
00:12:40.040 are not necessarily going to be there nationally
00:12:42.760 and not when there is an election day.
00:12:45.240 But when you see a poll show you something so continuously,
00:12:48.260 you should probably start paying attention
00:12:50.560 to what it's saying.
00:12:51.580 And we've seen that the Conservatives
00:12:52.900 have not just been riding high in the polls
00:12:55.180 for several weeks and several months,
00:12:56.960 but they've been doing it with a level of consistency
00:12:59.420 that we've not seen in many, many years.
00:13:02.200 And they've also been doing it across demographic groups,
00:13:05.940 specifically among youth.
00:13:07.240 This has always been the group
00:13:09.020 the Conservatives have the hardest time breaking through to. But one poll I'll show you right now
00:13:14.660 from Abacus, which breaks down voting intention by generation, shows the Conservatives winning
00:13:20.260 across the board. But look at every single demographic group. They are winning among
00:13:25.440 Boomers. They're winning among Gen X, which is the Friends generation, which shockingly is now 0.99
00:13:30.880 over 50, but I apologize for pointing that out. Millennials, they're winning even among Gen Z,
00:13:35.920 the youngest generation of voters, the Conservatives are still winning, not as much as they are in
00:13:41.280 other groups, but 30% as opposed to 26, 25, and then all of the lower vote shares. So this is
00:13:48.620 something that the Liberals have as a big problem, because if Justin Trudeau can't rely on the youth
00:13:53.360 vote, which he always thought he could take for granted, there's no way they can win an election,
00:13:58.420 certainly not a majority. So what is it that the Conservatives are doing that's capturing
00:14:03.580 this generation, that's capturing this demographic. I want to bring into the show Sabrina Maddow,
00:14:09.680 who is a fantastic columnist with the National Post and pops up in all fora, in media, in writing,
00:14:15.860 in video. It's great to talk to her. Sabrina, thanks so much for coming on today.
00:14:20.560 Thanks for having me.
00:14:21.780 So let's talk about the millennial aspect here, because this has always been the group that tends
00:14:26.600 to be kind of crapped on as a demographic cohort. And I think the older you get, the broader
00:14:32.680 millennial becomes. So people basically think anyone under 40 is a millennial now, which isn't
00:14:37.140 entirely true. But it is a generation that's had a lot of issues with housing, that's had a lot of
00:14:42.760 issues with finding work, that's had a lot of these challenges that are really being tackled
00:14:47.880 by Pierre Polyev right now. And do you think it's that simple that, you know, this is a generation
00:14:52.080 that says the status quo has failed them, Pierre Polyev is talking about it, and that's why they're
00:14:56.700 leaning conservative? I'd go further than saying the status quo has failed them. The liberals
00:15:02.200 under Trudeau have specifically failed them. And as we know, millennials were a huge part
00:15:07.000 of Trudeau's win back in 2015 and even to a lesser extent in 2019 and 2021. But now we're seeing huge
00:15:14.840 shifts. A recent abacus poll showed in the 18 to 34 demographic the CPC is up 10 points. Now they
00:15:22.120 took the same poll right after the 2021 election and it was the Liberals up seven points in that
00:15:28.200 demographic so that's a 17 point swing which is hugely significant and we haven't seen young
00:15:33.800 people in canada turn to the conservatives in these sorts of numbers in well my lifetime for
00:15:39.240 sure but perhaps ever yeah and i think that basically there is a lot of vote parking that
00:15:45.640 we see in polling which is why i get nervous about polls that take place a lengthy period
00:15:50.440 before an election where you know someone gets a phone call about an election that they're not
00:15:54.120 even thinking of and they sort of blurt out what they think at the moment which might not carry to
00:15:58.040 the election. But in this case, I don't think that's what's happening here because I think
00:16:02.140 people in general are in a bit of a crisis point here. You have the housing issue is probably the
00:16:08.220 best example of this. And I also look at Gen Xers, which are very heavily skewed to the
00:16:14.760 conservatives in this poll. They're the people that are getting to that point where they're
00:16:17.960 starting to think about what their Gen Z or Gen Z kids are going to be doing in two, three, four
00:16:23.320 years. So you can actually see why boomers, which have always been the conservative loyalists are
00:16:29.460 the ones that are actually most suited to voting liberal right now, because they're the ones that
00:16:34.000 really have the least to lose as far as all of the things we're talking about. Absolutely. It's
00:16:39.600 been millennials and Gen Z who have taken the brunt of a lot of the inequality that popped out
00:16:44.740 over the pandemic and over Trudeau's eight years in government, whether it's housing, we have two
00:16:50.160 generations probably another one coming up that's locked out of home ownership not just home
00:16:55.280 ownership but affordable rentals they are having to move to other provinces even other countries
00:17:00.800 lose their social ties just to be able to afford a place to live affordability inflation is also
00:17:07.680 impacting them and their wages in the prime of their careers and in terms of the pandemic we saw
00:17:13.280 that the measures brought in the lockdowns had a really disproportionate mental health effect on
00:17:18.880 young people as well so you combine all of these things together and there are a lot of hot button
00:17:23.920 issues where young people are very very frustrated and they want change and i think that's part of it
00:17:29.920 so those are the issues that are impacting the millennial and gen z vote but there's also a
00:17:34.400 personality personal component with trudeau when we look at polling millennials are saying we
00:17:40.960 dislike trudeau a lot more than we actually dislike the liberal party so they feel a particular sense
00:17:47.520 of betrayal and disillusionment from him and that's what makes this election so key and especially
00:17:53.520 the decision of whether Trudeau decides to run again because a lot of these voters will be
00:17:59.520 potentially voting conservative for the first time and we know when people cast a ballot for
00:18:04.160 a party they're more likely to do so again and we know after they've cast a ballot for the same
00:18:08.480 party twice that often becomes a lifetime pattern so this is a really big change election not
00:18:13.920 potentially just for right now but decades down the road and could spell a lot of trouble perhaps
00:18:19.360 the end of the liberal party i know the poll that i was referencing another polling doesn't go into
00:18:25.360 the motivation necessarily it just talks about that surface level vote intention but i wanted
00:18:30.720 to try to dig a little bit beyond that there's that apocryphal churchill quote which churchill
00:18:35.280 never actually said but i think is nonetheless a useful quote that you know if you're not a liberal
00:18:39.360 by 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by 40, you have no brain. And
00:18:43.720 there are variations of that, like, you know, 25 and 50, 30 and 50. But basically, the whole point
00:18:48.420 is that you're expected to be a leftist when you're young. And then when you grow up and have
00:18:52.020 responsibilities, you're going to be more conservative. And I'm wondering if we can
00:18:56.600 draw from this polling any sense of an ideological shift. Do we think young people are inherently
00:19:02.180 becoming more conservative because of the realities of the world? Or do we think it is
00:19:06.400 It's just something as superficial as vote choice or vote preference.
00:19:10.700 I think the economic realities are what are pushing them to fiscal conservatism, along
00:19:16.820 with seeing what the spending impact by the Liberals has had on their lives, the inflationary
00:19:21.160 impact, the way it's fueled housing to such an extreme, extreme bubble.
00:19:27.580 So they've really come into realizing the economic benefits of conservatism at a much
00:19:32.860 younger age than their predecessors and other generations.
00:19:35.920 Usually when you talk about you become a conservative around 40, why is that?
00:19:39.540 You probably own a home, you have children, you're starting your family, you're in the
00:19:43.600 prime of your career.
00:19:44.600 So those economic considerations tend to become more important, but we're in such an
00:19:48.960 economically disastrous place right now, particularly for our youth, that they're
00:19:53.740 having that realization a heck of a lot earlier.
00:19:56.620 And when it comes to the social issues that fueled Trudeau into office and initially
00:20:02.040 got him their support um it's hard to care too much about some of these social justice issues
00:20:07.800 up in the sky when you can't afford rent you can't afford groceries you can't afford to have children
00:20:13.000 um you're looking at maybe even living on the street that's that's a core issue when you look
00:20:17.400 at maslow's hierarchy of needs that's like number one how do i live and how do i eat and they're
00:20:22.520 realizing they can't do that under trudeau's liberals yeah i think immigration is a great
00:20:28.280 example of that. And I know you had a column about this a month ago that I thought was quite
00:20:32.600 poignant. And you talk about how when people see the rising, rising numbers of immigration and also 0.68
00:20:38.700 rising, rising house costs, house cost issues and declining supply, it's not hard to draw a line
00:20:45.380 between these two. And the Liberals have always been very hesitant to do so. In fact, they've
00:20:50.000 continued to say we need more immigrants, you know, getting up to 500,000 a year. But even this
00:20:55.600 week, the Liberals have appeared to see a little bit of pushback on that. All of these columnists
00:21:01.580 that are, I'd say, not at all conservative are starting to point out, okay, maybe we're overdoing
00:21:06.500 it on immigration when we have this crisis point on housing. And then you throw in international
00:21:11.640 students into the mix. We're looking at about 900,000 this year, which even if this is not all
00:21:16.900 permanent residents, that's 900,000 people that will need to be housed and will need to live in
00:21:21.060 this country for at least a few years. And I'm wondering where you think that is going to go,
00:21:27.200 because the Conservatives right now are in a bit of a bind, because they don't want to be the
00:21:31.740 anti-immigrant party, which is, I think, feeding into the most inhospitable portrayals of them.
00:21:37.400 But I also think public opinion is turning on this issue right now.
00:21:41.520 It is. We've seen in polls that now 11% of Canadians, according to abacus, say immigration 0.73
00:21:47.280 is one of their top three issues. 63% say that the current levels of immigration are tied into
00:21:53.280 higher housing costs, and 61% actually say they think the Liberals' current immigration targets
00:21:58.800 are too high. And the reason why it's becoming an undeniable issue is because if you look at
00:22:04.640 a chart that shows the spike in huge immigration versus the spike in house prices, you can see
00:22:10.880 there is a connection. They both begin to spike at the same time. And I think it needs to be made
00:22:16.640 clear by anyone who speaks about this issue that this isn't immigrant faults themselves this is not 0.97
00:22:22.880 an immigrant problem it's a systemic problem in terms of our government hasn't decided to think
00:22:28.080 about the infrastructure the supports the housing behind having these numbers and of course immigrants 1.00
00:22:33.760 are important to society and bring a lot of benefits in many different ways but we need to
00:22:38.800 be able to both support them and support the current population for this to be sustainable
00:22:44.320 because in a worst case scenario if we don't do that we've seen it in other societies people
00:22:49.120 become resentful anti-immigrant sentiment grows and that is the last thing that we want to see
00:22:54.400 the liberals talk about sustainability in many other areas they should be thinking about whether
00:22:59.280 their immigration policy is sustainable yeah i mean to use a crass example if a bar opens the
00:23:05.680 doors and lets a certain number of people in and everyone there finds it's too packed and too busy
00:23:10.480 It's the fault of the people that opened the doors that didn't say, OK, maybe we need to reduce this capacity here.
00:23:16.260 And I think that that's to go back to your Maslow's hierarchy parallel, which I thought was a very good one.
00:23:20.900 This is kind of the problem here is that the liberals viewed immigration as being a moral issue, not an economic issue.
00:23:26.860 And they wanted to get that big arbitrary number.
00:23:30.080 I mean, 500,000 is just this grand arbitrary number.
00:23:34.160 But in practice, there are very real implications to that increase.
00:23:38.280 And this is where we have an example of they're skipping right ahead to self-actualization.
00:23:42.560 Well, the people in this country already, immigrant and native born, can't afford a home. 1.00
00:23:48.440 Absolutely.
00:23:49.160 And, you know, it's often newcomers who suffer the brunt of this even more than Canadians who are already settled here.
00:23:55.700 Just to interrupt, they're going to the most expensive cities typically.
00:23:58.840 Like they're not, you know, settling in Canada and going to Red Deer.
00:24:01.240 They're going to Vancouver, Toronto.
00:24:03.600 Absolutely.
00:24:04.000 And when they're international students, which right now is open-ended, and I believe I just saw that we're expecting 900,000 international students to come in this year.
00:24:12.840 Last year, it was only 550,000. And the fact that I'm saying only that's with a big asterisk, but they we've seen the areas around colleges and universities have seen some of the most dramatic rent increases.
00:24:25.980 London, Ontario, which is a big college town, has seen an 86% increase in the rent of one bedroom since 2019.
00:24:34.000 and they've seen 20% increases summer over summer.
00:24:37.920 We hear stories now where students and international students,
00:24:41.600 they're going to food banks, they're living in tents.
00:24:44.120 There have been stories this week about parents having to rent out parking spaces
00:24:49.320 for their kids to live in a van and they're setting up a heater
00:24:52.040 because that's the only place they can afford to be in
00:24:54.520 and attend the school they want to attend.
00:24:56.680 When it comes to international students, this makes them ripe for exploitation.
00:25:01.280 there's been issues with students falling into sex trafficking because they get put in these
00:25:06.000 terrible situations where they say you want to make rent you want a place under your home
00:25:10.720 i i know you're vulnerable and who are you going to report to because they're afraid that they'll
00:25:14.880 be sent back home so this issue is really it's a predatory system for everyone and it's absolutely
00:25:21.440 not a moral immigration system and it needs to be fixed it needs to be reconsidered yeah i mean i
00:25:27.600 i'm from london ontario and we have a very large university we have a very large college as well
00:25:34.320 india in particular supplies massive numbers of international students that go to both of those
00:25:39.840 schools and you know a lot of them are here for for all the right reasons they're not the problem
00:25:44.640 and there have been so many stories though in the last few years of for example apartments
00:25:49.280 that have been rented out above capacity where you're shoving people into these like closets
00:25:54.000 in a basement with no windows which is illegal and renting it out as a room and that's something
00:25:58.160 that people take and if you order you know doordash or uber eats in london more often than not you're
00:26:03.440 going to get a foreign student there and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that it's a perfectly
00:26:07.760 legitimate way to earn a living but i know they're not making a lot of money and you have problems
00:26:12.400 in london i mean i i know both the university and the college have had to invest in student food
00:26:17.120 banks so there is a sustainability issue here that no one is speaking about yeah we've essentially
00:26:22.640 allowed our student permits to become untapped low-wage permits and this was especially through
00:26:29.280 when the liberals opened up for students to be able to work as many hours as they want when they
00:26:35.120 come here and also they're allowing these essentially what are diploma mills to function
00:26:40.480 and these are schools that are bringing in students they often don't even really have
00:26:46.000 classrooms or they don't have classrooms that are big enough to accommodate all the students
00:26:49.520 they've allowed in they provide no sort of student housing and it's just a pathway into the country
00:26:54.960 where then these students end up working low-wage jobs and often living in really poor conditions
00:27:00.000 so we don't even need to necessarily be talking about a cap on the number of international
00:27:04.560 students but we should talk about making sure that when we issue student permits students are coming
00:27:09.680 here mostly to study to get an education and to um better their lives as well as contribute to
00:27:16.080 the canadian economy so that can be done by linking the number of permits each institution
00:27:21.520 gets to spaces in a classroom or perhaps amount of housing they can provide um perhaps even rolling
00:27:27.680 back the number of hours that students can work per week so that they can really focus on obtaining
00:27:32.640 those degrees or education that they're here to get um so there are many different ways this can
00:27:37.200 be approached um and again it needs to be a conversation that's definitely not anti-international
00:27:42.880 student or anti-immigration, but it's really about common sense and sustainability because
00:27:47.560 this isn't a problem we want to get worth. Yeah, you raise a few important points there
00:27:53.000 on the hours worked. It used to be up until very recently, if you were an international student,
00:27:57.780 you could work for up to 20 hours a week, I think it was. And then the government looking at the
00:28:02.660 labor shortage said, okay, let's just get rid of that cap and you can work more than 20 hours.
00:28:06.920 And it was funny, right after that happened, I was at a Tim Hortons and there was a foreign 1.00
00:28:11.880 student that walked in and was applying for a job to a coffee shop that hasn't been at full
00:28:16.220 staffing in like four years. So the manager interviewed him on the spot. And as I was
00:28:19.520 waiting for my bagel, I could hear this conversation. And she had said, well, I need
00:28:24.120 someone to work overnights. And he was saying, yeah, I'm happy to do that. I'll work that. But
00:28:28.980 you're not an effective student if you're working overnights, 40 hours a week at the local Tim
00:28:34.580 Hortons. So something in this was not computing and certainly was not keeping with the spirit of
00:28:40.420 what international student programs are supposed to be.
00:28:43.140 So great points all around.
00:28:45.180 You can read her in the National Post,
00:28:47.260 and I would encourage you to do that.
00:28:48.400 Sabrina Maddow, great to have you on the show at long last.
00:28:51.100 Thanks, Sabrina.
00:28:52.340 Thanks for having me.
00:28:53.720 Thank you.
00:28:54.500 Yeah, and that Tim Horton story I shared
00:28:56.640 was not all that long ago.
00:28:58.080 And I think that, again, it's when you solve one problem,
00:29:01.320 you create another.
00:29:03.220 And one thing I, because initially when I heard it,
00:29:05.500 I was kind of supportive, which is, okay,
00:29:06.860 we've got a labor shortage.
00:29:07.880 If we've got students that are able to work a few extra hours, then go for it.
00:29:11.900 But I wasn't thinking of immediately the abuse that would come of this, which is you get
00:29:17.260 some, you know, like crappy little storefront that decides to register as being a technical
00:29:22.180 college and all of a sudden is churning out visas for students that aren't really there
00:29:28.220 for an education.
00:29:29.180 They're there for a backdoor way into being able to live and work in Canada somewhat indefinitely.
00:29:34.740 And again, you do a one year program here.
00:29:37.260 you renew, you get another, you get another, you get another. And it's not hard to imagine
00:29:41.640 how all of these problems will start coming about. So Justin Trudeau has broken the immigration
00:29:46.980 system. This goes back to when he decided that overnight we could bring in 50,000 refugees
00:29:51.660 from Syria for the sole reason of spiting the conservatives. That was the only reason the
00:29:58.100 Trudeau refugee resettlement program in that election came the way it did. It was because
00:30:03.660 Trudeau wanted to play the Harper is racist card. Harper doesn't want Syrians here. I love 1.00
00:30:08.580 the Syrians. I want the Syrians. He went to Pearson Airport. He started shaking all their 1.00
00:30:12.960 hands as they walked past and then tweeted that obnoxious welcome home tweet. But for a lot of
00:30:18.100 those people, and by the way, a lot of those people are the ones that are now protesting
00:30:21.700 gender ideology in schools. And the liberals are markedly less hospitable to these Syrian refugees
00:30:28.200 that they rolled out the red carpet for a few years ago.
00:30:31.680 But nevertheless, that's besides the point,
00:30:33.860 but had to bring that up while we were on the subject.
00:30:36.660 The whole point of what Trudeau is doing here right now
00:30:39.540 is putting the virtue signaling aspirational target
00:30:42.920 above the economic realities,
00:30:44.900 which is that immigration is broken,
00:30:46.860 housing is broken, labor is broken, Canada is broken.
00:30:51.300 And whenever the conservatives start talking about this,
00:30:55.140 the liberals cannot argue that it's not
00:30:57.540 in any fair or reasonable way.
00:30:59.800 The only thing they can do is to turn around and say,
00:31:03.000 you know what, everything's fine.
00:31:04.960 We're the best country in the world, by gosh.
00:31:07.760 I would love it for one of the,
00:31:09.180 because they won't accredit me to their press conferences.
00:31:10.960 But if you're one of these mainstream media reporters
00:31:13.420 that has access to Trudeau press conferences,
00:31:15.600 I would love to say,
00:31:16.900 how did Canada go from being a perpetrator of genocide
00:31:20.720 four years ago to being the best country
00:31:23.800 in the world right now?
00:31:24.940 What about that is the best?
00:31:27.540 I don't think he's going to answer.
00:31:29.000 I think it's going to be like
00:31:29.840 when he tried to say what a water bottle was
00:31:31.960 and he just goes,
00:31:33.440 but the water genocide bottle,
00:31:36.060 drink box, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle.
00:31:38.440 That's my ringtone, by the way,
00:31:39.560 what I just did there.
00:31:40.780 That's going to be what happens.
00:31:41.920 Or when he tried to like spit out the LGBTQ2A,
00:31:45.040 actually, I got it on the first try, didn't I?
00:31:47.980 LGBT... 0.50
00:31:48.300 No, I missed the plus.
00:31:50.180 You always got to do the plus.
00:31:51.560 Anyway, when he struggled to spit that one out as well.
00:31:54.900 So all of that is where we are headed as a country right now.
00:31:58.580 If you call out the obvious, if you point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes,
00:32:02.640 you are accused of any number of other things.
00:32:04.980 So we're left with this blissful denial gaslighting on a national scale.
00:32:09.820 That does it for us.
00:32:10.980 We are going to end things there.
00:32:12.180 This is Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:32:14.500 We'll be back tomorrow here on True North with more of The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:32:18.180 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.
00:32:21.420 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:32:23.460 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:32:53.460 We'll be right back.
00:33:23.460 We'll be right back.